this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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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.

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[–] NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 18 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

More dead billionaires, please.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 7 points 5 hours ago

especially one that donated to AIPAC.

[–] fierysparrow89@lemmy.world 37 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

I didn't know him, but apparently he financed the republicans. If that is indeed the case I say fuck this guy.

On the other hand the site took out the middleman/madam who traditionally exploited these women (perhaps man as well) So, good for them!

Edit: I'm an idiot, I'm sure the site took a fat percentage of the earnings, so technically they just replaced the pimps. And just like that my sympathy is gone...

[–] Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works 11 points 10 hours ago

I mean taking a cut is pimpish but at least they aren't getting beaten up and physically abused and getting STDs and whatnot.

It is a little better for them.

Thing is though legalized and well regulated full on prostitution would also be better than traditional pimps as well.

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 11 points 11 hours ago

He certainly didn't become a billionaire by charging them reasonable fees for the financial and computational infrastructure his company provided.

[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 15 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (4 children)

EDIT: Example of what I mean by how much OF has ruined mainstream social media.

I went on Facebook earlier this eve. I saw a video from Bentellect show up on my reels, a content creator with 17M total followers across all his socials. About 60% of his videos are him reacting to people's online posts. The other 40% (the ones that the algorithms are actually promoting) are ones of him and his girlfriend in their underwear picking outfits out for each other and doing some silly fake catwalk poses on a treadmill. And of course, each of these videos begins with her strutting past the camera, full view of her huge panty-clad arse.

Check profile, click link to Instagram, oh look, a LinkMe URL, which takes me to a profile where about 90% of the page is taken up by links to their separate OnlyFans pages, and about 5% of the page has a few puny buttons linking to Ben's Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and X pages. And of course most of her videos are pay-to-view with some requring as much as a $100 tip.

This seems to be something he's done ever since he started dating an ex-pornstar, which I assume was rather recently based on his post history.


I'm not exactly mourning this guy's death. Not only because of his financial support for the US Republicans, but because OnlyFans has single-handedly ruined the online pornography and greater social media landscape.

You can't go on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Tumblr, X, any dating app, or even Reddit anymore without seeing how much e-girls have astroturfed and spammed the absolute shit out of these platforms. And the way they get past content guidelines (which should've had them banhammered outside of Reddit) is with an allmylinks or linktree URL in their bio where half the links are trying to lull you into paying $20/month to see their nudes. Then you have models like Bonnie Blue who have genuinely gained infamy from doing it with over a thousand guys in a single day, in the kind of publicity stunt that has shown just how low the bar has fallen.

Amateur porn used to be about exhibitionism. Now it's all shot with professional grade studio setups and you don't get any kind of interaction or engagement unless you bankroll a model's influencer lifestyle. We've genuinely commodified female interaction as a society and made bank off of findom. That I think is more damaging to society than the lack of ID & age verification checks on porn sites, and why I think the Dead Internet Theory held a lot of weight years before the rise and wide adoption of generative AI...

On top of that, it's simply poor value for money. We rag on the television and film industries for the amount of competing streaming platforms they've created which have all-but-reversed the money consumers saved on cable packages, yet we simultaneously celebrate OF and its ability to let you subscribe to a single creator for twice the price as a Netflix-of-porn streaming service like Pornhub Premium or Xvideos Red. And it's not as if porn isn't freely available all over the internet...

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

he also funds AIPAC, so nobody shedding tears. OF puts the money back in the hands of the "OF" acct users. Porn industry, the studios control all the money, or have the ability blacklists actors they dont like.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago

Disagree. Some amateur porn was about exhibitionism but most of it was about money and that money was more often than not made by human slavers. I think onlyfans is a net good for this particular industry and the issues of "spam" and content moderation are entirely separate - it's the platforms that promote this spam as horny users are spending more time and money on the platform.

[–] LePoisson@lemmy.world 18 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Counterpoint: there is plenty of poorly shot amateur porn that's free on pornhub. I've done some research.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

they mostly been removed, and only "professional porn", non-PH sites have largely captured most of the old videos.

[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 9 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

A lot of it has disappeared because PH removed all videos that weren't posted from verified accounts back in December 2020.

[–] Fishnoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah, xhamster is better than pornhub

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 5 hours ago

dint xhamster captured most of the PH content before they sanitized it, plus some older OF content.

[–] paultimate14@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

"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.

