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.
“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.