Adverse inflow trap: a new ecosystem gets captured by whoever has nowhere else to go.

· Bits and Bobs 8/17/26
  • Adverse inflow trap: a new ecosystem gets captured by whoever has nowhere else to go.
    • You could imagine that OnlyFans was supposed to be a Patreon-style service, that just happened to be erotica-friendly.
      • In practice, it started out explicitly focused on erotica, but ignore that for a moment.
    • Erotica isn't allowed on other similar communities, so those content creators flocked to OnlyFans differentially faster than average content creators.
    • As a result, the net inflow was structurally disproportionately the most stigmatized use case.
    • That quickly reduced OnlyFans to "that thing for erotica" which pushed non-erotica brands away.
    • Another way of putting it: you are downstream of everyone else's moderation policy.
    • The use case with nowhere else to go arrives at 100%.
      • Everyone else arrives at 1/N.
    • You don't get defined by what you allow, you get defined by what you allow that nobody else does.
      • They can't leave you, and everyone else can.
      • So the skew only ever goes one direction.