My biggest shock was how much "PR" was generated on Reddit, and how many sexworkers really do use the platform.
I knew it was a thing, I knew of the memes, but to see both sides in arms over a company vs branding, creating their own website and content - and vanity domain as well.
People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.
And the memes, I think they're pretty toxic, 4chan, incel, reddit, twitter memes - I never knew there was that much angst.
> People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.
Once they know it's possible, people want a one click solution for anything. The subject being taboo has nothing to do with it.
This is one reason why Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix did such a good job combatting piracy for music, video games, and movies, while ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There's no equivalent for most ROMs, so they're still widely pirated.
It strikes me the best cure is to restrict copyright to force federation - if you sell to one company who retails to consumers in a geo locality then you're required to make available to any company at that price.
Streaming services would be forced to compete in everything except content. Creators would still be paid.
Copyright isn't a natural right, it should be continually adapted to serve the public.
There already are compulsory licensing schemes that work like this. For example, in the United States, there are “mechanical licenses” [1] available by statute for streaming and downloaded music recordings. In practice, most big platforms negotiate with a rights organization or with the artist directly[2], but the statutory rate operates as a price ceiling.
One big problem with compulsory licensing is that rights organizations that manage the payment of royalties often become very powerful themselves and are sometimes seen as copyright bullies. For example, ASCAP, which represents composers and licenses musical compositions rights, pursued the Girl Scouts for unlicensed singing of campfire songs. [3]
This presumes piracy is bad. Which I'd say is mostly true, but I'd go so far as to suggest that, e.g. Spotify is worse.
Essentially, they both mean that creators don't meaningfully get paid, only that Spotify appears legitimate due to the breadcrumbs and "exposure" they do give out.
E.g. Bandcamp is better than piracy, but I'd argue piracy is better than Spotify.
always find this argument so weird - The amount of people who can create music and find an audience now vs a decade ago is exponentially higher; subsequently, the market price of a song has fallen and Spotify pays accordingly.
Except now, as an independent artist I can get easier exposure on Spotify and build up more income from live shows, merch and whatever else as a result. My closest fans will still often buy from band camp, or buy a vinyl or whatever. Except now I have a ton more fans than I could have reasonably achieved in the iTunes era
And the distribution of wealth has stayed relatively similar - huge artists (The Taylor swift’s of the world) continue to be minted, small unknown artists continue to make a comparatively tiny living - except now many, many more people can make that living and stream music
If copyright law said that the price a piece of content is available for is the highest amount any provider in a region is willing to pay then you're setting up for a monopoly, as Netflix or Amazon Prime with their near infinite content budgets set the price of everything they like higher than any new competitor can afford to pay.
Sorry, I don't think I expressed that well, I intended to say it was akin to a "most favoured nation" situation; if Netflix get a lower price per person, then you have to offer that price to others.
I can't see how Amazon and Netflix could push prices up without unlawful collusion? But if they did push prices up for all media how would they sell their service?
It's not unheard of for major players to have contracts that say 'if you're offering this to another company for less per unit than you are to us then you agree to reduce our price accordingly', the idea is just to make that lowest price universal so that.
I sell license for prints of my painting to Acme for £5 then ABC can print the same painting and pay me £5. As creator I can choose not to sell the work for £5, but that's no different to now; what I wouldn't be able to do is restrict who - in the wholesale market - could buy the work for that price.
The fundamental trust of copyright is literally to make things worse for consumers to the benefit of producers. If you see consumers being inconvenienced in an expensive way as a problem then you haven't engaged with the problem copyright is here to solve.
[I fear you were being sarcastic, but in any case ...]
Copyright is to enrich the public domain. It's foundation in the West is Queen Anne's statute which followed on from printmakers making their own regulations. It shifted power from the printmakers to the creators, buy it served the public domain by having a limited period of protection and by preserving copies of works which could be referenced.
It made things better for the public because after 7 years (IIRC, I think it was later extendable to 14 years) the work was free to get printed anywhere vastly aiding the spread of culturally important works. The fundamental bargain also aided the demos (as opposed to the consumer, per se); that bargain being that a creator could exclusively - with the backing of the law - control reproduction during those 7 years and so profit sufficiently to continue creating further works without having to seek a patron.
Copyright is supposed to be, and was, about liberation of creators from control; and democratisation (making available to the people) of works.
The change I propose aids creators getting paid, and aids works benefiting the public. Moreover, it wrests some control from the "printmakers" in keeping with early copyright laws.
I'm the US copyright is to allow creators control over their creation, for a time, presumably so the can monetize it. This incentives creators to create. Yes, in the long run, public domain wins. But so do the creators.
Forcing them to sell to everyone takes a lot of control away from the copyright holders.
On the other hand, I firmly believe that creators must be able to choose any distribution way they want (similar to "right to burn"). E.g creators may choose to sell unrestricted copyrights to the most evil companies they want, it's their ultimate right.
Consumers have a right to consume or not consume, but they may not limit creator's freedom, nor by "restricting copyright to force delegation".
Creators may choose who to sell to, with you there. But then we (the demos) may choose to not give copyright protection. We're not limiting creators freedom, we're limiting who we choose to protect from the open market.
I mean this particular part I have a problem with: "may choose to not give copyright protection" -- we, consumers, don't have a say in creator's copyrights, because we don't have these copyrights, creators do. Creators may as well be with us and sell their content to a company that abides by these laws of restricted copyrights (e.g. GPL license is particular example). Or not.
It's our job, though, to make that available and easy for creators (e.g. kudos to RMS for making and popularising the GPL).
But no one should be able force anything on _all_ creators.
PS: Well, the outcome would be that creators would stop create at all, and in some cases that might be fair and just, but that's another topic completely. E.g. some societies regard as fair and just limits on drawings of humans and animals, so there's no such drawings. And they see it as fair and just.
> I mean this particular part I have a problem with: "may choose to not give copyright protection" -- we, consumers, don't have a say in creator's copyrights, because we don't have these copyrights, creators do.
But demos doesn't mean "we, consumers" -- it means "we, the people". As in, the body politic, from whom all laws and therefore copyright ultimately emanates. Creators only have those copyrights because we've granted them. This is a law of man, neither God-given nor a law of nature -- we can, if we want, un-grant them.
I had completely stopped downloading movies in 2018, and even for that year, I downloaded very few. I had been tapering off since 2015. These are real numbers from my NAS. I got a seedbox 2 months ago. This was my last straw: trying to rent some movie on Amazon and was told I had to subscribe to some service to watch it--there was no price to watch it once.
The other things I did recently:
1) paused Google YTTV because NBA season was over
2) canceled Netflix because I never watch it
I've been watching content (some of it very old, like The Larry Sanders Show) on HBO Max, but the app on Roku is *SO HORRIBLE* I'd rather pirate content and watch it on PLeX.
The Amazon app/UI is *HORRIBLE*, too. Like multiple seasons are separate items? WTF. I'll download series I have access to on Amazon just to avoid that app.
> The Amazon app/UI is HORRIBLE, too. Like multiple seasons are separate items? WTF. I'll download series I have access to on Amazon just to avoid that app.
Not only that but I've even seen the seasons presented in no order whatsoever: i.e Season 2 followed by Season 8. It is nonsensical.
Ironically, the biggest russian torrent site is just a phpbb forum and it is wonderfully organized and very well moderated. Easy to find the content you want.
Fun fact: previously it tried to cooperate with the content owners and removed content by request, so the UX was considerably worse. But then, someone successfully litigated to block them 'forever' in Russia, so... They restored all prevoiusly removed content and now it has almost everything I ever wanted. Great win!
I genuinely do not understand how Amazon can have dropped the ball on their UI for this long, this bad. Given their drive to get customers to consume shipped product, their track record with digital products is abysmal. Video games is a product problem and that's a different discussion, but "television" and movies are a different matter. The product and consumer appetite are there, but the roadblock is the UI. Does no one who is in upper management use the product? I know they treat their testers like crap, but surely someone in the marketing or graphics department has at least done some usability polling. Right? Right?
I don't understand it either. It might be hard to quantify the affect of their Prime streaming business on their sales and thus they don't prioritize it ? That's my only guess, it feels to me like their most public product and its received the least attention.
The UI and general use of these apps are so bad - that I literally find myself torrenting things from Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ rather than use those apps, purely to be able to consume it on Plex.
The VPN jumping lunacy bothers me. I moved countries - great so I can't use Disney+? I get it, but that now means I have to download (your new) content because you won't actually let me buy your content, directly from you. For the first couple of months I continued to pay for the service. Eventually I decided that if you don't want me as a customer, I don't feel bad about downloading it. Sad really.
The Beavis and Butthead music video thing is a decades old problem, unfortunately. The DVDs were like that too. Something about failing to obtain the music video rights for the show outside of its original airing.
Happens sometimes with some video games as well. In the past when remasters came out they couldn't secure or couldn't afford the music licensing costs so they had a cut or replaced score.
That became worse in recent years when titles on digital distribution platforms e.g. Steam had music removed due to expiring licenses. This meant a game you had already downloaded and installed would be downgraded unless you were quick enough to stop the automatic updates for it.
I subscribed to watch season 8 of alone. Each show had about eight thirty second commercials that you couldn't skip. Last time I'll try that way to watch something.
Why would I? Most of the content on my PLeX is paid for elsewhere. And, anything I pirate which I like I buy. I watched _Pig_ and immediately went to Amazon and paid $14.99 for it. If I pirate something that is terrible, there's no point.
My anecdata is definitely this. I used to pay for almost all my media, but switching regions, logging in and out of shit, buying iTunes cards on ebay, checking through 4 different streaming apps, and then extra work when you do find what you want and try to watch it only to be told your subscription doesn't actually cover it but you can pay extra (looking at you, Amazon Prime), it's just so much fucking work when tracker -> torrents dir -> plex is so much easier and user-friendly.
I found this site from the torrentfreak link below and thought it was pretty cool.
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/annual/2021
If you flip thru the years at least the top movies in 2018 have more downloads than the top movies in 2021. I think that can somewhat safely answer your questions.
EDIT: WRONG because as a comment points out below older movies also might just have been downloaded more over time.
From this site, it doesn't look like their was much of an uptick in top downloaded movies from 2019 to 2020. And in general torrenting has been growing less popular.
However, the numbers on this site in general don't sanity check very well for me. For example, the End Game Avengers movie, which was incredibly popular, was only downloaded: 2,890 times in 2019? That doesn't seem high enough to me.
It does make some sense that movies which have been available for three years could have more downloads than movies which have been available for one year.
A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.
