Although she never uses the word “pornocalypse”, veteran and beloved fetish model Ariel Anderssen posted a lengthy rant earlier this month about the precise pornocalypse pattern that I have tracking all these years:

I’m told by people who’ve been in the industry (even) longer than I have, that this godawful pattern is normal. Every few years a new platform for pornography will appear, offering something better than whatever’s gone before, or something new (as OnlyFans did by allowing creators to essentially monetize their social media).

Producers and models will begin to use this new platform to sell their content, and the site will grow, using the income it receives from commission on our sales to expand its reach, and building a customer base in the process. Creators like me will begin to rely upon it, first for additional income, and then, if the platform becomes successful enough, as our main income, or even (and this is dangerous) our sole income.

…

I’d love to tell you that the cycle just continues this way, with new platforms emerging every few years, giving more choice to creators and customers alike, and forcing the websites we use to remain competitive while providing an excellent user experience. But sadly, that’s not how it works. What happens next, generally, after a few good years, is that the platform will self-destruct. Often, this seems to be at least initially precipitated by external pressures. For OnlyFans, for example, it was scrutiny from Visa and Mastercard, and then from various national governments, that made it become first increasingly censorious, then to announce it was banning adult content altogether, and finally to reverse that disastrous choice after a massive backlash, but to fail so comprehensively in taking on enough staff to sensibly moderate the vast cascade of content being uploaded to OF on a daily basis, that it became essentially unusable for anyone producing anything other than entirely vanilla content. In the process, it also began to hide its pornographic reality behind a safe for work (SFW) facade, which sees OnlyFans’ social media feed looking very much like a pallid, underpopulated version of YouTube.

When things like this happen, porn creators, who tend to be resilient through necessity, will begin to search for new platforms.

And the cycle begins anew!

Thanks to Femdom Resources and loyal ErosBlog reader Vagans for letting me know about Ariel’s essay.

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