With the potential for anonymity and digital-only connections, OnlyFans is a big improvement over prostitution, strip clubs, or crushing poverty.

As always, the core issue is economic insecurity, not human sexuality.

more like economic insecurity combined with moral decrepitude. reduce everything to economic insecurity and you're not left with much

There is nothing inherently immoral about showing people your naked body.

It depends on the context, sort of similar to how there is "nothing inherently immoral about firing a gun."

If you are an adult, showing your naked body to a minor is considered in most western societies to be immoral.

Well, not to strip naked on the internet. There was a great paper that came out recently demonstrating the value of men's sexuality is negative (vs that of women).

Men don't possess anything intrinsically valuable or desirable. There is no fallback. I too wonder what this will mean for (young) men, who have already been pushed down a dark path.

We know already where it heads - to young men being radicalized to hate everyone who isn't like them (i.e. not young, male, angry, usually white, usually straight).

This would’ve been a good comment if you had left out the part in the parentheses.

I’d say it’s more of a class thing. They will be angry at the the ruling class and wealthy. I don’t think they are going to be taking it out on old ladies...

That's what you'd hope for, but in practice that's not what I'm seeing. The anger I see online is directed at politicians in some cases - but usually for said politicians supporting social programs, pro-immigration policies, and anti-gun policies.

In the rest of cases, anger is indeed directed at LGBTQ+ people - especially towards trans people - people of color - especially blacks, and increasingly Asians - and women - especially those who are viewed as "promiscuous".

Eh, I think it's a decent label. Individuals belonging to a social group with a presumption of power (in many western contexts, white men) tend to behave as described above. Individuals belonging to groups with low presumptions of power just tend to be problematic within their own community.

You don't see many long lasting violent weak minority supremacy groups.

I observe this to be a narrative that many are pushing, but I don't see it anywhere IRL or even the proverbial data. I suspect they just fall out of statistics and into depression.

Anecdotally, I see it in lots of places - I was a part of those types of communities when I was younger (I'm better now, and I _think_ I'm reasonably well-adjusted), but I still keep tabs on those corners of the internet so I know what's going on, and can be prepared if/when they bubble over in a meaningful way.

I see lots of hateful activity, from "boogaloo" groups that hide their violence fetish behind euphemisms and jokes about revolution, to "satirical" posts about the value of white identity and culture over other cultures and races.

The other day I came across a website whose purpose was to collect the full names and photographs of (white) women who date outside their race - specifically, women who date black men - and the (white) men who date women like that. Said site has a section dedicated to women who were hurt or killed by their partners, and labels those women those who "paid their toll" for dating outside their race.

I haven't seen any meaningful action by any of these groups except that website I mentioned, but the activity is there if you care to find it. It's something that worries me, specifically for my partner - who is a woman of colour.

If you spend enough time searching for the darkest corners of the deep web, you can find powerless, sad people saying bad things about women and people of color.

You can find roughly the same things being said about white men on the front pages of NY Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Twitter, HN and Reddit and being celebrated as progressive, socially acceptable views to be shared non-anonymously by people in positions of power.

If we’re thinking of the same thing (related to ‘coal’) thats looking like it’s a 4chan troll site.

Yes, we're thinking of the same website.

I've been around on 4chan long enough to know that "troll" most often is equivalent to what the site really feels, or at least some of the people on there. The "troll" or "satire" label is only there to try to evoke plausible deniability - as in the case of "for legal purposes my call for violence against this person is a joke".

i.e. the sorts of people - in general - who browse the more unsavory parts of 4chan/8chan/etc are very fond of their dogwhistles.

The way I read it, 4chan is like a concentrated version of what it was like to be a teenager at the edge of society. You stir the pot and feed off the energy that people respond with.

If you live in a Christian conservative community, you leave pamphlets full of gay porn outside church. In a progressive community, you make racist websites about interracial dating.

They aren’t pro gay porn or pro racism, they’re pro getting a reaction out of people, that they find hilarious. We encourage them with our outrage.

"4chan is like a concentrated version of what it was like to be a teenager at the edge of society"

Which teenagers and which edge of society, I'm fairly certain they're not all the same. Also your post is what every reader of 4chan says when the discussion comes up.

I'm not a reader of 4chan. I just know people that are, and I try to have empathy for other people's situations.

5 males aged 13-15 with basic self-taught networking skillz could wreak a huge amount of havoc such that it would throw off observations that are based on web activity. It is one of the reasons that anecdotal observations of online behaviors I consider to approach zero value, with some exceptions.

And, obviously, a lot of those kids are older and still engaging the same juvenile behaviors.

There's definitely radicalization and rising militancy in boogaloo groups, and I'm fairly confident that this is where alienated young men are increasingly headed.

But their composite ideology seems closer to a more nihilistic, violent, class-conscious form of libertarianism than the ethnonationalism-tinged militia movements in the past. Groups seem to go through semiregular cycles of periodic anti-racist meme posting in order to keep their communities relatively clean of white supremacists.

It's fascinating, because historically (since the oughties at least) reactionary movements have emerged as deliberate constructs from the racist fringes of the right-wing, growing to attract dispossessed libertarians/Republicans, only to collapse in relevance as their origins and convictions are laid bare. Conversely, even moreso than the kekistan phenomenon, boogaloo seems to be an emergent initiative manifested through, rather than engineered to take advantage of collective discontent shared by young men ranging from disillusioned Trump voters, to anarchists, to libertarian progressives that feel betrayed by the corrupt appearance of the DNC. Some actors have emerged to take stewardship of segments of the movement's broader community, but none that I've been able to identify can claim ownership of it.

Narrative? Yes yes, because 99.9% of white christian american terrorists are women. /s Were you born today?

If you keep posting like this to HN we will have to ban you again.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

link to paper please if available online?

There was a relatively viral tweet I saw a few weeks ago saying "Gen Z career options: Fulfillment Center worker or OnlyFans" with gendered undertones. For what it's worth, though, while less common, it's not that rare to see men have (and quite successful) OnlyFans. But I agree with the economic sentiment of what you're saying. It's hard not to believe that we're seeing the middle class being completely hollowed out during this pandemic.

Our sons like The Dream, Ansel Elgort, Brian Phillip, all mentioned in the article as having OnlyFans accounts?

> Our sons like The Dream, Ansel Elgort, Brian Phillip, all mentioned in the article?

These seem to be people who were already known personalities.

OnlyFans massive creator growth is likely largely going to be from "normies".