Additionally, I guess there are also many people, myself included, who download stuff again, but I don't use torrents, as I have indeed been burned in the past by that. I now use forums that link to encrypted Mega accounts or similar.
> A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.
This makes far more sense, I wonder why their numbers are so bad.
The stats can be collected only from public torrents where DHT is being used (AFAIK). There are many private trackers that are closed to the outside world and have tens of thousands of members, each of whom may not only download from the peers within that private tracker, but also share the downloaded content with others.
Yeah but if most people have services - I have three - then the most popular movies for that year will be on all the services almost. Endgame has been on all my services at some point over the last couple years. I've seen it probably 20+ times. Probably also the people who are most likely to want to watch Endgame have services.
Specifically for the example of Australians watching pirate rips of television programs, the percentage of us doing it dropped like a brick after Netflix launched here back in 2015 and has climbed back slightly since the fragmentation occurred.
It's nothing like the old days where we had to wait several weeks to watch Game of Thrones legally, though.
I don't have the exact numbers on hand, but from memory it was something that around 40% of us were doing back in 2013, had dropped to around 15-20% by 2018-2019, and is now at just above 20%.
My parents asked me to help them get into streaming a few months ago after they got a new iPad. So I bought them a Chromecast, taught them how to switch the input source between the Chromecast and Cable on their TV, which they were cool with.
Then I tried to set them up on the iPad.
There was about 5-10 specific shows they wanted to watch, what I found was that they were literally spread across more than 5 services, with one show each. Not a single one of them had 2 of the shows they wanted to watch.
They were already set up with Foxtel and had been using it for a couple of years, they watched shows on it regularly and knew how to do everything up to hitting the 'cast' button.
So I set them up with the other services, bummed an Amazon account off a sibling, signed them up to the 3 or 4 free services we have in Australia, think I subbed to one other one or something too. I can't even remember what they all were there was so many. I put the icons all in the same place on their home screen so they knew those apps were all the streaming ones etc etc.
I logged into a few of the accounts a week or so ago and they haven't watched a single thing. Not even on the Foxtel, which they were already using, and now they've stopped using it.
It seems to me like they've just hit a wall of complexity and thrown their hands up and said fuck the whole thing.
And you know what? I'm right there with them. Half way through the set up, trying to do the right thing, I was an inch away from throwing my hands up and saying fuck the whole thing as well. It would be far easier for everyone involved if I just brought a hard drive with new shows around for them every few months.
There was another thread here yesterday where some bloke was going on about how he couldn't understand why people wouldn't just spin up a linux box or something instead of using Discord.
Well, this is it. It took my parents months to get used to using one app, and adding something as simple as another couple of apps to the mix has turned them off the technology entirely.
When you introduce anything other than the absolute most simple UX, you risk losing part of your market entirely. You're not building stuff for other software engineers or other TV network execs or whatever your job title is. Everyone trying to carve out their own piece of the pie is just smashing the pie to bits for everyone else.
When it was just Netflix, piracy was almost dead. Now, it's going to come back, unless content distributors can find some way to work together. That goes for music, TV and games. All 3 ecosystems are running into the exact same problem.
After my sister died, my brother in law was in a deep hole. I wanted to cheer him up somehow, and so I ended up giving him a 2TB hard disk connected to an old laptop. Then plugged a gen 1 Chromecast into his TV, and installed Plex onto an old tablet. He said it was a life saver. It helped get him through a really bad winter. I can't even think of a way I could have given him that content "legally". Some of it was great but obscure stuff ripped off DVDs that I bought over years. It's not just the complexity of multiple apps and devices - some content just isn't there. Like a shitload of really decent TV series and movies from the 60s onward.
> It would be far easier for everyone involved if I just brought a hard drive with new shows around for them every few months.
I do this for my family. 3TB external HDDs, each time I see them they give me the old one and I give them a another one freshly topped up (things added/removed based on suggestions/requests).
It's been a smashing hit and they all love it.
We all loved Netflix when it came out and paused doing this for a while, but it wasn't long until the fragmentation and geoblocking led to more requests for certain shows popping up again, and now we all pretty much got rid of all our streaming services and are back to the HDDs.
When it was just Netflix, piracy was almost dead. Now, it's going to come back, unless content distributors can find some way to work together.
Right. They need to swallow their pride and realise there needs to be a way to have one interface that shows you all the content you can access from the subset of services you subscribe to, in a searchable way. My Netflix shows, Prime shows and Foxtel shows should show up side-by-side in the interface. They can put a ribbon on it and/or an opening title to tell me who the distributor is.
Purchasable/rentable content can appear in a separate section, and when I can buy content from two or more services I have an account with, present them all and let me choose which one to use.
I'm right there with you. I'm increasingly frustrated by the experience of using my various streaming apps. I don't even mind having to bounce between different apps for different content. But just _finding_ the content I want is such a fucking chore sometimes.
One of the most annoying scenarios I seem to find myself in all too frequently is trying to get to the episode list for a series. The assumption that most of my services make is that when I click on the series card in the list of shows, the thing I want is to automatically be taken to where I left off. This is fine when it works (although it's a big damn assumption that the app correctly preserved where I left off, and even when it does that often dumps me into the credits for the episode I finished last night). But when I want to see the episode list, I feel like I just have to flail about and curse at the TV until I stumble upon the right sequence of buttons to get to what I want.
That's not even to mention the incredibly disheartening recent changes to the home screen of my (Shield) Android TV, where half the home screen is now taken up with ads for programs I will never watch on services I don't even use.
It does make one rather miss the days of a folder full of AVIs and VLC. I also had a nice Plex setup at one point. Maybe one of these days I'll get off my ass and heed the call of the open seas.
There was a little upkick at the start of the pandemic according to Sandvine, but Sandvine's methodology is not watertight and lots of people staying at home with not much to do seems a more likely culprit than service fragmentation.
anecdotally, I freeload on a Netflix account paid for by a friend, and last year I was tempted to get my own subscription. Then I noticed Netflix had fewer and fewer movies I was interested in, and just went back to sailing the high seas.
Yeah. The attraction of Netflix was the ease of access to a lot of desirable content even faster than finding it online somewhere else*
But, nowadays it feels like Netflix’s catalog is full of its self made titles(Some of them are great), but less and less “popular” ones that we heard of somewhere and just want to watch.
If I am expected to shuffle around multiple streaming subscriptions, and pay for them individually, it is not that different from the cable TV model that these guys took on against.
It is one of the biggest reasons to use torrents. You see, this is the only non-fragmented service that has all media content!
Now, of only there was a way to have a moderated search for all content on all trackers.... Maybe there is one already, and its just that i don't know it?
PirateBay became a haven for false torrents infested by malware. I'm ta lking about rutracker.org
It has mostly russian-dubbed content, but it usually has original soundtracks, too.
Also, now it is probably better than ever (didn't watch anything for quite a while, so it's a guess), because films are currently released on VOD concurrently with premieres in theatres, and that means that good quality content appears immediately, and not after theatrical window
Netflix seems like a split brained company. Most of its original movies are terrible, and are in sharp contrast to many of the Netflix original series which are very good. I personally wouldn’t (and don’t) look for movies on Netflix.
It seems like there isn't a widely available service to just bundle everything and serve what you want (?) Anyone kmow is that a cost restriction or do the companies disallow it?
"ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There's no equivalent for most ROMs, so they're still widely pirated."
The only example I can think of is Nintendo Online. You can play select NES and SNES games on the Switch with a N.O. subscription.
I collect ROMs, I've got damned near 4Tb worth. I collect for two reasons:
1. Archiving
2. Most of the "good" vintage games carry ridiculous prices. Games that had over 10 million copies pressed going for $100+. Even if we assume 1 million were destroyed, that's still 9 million copies floating about. Not exactly rare or worth $100.
It's ridiculous that games like super smash bros are the same price whether you buy them new on a switch or used for a 25 year old n64. No clue why nintendo bothers ending production runs on games when they know people still buy sell and play 30 year old titles. They could just license the reruns to someone else to produce the cartriges and disks and make money hand over fist. It always seems like nintendo has blinders on and self sabotages with stuff like this all the time (nintendo online being a huge fail compared to something like xbox live which has been around for almost 20 years now). In my opinion they could easily overtake xbox and playstation marketshare just by being smarter with their IP and taking back this market that is currently totally owned by people on ebay and craigslist because of nintendo's short sightedness with their production runs.
For that matter - why not sell N64-compatible consoles? You could make them incredibly cheaply now, and they're definitely still in demand. Are they scared of cannibalizing their "high end"?
Why do you think they would be cheap? Many of the relevant chips have been out of production for decades. Sure you can emulate a lot on a logic device like an FPGA, but those are still expensive compared to a microprocessor, and your engineering costs will go up. Then you’re facing stiff competition- a vintage gamers ideal is exact hardware. Any sort of emulation will have slight quirks- timing changes, mildly perceptible audio frequency shifts, etc. if your product isn’t an exact match for the hardware, it’s competing with the hundreds of ARM based emulation oriented systems that popped up after the RetroPi concept took off. And for what, a few thousands units of sales? Most people fall into “fine with emulation + ROM”. A select few stick with vintage hardware, which is not expensive. The market for “very close to original hardware but not quite” is a hard sell.
You're Nintendo, you have all the original specs, you can literally make an exact clone on an FPGA (or whatever's cheapest).
I don't disagree that the market is small, though. But Nintendo does have a chronic problem of under-manufacturing desirable hardware. Like, if you want a SNES Classic (good emulator, fantastic controllers), you'll have to pay 2-3x the original price. Nintendo could do another run of them every year for basically no effort, and they just...don't.
For the SNES classic, the limit on their production runs is probably the licensing of third-party content. They put blinders and only license titles up to a certain amount.
If you mean the Nintendo solution I think the [system] Mini trend has finally died out for good outside of a handfull of pathetic outliers like Amiga 500 mini. At any rate Nintendo seems to prefer to release these things on their existing consoles, as emulated roms, as it's cheaper anyway.
If you mean third party solutions I think there is at least one project that aims to be compatible with various original cartridges but its name eludes me at the moment.
[edit]
It's Polymega though it doesn't support N64 it does support SNES/Megadrive/NES/TG16 and a number of CD-ROM based consoles.
I don't think they can undertake Xbox/Playstation. Nintendo is a niche while Xbox/Playstation another. I guess they just want people to buy newer consoles and games, which make sense for them.
They did this for a number of years on Wii/Wii U. You could buy Smash 64 from them for $10. It wasn't nearly as popular as their current games. Paper Mario 64 for $10 was sick, though. Loved it after having played TTYD.
