Last week the creator platform OnlyFans announced that it would be getting rid of explicit content on its site as of October of this year. The announcement was akin to the ocean announcing that it was totally over this whole "water" thing. After instant backlash from both its own creators and the wider internet, the company has reversed its plans, saying that it's suspended the change.

"We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community," OnlyFans announced in a tweet this morning, "and have suspended the planned October 1st policy change." Said policy would have revised the site's content guidelines, allowing nude photographs and videos but making explicit sex acts and other more "hard" pornography verboten. Reading between the lines, it appears that whatever issues the company had with its payment processors or creditors (a frequent source of frustration for anyone who monetizes adult content) have been solved or worked around.

The language of a "suspended" plan lacks a certain finality. It's possible that OnlyFans still intends to try to shift away from adult content in the future. OnlyFans is not exclusively built on adult content, "hard" or otherwise: similar to Patreon, it includes ways for fans to support independent content creators in other avenues, such as cooking or exercise videos. The company had hoped to highlight this more tame content with the launch of OFTV, a video portal and accompanying mobile app that featured only safe-for-work content. Since OFTV's curated collection features no nudity (only the same kind of titillating, PG-13 videos you might see anywhere on Twitch or YouTube), it's been published in the Play Store.

OnlyFans' planned porn ban drew instant ire from the sex worker community, which accused the company of turning its back on the people that had allowed it to grow in a massive way since the beginning of the pandemic. The site expanded its userbase from 20 million to more than 120 million in just one year, as bored internet-goers stayed home and many of those who lost work turned to the platform as a way to make ends meet. It was a huge shift in the tide of the online porn industry, all the more reason that the company's seemingly out-of-nowhere turn away from explicit pornography was met with shock and ire.