[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] Trebuchet@europe.pub 189 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

$11 million donation to AIPAC. The world has lost nothing of value with his passing.

[–] jimmy90@lemmy.world 0 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

apart from a business leader making sex work safer and more profitable for sex workers

[–] Trebuchet@europe.pub 5 points 3 hours ago

I think this may have been an unintended benefit

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 57 points 19 hours ago

Agreed. Imagine being so shitty I cheered for cancer…

[–] TwilitSky@lemmy.world 86 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

Imagine reaching the pinnacle of wealth and achievement only to have this happen.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 87 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

And all your money won’t another minute buy. Dust in the wind.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 20 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

And all your money won’t another minute buy.

Because all these billionaires would rather hoard money than pay taxes for cancer research, or get Trump elected, who killed all cancer research in 2025.

We should have service that sends cards to people on their deathbeds: "No cure, but you saved $11,000 in taxes".

[–] liuther9@lemmy.world 7 points 16 hours ago

I have a feeling that many of them are not smarter than regular engineering department student

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[–] FEIN@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

"long battle with cancer" should've been longer for him specifically

[–] affenlehrer@feddit.org 56 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (16 children)

I don't wish cancer on anyone but I also kind of wish it on all the billionaires in the hope that they'd use their unfathomable amounts of wealth and power to "solve" this horrible disease.

Make a new Manhattan project of it. Get all the researchers together, throw money and resources on them until they find a cure for it. Fast!

[–] fierysparrow89@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

And you imagine they'd just give the cure (whatever form that may be) away for free? That's not what billionairs are known for! Can you imagine the calamity that such power would cause? People getting a personalized quote for ~~curing~~ managing their cancer, which will definitely include an "affordable" monthly payment. There is an applicable recent Black Mirror episode giving you an idea of a similar scenario.

No, if there is ever such an endevour, I sincerly hope it will be funded by public money and there may no patents come forth of the research or cure.

[–] affenlehrer@feddit.org 1 points 5 hours ago

I'd be all for it but I'm actually not sure how much the public would like to spend on this topic with lots of other things to take care of too.

Billionaires on the other hand just collect wealth and don't have to think about the public opinion. They could even market it as philanthropy.

I'm aware that they might want to keep a lid on it but that's still better than no cure at all.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 14 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

Curing cancer would be the equivalent of the Manhattan project, the moon landing, the mapping of the human genome and the making it relatively affordabl, e the discovery of both antibiotics and phage therapy, and the development and mass deployment of vaccines. It is an achievement demonstrating such wild dominance over the struggles and complexity of the physical world that I think its only comparisons would be to something like establishment of terraformed nations on Mars.

Right now we're still developing cures for the easy cancers. Attempting to cure cancers is big business in both the pharmaceutical world and in nonprofits, and it is working, but it's slow. Unfortunately cancers are made of our own cells so even things like curing bacterial disease don't even really express the difficulty. But it's happening, and general treatments and prognoses continue to improve as well as increasing numbers of cures for specific cancers in people with certain gene presentations.

Sorry about the rant, my mom died of cancer nearly a decade ago and I'm annoyed to no end by people acting like big pharma is intentionally not curing cancer to make more money, when the reality is what I said above.

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[–] homes@piefed.world 36 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (13 children)

I’ll toss one off in his honor

But one of the first things I learned from the Internet in the 90s is that I will never ever have to pay for porn

Edit: ok, so I get that OnlyFans was more about the eSexWork part of the CumCalculus, but, still, not for me. No judgment, though. In fact, I had some friends that found it quite empowering.

[–] generic_computers@lemmy.zip 9 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

It may sound weird, but the only person I follow on OnlyFans (and have paid for) is a friend of mine, someone I've hung out with in real life. She only did it because she was struggling to make enough money, even with a job!

It was a little weird, I guess, to see her boobs online and then go hang out at her house, but whatever.

Oh, also I guess I follow Markiplier who posted "tasteful nudes" and donated all the money to charity.

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[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 18 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

At risk of repeating myself (just saw this above)

Sweet, NEXT

[–] BillyClark@piefed.social 31 points 20 hours ago (10 children)

So he didn't do any of the work for originally coming up with the idea or making the site, and then he also didn't do any of the work in making the site's popular content.

I do see there is some risk and some value in investing in a company, but it seems wrong that he became a billionaire when the people who did the actual work didn't. More evidence that we don't need billionaires.

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