I still have a membership to Planet Fitness from 5 years ago that charges to my account every month
while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)
I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership
worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts
Contact your bank and explain what's going on. They may have a way to block Planet Fitness' auto charge. Your bank should be sympathetic and they control outflows.
After a while, PF will drop their auto-charge because they won't want to deal with the rejected payment requests.
I hope I'm correct about this and I hope it helps!
I don't know why people think that something magically can't effect your credit report without knowledge of your SSN. Name+address+DOB is enough to identify you.
Chase does not require a Social Security number when you add an authorized user so people are always absolutely shocked their "authorized user account" appears on their credit report.
Yup, I had a ton of delinquent accounts on my credit reports that were a similar (but not exact) name and similar (but not exact) SSN and similar (but not exact) birthdate as mine. Seems they’ll just find the closest match and slap it on.
I learned this as I was applying for student loans at the end of highschool and kept getting denied. It’s the reason I ended up having to take a bunch of crazy high interest rates from Sallie Mae/now Navient to go to college as planned.
Of course the credit agencies reporting all these false debts suffer 0 consequences for it, only the consumer does. I’m still pretty mad about it 15 years later, got slightly off topic :)
I wonder if this is a franchise thing. I've moved states more than once and Planet Fitness has been one of the easier things to deal with cancelling. Done this a few times in different states. You should be able to go into any location and make that your new home location, and then cancel there.
They also let me use a credit card for payments too.
The contract requires you to send the letter to cancel, but it doesn't prohibit you from calling to discuss the matter. You have already cancelled in compliance with the terms of the contract, you don't have to hop on a flight to do anything.
I forget which gym but I sent them an email cancellation ("in writing") and they told me I had to come in. So I cancelled the card. They had some bullshit agreement with my bank where the subscription followed to my new card. So I cancelled the bank account.
Bank accounts don't need to be some terminal relationship. If they don't treat you right, leave.
content reviewers are not employees, they are contractors through third party companies like Accenture, so likely not included in the 83K employee number
"all career advancement and social status is dependent on your position with the church" -- this is bullshit, at least in my experience.
I lived there 2012-2017, never had an issue with dating/making friends/getting promotions at work. There were of course many women that would only date mormon men, but the non-mormon population was big enough that I didn't think about it much.
I worked for multiple tech companies there, had plenty of non-mormon co-workers (and bosses!), and while people did talk about mormon things sometimes in social settings, it was never pushed on me, nor did anyone make a big deal that I wasn't mormon.
I should mention I lived in downtown SLC, which is arguably more liberal/secular, and I worked for companies both in and outside the city.
SLC makes all the difference. It's quite different elsewhere in the state. I've lived and worked in multiple locations and was happiest in SLC but housing prices are absolutely outrageous for what you get.
I wonder how many people here are aware of Snapchat's thriving underground OnlyFans-like ecosystem. I also wonder how much of that is driving Snap's user metrics.
As far back as 2014, I remember there being a huge ecosystem of "premium" snaps (sometimes known as "prem(ium) girls"), whereby you would pay the account owner a one time or recurring fee for access to a "premium" snapchat account where the owner posts nudes/etc, essentially OnlyFans-like content. Owner would typically accept payment through any number of ways (paypal/cashapp being most common), and "customer" would provide proof of payment by sending screenshot of receipt that the owner then confirms.
The premium account owner would also typically have a free/open account where they would post free content / teasers/etc, essentially marketing/advertising for their premium account. They would sometimes also market their account on Twitter and Reddit and especially Tinder (and one less popular app by the name of Whisper), much like OnlyFans content creators do today.
As far as I know, this preceded the popularity of OnlyFans and remains a popular use case for Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays, but I used to be a customer of many of these premium snaps years ago. When I do log in once in a while, many of these accounts are still active, though some are also advertising their OnlyFans.
I think Snap officially bans this practice, but by nature these accounts are private and the owner adds users on a one by one basis, so I don't imagine they get reported a whole lot.
The fact that the content is ephemeral surely helps and is probably one of the main reasons the content creators choose Snap as their platform. Snap also tells you when users screenshot your content, which would often result in getting banned from the premium Snap. Unlike OnlyFans, which cannot get in the AppStore and is relegated to being web-only, Snapchat is mobile-only, making it harder for users to download the content, which is another appeal for these "premium" content creators.