Game prices are part rarity, part demand. Pokémon games aren't rare, but they're always in demand so they always command decent prices. Plus even if millions of copies were sold the majority might not be English versions which are often most popular. Chrono Trigger for example sold millions in Japan and can easily be picked up for less than $20 in Japanese. US copies sold more like 500,000 and collectors outside the US are interested as well since English is much more of a common 1st or 2nd language than Japanese.
Almost all old games in Japan are dirt cheap; on the order of US$1-$2 for a typical loose SFC/N64/Game Boy cart if you don't go to the tourist traps in Akihabara.
$20 is exceptionally expensive for a Japanese game.
I swapped my NES cart of Dragion Warrior IV with a friend for his copy of Dragon Warrior III in high school; it was supposed to be temporary but we both went off to college and never saw each other again. I looked into buying a copy of DW IV online and choked on the prices ($150 cart only). Apparently that game was a limited run though.
Yep, I recently bought Dragon Warrior 1, 2, and 3. I’ll buy 4 soon, but wow - it is not cheap. I play them on a Retron 5 which can play NES, SNES, GBA, Sega, and even Famicon cartridges. It also lets you set hot keys and toggle turbo mode. It’s pretty great.
> If it makes you feel any better it cost $100 in 2021 dollars new ($50 in 1990)...
That does actually make me feel better knowing that DW4 would cost $100 if it were "new" now.
These days a sealed copy of DW4 graded at 7.0 will run you $1549. I'd be nervous paying anything less than $170 for a working cartridge alone right now.
As a consumer of these things, I've thought many times how easy it would be for someone to just print off "original boxes and content" for these old games, and sell them as if they were mint. As someone who wants this kind of thing... please don't be afraid to charge premium prices for replicas! As long as you tell us it's a replica, and it's high quality - everyone wins. Once enough time passes, replicas and forgeries all just become history.
I just saw this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A ) on why vintage video games cost so much money now. It's almost an hour long piece of effectively investigative journalism by someone in the speed running (and thus vintage gaming) community.
The evidence presented does seem like a bubble, with scam/fraud properties.
Yeah. The storage medium changed so much, but the functional shipped object was still "a chunk of read-only memory containing the (probably) sole version of a game that got shipped to a market".
I too tend to think of ROMs as strictly images of non-volatile chips, alone, but it's interesting that when we're in computer emulation territory, it's really only the size that's different; a CD iso feeds into a PS emulator pretty much the same way a rom file feels into a SNES emulator - it's just a document.
It's funny how the wheel goes round and round. I loved it when Netflix had a lot more content, but now that each studio/production/company offers its own, it's ending up like nothing more than streaming a la carte and people are returning to piracy rather than spend hundreds across various streaming services (like cable/dish...).
Because copyright holders like the idea of reselling the same games to you hundreds of times. Nintendo resells the exact same games to people every time they launch a console. Companies create low effort compilations all the time.
You'd think they'd make their money and move on to new creations. You make something, it's successful, you make your money for 5 years or so and then it's public domain. You'd have to make new stuff to make more money. No. Copyright holders feel entitled to extract value out of their "property" essentially forever. It's the ultimate in rent seeking.
The copyright issue is what sucks most. For the US the first implementation of copyright allowed max 28 years.
Since then the cycle to make/market/distribute/profit off a product has gotten much faster.
If anything, copyright should be shorter than 28 years. Not longer.
I love the original The Matrix(1999) movie. But it has had it's day in the sun, earned money and become "old news" at least 10 years ago.
In a "free market" sense, 12 years is a long time to have a monopoly on IP. If you have failed to make whatever money you are going to make of this IP by 12 years, then you are sucking at your marketing/use-of-IP and there should be "competition in the market" with your IP, to best make use of it.
If that's the motivation, it's pretty misguided, since it is a completely different motivation to buy. I buy (or pirate if I can't) the old games for nostalgia fun, not so much for the gameplay or graphics. I then also buy the new game for the modern experience & gameplay.
They want to have the option to resell you the exact same game emulated on the new systems too, see Wii Virtual Console I think it was called, and NES classic system, all of those.
Yes actually. You can still buy brand new copies of titles like Kingdom Hearts, FFXII and others for PS2 directly from Amazon.com and not a third party seller. For a while Square Enix was selling PS1 versions of FF games too although they have seemed to have stopped in the last few years.
> But I agree with you, I'm surprised Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.
Not quite old ROMs, but gog.com sells old computer games prepackaged for Dosbox, which because of that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. That's basically the old PC computer equivalent of what I believe Nintendo does by shipping the emulator with the ROM when you buy it through the Virtual Console so it runs as a whole.
GOG has been earning a lot of my praise recently for not only hosting binaries - but actually putting labour into making sure their games run on modern systems. This is particularly important for games from the era of weird sound cards that can't render audio quite right without a vintage soundblaster - but also goes for games that were simply designed with DOS expectations in place.
Back in the day I was a big fan of an SSI game called Imperialism - this game pretty much refuses to run on modern software - it needs DOSBox to run smoothly and even then it does custom cursor stuff that tends to screw up very obviously on modern systems - the GOG version of the game runs smooth like butter.
Why would I ever pirate a copy of Imperialism and spend a day actually getting it set up to run sorta decently on my machine - when I can grab it off GOG for 1.89 CAD? A day of my time, even an hour of my time (even my leisure time), runs well above 2$ at this point - the convenience is there so pirating becomes a bad value proposition.
IANAL, but yes. If you don't copy something, copyright is not invoked.
In many jurisdictions (AU, UK), it would be legal to copy them to another device you own, such as a hacked PSP, under the "format shifting" exemptions.
Those games are an interesting case: it’s very likely Activision or Warner owns the rights for them, but since ownership could be in the hands of at least one other party and the games themselves aren’t popular nowadays, it isn’t financially worth it for them to do the work to verify it, even though people have tried to work with them in the past.
The Sega Genesis games they sell are basically just ROMs. You can go into the folders where they are installed and grab them to use in a different emulator.
Seems like more of a benefit than a problem. Current games that need a server side will die off this decade with no chance of being played ever again. Zero long term marketing/awareness for the brand, developer, console maker.
The other thing is that a lot of games from 20 years ago can't even be bought anymore from the original source. But from ten years ago is even worse --- you just CAN'T get any piece of WiiWare without pirating it. You can't buy it used.
I don’t see how ROMs for a 20 year old console would be a problem. The console and games are no longer sold. The producers have made all of the profit that they would make, on the original sale. They don’t see any profit on sales of used consoles and games.
These files are so simple to distribute - there’s no engineering challenge and it’s very hard to justify building a moat. That’s one thing the notables you list did, beyond merely gatekeeping content.
YouTube was an absolute cesspit of copyright violation until (well after acquisition) it wasn’t. Move fast, break things, but I guess it matters which things.
The only thing that prevents this from existing is the licensing nightmare of trying to track down who still owns the rights to those old ROMs. So many defunct companies and cases where even the people who worked on it have no idea who currently owns the rights.
Had we kept the 28 year copyright duration from 1831 almost all ROM images would be in the Public Domain now.
And some of the licensing conflicts are because of an alliance that existed and made sense in say 1995 and today seems like inexplicable nonsense.
For example indie creator studio makes video game for the PS1. It's a huge hit, they go on to make other popular games, and one day Microsoft buys them, morphs them into an in-house team. And then one day you realise you're arguing that, Microsoft (now the owner of the license) should release this Sony Playstation game. No. Not going to happen.
When this stuff happens for individual humans, often even if the money doesn't mean anything to one person who is an obstacle, it does mean something to their co-creators and they'll do it for that. For example it would be possible for Alan Moore to have blocked a lot of stuff that uses his work, from the V for Vendetta movie (which lots of people liked but I felt missed the whole point) to the re-issues of Miracleman, but while Alan doesn't care about money, the artists on that work do, and him blocking it would hurt them. So e.g. that's why modern copies of Moore's seminal run on Miracleman say they're by "The Original Author" in big text but never mention Moore by name, that's his condition, he doesn't want the Mouse's money, but his artists do.
Corporations don't care though. If they can inconvenience a modern competitor by snuffing out an important cultural artefact that is exactly what they'll do.
I'd actually advocate outright abolition of copyright. The associated moral rights have some place, but copyright is almost entirely a means for corporations to try to control culture for their own profit and we don't need it. But 28 years is a more acceptable middle ground I guess.
There should be a rule that if an IP was broadly commercialized at any point (eg. offered at a retail store) the owner can’t resist any abandonware offering unless he’s still offering the IP at RAND terms
That still protects the individual artists and perhaps the Banskys but doesn’t unnecessarily lock up these old games
It's difficult in some cases but demand is absolutely the main driver.
Much like Netflix, the reality is that people aren't actually very interested in old shows apart from a handful of super famous perennials which are already available anyway.
They say they are in surveys, but consumer behaviour does not back that up. They just use newer content in practice.
There is always interest in old shows, but not enough to deal with the licensing issues. You could have much wider libraries if the licensing was less of a nightmare.
haha, the genesis library is about 90% just different hacked versions of Sonic 1, with different sprites replacing Sonic.
And one I found particularly cute, "Sonic's Unexciting Quest", which starts in a level called "Straight Line Zone".
The issue is that the VG industry is pretty far behind in this respect, not that there's a lack of demand. Just look at how the NES/SNES classic consoles sold out in the blink of an eye and there were mass shortages.
The demand is there, it's just a question of having a convenient enough package
I think Nintendo in particular revels in the scarcity. They value their IP above all else, and they know that's what their customers value, and they want to squeeze it for every last drop of fan loyalty they can. See the artificially limited-time (digital!) release of "Mario 3D All-Stars": https://www.nintendo.com/products/detail/super-mario-3d-all-...
I can see it now. Most ROMs would be available, but Nintendo would be notably absent from any of the platforms and only allow their ROMs to be streamed from their own service.
Oh, I know, but in the theoretical world where there's a Netflix like subscription, I would assume that means a lot of different IP was also gathered there, like Sega, Atari, older Playstation and Xbox titles, etc.
There's not a lot of incentive for some of those groups to come together, but I imagine even if most could be assembled, Nintendo would be particularly resistant.
GameTap had a Decent collection of Sega consoles and arcade titles back in the day, though it unfortunately never got off the ground. Nintendo has been particularly aggressive regarding ligating against ROMs historically and sold them as individual units, though with the Switch's online service's free NES/SNES games it seems like they're dipping their toes into the model. I think the risk to them is if someone winds up playing say the GB version of Link's Awakening for free instead of the $60 remake.
