Instagram is OnlyFan's Freemium (Cafe Society Dinner Discussion #9)
Social Fog of War & Monetizing the Illusion of Community
Cafe Society is Maxwell Social’s weekly magazine on the intersection of community and society — an anthropological look at the underpinnings of what makes the world tick, written by David Litwak (@dlitwak) and the Maxwell team.
Hey all,
Thanks to all of you who have shared the newsletter over the past couple months, and welcome to all new subscribers!
Today we’re delving into the latest in a trend that we’re noticing - the illusion of community and intimacy to sell products, spurred by the recent press around OnlyFans. If you want the TL;DR, zoom to the bottom and look at our Tweetstorm or just click through here, and feel free to read, follow us and applaud on Medium as well.
OnlyFans is a subscription service where influencers send their followers racy photos for a monthly fee. The NYTimes called it the “Paywall of Porn.”
OnlyFans is propagating an illusion of perhaps the most intimate of intimacies in their quest to make money, and says more about the trend towards “community” in business than maybe we want to admit to ourselves.
I was introduced to OnlyFans a few months ago when a friend in a holiday house share was trying to get one of the women he was corresponding with on the platform to come out and visit.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. I laughed and rolled my eyes, just another guy who thought that no, the stripper ACTUALLY liked him. But I knew enough of what the platform entailed that when a friend I follow on Instagram posted an artfully topless photo on Instagram, the latest in a series of kind of scandalous photos she was regularly posting, I texted the friend who used to date her and joked that her feed was turning into an OnlyFans account and posted this status:…
⛈️ In Tweet Storm Form
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Have a great rest of the week!
David (@dlitwak), Kyle, Joelle
Nice article, keep going! I would imagine the next step of OnlyFans (or maybe similar platform): you pay 16$ to chat with a bot who has been trained by previous chats with Thorn (with many topics covered, with abilities to send some "private" photos, videos, etc), and if that won't be enough or the bot won't be able to answer some question, you will be asked to pay extra 160$ to chat with actual Thorn (one chat session).