Plenty has been written in this thread about the article's take on SV attitudes on sex workers. For the most part, I think the article is right. But there's another reason why tech orgs and banks don't want porn, which it completely ignores: the sheer quantity of bad actors around the industry. Chargebacks, disputes, hacking, spam, money laundering, content theft, stalking, child pornography, and so forth are all endemic to the porn industry. Sure there's gold in them thar hills, and lots of it, but the hills are being shelled and ninjas are hiding in every bush. Perhaps OnlyFans is finding a better path. Or maybe they're just in the early golden age before the same forces crowd in and shell them, too.
While what you say about bad actors is true, I just don't buy your argument. SV prides itself in solving "hard problems" (whether that's actually true is another issue entirely), so are you honestly saying that the issue with high chargeback rates or illegal content is too difficult to solve? I mean, SV can create advanced electric cars, launch rockets into space, serve millions of queries a second, but porn spam is too difficult?
I think the moralistic argument makes much more sense. Most of the VC types who want to "make it big" in SV do it not just for the money, but also for the approval of their peers and the praise of their Ivy-league brethren ("Wow, look how smart he is, he was one of the earliest investors in Facebook!") Making it big in porn just wouldn't have the same cachet, and would be a potential minefield of social opprobrium.
Many have tried; there are a lot of bodies on those hills. Take chargebacks. Not only does the merchant who gets a chargeback lose the money, they're typically hit with a $20-$100 fee on top. It's very common and an old trick to use stolen credit cards, download all the premium content, and redistribute on your own site. Or maybe just because your spouse found the line item on your credit card and you're embarrassed. The chargeback rate for the adult industry is said to be about 15%; the vast majority of merchant accounts will drop you after reaching 1%.
Porn spam is an unbelievable technical challenge because it's so damn profitable. If you fight them you are fighting the best—and an army of hundreds of thousands of the not-so-best, who can overwhelm you with sheer numbers. Also the spammers tend to be vindictive kooks, and active efforts against them can bring DDoSes, swatting, and other unpleasantries down on you and yours.
Child porn and revenge porn are ever-present. You will have to moderate it, which means people will have to see the images. Also people like to use porn sites to distribute snuff imagery (videos of suffering/torture/death). Imagine the job of a Facebook moderator except ultra-concentrated.
I don't think the moralistic and execution arguments are opposed; rather they are an ill-virtued cycle of reinforcement. The industry is shady and filled with bad people because it's said to be shady and filled with bad people. I do expect SV & friends to keep trying, because there's just so much money!
Chargeback is significantly an issue due to scummy business practices in use by enough of the websites. $1 trials that auto-renew at $100 per year and other such predatory credit card pricing tactics. There’s a significant percentage of the industry that is reliant on these tactics to survive and it results in the huge difference in credit card chargebacks compared to other industries.
That said this is a situation that is slowly improving thanks to competition. However this is likely going to be a stain on the porn industry for decades after the problem is mostly gone due to the way the financial industry does risk analysis.
The question, why does not streaming sites for music and video have the problem where someone use a stolen credit cards, download all the premium content, and redistribute on your own site?
I would even assume that this is actually happening pretty regularly with different piracy scenes. If you want to rip content with as minimum amount of traceability, identity theft (cc fraud under a different name) would be high on the list. Afterward people can just copy the copies.
The question then is why would it be different for porn?
Considering what the original idea behind Facemash was, I don't think the type of industry to achieve success in matters.
Porn spam is difficult in the same manner filter-evading YouTube clips are - it's human intelligence applied at scale. With highly motivated humans at that. It really is harder than all the things which you mentioned.
Imho the fact that porn-related “supposedly-technical” problems are still so prevalent, is an actual raincheck over SV’s claims of world-changing capabilities. In the end, SV dudes are mostly just pushing ads and marketing Chinese tech. When hard people-problems come up, be it fake news or scammers, they have no solution.
> I think the moralistic argument makes much more sense.
I find it absurdly laughable that you think that there is any moralistic response from Silicon Valley VCs who have funded outright theft and lawbreaking--and who also funded YouTube when it was primarily a porn distribution system.
People have made lots of money from porn over the years. The porn tech conference used to occur at the same time as CES--and often it was more technical than CES--things like Laserdics, DVDs, the web, online credit card tech, etc. all were at the porn conference long before the mainstream ones. One could make an uncharitable comment about it being more profitable to sell shovels in the gold rush than to be a miner/performer ...
The big issue with porn sites is that they only scale so far, and then it's a race to the bottom, and when you hit the bottom the law starts knocking on your door. So, you have to switch off porn before the race to the bottom starts if you want to scale further. And if you make make that change at the wrong time or in the wrong way, your site dies.
OnlyFans is in the race to the bottom now. There is always another girl who looks just as good who will do whatever thing you want for 10% less than that other girl. Do you really think that people really care whether they're watching Porn Star A or Porn Star B--or whether they care that Porn Star B is $10 less per <whatever>?
Sure, there will be some exceptions where a bunch of people want to see some famous Disney tart's naughty bits. The rest of the performers, however, are in the swamp.
OnlyFans broke the monopoly. Great! But then it will become the monopoly. The wheel simply turns.
Sure, we have porn examples like Kim Kardashian. Apparently people don't consider her fungible--God knows why. And we obviously know that a sitting President pays about $100K for sex with a Playboy centerfold.
Simple question: Who was the most popular porn star 5 years ago? 10 years ago?
Most of the past porn stars lament how much the ubiquity of porn has reduced their escort/stripper revenues which were way more than their porn revenues ever were.
Just like everything that goes online, your customer base goes global but so does your competition. And the customer base is mostly men in developed rich countries while the competition is a lot of very pretty young women in very poor countries.
