Discussion
'Icky and heartbreaking': The $2 per hour worker behind the OnlyFans boom
profdevloper: We could free this poor soul from wage slavery by just banning pornography.
anovikov: Now this is almost entirely automated anyway, there is a big adult ecosystem here in Cyprus and i talk to a lot of people. No manual work is used there anymore, "chatters" are a thing of the past.Now they are well on the path to automate OnlyFans models themselves, there are plenty of hybrid sites where known live models are attracted with good terms to bring in the users, and then slowly switched for AI ones, and it WORKS.Adult industry is so competitive and fast-evolving because there are few deep moats, it shows the way for everyone else, in fact.
vimda: God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI
morkalork: Now you have two problems: That poor soul has lost their meager income and you've criminalized countless people who will no doubt still be consuming porn but from illicit sources
zoklet-enjoyer: That's what the private prisons are for!
steve1977: That's a good plan. We did that with drugs and it worked fabulously.
cedarscarlett: Let me complain about how I'm being exploited at my job while voluntarily choosing said job over literally every other job available to me.
soygem: inb4 you get downvoted by the reddi... hacker news hivemind
tehjoker: Does that mean that people do not recognize that some of the content is AI? Or do they simply accept it?
firtoz: There's enough people on both camps I'm sure.
swiftcoder: Please do enumerate these other jobs that are available to the Filipino currently performing this job for... checks notes... $2/hour?
mhb: Please say what you think the hourly average wage is in the Philipinnes and how you conclude that this isn't the woman's best option.
autoexec: How is this not fraud, or at least false advertising? If I'm paying money to chat with a specific sex worker how is it even legal to let some random dude in a third world country pretend to be the person I'm supposed to be talking to? I've never personally engaged in these types of systems, but I don't think there's a problem with them as long as they are run honestly. It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.
throwaway5752: It's going to kill the software industry as we know it!We're literally killing our field by making the devices and internet so repulsive that people are actively unplugging. You can't hear about this online because the bot generated content is filling the gap and the people doing it aren't online to tell you about it.Children are getting addicted to everything because the internet has killed any sense of self-stimulation and they are growing up into gamblers cards, sports, and prediction markets or rage-addicted media consumers.There is plenty of free human connection to be had out there, it is free, and all you have to do is put down the phone or computer. It is getting extremely compelling as an alternative for increasing large groups of people.The tech industry is energetically strangling its golden goose.
nine_k: To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.
V__: There is probably some lingo somewhere clarifying that you pay for the "experience" of her and not for her in particular.
swiftcoder: I don't think you and I are disagreeing here? The article explicitly states that she only took this work because she couldn't find other work, and that she dislikes the work intensely (... but has no better job prospects)
mmooss: That's how exploitation works: The exploited don't have another choice. That doesn't make doing cruel things to them wrong and (hopefully) illegal.For example, someone could compel people who are starving to do all sorts of horrible things for food, and then say 'well, they chose to do it!'.
dangus: This is true, but I also think that the information in the article alone is insufficient to make a judgment.This salary is over the Philippines minimum wage. It's a legal job like any other.The people interviewed are not super happy about the content of the job, but none of it seems to be anything more than it being pornography-related.Nobody's really seeming to cross any lines of illegality as described in the article. This doesn't come close to the kind of conditions faced by Meta's contractors in Africa spying through Meta glasses in private homes.I would equate this type of job to any type of job that has aspects that some people would never be willing to do.E.g., I would never be willing to be a window washer. I'm too scared of heights. Same deal with tower construction. But there are plenty of people doing those jobs who don't feel exploited.The plus side of jobs like this are that you can do this work at home, you can be physically disabled, there's often some level of flexibility of hours, and there's no manual labor.I'm going to guess that the only scandal here is that the Philippines is 80% Catholic and possibly more conservative than people in the countries where OnlyFans generates its income.
mhb: Once you make this job illegal, what do you think she does then for a job? By taking this job she has revealed that this is her best option. When you make the job illegal, you're forcing her to take a worse alternative.