What I don't get is why Snap never tried to build a good product around that and give creators (uhmm) a good way to monetize their profiles. This seems like such an obvious thing to do to me. Why would you give up on that usage and allow it to move to OnlyFans and other platforms if you already have it? And even more, penalize your audience for such practice. And same question to Instagram team (I left the company a while back so don't know the current thinking). If anybody with insider knowledge can comment even top-level, would be much appreciated.
Are there any good examples of product that maintains popularity within youth / teen markets while enabling monetisation of adult content?
It seems near an impossibility.
From a product perspective it would be possible, tho it’d be playing with fire. Very different when young people see adult content and you ban it vs they see the adult content you condone but you didn’t intend them to reach. (And they will try to).
But from the perception perspective, even harder. When adults (some parents) see snap as an adult entertainment product, they are not going to want kids using it. Even if there’s some suitable product barrier between the audiences.
Because they are a public company and institutional shareholders wouldn't let them.
Before going public they wouldn't have been able to pass it by VCs already invested or raise any more capital. OnlyFans has this problem.
Even if they had offered it early they would have struggled the same way OnlyFans did recently over payments, and with no way to police it on their technology probably would have been embattled with media and public perception way worse.
Banks, investors and other companies don't want to deal with Pornography and sex workers despite the massive proliferation online.
They wouldn't have been able to have all their partnerships, generate revenue from other sources or have apps either.
Probably because being open about allowing adult content will risk advertisers on the rest of the platform and the loss of those advertisers might outweigh the revenue from OnlyFans type profiles.
Apple does not allow adult content on the app store. For example, OnlyFans does not have an iOS app as a result. If Snap were to openly embrace adult content, they could risk getting booted from the app store.
I tried to use their filters for Zoom / Teambuildings (yes, It's tacky, I know) but had to realize that their filter discovery just doesn't work on the MacOS (at least)
Some other things to mention: the premium content is almost exclusively in the form of stories, which disappear after 24 hours of course. Sometimes creators offer extra services at an additional fee or if you buy a lifetime membership or whatnot (duck/face rates, custom photos/videos, phone calls, etc), all of which go through the Snap app. Some even have a menu which they re-post on their stories daily ($20 for a custom 3 minute video, $10 for a 5 minute phone call, etc, etc). Sometimes these are also sold as "packages". Photo/video archives in the form of links to folders on mega.nz and similar websites are other assets commonly sold this way.
It's kind of still amusing to me that Snapchat ever moved beyond being a niche platform like that. Heck, I might still have an account, but the only reason I ever did was around 2012 or so when I first divorced and started seeing women again, they offered to send nudes, but only via Snapchat. What other purpose could a service that let you send disappearing pictures serve? It was clearly for sending nudes. Watching them become a VC darling and totally rebrand to something for kids was surreal.
I'm kind of sad at your scenario, though. Receiving pictures from someone I actually got to meet and go on dates with was quite a bit more personal and fulfilling than subscribing to a mass semi-public feed from a professional adult performer. Pros always have to ruin everything.
Interesting question. The answer is because people pay to have quasisocial relationships with the OnlyFans providers. On other sites with just videos, you don't get that same feeling.
Basically, people are lonely and will pay to feel seen, heard, or loved.
Is your argument that there is enough free random porn to make it not worth paying for OnlyFans?
The reason I would pay for OnlyFans content, if I could afford it, is that there are specific creators on there that I find particularly attractive, either physically or personality-wise, and I would love to help fund their lifestyle.
I did a software engineering internship at Overstock circa 2013-2014, and have a couple interesting stories myself.
However while an intern there I heard a story that Patrick Byrne locked a team of engineers in a room and didn't let them out until they implemented bitcoin payments into Overstock. Do you happen to know if this story is true? I remember at the time that made Overstock one of the first bigger mainstream websites to support Bitcoin.
It's not precisely true but that story comes from him and it's not too far off.
He loved talking about "throwing a bunch of engineers in a room for a couple days and shoving pizza under the door periodically" for that implementation, and they basically did do that, but it was nothing more intense than a normal crunch time overnighter or like a hackathon, and of course they could've gone home if they wanted to. I knew them and most of them were pretty stoked on the project so they kinda wanted to do that anyway, and got a hell of a bonus for it too (and promotions, lots of them).
while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)
I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership
worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts