Once upon a time, Twitter was paradise for sex workers. We could post our thirst traps, network and build community with each other, find clients, and build a following. Then came the hateful algorithms with their dreaded shadowbans. Building a following became virtually impossible, and our posts were hidden from our actual followers who WANT TO SEE THEM BC THEY FOLLOW US! We tried to warn the masses that these tools would be weaponized against political dissenters, but predictably we were mostly ignored. (We’re trying to warn y’all about banking discrimination and the dangers of facial recognition technology too but that’s a subject for another post. Just know that they always test their hateful tech tools on us first, then roll them out for the respectables and normals.)
If you are interested in learning more about this, check out Hacking Hustling’s piece
Anyway, when Melon Husk bought Twitter, we knew it didn’t bode well, but some remained hopeful due to all his yapping about “free speech.” Of course things only got worse for us under Apartheid Clyde, but most of us have stayed because it remains one of the only platforms where you can post tit without catching a permaban for it.
I guess the Neo-Nazification of the platform culminating in the re-election of Trump with Elon’s help has finally pushed us over the edge, because there has been a huge migration over to BlueSky (aka LibSky.) Will it be better? Probably not. But for now, the shadowbans are minimal and fascists don’t appear to be tolerated so here we are.
Y’all may or may not realize it but sex workers tend to be at the forefront of new tech trends and innovations. When a new platform pops up, we’ll be there shortly with innovative new ways to sell hole. So I predict that LibSky may just take off.
TL;DR: if you post tit, they will come
Well that’s it for twitter then. Where the sex-work industry goes, so does the world
" if you post tit, they will come"
I thought you were talking about a new BlueSky instance called LibSky. I’m sure there’ll be one (or there’s already one)
itll be unironic too
Reminder than the term “blue sky” comes from the Blue Sky with White Sun flag of nationalist China. The Bluesky CEO’s mom fled the country during the Cultural Revolution because she supported the KMT lol
Your posts are funny and informative. Hope you stick around.
Thanks Bob Dole. Idk why my parents didn’t vote for you in the 90s
Lol fitting right in
Y’all may or may not realize it but sex workers tend to be at the forefront of new tech trends and innovations.
You can take my Betamax tapes and HD DVDs from my cold dead hands.
SWers struggles against censorship, banking discrimination, and a whole slew of other issues have been the front line of digital repression for decades. Worth looking up the SESTA/FOSTA disaster. It’s a key example of how efforts to supress sex work are usually just fancy social murder.
Yeah there’s this switcheroo tech companies do where they establish an initial value/user base on the adult content side of their platform but then try to pull the rug out from under it once they’ve hit critical mass and want access to more prudish investors’ money (see: OnlyFans’ aborted attempt to cull the hardcore content from their site).
This is definitely a thing, but I have a different take on OnlyFans in particular.
I don’t think they ever wanted to get porn off their platform. Unlike sites like Reddit and Twitter, they started as a porn site and they have always made all their money from porn. They really started raking it in during the height of COVID, and when the platform got huge, that started attracting unwanted attention from Big Banking. It’s difficult and expensive to maintain reliable credit card processing as an adult site because these big banks have very strict and ever-evolving puritanical rules about what types of content they’ll process payments for. Run afoul of these banks, lose the ability to process Visa and Mastercard, and your business is dead in the water.
By appearing to pivot away from hardcore content and aggressively promoting SFW creators, it’s easier to make the case to credit card companies that it’s not just a porn site.
OnlyFans makes an astronomical, disgusting amount of money. They know where their bread is buttered. It’s a soulless capitalist enterprise, they don’t give a shit about the “morality” or porn or anything else. Their only goal is to maximize profits, and every decision they make can and should be viewed through that lens. They don’t sell paid ads on their site so they don’t have to worry about advertisers pulling out the way sites like Reddit and Twitter do. Plus Reddit and Twitter were never making real money off adult content on their sites; we have always driven tons of traffic to their platforms but they don’t actually profit from our presence there beyond the traffic we bring, so it’s easy for them to discard us once the users are already there and invested. None of that is true for OnlyFans.