PeterStuer: Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.
vimda: You betray your ignorance of how parasocial OnlyFans and their ilk get. Yes, people get real connection out of it, whether its with who they think they're talking to or not. I think that connecting those people into a chat bot instead of a real human is depressing, and a bad thing for society, but you're welcome to disagree with that
whynotmaybe: Do we know if onlyfan is already training their own models with their user's content?
thedelanyo: That's why China ban this service outright? But hey, America is a democratic and freedom land.
cess11: What do you mean by "human connection"?
steve_adams_86: It appears a lot of people using OF are using it as a parasocial medium, not strictly for porn. They want to believe they're actually in touch with the performer and part of their lives to some degree.
cess11: What does "para-" mean?
bawolff: > She would be set targets to earn the model hundreds of dollars worth of sales of pictures and videos during her shift.So lets assume $300 per shift, so with an 8 hour shift, that would be about $37.50/hour of merchandise per hour. So the workers makes about 5.3%. Google says standard for sales workers paid on comission normally get 5-10%.So its possible this is within what would be normal for a low end non-salary commision job, but it depends on what "hundreds" really mean. Of course i think normally for commision only sales jobs you move much more expensive product to make it worth your while.Otoh they probably deserve a lot higher than normal sales commision given the nature of the job and all the stuff they undoubtedly have to put up with.
system2: I am still amazed that prostitution is legal when done online, and these teenage sex workers are allowed to continue selling themselves.
beejiu: It's not prostitution, and while prostitution is illegal in the US it's perfectly legal in the UK and many other countries.
mschuster91: Related: in Germany, there currently is a huge scandal surrounding the company "Fanblast", where you could purchase the supposed "whatsapp phone number" of various "celebrities" and, allegedly, the chats were also run by random freelancers [1].[1] https://www.comicschau.de/news/fanblast-aloa-me-klengan-krit...
SoftTalker: There will be some interesting game theory studies in the aftermath.
shrubble: This was done by “mail order bride” companies like those in Russia and Ukraine; the phrase is that you are not talking to Anastasia but “Hairy Boris”!
mingus88: It is fraud. However, one thing has become crystal clear lately is that laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and able to enforce them.And further, scamming people in the context of sex has always been easy because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.Imagine filing a report that you spent thousands of dollars chatting with some random person, having the chat logs submitted as evidence, etc. it’s similar to why all types of sexual assault are rarely reported
ghurtado: > because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.I would argue that the reason has more to do with our utter inability to create common sense laws regarding anything "sex".
giantrobot: How could they not be? At $2 an hour they'd be leaving money on the table by not paying a tiny fraction of that for an LLM.
alwa: “Para-“ means “around” or “beside,” kind of in the sense of “close to.” In this specific context, American psychiatrists Horton and Wohl (1956) introduced the notion of “parasocial interactions” to describe audience members’ intensifying one-sided sensations of relationships with characters as American-style mass media came into its own.In the mid-2010s social scientists began to use the idea to think about the newly-more-intimate, confessional celebrities, like the Kardashians, as they started to use the socials ‘round the clock [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word they choose.[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11...[1] https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/7/
chaseadam17: Somewhat unrelated but I won’t be surprised if we eventually find out a lot of OnlyFans revenue is money laundering.
jfengel: It means that it shares some, but not all, aspects of a social relationship.It's often applied to one-sided relationships with celebrities, where you feel a personal connection to them but they literally don't know you exist.
localuser13: I think that's just a good old prisoner dilemma. You can't have a free-range golden goose, because if you grow it responsibly, others will abuse it first and you will get out of business. The only way is to be as greedy as legally allowed, because otherwise you're left behind.
ndriscoll: Talking to a real human seems more depressing to me, especially when they're making less than $2/hour doing it and they feel bad for you in the interaction. Paying for female attention is pretty bad, but not even getting the attention you paid for is just bleak. At that point go with the machine. At least it's not thinking "what the hell am I doing here?" while it's "talking" to you.
Invictus0: It's not illegal in the US
swarnie: > As of early 2026, the minimum wage in the Philippines is set daily rather than hourly and varies by region, with a common daily minimum of approximately 695 PHP in some sectors, often equating to less than $2 USD per hourPretty much any Wagie job?
prepend: Isn’t $2/hour a pretty high salary in Philliphines?This is sleepy, but then so is chatting with onlyfans models. It’s already a fake, paradoxical relationship and even that aspect is fake. It’s delusions on deceptions.
iugtmkbdfil834: But then.. how is it any different from Amazon saying automated stores while a human is watching cameras or waymo having humans operate in some circumstances. If there are no rules, you can't expect corporates to govern themselves in a way that does not benefit them..
