- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.today
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- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.today
- world@lemmy.world
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Pretty depressing all around, but man you have to be willfully gullible to believe you’d be talking to the actual performer…
It’s quite easy to believe you’re talking to an AI bot.
Oh especially now, yes.
I did a tiny bit of basic research ignoring the nature of the work and looking at the $2/hr. In Manilla, you’re renting a bed and barely making it. But in a secondary city, you might be able to rent a small house and have fibre (but need a UPS and probably mobile backup just in case). At that rate, apparently you can probably save a little bit each month and get ahead, and not be living right up to the edge of your means.
So if they could get, like, $3/hr, it would make a really nice difference. Neverminding the nature of the work.
Paying someone else to chat doesn’t necessarily surprise me (some OF models have ridiculous amount of subscribers), but they could easily pay more than $2 per hour. Not sure how many messages they have to deal with but what’s stopping them from stacking multiple people’s pages at the same time? Sucks for the dudes paying for this stuff but I guess you should know what you’re getting into by paying for this content online.
A Philippines-based woman has described how “heartbreaking” it is to get less than $2 per hour pretending to be much better paid OnlyFans models in online chats.
Article is worth reading, IMO.
A lot to unpack here.
She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.
I feel like this summarizes the time we’re living in. Some poor bastard somewhere sitting on his computer chatting with some lady he believes he is paying for attention, but in fact he is just being pitied by some unnamed underpaid worker in the Philippines. Meanwhile they’re both filling the accounts of an online influencer and some onlyfans tech bro, both of whom are surely completely miserable in their own right.
Distribution of labor, distribution of misery. Both labor and misery are inherent, but ability to change the kinds of labor and misery is what makes our time more like heaven than something in XV century.
Still, sometimes this also seems to be sliding back as it’s harder and harder to control your movement in that stream.
People seek bland fantasies when they are lost (the poor bastard), other people seek some broken solutions when they are lost (the performer), other people use some way of keeping to exist when they are lost (the tech bro), and other people feel how something they do kinda more normal and honest than the previous variants still feels like a cardboard shape of a person (the unnamed underpaid worker).
I just thought that someone should really make a “moderate modern cyberpunk” movie\story out of this. There’s really no need to show brain chips and holographic UIs in that story. The mood will do, something between Neuromancer, Vacuum Flowers and Blade Runner, but around this picture and even without violence.
“Someone should” might be an indication that I should, except I’ve never done writing, for real. Only descriptions of nature. There’s a person who writes plays sometimes. I’m not sure that person wants to have anything in common with me, though.
In the article the chatter is a woman but it can just as easily be a man. So all those customers are sexting with men half the time, heh.
404media had an interesting inteview with a Kenyan “data labeller”. He talks about his jobs working with AI companies, and how he had to pretend being all kinds of things. He’d work at least 18 hours a day, constantly switching between roleplaying different characters of different genders to people who thought they were talking to AI.
So even people who think they are talking to robots might be sexting some underpaid guy in Kenya.
There was a media company in Switzerland that advertised chatrooms with your favorite influencers and many many german Influencers advertised it and told people how happy they would be just to have 1on1 chats with their fans.
Of course it turned out it was a huge scam and even though a lot of the advertised influencers were female, the overwhelming majority of paid chatters from the media company were of course guys. Some of those chats got steamy too and the company briefed their staff to love bomb and exploit their customers as much as possible. They even went as far as to fake soft porn images of the influencers they officially worked with.
There was a lot of drama, pointing fingers between influencers and the media company and legal prosecution. But most exploited fans will never see their money back or get damages for being systematically emotionally abused.
Makes absolutely sense to continue working on this job, even though you hate it. No one forces you to work for adult models. There are always other opportunities. But that would require courage.
And complaining about how much the creators earn versus how much they earn; you don’t say? This is part of this fucked up capitalistic world. 99% of employers are like that.
That rate of exploitation is pretty wild though, $2/hr while earning hundreds for the employer. Most capitalists begin uncontrollably salivating just thinking about that.
This is a power thing though, the closest we have/had in terms of rate of exploitation was silicon valley software engineers. They got basically free everything to distract them from how much they were being exploited. If working circumstances were worse, they would have demanded higher pay or quit, because they could afford to.
As the article notes, in the Philippines that is not the power dynamic at all. These are already among the highest paying jobs, and I doubt these workers are in a position to bargain for better. There are too many people willing to take their job, either in their own country, or in other impoverished countries.
