zlacker

>>mef+(OP)
What I find fascinating/disturbing with OnlyFans and in some way with Twitch and streaming in general is more the client side than the creators. Here are basically people paying, and paying a lot, for parasocial relationships. Because clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.

I think it says something quite dark about our society as a whole that we have basically commoditised distress and are encouraging some people often themselves in dire circumstances to prey on others to the benefits of the middle men. I find these new pimps scarier than the old sort in that they pretend to have clean hands.

>>Random+hPb
> Because clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.

I think you should step back and look at it with a bit of distance. Is the content they're paying for really the same as you think is available for free, and do they even get it under the same conditions, in morality and circumstance.

Not knowing your life, it feels like you could have said the same towards people buying pricy concert tickets when there's royalty free music abundantly available.

> commoditised distress [...] often in dire situations

The first step to alleviate these specific situations could be to stop marginalizing this kind of content and give them a regular professional status, instead of systematicly pigeon hole it.

>>makeit+JXb
But the OP is right about the parasocial aspect. OF content and other such platforms is about the personalization aspect. Sure, there's some kinks/fetishes too.. but it is primarily about engagement. In some ways, it's just an explicit, subscription based, social media platform where it feels like you're being treated uniquely... But most times you are not.

>>Secret+lZb
How is that particularly different from, say, concerts? The social aspects are what drives value.

>>itisha+91c
This comparison is backwards.

Listening to music performed in person by other humans is the natural way of things, like actually having sex with another human.

Recorded music is much more like pornography.

>>pfannk+dbc
That's a fascinating perspective. I wonder if there was any pushback when recording was first introduced?

A quick search shows... of course there was!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/06/the-record-eff...

https://archive.is/PDR04

>>itisha+ycc
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a couple of places about how recording and mass reproduction destroyed the social (and monetary) value of small-time creative or artistic-expression talent, like knowing how to play the piano OK or being a pretty-good singer or dancing decently well, or being a quite good (but not top 0.1% good) storyteller, or being fairly good at sketching people.

Took social, and perhaps making-a-living value almost totally away from anything but tip-top talent in those areas. Nobody in your family needs you to play music at get-togethers and parties—you’re worse and less-convenient than thousands of artists on Spotify. They don’t wonder with excitement what sort of sketches Uncle Robert will bring to the next holiday, to give to his extended family. At best, that kind of thing’s indulged and tolerated now. The demand is all but entirely gone.

I reckon it was a real belief of his, given he wrote of it more than once, and whose voice it was put in, the one specific case I can call. There’s a chapter in Bluebeard about it for sure (that novel’s kind of a whirlwind tour of most of the major themes and points of Vonnegut’s work—dunno if it was intended that way, but that’s how it turned out) and I know I saw it other places, can’t recall which books.