this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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chapotraphouse

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Once upon a time, Twitter was paradise for sex workers. We could post our thirst traps, network and build community with each other, find clients, and build a following. Then came the hateful algorithms with their dreaded shadowbans. Building a following became virtually impossible, and our posts were hidden from our actual followers who WANT TO SEE THEM BC THEY FOLLOW US! We tried to warn the masses that these tools would be weaponized against political dissenters, but predictably we were mostly ignored. (We’re trying to warn y’all about banking discrimination and the dangers of facial recognition technology too but that’s a subject for another post. Just know that they always test their hateful tech tools on us first, then roll them out for the respectables and normals.)

If you are interested in learning more about this, check out Hacking Hustling’s piece

Anyway, when Melon Husk bought Twitter, we knew it didn’t bode well, but some remained hopeful due to all his yapping about “free speech.” Of course things only got worse for us under Apartheid Clyde, but most of us have stayed because it remains one of the only platforms where you can post tit without catching a permaban for it.

I guess the Neo-Nazification of the platform culminating in the re-election of Trump with Elon’s help has finally pushed us over the edge, because there has been a huge migration over to BlueSky (aka LibSky.) Will it be better? Probably not. But for now, the shadowbans are minimal and fascists don’t appear to be tolerated so here we are.

Y’all may or may not realize it but sex workers tend to be at the forefront of new tech trends and innovations. When a new platform pops up, we’ll be there shortly with innovative new ways to sell hole. So I predict that LibSky may just take off.

TL;DR: if you post tit, they will come

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[–] Bureaucrat@hexbear.net 1 points 53 minutes ago

Well that's it for twitter then. We're the sex-work industry goes, so does the world

[–] vegeta1@hexbear.net 1 points 1 hour ago

" if you post tit, they will come"

[–] bloubz@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I thought you were talking about a new BlueSky instance called LibSky. I'm sure there'll be one (or there's already one)

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 2 points 2 hours ago

itll be unironic too

[–] Parzivus@hexbear.net 17 points 8 hours ago

Reminder than the term "blue sky" comes from the Blue Sky with White Sun flag of nationalist China. The Bluesky CEO's mom fled the country during the Cultural Revolution because she supported the KMT lol

[–] Crowtee_Robot@hexbear.net 15 points 9 hours ago

Y’all may or may not realize it but sex workers tend to be at the forefront of new tech trends and innovations.

You can take my Betamax tapes and HD DVDs from my cold dead hands.

[–] BobDole@hexbear.net 44 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Your posts are funny and informative. Hope you stick around.

[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 43 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks Bob Dole. Idk why my parents didn’t vote for you in the 90s

[–] Sulvor@hexbear.net 23 points 11 hours ago

Lol fitting right in

[–] Frank@hexbear.net 43 points 13 hours ago

SWers struggles against censorship, banking discrimination, and a whole slew of other issues have been the front line of digital repression for decades. Worth looking up the SESTA/FOSTA disaster. It's a key example of how efforts to supress sex work are usually just fancy social murder.

[–] PKMKII@hexbear.net 50 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah there’s this switcheroo tech companies do where they establish an initial value/user base on the adult content side of their platform but then try to pull the rug out from under it once they’ve hit critical mass and want access to more prudish investors’ money (see: OnlyFans’ aborted attempt to cull the hardcore content from their site).

[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 28 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

This is definitely a thing, but I have a different take on OnlyFans in particular.

I don’t think they ever wanted to get porn off their platform. Unlike sites like Reddit and Twitter, they started as a porn site and they have always made all their money from porn. They really started raking it in during the height of COVID, and when the platform got huge, that started attracting unwanted attention from Big Banking. It’s difficult and expensive to maintain reliable credit card processing as an adult site because these big banks have very strict and ever-evolving puritanical rules about what types of content they’ll process payments for. Run afoul of these banks, lose the ability to process Visa and Mastercard, and your business is dead in the water.

By appearing to pivot away from hardcore content and aggressively promoting SFW creators, it’s easier to make the case to credit card companies that it’s not just a porn site.

OnlyFans makes an astronomical, disgusting amount of money. They know where their bread is buttered. It’s a soulless capitalist enterprise, they don’t give a shit about the “morality” or porn or anything else. Their only goal is to maximize profits, and every decision they make can and should be viewed through that lens. They don’t sell paid ads on their site so they don’t have to worry about advertisers pulling out the way sites like Reddit and Twitter do. Plus Reddit and Twitter were never making real money off adult content on their sites; we have always driven tons of traffic to their platforms but they don’t actually profit from our presence there beyond the traffic we bring, so it’s easy for them to discard us once the users are already there and invested. None of that is true for OnlyFans.

FWIW, this is not a popular take among my peers. Most seem to think OF is like the other tech companies that want to boot us once they get big enough. But I think there’s decent evidence that OF does not want to do that and will never do that. Not because they care about us or anything, but because our porn makes them hundreds of billions of dollars (probably.)