FWIW, this is not a popular take among my peers. Most seem to think OF is like the other tech companies that want to boot us once they get big enough. But I think there’s decent evidence that OF does not want to do that and will never do that. Not because they care about us or anything, but because our porn makes them hundreds of billions of dollars (probably.)
do banks have a material incentive to crack down on SW?
As far as I know, not really. This is one piece of the puzzle I don’t understand: why do they care so much?
My best guess is that it’s due to the higher frequency of chargebacks on adult transactions, but they already mitigate this with high processing fees so I just don’t get it.
Maybe it’s labor discipline? SW might put upward pressure on wages as employers compete with a form of lucrative self-employment available to millions of workers?
Hmmm, how do all the traditional porn sites avoid that issue? Do they have access to different processors? Or does the parasocial aspect mean OF has a lot of add-on services that blur the line between porn sex work and “sexual services” that the processors balk at?
The traditional porn sites also struggle to retain payment processors and pay exorbitant transaction fees (10%+)
There has been a big crackdown recently due to the rise of Christofascism
(We’re trying to warn y’all about banking discrimination and the dangers of facial recognition technology too but that’s a subject for another post. Just know that they always test their hateful tech tools on us first, then roll them out for the respectables and normals.)
I look forward to that post!
Ugh so much pressure! 😭 I have some very smart colleagues who have written pieces on these issues. I will try to compile a few in a post here soon.
Oof. I have a bsky account I made a long time ago but I don’t use it because the vibes over there are so rancid
It’s libbed up over there for sure, but membership has more than doubled in the past couple weeks so maybe there will be a shift or at least little enclaves of cool people, similar to Twitter.
Weird left twitter started showing up in force a week or so ago. It’s still rancid but at least when you’re screaming at libs you’re not screaming alone.
is it better than mastodon which is just ukraine flag libs and the occasional imperial leftist that believes all the things the state department wants?
I don’t fault you for going where you gotta go, but I imagine that as bsky gains popularity, it will gain advertising, and it will start deplatforming accounts like yours. It is corporate social media after all. I’m not sure what a good alternative is though. In my early days on Mastodon, there was Switter, which seems like the right kind of model, but it collapsed for reasons I can’t recall.
Yeah I addressed this in another comment, but this will happen if Bluesky gets big enough. That’s just the joy of being a SW! But we’ll use it until we can’t. We’re very adaptable like that because we have to be.
The reason I thought it might be relevant here is that we are pretty much always early adopters, so often the masses tend to follow us, whether they’re aware of it or not. We’ve been on there for a year or so but this is the first really big migration that I’ve personally witnessed.
My opinion as to why Switter never really took off is that a SW-specific platform is too niche. Clients/customers didn’t really follow us over. It’s super difficult to get people to switch to new platforms; Emile Torres did a great episode of Kelly Hayes’ “Movement Memos” podcast about “switching costs,” why it’s so hard to move people to a new platform, and what platforms can do to mitigate those costs.
Also, Mastodon just seems a little too nerdy for the general public if I’m being honest 😬
It’s like when young working class people, minorities, artists, make a neighborhood nice and then it gets gentrified.
I really appreciate your perspective on this stuff. I hadn’t considered how SWerz would be on the cutting edge of privacy/security tech and concerns. I completely understand the nerd factor of the fediverse in general, but I can’t help feeling like it is “the answer” to corporate controlled networks. Then again, I’m also aware of the inherent issue around “technical solutions to political problems”.
Uhhh woah
Edit: This is not LibSky lol I’m just dumb
Wait a minute lmao this is not the same thing. This is a crypto thing
bit idea: create a new shitcoin for every trendy new startup so people buy it thinking they’re buying
If The Producers and Office Space came together for a crypto plot…
How about we just create ShitCoin that mints more coins every time a trendy new startup launches and then burns coins whenever they fail
I heard it’s the number 1 free app in the app store right now, but haven’t bothered to confirm this.
It’s showing up as number 1 for me, Threads is 2
deleted by creator
Adjust your sensitive content filters. 🤷🏼♀️ We need to eat. Most of us don’t want to be social media influencers; we were forced to start advertising on Twitter because Kamala Harris went after Backpage and Congress passed FOSTA/SESTA in 2018.