I worked on GameTap! Old ROM websites at the time had these click-through agreements that would say things like "you may only download these ROMs if you have explicit, written permission from the publisher" and I may be on of the only living people who've clicked one of those "I agree" links in good faith.
Technically, GameTap had some really neat little features. For example, it would track your high score for most emulated games, and for really old games where the score would rollover to zero, it noticed that and would let you see your effective grand total score. So there would be a global Galaga leaderboard that could happily go into the millions.
Regarding the success of the service, Gametap was live for a few years. It totally had its shot. GameTap was regularly advertised on TV. It had a pretty big library covering a dozen or so platforms: Several Ataris, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Sega, PC games, and more. They did a few high profile things like buying some failed MMOs and keeping the servers running for all GameTap subscribers.
At the end, I think it turned out that the folks who get really excited about playing ColecoVision games are the same folks who are very comfortable downloading ROMs.
Reading back I definitely come off a bit too harsh on gametap - It was a good service from the start. but I remember it seeming like there was trouble figuring out a pricing/content model that worked, as you said a lot of people who were excited for those sorts of games are often able to download roms as well.
I think it may just have been ahead of it's time in terms of model in the era of battlepasses, paid online and gamepass, as well as monthly paid streaming services in general.
It's true. It was a plausible idea that certainly MIGHT have worked, but whatever form of the idea GameTap went with clearly didn't catch fire.
Here's a fun technical secret about GameTap. Several of the companies that we bought licenses from barely knew they owned the games and definitely didn't have any original binaries or source, and for the obscure consoles/titles, we sometimes could only find cracked versions online. Those would usually have crack intros (it was the birth of the demoscene!), though, and we clearly didn't want to use them. Ultimately we cheated. We just launched the game by loading a save state just past the crack intro.
Probably not. Most cartridge games outside of first party titles are mired in a confusing mess of IP ownership. Consider what happens when the developer doesn't exist anymore, the publisher was acquired, the brand for the franchise is owned by one company, and the code for the original game is owned by a different company, which has no interest in making games.
I doubt that's going to happen any time soon. Nintendo would rather publish its old games on its own store. Ditto for Microsoft and Sony. The older consoles now usually have a collection of ports for old games sold on the newer platforms, though those don't always behave true to the original platforms without special hardware.
For a very long time in the Netherlands you could download movies and music from unauthorized sources, as you were indirectly paying content creators because of “copy taxes” on data drives, burnable discs etc. It was sort of a loophole but it was completely legal. Those were the days.
Then suddenly the highest court disallowed it. Guess what, we still pay the copy tax.
Clarification: The copy tax was meant to compensate copyright owners for consumers making copies (for private use) of purchased media. It was widely interpreted as to allow downloading from the internet as well (even from pirated sources).
Ah sorry yes - my comment was made from an American/Canadian perspective - I know that other parts of the world have been significantly more progressive in the past.
COVID hit recently graduated Gen-Z incredibly hard. There's huge groups that are/were unemployed and then there's huge groups who are sexually repressed due to quarantine. Across the whole world, too*. Many can easily make more than min wage, and in certain niches you probably don't even have to be 'conventionally beautiful' (sorry to use this term, but it's important I think) to make a living or solid portion of a living on there.
For $$ per hour worked, why would they field low wage, menial jobs with a risk of COVID?
And if you price model right, you don't need thousands of fans, just a couple really dedicated superfans/whales.
* Consider the value of dollars/euros/pounds in poorer countries!
Bhad Bhabie (cash me outside meme girl) made over $1M in 6 hours and said she could retire right now from the amount of money she has made off OF. And she's not doing "porn" or even posting fully nude photos.
There's a big movement to gain a lot of followers on social media like TikTok and then redirect those followers to their $5/month OnlyFans. There are a lot of people making a living or at least significantly boosting their income from this model, and they don't have to leave the house to do it.
The top earners on OnlyFans make a lot of money indeed. There was recently a great interview with Amouranth [1] where she talked about her work.
Making $1.4 million per month and growing, has 4 employees, outsources every chore she can, posts content on all the social media platforms, and grinds 12 hour days on Twitch. [2] Doesn't spend most of the money, is learning about and trying out investments.
Interestingly she doesn't think that this type of top-heavy earnings situation will be sustainable, that the revenue will be more evenly distributed in the future. Even so, she considers her biggest competition to not be up-and-coming people, but instead existing influencers who might bring their audience to OnlyFans.
Definitely not a common success story, but it's pretty interesting how it is possible to have insane success when applying well-reasoned growth strategies and keeping up the grind.
OF is significantly different from other social media in that the adult market has a lot of really weird market factors that make even new market participants able to access significant revenue. Most OF people aren't making 10 million, but it's better to compare OF to patreon where most small users are still pulling in a few hundred dollars a month at least - and that's a pretty significant amount if you've graduated from school into a pandemic market.
I also wonder if OF customers prefer paying girls who have less fans. This allows the person paying to have more personal interaction and to have more influence/control over the girl for less money. So market forces therefore would drive a long tail
Though I can say with considerable certainty that a lot of wannabe Twitch streamers think that being a streamer just means having people watch you play a game, which may be true for story-driven games that don't get a lot of viewers, since it creates a more movie-like experience, and may be true for highly-competitive games where you can watch someone make amazing plays. But for the rest, you need to have the charisma and creativity to create entertaining commentary and audience interaction.
Nobody wants to watch an average Joe play World of Warcraft.
I was proud of my JTV channel. I actually used to vlog and chat to people. They regularly featured me too. I wonder how much I could have made in today’s market..
I have an acquaintance who I know made ~$1500 in 2 weeks, just after work occasionally. She had been on the site already, the only reason I know the amount made during that time is she did it as a fundraiser and donated it all to a non-profit. I'm sure it's a distribution with a long tail, but I think it's probably easier to have a side gig on OF provide you with a little supplemental income rather than Etsy.
Every “social” or user generated platform is like that. Handful of people make serious money, then a small middle class and 90% are just trying to chase their dream while making <$100 a month
In Germany, all Craftsmen are just laughing. Tiler, Carpenter, electrician, etc.. all of them have enough to do, can choose their clients and their wages. I understand that HN always will tend to talk about CS, but Craftsmen are doing their 40k/year, easily. The Salary potential is just increasing.
Skilled crafts here can generate a more money in the first 10-20 years of a career than what you make with a university degree desk job. One factor is that you can get into the labor force much earlier, don't neglect that 3-5 years head start when saving for your first house loan. After that, it depends if you're doing the extra hours, weekend and night shifts.
After that the masters degree jobs get the advantage. The craftsmen either they worked their way into a more supervising role or are not able or willing to do the lucrative labor hours.
The decline in crafts like baker or butcher is attributed to the long and weird hours, more than the pay. There are simply not enough to replace the
Craftsmen who are willing to do a small job for me are so hard to find right now, they're busy enough NONE of them in my area need the business. Every quote I get is either overblown "to make it worth my time", or I simply get declined. Ontario, Canada.
Many trades are boom/bust cycle industries and it is in boom mode right now on top of inflated material prices. This is just the wrong time to need/want one.
That’s interesting- this is the third time I’ve heard this about Ontario in less than a week. Do you have any idea what’s driving this? Another person in the same boat believes that a lot of people are fixing up homes to sell while the market is hot. Another person believes that it’s a supply problem - trades people left Ontario for Alberta, lost their jobs there and can’t afford to move back.
In my experience, having been a homeowner in Alberta first, then Ontario second - it's similar to software development...
Most tradespeople prefer to work on new builds, large amounts of stable work, without the hastle of renovating existing structures and all of the hidden issues that are quickly exposed once the surface has been taken away. (So... technical debt...)
As a contract IT consultant - sure, sometimes I take small "side-hustle" contracts if I am not swamped by my primary gig - but, I couldn't pay all mortgage if I was reliant on just taking small/odd jobs. Same goes for tradespeople.
Ontario and BC have extremely hot housing markets and the demand is off the charts - a lot of tilers and plumbers in BC get sucked into reno contracting companies and simply have enough work to keep them busy for years. I don't think there was an exodus to Alberta - tradesfolk bring in serious cash in Canada so they can definitely afford to live in hot areas... I'd be more curious if it was actually early retirement that was driving things with tradesfolk building up enough of a nest egg that they can afford to retire early.
Not if you need to buy a car, relocate, or find some child care, for example. There are important upfront costs when your situation changes, and if you’re unemployed (i.e. with not necessarily that much money available) they can be a significant hurdle.
similar thing happens in Austin, TX area. It took me several months to find a general contractor to just give me an estimate for the repairs (and he charged quite a lot for just that)
I had to have my HVAC system repaired and I got to talking to the guy who was working on it and during the course of our conversation we started talking about pay... 100k-200k USD/yr he said wasn't unusual once you were done with school and got a little experience. I was floored, I called a family friend who does HVAC and he said that was about right. If I didn't love CS I'd be working in HVAC right now.
Median HVAC tech salary is $50k. Is it possible to make $200k or higher? Sure. But the HVAC people pulling down that comp are generally at that level primarily because of their business skills not their HVAC skills.
It’d be like saying you can make a million as a waiter or cook, because of a small business owner who opened a restaurant.
Well, some of those destroy your body in 25 years (Roofer/back, Tiler/knees), as a Carpenter you have to work with toxic laquer without getting compensated for it like Painters do. If you don't have your own shop at 40 you are pretty much screwed.
In Australia craftsmen (called "tradies") are booking 18 months out, will only work on the things they want to (i.e. new builds, because they're easy/clean), and are easily making $100k - $150k a year.
You have to wonder though, is this because of a genuine gap in the market where people are yet to realize there is money to be made, or is there something else that these stories are leaving out. Is everyone in the industry making this much money? If you joined the industry today, how long would it take to start making good money?
You have to do a 4 year apprenticeship, during which time you won't make great money.
Then you work for someone else and probably make $80k or $90k, then you start your own business.
In terms of supply/demand Australians are extremely house proud and spend an insane amount of money on renovations, upgrades, etc, so all the trades are always slammed. Have been for 20 years.
Right so it seems somewhat similar to the profits you can make programming. Doesn't seem like a crazy get rich quick scheme, just years of hard work paying off.
Pretty much. There's probably also an "in crowd" aspect to it as well. Everyone I know makes $100k+ as a dev here at least after a few years, but I've had Uber rides with older Indian dev drivers complaining that they can't find a job. I imagine anyone lumped into the whole "dodgy lebo/bogan/asian tradies" stereotype might struggle in a similar way.
