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The Great OnlyFans exodus

Good morning! This Tuesday, OnlyFans banning porn is bad for creators but great for competitors, #AppleToo wants to help create a "healthier workplace" and Biden is talking cybersecurity with Big Tech.
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When OnlyFans announced it would be banning porn this fall, server traffic at porn-only competitor JustFor.fans jumped to three times its average — and stayed there. In the last five days, thousands of former OnlyFans sex workers have created new accounts at JustFor.fans.
Even if OnlyFans doesn't want to sell sex, sex definitely still sells.
OnlyFans said that it will ban "sexually explicit conduct" because the move is necessary to maintain its status with payment providers like Visa and Mastercard, which have strict rules for websites that provide pornography.
But there might be other reasons why OnlyFans is abandoning porn: VC money and the traditional model of growth for tech companies, neither of which is particularly fond of explicit content.
OnlyFans has never been good at addressingillegal content, harassment or abuse, creators on the site say. Creators feel that while it was useful for building a reputation, the site was never a safe place.
Even if JustFor.fans attracts most of OnlyFans' current sex work business, Ford has no plans to ever expand beyond pornography. "I don't know what [OnlyFans'] play was, but our play is to make money in the adult entertainment space, period," Ford said. "Those eyes are wide enough, I don't need wider eyes. If we can replace OnlyFans, who evidently were pulling in something like $150 million a month, trust me, I'll be fine."
— Anna Kramer (email | twitter)
A version of this story appears today on Protocol.com.After a year and a half of living and working through a pandemic, it's no surprise that employees are sending out stress signals at record rates. Just as with building a healthier lifestyle, enacting measures of support on the day-to-day level is where lasting change is made.
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Some people work at tech companies. Other people work at tech companies, then take on a side hustle — or three or four. Mina Markham is one of the latter: She's an engineer at Slack, but she also teaches for Black Girls Code, co-organized a conference for front-end developers called Front Porch and built Pantsuit, the internal design system of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, among other things.
She's also spoken at a bunch of conferences over the years, including Front-End Design Conference, Midwest.io and Distill, and is prolific on Twitter. A prime example of someone using their tech chops in ways that go far beyond the company they work for.
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