Loomio
Thu 29 Apr 2021 3:31AM

A New Platform for Online Sex Workers

KM Kat Marchán (they/she) Public Seen by 18

Background

As a trans person, sex workers have been a close part of my community for a long time. It's hard for us to find good jobs, and sex work turns out to be often preferable to service or other jobs filled with misgendering and abuse.

So much sex work happens online these days, and so much of it is terribly exploitative, with high fees, poor moderation tools, (gross) fetishization, and general insecurity about whether the platform will even treat these workers as a priority as they grow.

The Idea

My idea here is that we build a platform for these sex workers with image and video upload support, and/or potentially live video, multi-worker videos, etc. And do this in an anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and queer/trans-friendly way.

Challenges

The biggest challenge, aside from the competitive space (see below), is that it's hard to find high-quality, reliable payment processors. Stripe and similar are not available because they (and most, really) ban sex work payments. We'll need to figure out who to use.

Prior Art/Competitive Space

Obviously, the biggest elephant here is OnlyFans (who, annoyingly, uses Stripe and gets away with it, ugh). Besides that, there's a massive amount of porn sites out there that we'd be competing with, but I hope that we can lean more on social media for bringing people in, much like I believe OF does.

I know there's another co-op working on this, peep.me, but they're UK-based, for one, and it sounds like we could definitely find ways to support their efforts.

Conclusion

What does everyone think? Would you be interested in pursuing this idea? Is this something you have the skillset and/or connections to build effectively? I know we have a lot of web folks in the Discord, and there's several Elixir/Phoenix devs (and Ruby and Python devs). I'd love to hear your thoughts and contributions!

W

whitingdev Thu 29 Apr 2021 3:36AM

payment wise the only thing I saw similar to this was Sponsus (e.g., their TOS: https://sponsus.com/guidelines )

JB

Jamie Bliss Thu 29 Apr 2021 3:39AM

The big differentiator would be the membership (the content creators) having an active say in the governance. AFAIK, no other platform does this. (Even foxy.co, who is supposed owned by a sex worker.)

JB

Jamie Bliss Thu 29 Apr 2021 3:40AM

The one comment is that some of the feedback I got from MNN is that yet another platform is not the most pressing need. Especially since a new publishing platform needs to gather up a critical mass of users on both the creator and the consumer side.

KM

Kat Marchán (they/she) Thu 29 Apr 2021 3:41AM

@astraluma to that end, I think that while what I want to build is a worker co-op, it's important to have customer representation, too. We might be able to have assigned representatives for customers that can vote like members, and we can have them participate in our organizational stuff in general.

R

Ryzngard Thu 29 Apr 2021 3:41AM

I'm interesting in pursuing this. While I don't have self ties to the problem space, I have friends and family that have been impacted by it. I'm passionate about making a safe environment for marginalized people, and this is one way to do that.

I haven't done web work directly, outside of helping standards bodies for browsers, so my skillset translates with general development skills and not targeted technology or architectural knowledge. I've been doing dotnet for the past 2 years working on developer tooling. I do specialize in accessibility standards adherence for my team, and am happy to help facilitate making inclusive design decisions for user experiences.

One other place I've seen growing, similar to OF, is fanhouse. I don't know much about it and have not participated, does anyone know if that's a direct competitor?

JA

Justin Abrahms Thu 29 Apr 2021 3:55AM

I don't want to be crypto guy, but "supporting transactions that don't fit into the standard payments structure" feels like a cryptocurrency-adjacent area?

There are a handful of sex workers in my social circle. I'd be open to asking them a few questions or sending around a survey if there was one around.

KM

Kat Marchán (they/she) Thu 29 Apr 2021 4:01AM

I'm personally pretty kneejerk-against cryptocurrencies. I feel like not only are they bad for this kind of transaction, but they have tons of problems (esp environmental), and I don't want to exacerbate when I think the payment issue, while difficult, is tractable.
That said, I'd totally love to hear from SWers!

AC

Aida Crone Thu 29 Apr 2021 4:03AM

I'm absolutely up for building this. I did a bit of camming on chaturbate and their payment system is very fast and not super sketchy like some others. I think the right answer is to have multiple pocket implemtations though, porn sites have done that for years so that a payment processor can't bring the entire network to the ground.

TE

Tyler Earls Thu 29 Apr 2021 4:13AM

I'm interested in this idea. I'll admit that I need to read more about the issues we'll be trying to solve, so I will be listening and learning for a bit in that regard. That being said, I would find it fulfilling to work on creating safe, anti-oppressive spaces for sex workers and trans folks.

I think I could be most useful working on frontend tasks. I have the most experience with Vue and React, but I'm willing to learn / work with whatever web stack the co-op decides on. I have done some a11y work, too.

K

Kirill Fri 30 Apr 2021 6:38PM

I don't claim to be an expert on this matter, so what I say may be less an argument and more an opinion, but here's my two cents.

Wouldn't such a platform (especially if advertised as queer/trans-friendly) only reinforce marginalizing attitudes towards these groups? My premise is that most people (many of who
will likely be on the consuming side of the platform) don't really treat SW as a good thing, so it can even be seen as taking advantage of these groups and instead of providing a new choice that people who started SW didn't have, just providing another way to do SW and make $ (regardless of good intentions). I heard that the majority chose SW because there was no other choice, not because they wanted to - correct me if I'm wrong.

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