In Germany there must be an undersupply of these laborers. Come to California and you will find electricians with years of experience, all sorts of craftsman, woodworkers, tilers, roofers, hvac specialists, approaching you with your three cans of paint and asking you for work in the home depot parking lot. Maybe that's just what happens though when you get your working experience in another country like Mexico or El Salvador and these trades in the U.S. are protected by a licensing process that doesn't care about relevant unlicensed experience.
The licensing process helps make sure that the electrician that has 10 years of experience in El Salvador understands American wiring codes and practices before he does something that'll burn your house down.
For sure there are common skills that all electricians share regardless of country, but there are still significant differences between countries, like in the UK ring circuits are common, but are against code in the USA.
licensing process that doesn't care about relevant unlicensed experience
The problem with unlicensed experience is that it provides no assurance of knowledge of code or safe wiring practice. Like when I found that my house had several MWBC's, but on one of them, the previous owner (or someone he hired) had replaced the tied-handle breakers with untied breakers, which leads to a very unsafe situation (another common mistake with MWBC's is moving breakers around and putting the hots on the same hot leg, which can lead to an overloaded neutral). Or worse, when I mapped out my outlets and found that the owner had put a 30A breaker on the 12 gauge wire leading to the garage outlets, presumably he was tripping the code compliant 20A breaker and "solved" that with a bigger breaker.
What is ironic about your examples is that you had all these problems with unlicensed work in a place where licensing is still required. So whats the point of the license even if so much work is done that isn't licensed? People who will cheap out will cheap out no matter what the laws say, and people who pay for good work will continue to pay for good work.
In my jurisdiction, minor electrical work can be done by the homeowner (as long as it's a single family home). I think technically even major electrical word can be done by the homeowner as long as it's inspected and signed off, though it's possible that the inspector will require electrician signoff first.
But if a guy who is a master electrician in El Salvador can sell himself as an electrician here, then a homeowner may trust him to do major electrical work "Permits? Naa, you don't need permits for this, that'll just make it more expensive. Trust me! I'm an Electrican and I've been doing this work for 20 years back home"
I live where the median home is 900k and there is still no shortage of handymen and general contractor labor here if you are willing to pay for work under the table. It's an interesting dynamic.
It’s not an issue of how expensive houses is, it’s an issue of how many houses are being built. California has the slowest housing starts of any major state in the country. That same carpenter would have his pick of job sites in Florida.
What I wanted to point was that talking about "employability", people don't have to go to a university to get a degree and then try to find a job. There are other great ways to make enough money to don't have to end on OnlyFans.
A lot of places around the world have been in lockdowns that have made manual labour difficult, while doing sex work from home has been made much easier.
So sick of seeing these wildly inflated numbers, they increase after every post I'm sure. Most of us here who are software devs are not earning close to 150k, stop using a few SF salaries as the baseline for the rest of us. It is really annoying.
Ok, so let's not use inflated Numbers for the trades either. According to the BLS, the median Software Developer makes $110k. The median carpenter makes $34k. There are also nearly 5x the number of Developer jobs then carpenters.
It's a similar story for other trades, machinist is $47k, welder is $44k, plumber is $56k, HVAC is $50k.
Then when we look at other technology jobs, PM, IT, etc, the story is similar to developers, high median salary with a multiple of jobs available over the trades.
The big upside of the trades is that after working for journeyman wages for a while, learning the job, and establishing a reputation, it becomes possible to own your own business, either by founding or buying out a retiring boomer, of which there are many. At that point your earning potential skyrockets into the millions.
The problem with this is the same as assuming that every developer is earning a GAFAM salary. It just isn't applicable to the average employee in the given profession. I'm also extremely skeptical that yearly profit potential is in the millions for trade businesses except in extremely rare cases.
It’s pretty easy to search business broker websites for $1 million and up EBITDA businesses. I can’t answer your question about prevalence from that since I don’t know on average what percentage are for sale.
I do know though that it’s pretty common for the seller to write the note financing the deal, especially when the buyer is a soon to be former employee. So financing is often within reach.
Another example is trucking. Plenty of trucking businesses were built by a lone operator rolling profits into more trucks and hiring drivers. Given the intense competition for CDL drivers today though it wouldn’t be my first pick.
If you start selling millions in contracts, then are really doing trades any more? You are a business manager and you need business management skills. Many people go into trades specifically to avoid that kind of life, they could have gotten a business degree instead if that is what they wanted.
I know that your talking about the US, but I assure you no Danish carpenters work for $34K, unless they are still in training. You can easily triple that $34K which places you nicely in the same area as a developer with 10 to 15 years of experience.
The SF saleries are inflated BS because they are insanely high even compared to one of the most expensive countries in the world.
Sorry, but without some sort of source, I am skeptical, but also acknowledge that different markets and economies will reward labor in different ways. So when it comes to the US this is a common talking point on the English speaking internet, "the trades pay well", "my buddy makes $150k a year as a carpenter, so you should think about becoming a carpenter too", etc. The fundamental problem is that while yes, there are people who make good money in the trades, on average, it simply isn't true, as opposed to being a software engineer, where the average employee is compensated quite well.
My sister has a trade and has talked about the salary distribution enough that I think it’s going to be very hard for anyone to ever agree on numbers.
She describes it as a bimodal distribution. One (smaller) group of people with trades are willing to work anywhere whenever. They work in fly-in camps with limited work seasons and practically unlimited overtime. Since there’s nothing else to do, they log enough hours to get into double and triple time. The other (larger) group goes home after work and their overtime is limited to nonexistent. The pay is so different between the two groups that if they’re analyzed together, the statistically typical tradesperson looks nothing like the typical tradesperson.
I actually wouldn't be surprised to find that most labor markets are bi-modal (but certainly not all). Which is why I used median wage and not average wage, because the median is very likely to grab the common tradespersons compensation experience whereas the average is likely to be skewed high by the upper distribution group.
Sfba is one of the most expensive areas. The 250k tc number is completely reasonable for sr level (~10yoe) engineers here especially if they changed jobs in the pst few years. If that’s your family’s single source of income you can barely afford a mortgage here.
> It's a similar story for other trades, machinist is $47k, welder is $44k, plumber is $56k, HVAC is $50k.
A good plumber in my area (Seattle) is pulling in $60/hr minimum, and that is after the employers cut.
A plumber with some seniority is going to be making over 100/hr.
An experienced electrician is also well over 100/hr.
Granted if self employed they all have a higher tax burden and pay their healthcare costs, and driving between sites is a pain, but 100/hr makes up for a lot of that.
The trades people I know are booked out months. The general handyman I use is only booked out 2-3 weeks, and he comes in at an affordable $60/hr!
Next time a plumber stops by to fix your water heater, have a chat with them. Some of the ones I've talked to live in very nice custom built luxury homes that they designed themselves.
Sure but now you're talking about an above median plumber in an above median col area. A similarly above average software dev in Seattle is probably pulling in 250k/year all in.
The two major employers in Seattle (Amazon and Microsoft) aren't paying 250K to new grads. Their packages are closer to 175K starting.
Speaking of "250K" as a number, every single offer over 250K+ for someone with no experience, on levels.fyi, in seattle, was either for someone hired at L4 at Google or Facebook (usually this means a PhD hire), or a Facebook "rockstar" signing bonus, which I think levels.fyi mis-estimates (the "recurring" comp is lower than 250K, you get something like 120 base, 40 stock/yr, 100K signing (+ your normal annual bonus of ~15K). That's 200K/year over four years, not 250).
And last time I checked those packages had serious compensation cliffs after the first few years!
Software developer compensation is seriously bi-modal, most developers even in big cities are working at a fraction of FAANG pay, doing routine maintenance work.
Ok but the person you are replying to literally just went with average to avoid rare geographic salaries.
Finally in seattle a top electrician makes 100/hr or ~200k/year. A top developer with similar years of experience makes $500k and never has to crawl around in your nasty attic and gets amazing healthcare and free food.
It really puts in context how software development isn't a particularly good career, depressingly.
The money may be approximately comparable (outliers in both camps excepted) but all the trade people I know that have established themselves have very flexible work schedule. They have all the demand they can take so when they want to work 60 hours weeks they do. But since work is per job, when they want to work a few hours a week or take time off, that's also possible without repercussions.
Meanwhile in software land it's either great pay at 60+ hours a week, or nothing. Oh and "unlimited vacation" (aka don't dare take vacation ever).
Tradepeople also don't have standups or agile soulcrushing BS and their experience is respected.
> But since work is per job, when they want to work a few hours a week or take time off, that's also possible without repercussions.
I realize it's rather irrational but I personally don't think I could stomach the non-salaried lifestyle. A day of vacation is a day's wages lost. I'm sure it's something you learn to live with but I appreciate that the cost of taking time off is quite abstract for me.
Keep in mind that most trade work isn’t mentally stimulating. That may sound fine to you, but as someone who bounces back and forth between a job that is and isn’t - it can be rough in it’s own way.
It’s boring and you can practically feel your brain turn to slush.
I feel like you may be suffering from the grass is greener on the other side.
First, work schedule. Keep in mind that, as another commenter pointed out, tradespeople often go through booms and busts, just like any other profession. The difference is that with tradespeople its a lot more obvious, since they still on a job for a few weeks, rather than a few years. On the boom, the tradespeople get a better deal out of it, because they get more work, whereas office workers of course only have the one job. In the busts, the office workers come out better, as the tradespeople have less work, whereas the office workers remain the same as they were in the boom.
Next, hours and vacation. I may be an outliner here, but my hours are the standard 9-5 and I get a fixed 30 days vacation a year, and flexible working (including working from home). As for unlimited vacation = no vacation, and 60+ hours is required, that seems more like a bad office culture/employer, no different than a tradesman would get a bad client. Again, its only more noticeable in office jobs because your there for a long time, whereas a bad client will only be a problem for a number of weeks (though potentially more if they hold off on paying). While we're at it, the same could be said of "their experience is respected". That's based on your employer, not your job.
Finally, standups, agile and office politics (assuming thats what you meant by BS). Its true, tradespeople don't need to suffer with that, but they do need to suffer through a hell of a lot of health and safety precautions and government red tape. Of course you can get some cowboys who don't bother with that, but that seems no different than the programming teams that don't do standups, agile or office politics (apart from the fact that one team is less likely to kill people). I would also mention the physical health issues that it can cause, but programmers get a similar thing through sitting for so long and you graciously didn't mention that.
