Just be a little careful, or the OnlyFans people might hear there's a new "social" where they can promote.
(For example: LLM-assisted forum presence, combined with profiles with oh, hey there, I have an OF, lol, combined with tech industry disposable incomes... I'd guess would pick up a couple new whales worth the effort. Now that Reddit presumably has been picked clean.)
Any OF models would be met with HN users over-explaining their own economics to them and how it's a terrible business that'll never work. These models will also learn they don't even have a moat to differentiate themselves from other offerings and should keep their development jobs. :)
I don't think people discovering these profiles on HN is the concern here.
The true problem with OF models is due to an iterated mutual tit-for-tat strategy between OF models and popular groups on social media platforms:
1. OF models (or people acting on their behalf) want to promote themselves using popular groups/pages/channels on social-networks — they spam posts to these places, seeming to be authentic engagement, in ways that get people curious to look at their profile; and where their profile on the social network then directs those people to their OF profile.
2. The popular groups/pages/channels on social networks are inundated by spam from these OF models, and so attempt to use automated measures to detect and block posts from posters who link to OF on their profiles.
3. OF models/their agents try to work around this by indirecting their OF profile behind "make an About You page with links" services like carrd.co.
4. The popular SN groups respond by also blocking profiles containing links to these "About You page" services (because, keep in mind, the SN profile already works as an "About You page", so there's no need to link to one of these external "About You page" services — you could just put the same links you'd put on such a page into your SN profile instead. The only people who do link to "About You page" services from their SN profiles, are OF models.)
5. And OF models/their agents try to work around this, by finding ever-more-obscure "About You page" services — and/or profile pages on other, more obscure social-media services, to use as an "About You page" — to get ahead of this moderation.
This at.hn service would sadly be exactly the kind of service referenced in step 5.
I am wondering why we don't see more OF models using custom domains instead. $10/yr shouldn't be too big of a price for them. Perhaps those About You page services don't support that?
I'm guessing it's because they think that even with a custom domain, some deep headless-Chrome-scraper-based OF-link scanning (or just human flagging!) will catch on and get them blocked within a few weeks anyway. Which would make the $10/yr for a custom domain, more like $10 per time-you-get-caught.
It's the same reason that scammers/spammers rely on these services: the only hosting you can "acquire scalably" is free subdomain hosting.
(Now, why they don't use something like a Google Doc, that can't be blocked based on its URL and can't easily be text-extracted by a scraping bot? I have no idea.)
Nothing stops people from doing that in their profiles now... and it's not like this is even an official hn feature, so either way they're linking to an external site.
HN has better moderation than any other site I'm aware of, I trust it to be robust against that kind of spam.
(For example: LLM-assisted forum presence, combined with profiles with oh, hey there, I have an OF, lol, combined with tech industry disposable incomes... I'd guess would pick up a couple new whales worth the effort. Now that Reddit presumably has been picked clean.)