From Don’t be Evil to Can’t be Evil
How ownership can solve sex workers longest lasting problem
Instagram has just suspended Pornhubs widely followed account on the platform. Pornhub had 13.1 million followers and more than 6,200 posts. Nevertheless, the account is gone, despite the fact that the profile did not feature any sexually explicit content that would have violated Instagram’s terms of service. Unfortunately, Pornhub’s suspension has now been made permanent instead, de-platforming another adult industry brand from mainstream social media.
The most important detail of Pornhub’s Instagram ban is Meta’s response that they banned Pornhub because they “encouraged users to leave Instagram and visit a porn site.” So, it doesn’t help for an adult site to comply with a platform’s content rules, if you have an off-platform porn destination/brand they will ban you no matter what content you post.
But this is just the latest incident in the “war on porn” that goes on for decades. Adult content creators, individual performers, and OnlyFans models have grown accustomed to being cut off from the possibilities to promote their work on social media, or getting paid.
Adult content creators need social media to drive their loyal fans to their personal sites, or to platforms like Clips4Sale, ManyVids, and the increasingly popular and visible OnlyFans, where they sell often custom-made clips or subscriptions that give fans access to a constant flow of self-created content.
A brief history of de-platforming sex workers
Just last month Wells Fargo closed the bank account of Alana Evans because she’s a legal sex worker. But it is not only banks, PayPal and Venmo also have restrictions against adult creators, and Stripe doesn’t allow sex workers to use its services.
Adult content creators have long viewed Reddit as more sex-positive than other online platforms. But a growing number reported in August 2022 that this is now changing and say that Reddit is quietly banning them.
In January 2022, another online platform turned on sex workers. Multiple sex workers started reporting on social media that Linktree has banned them from the platform overnight.
In December 2021, AVN Stars announced that it would end monetized content on its site, citing banking discrimination.
In the summer of 2021, even the paid subscription platform OnlyFans announced it was cracking down on the very content that built its business: pornography. The OnlyFans ban was ultimately reversed, thanks in large to the loud protest of many adult content creators. Yet it has made many of them all too aware of the precariousness of their existence — even on social platforms that had previously welcomed them.
In December 2020, Mastercard and Visa stopped processing payments on Pornhub affecting the content sales of hundreds of thousands of models who rely on the platform for their livelihoods.
At around the same time, sex workers have been getting kicked off of TikTok en masse. The purge appears to have been in advance of TikTok’s new community guidelines, which were recently updated and expanded. According to the new guidelines, users are forbidden from posting, streaming, or sharing nude or sexually explicit content as well as “content that depicts, promotes, or glorifies sexual solicitation, including offering or asking for sexual partners, sexual chats or imagery, sexual services, premium sexual content, or sexcamming.”
In 2018, Tumblr issued a ban on NSFW content, cracking down on many sex-positive and LGBTQ-friendly online communities and significantly impacting adult content creators' ability to post on the website. The CEO of Automattic, which acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019, explained recently why it still bans porn: To avoid sparking a crackdown from credit card companies and Apple.
The ones who suffer from this kind of de-platforming are always the same people: sex workers. They very often help build the platforms where they get kicked off, once those platforms reach a certain size. Tumblr is just one very prominent example. Reddit or Twitter might become the next...
In the spring of 2022, Twitter convened 84 employees to form what it called a “Red Team” to test the waters for monetization of adult content. The idea was to give adult content creators the ability to sell OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue. OnlyFans is projecting $2.5 billion in revenue this year — about half of Twitter’s 2021 revenue — and is already a profitable company. So it was very appealing for Twitter to pressure-test the idea to allow adult creators to monetize on the platform. But what the Red Team discovered derailed the project: Twitter could not safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not — and still is not — effectively policing harmful sexual content on the platform. With this in mind, it might be just a matter of time before porn on Twitter is banned completely.
The call for a sex-positive social media platform
The war on porn should worry us all. Sex is a substantial part of life. Sex is one of the most basic human needs, next to food, water, and shelter. People will always want to discuss and portray it in the spaces they inhabit.
But monopolistic platforms and app stores are increasingly policing such content, and credit card companies are doing the same. Also, companies like Google, Cloudflare, Amazon AWS, and GoDaddy have the power to shut down websites or block specific users.
We believe that one sign of freedom in a society is the democratic access to adult content, and the ability to make a living from any kind of (legal) work. We also believe that it is a sign of gender equality that women's and man bodies are treated equally. Woman's nipples are obscene, indecent, lewd, banned on Instagram and other social media, and against the law in most places. On the other side, hardly anybody notices a man's nipples.
It’s also odd to see how far the war on porn goes, knowing that around 70% of all adults watch regularly adult content online which translates to around 3 billion people. In the end, a small minority is trying to bully the vast majority of society with their moral standards.
3 billion people are the potential market size for a sex-positive social media site.
We believe that social media should allow the expression of any kind of (legal) sexuality — and that is the kind of network we set out to build.
Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic (and owner of Tumblr) just wrote on September 28th in a blog post:
If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.
I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don’t know about it. They’ll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that’s a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don’t attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist.
Change always starts when people come together to do something.
We are building Sharesome, a sex-positive social media platform since 2018. We are already independent of any app store as the platform is built as a PWA (Progressive Web App).
We have created Flame Token as the native currency of Sharesome. Flame Token (XFL) is a blockchain-based token compatible with the ERC-20 standard of the Ethereum blockchain. It is issued by Flame Technologies AG in Zug, CH. We have obtained a no-action letter from FINMA.
We have built Community Guidelines and a robust moderation & verification workflow to solve the three big adult content problems:
1. Age: The 18+ problem
2. Consent: The ‘No Involuntary Pornography’ problem
3. Copyright: The ‘don’t steal other people’s stuff’ problem
But how do we make sure that we are not “the next Tumblr or OnlyFans” to ban adult content because of outside pressure?
