- cross-posted to:
- obituary
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- obituary
- [email protected]
The owner of OnlyFans, a site known for its adult content that is credited with revolutionising the online porn industry, has died at the age of 43.
Leonid Radvinsky, who was born in Ukraine and grew up in Chicago, had purchased the company in 2018 from its two UK-based founders.
The site’s popularity surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, landing him on Forbes’ annual list of billionaires just three years later.
He “passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer,” OnlyFans confirmed in a statement, which asked for privacy for his family.
EDIT: Example of what I mean by how much OF has ruined mainstream social media.
I went on Facebook earlier this eve. I saw a video from Bentellect show up on my reels, a content creator with 17M total followers across all his socials. About 60% of his videos are him reacting to people’s online posts. The other 40% (the ones that the algorithms are actually promoting) are ones of him and his girlfriend in their underwear picking outfits out for each other and doing some silly fake catwalk poses on a treadmill. And of course, each of these videos begins with her strutting past the camera, full view of her huge panty-clad arse.
Check profile, click link to Instagram, oh look, a LinkMe URL, which takes me to a profile where about 90% of the page is taken up by links to their separate OnlyFans pages, and about 5% of the page has a few puny buttons linking to Ben’s Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and X pages. And of course most of her videos are pay-to-view with some requring as much as a $100 tip.
This seems to be something he’s done ever since he started dating an ex-pornstar, which I assume was rather recently based on his post history.
I’m not exactly mourning this guy’s death. Not only because of his financial support for the US Republicans, but because OnlyFans has single-handedly ruined the online pornography and greater social media landscape.
You can’t go on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Tumblr, X, any dating app, or even Reddit anymore without seeing how much e-girls have astroturfed and spammed the absolute shit out of these platforms. And the way they get past content guidelines (which should’ve had them banhammered outside of Reddit) is with an allmylinks or linktree URL in their bio where half the links are trying to lull you into paying $20/month to see their nudes. Then you have models like Bonnie Blue who have genuinely gained infamy from doing it with over a thousand guys in a single day, in the kind of publicity stunt that has shown just how low the bar has fallen.
Amateur porn used to be about exhibitionism. Now it’s all shot with professional grade studio setups and you don’t get any kind of interaction or engagement unless you bankroll a model’s influencer lifestyle. We’ve genuinely commodified female interaction as a society and made bank off of findom. That I think is more damaging to society than the lack of ID & age verification checks on porn sites, and why I think the Dead Internet Theory held a lot of weight years before the rise and wide adoption of generative AI…
On top of that, it’s simply poor value for money. We rag on the television and film industries for the amount of competing streaming platforms they’ve created which have all-but-reversed the money consumers saved on cable packages, yet we simultaneously celebrate OF and its ability to let you subscribe to a single creator for twice the price as a Netflix-of-porn streaming service like Pornhub Premium or Xvideos Red. And it’s not as if porn isn’t freely available all over the internet…
Counterpoint: there is plenty of poorly shot amateur porn that’s free on pornhub. I’ve done some research.
A lot of it has disappeared because PH removed all videos that weren’t posted from verified accounts back in December 2020.
Yeah, xhamster is better than pornhub
dint xhamster captured most of the PH content before they sanitized it, plus some older OF content.
“Noone should have to use xHamster”
they mostly been removed, and only “professional porn”, non-PH sites have largely captured most of the old videos.
he also funds AIPAC, so nobody shedding tears. OF puts the money back in the hands of the “OF” acct users. Porn industry, the studios control all the money, or have the ability blacklists actors they dont like.
Disagree. Some amateur porn was about exhibitionism but most of it was about money and that money was more often than not made by human slavers. I think onlyfans is a net good for this particular industry and the issues of “spam” and content moderation are entirely separate - it’s the platforms that promote this spam as horny users are spending more time and money on the platform.
“Back in my days the women of porn were properly underpaid and fully exploited to do exactly what I wanted for way cheaper!”
I’m not mourning the death of a billionaire. And sure, the advertising of pornographic content could probably use a bit of regulation… Heck, that probably applies to advertising more broadly. But I’m not upset that sex workers today have alternatives to working with sketchy producers. I’d rather a #girlboss spam Facebook (which you shouldn’t be using in 2026 anyways) than a GirlsDoPorn situation.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. OnlyFans gives me findom or financial exploitation vibes.
I’d also say they don’t exactly have a squeaky-clean reputation either. CEASE have raised concerns about young women being exploited by their audience. They’ve also come under fire for their leniency towards accounts that repeatedly post illegal content.
Do not get me wrong, I’m not defending the seedy practices of the porn industry, especially with all the crap that went down with GirlsDoPorn. But if I can’t even meet with ladies on a dating app because I only see hordes of fake spam profiles marketing porn to me, then it’s a sign that social media has been truly enshittified with content that doesn’t even belong on a lot of these platforms.
When I refer to amateur stuff, I’m thinking more like the earlier days of Reddit’s seedy side. The only NSFW sub that I think explicity bans OF models due to wanting to uphold that exhibitionist spirit is r/gonewild.
Yeah, OF gives me MLM for Porn kinda vibes. You hear about the women making tons of money but I’m sure that for every OF model that got rich, there’s dozens or hundreds that tried it and barely made anything.
And a lot of them make it so obvious that they are just doing it for the money. Which, on the one hand I totally get, that is the whole point, but on the other hand, it’s not exactly hot, unless you have an exploitation fetish.
Not that OF invented the “porn is fake” thing. But it seems worse now.
All of your problems seem to be with things outside of OnlyFans.
A quote directly from one of the articles you linked that I think hits the nail on the head. The problem is capitalism. The workers of OnlyFans are being exploited in the same way that Uber drivers are. Honestly, in a similar manner to how baristas and programmers and oil riggers and everyone else working under capitalism is. That’s why I’m not sad that this billionaire owner died.
The other problems you mention are problems on other platforms. It sounds like whatever dating app you are using has a problem with people using it to advertise their business- I think it’s the responsibility of the dating app to crack down on such misuse and give users a mechanism to report that.
If your Facebook feed is full of OF ads… Well first of all you should get off of Facebook because it’s terrible, but also Meta should crack down on what advertising they allow and how. Or maybe… You’re in the tiny minority if people who care?
Other platforms have tools to address similar issues. I always laugh when people complain about seeing adult content on Steam because that is turned off by default- you need to dig through your store preferences to allow that. The old LemmyNSFW instance had different communities- some allowed or even encouraged OF creators, while others banned them. That seemed to work well. I haven’t paid as much attention to FediNSFW and it’s probably still forming those sorts of structures, but I expect them to be there eventually.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect OnlyFans to have any sort of say in where and how creators advertise on other platforms. Such restriction wood be draconian.