I don't think being a tradey is a bad job, not at all. Its just not perfect, and like any job has its pros and cons. I too have fantasised about going into that line of work, but I imagine if I did, I'd end up fantasizing sitting in a comfy chair all day building software. As I said, the grass is always greener on the other side.
I've never worked 60 hours. I've managed 40h or under for 20+ years. I've worked two full time jobs and have done 60h for periods. I would not recommend it.
If you're in the US, don't be annoyed with these numbers; learn from them. If you get on LinkedIn and expect > $200k, you may be surprised by what you can achieve.
You should line up several interviews all in the same week and play the offers against one another. At least one should be over $150k, and possibly over $200k. That highest number then sets a floor that everyone else will need to rise to as you negotiate. Politely ignore claims that offers will explode; they won't. Add options/RSUs, and you may be shocked at the amount of compensation you can get.
Yeah, honestly if you're in SFBA/Seattle/NYC, this is not an unreasonable salary expectation for someone with a decade of experience. Especially if you're carefully selecting job opportunities that line up well with skill growth.
People do that with every job it seems. Always somebody talking about random tradesmen making $100k+ but in the vast majority of cases they make nowhere near that.
Please stop implying that $150k+ salaries are reserved for FAANG tier companies and SF only. It might have been true 5-10 years ago (and even then, i am a bit skeptical of that lower boundary of 5 years), but it is far from the truth in 2021.
Literally interviewed with a small startup (around 20 people total headcount) less than a week ago. The offer was for a base salary of $180k+grand promises of equity given out that should grow 15x and make one rich, but whatever, because equity at this point is just imaginary monopoly money worth pretty much nothing right now, so lets omit that part completely. But even with that in mind, $180k of pure cash just from base salary is more than doable. And I am not even a senior level or anything like that. Technically the company is in NYC, but the position is fully remote, which makes it even more lucrative for people who want to live in cheap COL states (no salary adjustment, which works out great for this scenario).
They are not inflated numbers they are what you can get working for a set of top companies with deep pockets competing over the same talent. It varies but 150k is entry level comp pretty much anywhere they hire in the United States [0].
It’s not “fair” but it’s worth your time to look into getting into the US tech sector. Your skills have the most market value their.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted because this is accurate. If you are a low level dev at a big company in a major city you will get a salary of at least $100k, a bonus, and stock options. They easily combine to get you to $150k, and I’m talking entry level roles, it goes up considerably from there.
Well I'm obviously in the wrong market then! Down here in Oklahoma, I'm a Senior Software Engineer, and I'm only at $110k, plus around $10k in bonuses a year. There's very few opportunities for salary increases unless I start looking for remote work outside of the state or I opt to move into a management role.
Most senior salaries around here seem to be in the $95-120k range, so when I see similar numbers for "entry level" roles, it always perks me up a bit.
This is very true, but you hear the same thing from craftsmen. Another commenter further up said that a HVAC repairmen told him that making $200k/year in that job was pretty average, and a reply to that pointed out the median was $50k/year.
Not saying I disagree, but yeh, its not unique to software dev it seems
I only have 1 YOE and I'll say the numbers sound right. A friend with 2 YOE got 2 290K offers. Another friend/former co-worker with 8 YOE got a 400K+ offer.
These numbers are all for remote roles for SV-based companies. You can also check salary on levels.fyi.
You won't believe it, but 300K+ for new grads (undergrads) isn't even unheard of if you look at places like Citadel & Jane Street, tho of course the hiring bar is very high at these places.
Ok, but I'm not from NY/SF but I'm assuming based on the small amount of time that I spent there, that every thing is more expensive there, including housing and medical care... In Germany (Europe?) I would say that a Software Developer salary floats between 30k/y - 100k/y.
Yeah, it’s more expensive in the big cities, but if you by a house you tend to profit from that increase. It’s hard to see that when in the early stages of your career, but I’m glad I stuck it out and didn’t move to a low cost area.
Im in the late stages of my career and after owning my home for 15 years my mortgage is far less than rents in my area, my salary has gone up a ton over the years, and my house has appreciated a ton.
If you are a dev early in your career and in a big city, stick it out. Get into a big company that gives you stock options that are worth something, but a house when you can, and start working to max out your 401k. In all likelihood it will pay off in the long run. My old boss called it the “get rich slowly plan”. As a person that grew up really poor and has been in tech over 20 years, I can assure you it pays off.
I don’t know if the price increases will keep happening at the same historical rates. Although it isn’t out of the realm of possibility, I have a hard time believing that the houses in my neighborhood in 5-10 years will go from $2-3m to $4-6m.
Real estate is a tricky thing. I wouldn’t buy it for the sake of expecting it to go up in value. I’d buy it because you need housing.
It's not hard to believe. First, the big caveat, what I'm about to say ignores the possibility of huge catastrophe (environmental collapse, world war, meteor hits the earth) because if such a catastrophe happens, most of this won't matter a whole lot.
Barring catastrophe, it will almost certainly go up if your time horizon is longer than 10 years. If you are in a big city, the populations are growing faster than new housing is being built. On top of that, there is no space to build many new single family homes so those will go up even more if you own one instead of a condo or townhouse.
I bought my first house at the peak of the last bubble. Ten years later I sold it for more than I paid for it, and those last few years my mortgage was a fair bit lower than rents for a comparable place.
Most people simply haven't wrapped their head around exponential growth. Our economy grows exponentially, and our population has historically (there are signs this might be changing). Unfortunately, I think our environment can't sustain that, but as long as it does, things will go up if your time horizon is long enough.
Edit: also, I’m not suggesting that your home value will double in 10 years. Not sure where you got that idea. My point does not assume or require doubling in 10 years.
It's actually a more complex topic that it appears at first. Some things are much more expensive, but some are identical to everywhere else - eg:
- vacations
- cars
- all online purchases
- most hobbies
- etc...
When I moved to NY, I expected that my (much higher than before) salary would barely allow me to buy a car. Instead, I ended up with the best car I had ever owned up to that point, and went on craziest vacations. I also lived in the shittiest place ever before and after.
Google has an office in Frankfurt, and SWEs there get paid far more than 30k - 100k/yr. The comp delta between google SF SWE and google Frankfurt SWE is less than 30% (at same level obv).
I totally agree that the non-FAANG companies have terrible dev pay. But most of the FAANG companies have offices well beyond just SF/NYC, so the opportunities are definitely available.
Women are also overrepresented on the side of loosing job.
Mostly artly because women work in segments that were hit harder - services and the like. And partly because childcare is more on them, mothers were even more likely to loose jobs.
>For $$ per hour worked, why would they field low wage, menial jobs with a risk of COVID?
Because after shit pay being the desk girl at Walmart Tire Center for 2yr you can easily convert that into a service writer job <fast forward 40yr> and then retire from your job as regional support manager for <company that makes industrial doodad>
Compare with thotting around on the internet where you can make a ton of money up front but you're basically racing the clock because your body won't be nearly as lucrative of an income at 30 and you'll be starting from square one-ish. Can you potentially take the cash and pivot into a career that will carry you to retirement? Sure, but it takes a work ethic and level of discipline that is uncommon.
It's like the female equivalent of being a marine rifleman for several enlistments. You get out at ~30 with few marketable skills, hopefully a good work ethic and a high liklihood of f-ed up knees.
There is no reason one cannot thot and do something else. Many of them seem to be enrolled in advanced education. Likewise, a good thot income can fund a future, either going to school at 30, when you have a much better idea of who you are, or funding a more traditional business, or snapping up a few properties.
Likewise, they might be cagey enough to learn the backend of their backend business, and come out of it with video editing skills and whatnot, possibly segueing into an advanced education in media.
Advanced education is a rough form for most sex workers as most companies will not hire people who have their porn all over. Certainly not in America and definitely not in the rest of the world. Sometimes we think of Europe as being more 'liberal' for example, but they are really more communitarian. Open minded but still culturally very traditional.
For some professions and companies it won't matter but for others it'll matter a lot.
Because we have just started with all of this, and we also don't know the future, it's hard to 'price in' what the future cost of doing this kind of work with respect to future options.
That said, Sylvester Stallone did porn films, but that's also a specific industry, pre-internet.
Well, it should not be that big of a challenge to leave it out from one's resume. Especially if you are studying at the same time so there would be no gap in the CV.
Yes, because it's impossible to ever change careers or apply your work ethic to gaining new skills. The idea that you don't have marketable skills having been in the military is also the biggest piece of bunk I've ever heard and you really have no idea what you are talking about.
When you leave the military with an infantry MOS and without leadership experience (which is the situation most people who quit after 4yr are in) all you have is a proven ability to work hard and put up with bullshit. You're on roughly equal ground with someone who's been a warehouse laborer or janitor for an equivalent period of time and on lower ground than someone who at least has industry adjacent experience. Being able to show up and work hard confers a much stronger advantage than it used to when applying for entry level jobs but it's not particularly unique. Yes you can apply a your work ethic to learning skills but that requires a kind of self-starting that we both know not everyone in the military develops.
You've learned a variety of skills, probably had to face some challenging missions, been exposed to other cultures, learned to work within an organization, probably have highly conscientious posture.
Anyone in 10 years and never had a leadership position at all you'd have to question a bit (they should for sure be sergeant) but ideally would be prepared to be a regional manager for retail or Wallmart Center Manager. The more easy going and communicative would work in sales. Almost anything operationally oriented.
Contrast that with a sex worker who will unfortunately have a narrow set of options because a lot of companies just won't hire for that reason.
If you do a 4 year stint in the infantry and don't come away with some sort of leadership experience, the problem isn't your lack of experience, it's you didn't take advantage of the opportunities presented to you.
> When you leave the military with an infantry MOS and without leadership experience all you have is a proven ability to work hard and put up with bullshit.
But, from the contact I’ve had with the military (been close to several people who have either enlisted or commossioned experience, did the ROTC basic camp but chose not to contract) that's not particularly likely unless you are either actively avoiding or completely unsuited for leadership.
And even then you’ll probably have some leadership experience.
> You're on roughly equal ground with someone who's been a warehouse laborer or janitor for an equivalent period of time and on lower ground than someone who at least has industry adjacent experience.
Even if you somehow manage to be in that place skill-wise (and I think, leadership skills aside, that's unlikely), you are still better off career-wise, because essentially all public and many, especially large, private employers apply systematic positive preference for veterans in hiring.
Leadership, accountability, management, planning large scale operations, cross-team coordination, team building, dealing with bureaucracy and large organizations, dealing with rapidly shifting priorities, etc. There are so many marketable skills that you will gain from being in the military and the infantry has one of the fastest paths to leadership positions.