autoexec: People don't usually pay for automated stores or rides because of the automated aspect. They just want to get the items or get to their destination. I think waymo was mostly upfront that humans are working behind the scenes, but if amazon lied to investors and shareholders by claiming that their stores were automated when it was "Actually Indians" I think they could/should have been sued.
hackyhacky: Yes, and it's sad.I wish someone would create a business that profits from people forming actual connections with each other, but every opportunity has been displaced.Dating sites replaces meeting IRL, and foster superficial relationships anyway. Bars are passé. Social clubs, golf clubs, etc, seem to belong to a past generation. Social media killed the social part. The damage to society is real.
ndriscoll: There is one: universities. They're just really expensive so you can't stay there for more than a few years, and people aren't properly advised of how important the opportunity is.
SoftTalker: It's no more fraud than any other "fan club" where you got letters and personal autographs and such from the celebrity but didn't realize it was all done by a hired staff of employees. It's been a thing for decades.
ghurtado: You're right - it's only 99.9% illegalhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_United_Sta...
PeterStuer: I'll admit. I' too old to 'get' OF.
nkrisc: It’s not a real connection. It’s completely invented in their mind. Probably more accurate to call it a delusion.
neya: It is fraud. But these parties are protected by OnlyFans themselves. Similar to how dating apps promote (and actually lot of them enforce) fake accounts with fake pictures because it boosts everything - engagement and revenue. So they always turn a blind eye.Last week, I used a dating app where they used a fake profile tailored specifically for me, using a married woman's photo. I deleted the app. Every app in this space is scummy and the people at the top running these are just trash. That's the real reason.
gruez: >But then.. how is it any different from Amazon saying automated stores while a human is watching cameras or waymo having humans operate in some circumstances.Did amazon/waymo actually claim they were 100% automated? Moreover is the fact that they're 100% automated a material fact to the consumer? The investors might have grounds to sue for securities fraud, but it's going to be much tougher for a consumer, when for all intents and purposes they got what they expected (ie. whatever they bought from the shop).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_fact
chrononaut: As an aside:> OnlyFans, which generated $7.2bn (£5.3bn) revenue in 2024, ..I didn't expect their revenue to be that high, but I suppose it's also unsurprising.
ahnick: > laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and ABLE to enforce them.The 'able' part is the critical insight. Laws are too often passed that really have no ability to be enforced, but end up adding bureaucratic processes that law abiding companies have to follow. This also implies that governments need to actively clean up existing laws, which almost never happens unless there is enough support to pass a new law to actively supplant the old one.
jzb: Which goes back to the shame thing, really. Few people are willing to stand up and advocate for common sense laws because they don’t want to be associated with anything regarding sex. Politicians, whom are not generally noted for being averse to hiring sex workers, sure as hell don’t want to be advocating for them for fear of losing elections.
aleph_minus_one: > Politicians [...] don’t want to be advocating for them for fear of losing elections.This assumes that the politician plans and has a chance to become re-elected. If this is not the case, the arguments for not advocating for such laws become much less important for the respective politician.
monocasa: A politician can rarely enact laws alone, and the above issues typically apply to enough politicians at a time to make having a quorum difficult.
localuser13: >To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.I'm married now, and never used any parasocial platform OnlyFans or another, but trivializing the problem of young adult loneliness is either ignorant or condescending.A large fraction of young males don't have anyone to "take out for a dinner", or at least have no idea how to initiate that. You may scoff at that, but I certainly wouldn't know how to do it, and money was not a problem. Paying for human connection, especially online, was tempting.
asdff: Taking someone out for a dinner and footing the bill does not require you to be some cassanova. Escort services are a thing and honestly somewhat increasingly normalized. The latest chris hemsworth movie had him using an escort and didn't paint him as weird for it or anything, kind of just seemed like a gym membership or any other service the way it was casually broached (he played a certain healthy/rich/clean cut professional thief/perhaps even autistic character).
mothballed: I don't think the escort service is necessarily because you can't get a woman. As they say you don't pay them to "fuck", you pay them to leave. It's a way to have a moment of romance without the crushing weight of having the commitment of children, family, the household and all the other challenges they may be dealing with their life.
sillyfluke: Now that you got the balls rolling in an unwanted direction, I'm sure you're not the only one with blue jewels.
superb_dev: I don’t think it’s an age thing, I think is desperation. I’m not desperate enough to get it