[–] iie@hexbear.net 5 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

do banks have a material incentive to crack down on SW?

[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

As far as I know, not really. This is one piece of the puzzle I don’t understand: why do they care so much?

My best guess is that it’s due to the higher frequency of chargebacks on adult transactions, but they already mitigate this with high processing fees so I just don’t get it.

[–] iie@hexbear.net 1 points 29 minutes ago

Maybe it's labor discipline? SW might put upward pressure on wages as employers compete with a form of lucrative self-employment available to millions of workers?

[–] PKMKII@hexbear.net 8 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Hmmm, how do all the traditional porn sites avoid that issue? Do they have access to different processors? Or does the parasocial aspect mean OF has a lot of add-on services that blur the line between porn sex work and “sexual services” that the processors balk at?

[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 13 points 10 hours ago

The traditional porn sites also struggle to retain payment processors and pay exorbitant transaction fees (10%+)

There has been a big crackdown recently due to the rise of Christofascism

[–] iie@hexbear.net 41 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

(We’re trying to warn y’all about banking discrimination and the dangers of facial recognition technology too but that’s a subject for another post. Just know that they always test their hateful tech tools on us first, then roll them out for the respectables and normals.)

I look forward to that post!

[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 20 points 12 hours ago

Ugh so much pressure! 😭 I have some very smart colleagues who have written pieces on these issues. I will try to compile a few in a post here soon.

[–] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 14 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I don't fault you for going where you gotta go, but I imagine that as bsky gains popularity, it will gain advertising, and it will start deplatforming accounts like yours. It is corporate social media after all. I'm not sure what a good alternative is though. In my early days on Mastodon, there was Switter, which seems like the right kind of model, but it collapsed for reasons I can't recall.

[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 21 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah I addressed this in another comment, but this will happen if Bluesky gets big enough. That’s just the joy of being a SW! But we’ll use it until we can’t. We’re very adaptable like that because we have to be.

The reason I thought it might be relevant here is that we are pretty much always early adopters, so often the masses tend to follow us, whether they’re aware of it or not. We’ve been on there for a year or so but this is the first really big migration that I’ve personally witnessed.

My opinion as to why Switter never really took off is that a SW-specific platform is too niche. Clients/customers didn’t really follow us over. It’s super difficult to get people to switch to new platforms; Emile Torres did a great episode of Kelly Hayes’ “Movement Memos” podcast about “switching costs,” why it’s so hard to move people to a new platform, and what platforms can do to mitigate those costs.

Also, Mastodon just seems a little too nerdy for the general public if I’m being honest 😬

[–] Moonworm@hexbear.net 5 points 9 hours ago

It's like when young working class people, minorities, artists, make a neighborhood nice and then it gets gentrified.

[–] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 8 points 11 hours ago

I really appreciate your perspective on this stuff. I hadn't considered how SWerz would be on the cutting edge of privacy/security tech and concerns. I completely understand the nerd factor of the fediverse in general, but I can't help feeling like it is "the answer" to corporate controlled networks. Then again, I'm also aware of the inherent issue around "technical solutions to political problems".

[–] PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS@hexbear.net 36 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Oof. I have a bsky account I made a long time ago but I don't use it because the vibes over there are so rancid

[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 33 points 14 hours ago

It’s libbed up over there for sure, but membership has more than doubled in the past couple weeks so maybe there will be a shift or at least little enclaves of cool people, similar to Twitter.

[–] Frank@hexbear.net 17 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Weird left twitter started showing up in force a week or so ago. It's still rancid but at least when you're screaming at libs you're not screaming alone.

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 1 points 2 hours ago

is it better than mastodon which is just ukraine flag libs and the occasional imperial leftist that believes all the things the state department wants?

[–] newmou@hexbear.net 31 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (3 children)

Uhhh woah

Edit: This is not LibSky lol I’m just dumb

[–] newmou@hexbear.net 30 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Wait a minute lmao this is not the same thing. This is a crypto thing

[–] buh@hexbear.net 39 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

bit idea: create a new shitcoin for every trendy new startup so people buy it thinking they're buying stonks-up

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[–] MouthyHooker@hexbear.net 19 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I heard it’s the number 1 free app in the app store right now, but haven’t bothered to confirm this.

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[–] M68040@hexbear.net 8 points 11 hours ago

Hell, half my friends for the past ten years have been adult artists of one sort or another. You don’t get into indie art of the sort I like without getting to know sex workers - and getting to understand why they’re important.

Long live the weird and wild.

[–] Des@hexbear.net 8 points 11 hours ago

i jumped ship the second Melon Ball melon-musk took over. sucks too because i had just started talking to some local leftists. one is a SW and they moved back nearby recently

might have to see if they moved over and check it out again.

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