The worst managers I have worked with were ex-military. They had no clue how to deal with highly skilled knowledge workers. They were probably fine leading grunts but the skills doesn’t transfer.
absolute best managers i have worked with were ex-military. in general, academy grads are all very good. also well connected across society.
a lot of difference between a 10 year Staff Sgt and a flag officer.
The economy won't support that many Walmart Tire Centers either. That was just an example. My point was that there are paths from these "crap jobs" to "real career" and traveling said paths require about the same level of "how do I tee up my next move for more money" long term thinking as being a successful camgirl.
You float the idea of perpetual growth in any other context, and you'd be called a fool, but apparently the economy doesn't obey the same rules of common sense.
when the take is so bad you need to go look and see if it matches other takes the person has posted. 'high liklihood of f-ed up knees' dear god who raised you and why. 'easily convert that into a service writer job' this is bias confirming insanity. There is no easy conversion from tire center desk girl to anything but tire center desk girl II for 3% more pay.
Reality check is that desk girl don't have as much upward mobility as you suggest. Most of low level employees in these jobs don't have the opportunity to go much up.
Practically nobody in any job has upward mobility without jumping ship. You have to job hop to move up in pretty much every industry. That's how it is these days. Selling a ton of brakes for Firestone or Jiffy Lube or whatever certainly puts your resume among the ones that get seriously considered for a service writer job.
The success of OF is more a question of demand than offer honestly. During the lockdowns they were a lot of guys with money to spend but could not spend it on social activities, so a lot of it went on internet websites.
But there is also a more long term trend of people having less and less sex and more and more porno consumption. But that can't go forever, at one point if all girls in the world are on sex workers then they will be much more offer than demand.
A girl on OF, to make a living, let's say 3k per month, needs to have 300 guys paying for her. But a guy is not paying for 300 girls, maybe 10 max, so the platform needs to have 30 times more guys than girls. Which is unsustainable in a world with 50% girls/50% guys.
Which is a good news imho. The day that having sex for girls is a normal thing (No this is not normal thing today). Then a lot of things will be much simpler for everyone
I would love to see their metrics. I would imagine, like most things, they have a ton of whales so that even if a minority of guys subscribe to 50 girls there probably are plenty of people with addictions shelling out $500 or $1000 a month on this stuff. And this people could represent the majority of all payments on the site.
It also seems (from actual published data) that the distribution is super weighted towards the top performers. That being said, even an extra 1k a month is pretty sick for posting topless photos if your regular income is less than 40k or you are in school.
Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting that the study notes that the drop in sexual activity was mostly in low-income/underemployed men, and students. So probably not the demand side of OF.
There are plenty of bi and gay people, or people whose porn interests diverge from their attractions. It's only a problem if you assume everyone is 100% heterosexual.
Females just have different/complex drives/needs for sexual attraction than males, who are mostly just drived by libido/horniness. You can observe this in nature too. Seems the males are the "abnormal" ones here, addicted to chemical reactions in the brain. (Didn't expect to see this line of thinking on HN...).
Even if they do have different needs that men (I feel so too, but have not scientifically studied the subject) you can't ignore the pressure of the society all their life on the topic
FWIW that's an average not median income with a ton of caveats ^ from the source. I'm confident though that only the first two screens of OF content creators make the bulk of the income though.
> https://ranking-fans.com/ - Seedlist and Fans Sorted by total fans; accounts where fans are not available have been excluded. Many accounts listed as having the most fans are free accounts used by OnlyFans models who also possess paid accounts. However, as fan numbers were only available for the free accounts, these have been disregarded for the purposes of this story. Likewise, "free" accounts where subscription is free but photos provided required payment have been disregarded. Accordingly, the only data shown is for paid accounts with high subscriber numbers. In some cases, models possessed multiple paid accounts. In these cases, only the one with the highest subscriber numbers has been tracked. Monthly earnings are based exclusively on the individual account assuming no media requires additional payment and disregarding tips and similar voluntary costs. Similarly, free trials and discounts have been excluded. Accordingly, all monthly earnings are estimates reflecting the monthly payments of subscribers over the long term.
Many factors can lead to this, but that's not surprising, the law of distributions when it comes to things like this is that there are incredible earners and then a massive drop off and long tail.
> for equivalent of a full time job.
You added this, I don't doubt that some people put in a lot more effort than the monetary amount they get back- but the inverse is also true and no source claims that "you get $180 for a full time workload", because that's impossible to measure at scale.
I don't think just any old person can make money off OF though, like presumably you need a reasonable camera and maybe lights or something, you need to be able to edit photos, the time and energy and motivation to learn how to use those things etc. It's not like some random struggling single mother can take a few pics of her feet on her 5 year old iphone and be expecting to make decent money.
> COVID hit recently graduated Gen-Z incredibly hard.
Gen-Z is less sexually active than previous generations. Significantly so. They've been exposed to porn at an earlier age (owing to earlier access to the internet and the ubiquity of pornography online). Porn use was already common among them. The lockdown made things worse, but the status quo was already in place.
> There's huge groups that are/were unemployed and then there's huge groups who are sexually repressed due to quarantine.
This false anthropology must die. Pornography is incredibly harmful to those that consume it. It enslaves a person to his passions. It feeds his lusts and deranges his desires. It makes him or her incapable of relating to the opposite sex in a healthy way, whether in the strictly sexual sphere or not. Lust blunts the mind and renders one incapable of thinking clearly. The consumption of pornography only feeds the sexual passions, further entrenching lust and often generating paraphilias and fetishes as the titillating novelty wears off. Emotions become disordered. Someone who has a porn habit becomes locked in him or herself. The stereotype of a lonely and smarmy 40 year old locked in his parents' basement masturbating to porn is a pithy illustration in many ways. It is the image of an emasculated, impotent wretch deranged by his vices and disorders. This has nothing to do with his lack of a sexual relationship and everything to do with how he views sexuality. He is not master of himself.
Frankly, we'd be better off permitting (regulated) prostitution. There seem to be plenty of women willing to provide these services and plenty of men who are slaves to their lusts (men tend to be more vulnerable to porn addiction and lust than women, but yes, it is true that it is not a problem exclusive to men). At least with prostitution, you're having sex with a human being instead of abusing yourself alone in your room. But ultimately, our view of sexuality must be restored to a healthy one and not the depraved one proposed by liberalism. I suspect the "asexual movement" is a subconscious reaction against the obsession with sex in our society. Excess in one direction tends to produce excess in the other. But maybe it will at least legitimize celibacy again. You don't need sex to have a happy life, contrary to the propaganda of the last few decades or so.
I will add that porn use is an industry fueled both by a corrupt society and people in power who recognize that those who are slaves to their passions (and lust is but one of them) are easy to control. Oligarchies are prone to let such vices flourish because it keeps the populace impotent and consumed with themselves instead of threatening the usurpers who have managed to gain tyrannical control. Porn appeals to prurient interest which is why it is so useful in psychological warfare (a rather stark example is the broadcasting of porn on captured Palestinian television by the Israelis; you think they were trying to liberate them?). Sexual liberation has made people easier to control. It has truncated their humanity, warped them, and turned them into sex robots.
Wow, I've never seen such a prudish comment so amply stated.
> Sexual liberation has made people easier to control. It has truncated their humanity, warped them, and turned them into sex robots.
This is entirely based on nothing. Even worse, it ignores the much more direct and relevant innovations in the area of controlling populations - propaganda and advertising.
> a rather stark example is the broadcasting of porn on captured Palestinian television by the Israelis; you think they were trying to liberate them?
No, they were trying to shock and humiliate Muslim sensibilities, similar to stashing pork on busses. Sexuality is not some secret sauce of controlling people - there are much more direct ways of doing so, especially with the power of a state like Israel.
Or rather: Paradoxically, what's truly prudish -- and I mean this literally, "overly prudent" -- is to short-circuit your sex drive with porn, because you fear the consequences of real sex.
Lust is good. It helps you overcome social risk aversion, and bond with another person.
But that's the point: You have to have those relationships.
You'll be happiest if you have lots of sex, as part of how you form and participate in a committed relationship. And your "base" urges, far from being bad, can help drive that.
Surely this is a joke? The amount of tin foil thinking going on is jaw dropping. I am imagining a crazy homeless guy screaming to people walking by while reading this.
by the tone ("It enslaves a person to his passions. It feeds his lusts and deranges his desires.") I'd say 17th century puritans. The author is missing the word "sin", but it's sort of implied.
a good friend of mine is a sex worker, a cam girl to be precise, and uses OF as it is safer than other platforms. it should be noted that she is a brilliant individual and do this job due to severe psychiatric problems that prevent her doing more "normal" jobs. she feeds one child with this money, as a lot of sex workers that are also loving moms.
it is important that such platforms do exist (if they implement proper safeguards) and that these content creators are not stigmatized.
We should try to read each others' comments in the most charitable light possible.
In this case, I think the friendly way to interpret that comment is as an attempt to anticipate and pre-empt a very common and harmful misconception about sex workers.
I read it as saying that it shouldn't need to be stated, ideally, that she is brilliant because of stigma around sex work and workers. That we have then freedom to do this as we please in the USA, it's legit work, and many people of all intelligence levels and circumstances may choose to do it.
It's a strongly worded opinion and with Afghanistan thrown in, but we all know the Taliban's history of repression soo.. I think it's worth everyone seeing.
It comes off as strange to me because it doesn’t make a difference if a “sex worker” is intelligent or not. And this goes for any job that doesn’t require brilliance. Am I supposed to feel better for, more accepting of, more sympathetic to, etc. a person because of their intellect? And if I have a problem with sex work, it has nothing to do with how I perceive the intellect of the workers, so the pre-empting seems unnecessary.
Maybe comments should read each others’ future, unwritten comments in the most charitable light possible. Otherwise it starts looking like we’re writing up preemptive strawmen.
Also, it is quite clear that comment was written to elicit sympathy. I can see why someone gets angry when intellect is used as a justification for sympathy.
Pointing out that someone is intelligent is useful, in this case, as a general "well, this can happen to anyone" kind of comment, and to break stereotypes about how sex workers all fit some narrow stereotype.
That is important to point out, as sometimes people generalize or attack people, unfairly, based on these things.
Though, you should also be careful about phrases like, "this can happen to anyone." It plays into another common and harmful misconception about sex workers, that they don't have much agency, they're victims, this is something that happens to them rather than just another one of many possible career choices that a person can make.
doesn't require brilliance? appart from her deep interest in science, she became one the top twenty most paid porn actress worldwide. i don't think this comes out of pure luck.
it is true that the intelligence argument was arbitrary (it is my assessment of her) and perhaps clumsy. but again, go have a look on your favorite social media how these people are considered.
