OnlyFans Reverses Decision? Is This Tumblr All Over Again?
A week ago, the Twitter-verse was clamoring over the headline: OnlyFans bans porn.
And this week, they announced that they suspended their decision…
There’s so much to touch on here. First, and most importantly, is the uncertainty this leaves the creators of OnlyFans that built the brand.
Courtney Tillia, a former special education teacher turned OnlyFans star, reported to TMZ,
she’s befuddled the company that built its subscription-based success on the back of sex workers is now hanging them out to dry by removing porn on October 1.
OnlyFans allowed Courtney to quickly go from a teacher’s salary to a six-figure income giving her a way to support her three children, buy a house, and provide security for her family. But with OnlyFans banning content from her and the platform’s earliest creators, this is all falling apart faster than it began.
Many sex workers who built OnlyFans into what it is today have already pointed out that this is just a suspension, not a cancelation. While OnlyFans claims to be inclusive for all creators, they have made no claim of actually changing their original plans to ban content.
OnlyFans has its reasons for disrupting the lives of thousands of creators, on whose backs it built its success:
“to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers”
Not a very sympathetic reason…
It’s easy to be mad at OnlyFans for this, but the blame is not all on them. While they are the face of this callous action, the ones pulling the strings are the banks and payment providers, like Visa and Mastercard, that allow them to pay creators.
According to The Verge, founder and CEO Tim Stokely,
named three major banks that refused service because of “reputational risk” associated with the UK-based OnlyFans’ sexual material: Bank of New York Mellon, Metro Bank, and JPMorgan Chase. He said BNY Mellon specifically had “flagged and rejected” every wire transaction involving OnlyFans, threatening its ability to pay creators.
When it boils down to issues over centralization or censorship, in both human expression and financial inclusion, the solution always seems to point towards blockchain and crypto.
As more decentralized platforms grow on open, censorship-resistant blockchains, they will be able to absorb the market demand for free, permission-less human expression. The fly-wheel happens when these networks reach a level of autonomy and decentralization that allows them to operate themselves while being guided by its core community.
This is the ultimate vision for MintGate: a decentralized platform with exclusive, “token-gated” content, operated by its biggest contributors and sustained by their greatest supporters. This should be the goal for every web3, community-centric venture. But it’s a long path to that world and we need your help to reach it.
As more people enter crypto, the chains of the legacy system will be unable to restrain these new self-sustaining communities, operating globally and aligned by shared values with their own censorship-resistant currencies.
Coming soon… Community = Currency.