Is it wild? Subjectively absolutely and also inhumane.
Is it a rare case? I don’t think so, if you look at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, hell even the most sane billionaire Warren Buffet.
Luckily in some states there are limits how much the top employee can earn vs. the cheapest employee. But usually this is only enforced for governmental bodies.
Pretty vile system we have created. The society exploits women for their sexuality, OF exploits lonely sadsacks, OF models exploit the underprivileged by outsourcing the demeaning work of chatting with weirdos, etc etc. Shit’s just sad.
This seems to be the business model of our times. It‘s only more obvious with OF but there are parallels to many booming industries.
Reality is a 4X (eXplore, eXploit, eXpand, eXterminate) game. We’ve practically exausted the Exploration and Expansion phases, so we’re left with Exploitation and Extermination.
We’ve practically exhausted the Exploration and Expansion phases
The Ocean and Space both called, and they disagree
Edit: damn okay we’re done exploring and there’s nowhere left to colonise, my mistake for making a throwaway joke comment on such a serious topic 🙄
That bbc article is paywalled.
Oh, USA? They are only paywalled there.
Works for me
‘Icky and heartbreaking’: The $2 per hour worker behind the OnlyFans boom
Chris Vallance
Senior technology reporterA Philippines-based woman has described how “heartbreaking” it is to get less than $2 per hour pretending to be much better paid OnlyFans models in online chats.
The platform works by linking creators of explicit content to users, who pay a subscription to access their material and chat online.
However, while high-profile creators can earn large sums of money, the job of interacting with fans - and attempting to sell them images and videos - is often done by low-paid people, employed by third parties, such as the person the BBC spoke to.
A union representing such workers - known as “chatters” - told BBC News it was concerned about the “largely unregulated nature of this type of online work”.
OnlyFans, which generated $7.2bn (£5.3bn) revenue in 2024, declined to comment but its terms of service state that its business relationship is solely with the content creator.
‘It’s really not pleasant’
The BBC is not naming the woman it spoke to in order to protect her identity.
Employed by an agency used by the model she was pretending to be, she says she first took up this type of work to support her family during a period of lower income, earning under $2 per hour and working an 8hr shift five days a week.
She would be set targets to earn the model hundreds of dollars worth of sales of pictures and videos during her shift.
The most popular creators on the platform claim to earn millions of dollars per month.
A more recent period of chatting work with a new agency offered improved conditions and pay, though still less than $4 an hour.
She said she knew the work would involve explicit content - but even so “sexting” was unpleasant.
“It’s kind of icky when you think about it, because you’ll have to do sexting a lot of times, like, several times in an hour because, you know, you’ll be talking to several fans all at once”.
She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.
That dishonesty troubled her, she said,
“Technically, I’m scamming them, because I’ll be sending all those photos and videos to them, and I’m just after the sale,” she said
Indeed the use of chatters has lead to legal cases against OnlyFans and the agencies who employ them, by users and law firms who feel the practice is deceptive. So far none have succeeded.
Some fans the chatter said would ask for “really weird, kinks or fetishes” which she could generally tolerate - but not always.
“There are days where I feel like, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ because there are days that it would really take its toll on you”.
Asked if she felt exploited, she described accepting an under two dollars an hour pay rate as “not her finest hour”.
“It’s really not pleasant, you know? You’re going to question yourself. Your morality, even, and even your conscience,” she told the BBC.
“It’s really kind of heart-breaking, especially knowing that the agency is getting way more,” she added.
The chatter also described concerns about potential legal risk in taking on the work, given relatively tough anti-pornography laws in the Philippines.
The BPO Industry Employees’ Network or BIEN is an independent union representing workers in the outsourced business process jobs in the Philippines.
Mylene Cabalona, its president, told the BBC that “while the Philippines does have relatively strict laws regarding pornography, our main concern as a union is the largely unregulated nature of this type of online work”.
This raised, she said, serious concerns about workers’ exposure to “potentially egregious or harmful content, as well as a lack of clear guidelines on safety, accountability, and worker protection”.
But there were also advantages to outsourced digital jobs, including chatting, which could, Cabalona said, allow workers to earn income from home, while supporting clients or platforms abroad.
“These jobs can also offer higher potential income compared to some local entry-level jobs and provide opportunities to develop skills in digital work,” she noted.