Someone will probably create a thirstposter block list on blue twitter. Bluesky has robust blocking tools.
Siiiiiigh
“Thirstposting” aka “Desperately trying to make enough money to buy groceries and pay rent.”
I understand people’s frustration with seeing content they don’t want to see, especially when my colleagues spam their shit under unrelated posts. But the reason so many SWs resort to spam is that every platform deboosts us to the point that our own followers can’t see our posts.
I always follow platform rules regarding marking my content/profile sensitive, 18+, NSFW etc but every platform still restricts my ability to reach people who do want to see me!! We used to be able to just build a following organically because a lot of people on the internet actually do want to see tits and ass.
idk why you are taking offense to the terminology when you used it yourself in the post, but I am sorry economic circumstances have forced you into such a position.
I don’t take offense to the terminology, I’m just saddened and disheartened by the fact that so many people seem to care more about not seeing nudes on their TL than they do about whether or not the people posting them can make enough money to live.
Tbh I take offense to your statement that you’ll be happy to see us off Twitter when you could simply adjust your sensitive content filter or idk…keep scrolling? You could also click the top right of the post and choose “show less content like this” or whatever. You can mute and block users who post content you don’t want to see. You can report users who spam the comment sections of unrelated posts with their links/thirst traps. (I think this is fine to do bc I see it as bad etiquette to spam people’s replies.)
Word. The more hostile the system gets the more aggressive the advertising needs to be to get eyes on it, and then it creates an arms race between censorship algos and advertisers
Yes that’s exactly it.
I thought blue twitter was democrat twitter for a sec
That’s basically what english bluesky is right now.
I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be glad not to be
english hard
I do wonder if this would move users over, or if SW will just relent and return to twitter as it has a much larger userbase. ofc if you’re advertising a service, you want the most people to see it and be able to pay for it. Blue Sky has had huge migration waves before, it’s topped the google app store before; a few weeks go by and people slowly walk on back to twitter over time due to the more active user base with an endless supply of content to doomscroll. the thing that gets me is. mastodon already exists, and does have a large established userbase, with sex work instances open to signups. BS is trying to be a secondary niche where others already exist. BS is also owned by corperate interests, publicly traded, and has shown crypto leanings in the past. they’ll do some unadvised things in the long run too to maximise profits, and SW are a very easy target when that happens
I hope it works out for online SW, an ex girlfriend of mine used to do it as a side hustle and it did a lot to pay her bills. especially in worsening economic times like this, SW being forceably deplatformed is going to hurt working class people who need to pay every increasing bills
Yeah, we’ll see. I made my account a year ago but abandoned it. It’s super hard to maintain all these damn social media platforms, and BlueSky was not taking off because of the silly “invite only” gatekeeping. Switching cost is a major barrier. I think they’ve done a bit to address that with the “starter packs” option that allows people to mass follow or mass block curated lists.
This is the first time I’ve seen a push from so many well-known SWs with large followings to move over, so it feels a bit more significant.
I should have clarified that I don’t plan on leaving Twitter. I remain firm in my commitment to ride that bitch til the wheels fall off. They will have to remove me. But I am trying to migrate as much of my following over there as possible.
And as for whether it will be a SW haven: it won’t. None of these platforms are. If it’s good for us, it will be good until it isn’t. It’s just the way of things for us. The only way to survive as a SW is to make peace with the fact that you might wake up one day and find your primary source of income gone, either because the platform was seized or they changed TOU and/or you get deleted.
Regarding Mastodon, I just feel like it’s too nerdy for the general public. We had a Mastodon instance called Switter but we never really had clients embrace it like they do the mainstream platforms.
it is genuinely horrifying that through not fault of your own, you can just have your income platform stolen from you, because somebody else decided your kind isn’t welcome around here, and you have to entirely reestablish yourself somewhere else
Hell, half my friends for the past ten years have been adult artists of one sort or another. You don’t get into indie art of the sort I like without getting to know sex workers - and getting to understand why they’re important.
Long live the weird and wild.