And for every one of the top twenty most paid porn actresses worldwide, there are probably ~2 million[1] who aren't that. I'm not saying your friend isn't intelligent when I say that sex work does not require brilliance, nor am I saying that intelligent sex workers don't exist. I am saying that sex work itself doesn't have employers screening candidates for their level of intelligence. This should be a fairly uncontroversial remark IMO. It's not strictly about your friend, and I'll take your word for it that she's quite smart.
The amount of anger and negativity in this comment is shocking.
The work she does is often stereotyped as being "dumb" or non-intellectual. To fight that idea, OP found it valuable to mention how smart she is and how these platorms provide a safe and profitable way to provide for her child.
Ask yourself - and I mean really ask yourself - what about that statement has you so angry?
1) that she is doing sex work, because she has no choice to feed her son, given her medical condition.
2) on an unrelated note: she is a brilliant and very intelligent individual.
3) point 2) was emphasized because for a significant part of the population, these two are incompatible, which is obviously wrong.
4) these platforms, while far from perfect provides some safety to sex workers. this important and fundamental: the sex industry, be it pornography or other, is dangerous to actress, actors and prostitutes alike. many get raped and/or abused, for instance.
5) on yet an unrelated note that she is a loving mom. moreover, an ex gf of mine, a past sex worker as well, is also a loving mom. i added this information because both in english and french slang, if you're mom is a sex worker, you and her are not good person. i don't think these children can openly talk about their moms' jobs openly at school without provoking major backlash, if not legal actions. and we live in a quite liberal country.
If she is restoring to sex work to feed her son, what is she spending the father's child support money on? That seems like the entire reason child support is required by law.
"Required by law" as not as powerful as it sounds.
Law is not powerful enough to protect someone from a violent partner. Restraining orders don't stop violence from taking place. They only promise punishment afterwards.
So you do not pursue a violent partner for child support, even with the law on your side. It is too dangerous.
Online sex work is the safer option.
Oh, also, you seem to have the idea that child support money is enough by itself for the costs of raising a child decently. It often isn't, you need another income source to cover it. In the example we are talking about, the person could not do a typical job, so they had to find an alternative and OF provided it.
> If she is resorting to sex work to feed her son, what is she spending the father's child support money on?
That implies:
(a) there is father's child support (a sweeping assumption that is often wrong), and
(b) the father's child support is sufficient by itself to feed her son without needing to resort to sex work.
It's also suggesting that the mother is misusing funds somehow.
The distinction between "feeding" and "raising" you might have picked on would be, in my view, a quibble over a technicality. Child support is to contribute to the costs of raising a child, it's not earmarked to specifically cover food, and if you need extra income to raise a child, it's acceptable common language to phrase that as earning money to feed a child.
Stop. The problem is you need to feed your kid today. Not when the judge or law gets around to deciding you’re right. Just stop arbitrating other people’s lives. It’s not hard.
You're so close to having empathy for all people! Just keep going: What if nobody had to justify their existence?
Edit: Downvoters, try a little harder. Engage your emotional core. Really work those empathy centers. Think about it: If nobody had to justify their existence, and people just allowed each other to exist, then we wouldn't have to weigh whether sex workers are more deserving of rights than computer scientists. We could allow both; we could allow everybody.
Since nobody had the temerity, I'll answer. If nobody had to justify their existence, then our society would not need systems which destroy people. It's that simple, and the folks using downvotes instead of words should confront their biases.
You shouldn't need to, but on Hacker News I can't say I can fault this caveat getting ahead of some potentially nasty comments, even if in principle I agree it shouldn't need to be said.
i know, unfortunately sex work is still highly stigmatized, including in western present cultures.
you don't need to go as far as afghanistan, i'm back from eastern europe where my friends from the LGBTQ community are literally being beaten by neo nazi funded by putin.
It is stigmatized because it plays a part in facilitating people's addictions and mental problems. Just like gambling, drug-dealing, snake-oil salesmen, etc.
It's not all roses, that's for sure..
I don't think it is just the One Click Solution they want (though I don't deny that is probably very attractive). I'm pretty sure we would see more vanity URLs and one-off sites if payment processors weren't so strict when it comes to selling adult content/services. Spinning up a CMS website of your own, even with commerce/membership functionality, isn't difficult. But the payment processors are the unspoken guardians of internet commerce, and without VC level backing good luck getting them to touch something like adult content.
I think this is a missing piece of OFs popularity and usefulness to creators. Not only is it a centralized and (by now) well known site for this kind of content. OF deals with the payment processors, the charge backs, and the disputes. It is relatively seamless for the content creators in that regard.
> But the payment processors are the unspoken guardians of internet commerce, and without VC level backing good luck getting them to touch something like adult content.
You're completely correct here. The only other real option in this space is CCBill - and they:
a) only do payments - not hosting and everything that OF does
b) still take a ~18-20% cut, in addition to annual flat fees
This is exactly the sort of problem cryptocurrencies were created to solve. Nobody should need some payment processor's permission for anything. People should be able to get paid in cryptocurrencies as if it was cash.
There is a good chance that any given reddit post in the widely viewed subreddits is posted in order to get people to look at the user’s profile or other posts and follow it back to their only fans page.
That's pretty right. In particular, there is a (huge) subreddit devoted to selfies where a high number of users that post in there have a OF link present in their biography.
> People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content
They want a solution for distributing adult content and getting paid for it.
By far, the single biggest hurdle here is payment processing - as evidenced by this whole OnlyFans fiasco. It's Visa and Mastercard who are pressuring OF - they've been doing this to sex workers for decades, but finally picked a fight big enough that it's getting real media backlash.
Of course there was a big outcry. It's like if Etsy announced they were gonna ban candles, or Kickstarter said they were gonna ban dice and cards. You think all those people would want to go create their own sites? You think it would make any sense for them to do that? Come on
It could be better for some of them in the long run, who knows. The fact is that there's no absolute security in either choice, but with a personal website at least you are in control, you have your “domain”.
I think OF has also become a one-click outlet for nontraditional sex workers, e.g., those who wouldn't otherwise have done this type of stuff. From what I've read OF has even more "amateurs" than platforms like MyFreeCams.
Part of the reason they've gotten so much heat is because of cases of underage girls selling photos on that site for some time before they're caught. I don't know if they've found a solution to that problem or just come to some agreement with their payment processors
There's a lot going on in the porn world, especially now that it's, er, democratized. Sex workers is very broad. Porn stars is a little fuzzy. Some porn stars are big names, and/or can actually act pretty well. Or excel at creating fantasies. A surprising number of cam girls just sit at their desk fully clothed, chin in hand, and the only action is their eyes darting around their monitor while bad background music gets mangled through their microphone.
"Sex workers" is synonymous with prostitution. Pornography is a form of art. "Sex artists" would make more sense. "Sex worker" sounds very pedestrian, we don't call actors or singers "theater workers". As for the girls just sitting in their desks that doesnt sound like sex-related work at all, they might as well be called cam-artists. This is a not a tiny niche anymore, there is space for more than one terms.
No, it's not, it's an umbrella term covering multiple kinds of sexually-explicit work people do, including prostitution, fetish modelling, camming, stripping, phone sex.
That's right, there's more than one term. When you want to say something about porn actors, you can use that term. When you want to say something about sex workers, you can use that term. When you want to say something about artists, you can use that term. They are different but overlapping terms and which one you use depends on what you're saying.
Interesting, i ve heard it more used to refer to prostitution -- do ,e.g. strippers count as sex workers? Also, even that article is confusing, for example it says that sex work is prohibited in most of the world, but camming is legal almost everywhere.
Well, I think the intention behind it is that it's an umbrella term; I'm sure there's lots of gray area around the edges--I doubt anyone thinks there's a bright line where it's "sex work" on this side and "not sex work" on the other. Maybe that's part of the point, it's somewhat loose. But the intention is to include workers other than prostitutes.
Pornography is as much art as streaming video games or uploading card opening videos to YouTube are a form of art.
Pornography is entertainment, and not all entertainments are art. In spite of all the more or less recent porn videos labeled "Art Porn," which, in fact, rather depicts passionate sexual intercourse, pornography cannot reasonably be considered art in the traditional sense. Pornography does not elevate your spirit, it does not make you feel a broad range of emotions, and there is no real creativity, or it is utterly limited to a mediocre plot and a few different environments.
What definition of art do you have in mind that makes you think that pornography is art?
that's a very narrow definition that excludes a lot of mediocre works which are typically classified as art. I m not interested in that discussion as much in why porn and prostitution are lumped together.
Not generally; its typically used either more broadly (though not strictly more broadly, as nonconsensual acts wouldn't generally be included) than “prostitution”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_work#Types
Or strictly more narrowly than prostitution, as in:
This is a term from their own advocacy, as an alternative to much more derogatory ones. It focuses on work issues: pay and safety. The OF issue is about pay.
"Artist" might imply dilettante. "Worker" captures that they are doing it in order to get paid.
"Porn artist" might be taken to mean the people who make pornographic drawings/animations. Actors aren't colloquially referred to as "artists" most of the time; they're called actors.
It's the opposite for me. The value for amateur porn is that they don't look or act like traditional porn stars. I don't find much value in abstract notions like "genuine interest".
/r/gonewild is actually one of the few subreddits that prohibits posts from sellers. But every subreddit that doesn't outright prohibit sellers is flooded with them. The OF girls all got kicked off of Facebook, Instagram, Snapshot, etc... Reddit is comparatively more friendly to sex workers as far as site wide policy goes.
That's simply not true, because /r/gonewild are extremely strict about not allowing OF creators. They can post under a seperate account but any mention of they're main account or OF results in a swift permanent ban.
The RES addon has been a godsend for reddit for YEARS.
I love to browse by /r/all -- but I have spent a long while +Filtering out so many subreddit - and running it with Res and adblock etc... I have a super sleek and fun experience on Reddit with my 15-year-old account...
Some memes are cool - most are lame.
I have never been interested in 4chan nor twitter (I think twitter is the new "National Inquirer type" -- I think of tweets as those horrific multi colored snippet boxes on the front of tabloids.
I knew it was a thing, I knew of the memes, but to see both sides in arms over a company vs branding, creating their own website and content - and vanity domain as well.
People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.
And the memes, I think they're pretty toxic, 4chan, incel, reddit, twitter memes - I never knew there was that much angst.