We believe that there are two things that need to happen to the platform (frontend) and the technology it uses (backend) at the same time:
1. Progressive Ownership: The users must own the platform
2. Progressive Decentralization: The backend must use Web3 infrastructure
Users should be able to own the businesses they love
There is only one solution to the problem that sex workers don’t have a saying in the platforms they use: They need to own those platforms and become shareholders. Ownership matters. Shareholders and their interests decide at the end the faith of a platform.
If Twitter’s shareholders decide that the porn on the site only costs money and resources and can't be monetized, it will go. If Shareome’s shareholders decide that porn is the main traffic driver and that it can be monetized, a sex-positive social media site is born.
What we need are democratic ownership models in the online economy. Web3 is experimenting with new models like DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) in which tokenholders participate in the management and decision-making of the entity. We can also learn from the cooperative finance sector — like the $126 billion CoBank, which is co-owned by its borrowers. Or the John Lewis Partnership, a British retail chain where workers receive a share of its profits and can elect representatives to the board.
At Sharesome, we decided on a solution that is based on the current regulations for companies but uses blockchain as the governing technology — a mix of both worlds so to say. We decided to tokenize our holding in Switzerland and move our shares on the Ethereum blockchain as ERC20-tokens. The process has already started. Soon one token will be a share, not the representation of a share.
This is possible because Switzerland now lets tokenized shares trade on a blockchain with the same legal standing as traditional assets.
Swiss lawmakers decided not to create a completely new regime but adapted legislation to graft specific features of distributed ledger technology (DLT) onto the existing legal framework. The DLT amendments recognize tokenized securities as a new class of asset, whose legal ownership rights are automatically transferred via the blockchain to each new investor.
- via Coindesk
Sharesome will be the first crypto project that issues shares on the blockchain in a fully regulated environment.
We will now work on the roadmap to making users co-owners. We will start with a whitelist for adult content creators that support Sharesome already.
We believe that tokenized shares combine the strengths of ICOs and traditional shares. We also believe that a traditional corporation with a CEO and a board is more efficient than a DAO. But we also believe that blockchain shares make great participation possible and provide the necessary transparency that an adult social media site needs.
The technology for a truly open and free internet is here
Using Web3 infrastructure for everything backend means that trusting the platform owners is replaced by cryptographic ownership of digital assets and mathematical proofs of security.
The first Web3 layer that we implemented in Sharesome is the Flame Token. Financial freedom is one of the biggest dreams that we have for sex workers and their customers. A utility token on top of a social platform that does not discriminate and offers a “Login with Sharesome” API can truly serve the whole industry.
We see also opportunities for fractionalized NFTs.
Right now, an OnlyFans creator with revenue lower than life costs, but higher than pocket money has very often only one option to quit a full-time job and focus on content creation: dept.
But it only works for small investments. You need a new camera and you know that OnlyFans pays out in 5 days? Go and leverage your credit card debt. But quitting your job and hoping that you cover rent and health insurance with your credit card limit — that is crazy. And going to a bank to take a loan is mission impossible. Banks separate customers into two categories: Consumer & business. Creators are neither, so they are underserved. Plus, adult content creators are vice-industry customers and have no standing at banks.
The next option is equity. Besides the fact that equity financing is like a tattoo (very hard to get rid of), adult content creators do not have exit scenarios that can make their investors rich. First, because there is no money floating in the adult industry — only out. Second, the best scenario is a steady stream of positive cash flows and not a 10–20x multiple IPO.
The most likely option for creators is a model that is based on future revenue. That means creators take an investment in return for a percentage of the creator’s income and the IP they generate over a certain amount of time.
This option would theoretically be best suited for up-and-coming creators who would need ~$50k to focus 100% on their content for about a year and see if they can make it as full-time creators.
We are working on a whitepaper for an NFT-based creator crowdfunding solution where creators can basically tokenize themselves on Sharesome.
The most obvious next steps are the implementation of decentralized domain name systems like BNS (used by Blockstack), Namecoin, ENS (used by Ethereum), and others. Or decentralized storage systems like Gaia (used by Blockstack), Swarm (used by Ethereum), IPFS, Storj, and others.
From Don’t be Evil to Can’t be Evil
We believe that the best road to a new internet and a truly open sex-positive social media platform is to build an entity that is controlled by the users of the platform and combine that with the progressive decentralization of the used technology for the backend.
For the first time, sex workers would own the platform that they help to build.
There are many problems to solve until that goal is reached. The big ones will be to build the site technically (as in making it scalable in a browser) and to stay regulated. That includes the implementation of a high level of self-regulation in the sense of promoting a “higher standard” that can be used for financial gain.
Decentralization is key: If the founders of Sharesome and Flame Token are still in charge in 3 years from now, something went wrong. And if we still run the site on centralized servers and databases in 3 years, the Web3 movement (or us) failed.
Our mission is to build a sex-positive social media site. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything else just serves this purpose. The distribution of voting power on a blockchain, the creation of a user-owned platform, the implementation of a cryptocurrency, and so on…
We will use the Web3 technology stack to make our vision a reality, but simply adding Web3 technology to our project will not change anything at large. The shift must go beyond technology. We need to shift society and culture. We need a real product-market fit. We need to change us, sex workers, users, lawmakers, developers, and many more to build a better product.
Can’t be evil is the future of technology, organizations, and business.
We are in this for the long run.
We are already so many.
#SharesomeLove
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/SharesomeCom
Join our Discord:
https://discord.gg/sharesome
And don’t forget: Join Sharesome! (NSFW)
Best
Ralf Kappe
Sharesome Founder & CEO
https://sharesome.com/RalfKappe/
