WORDS by MISS MIRAGE
Dashiell Bark-Huss, the founder of WishTender, did not respond to requests for comment or interview on this piece.
The day was February 7th, 2024. I, and many other adult creators making online content, as well as in-person service providers, opened our emails to a disturbing message with a subject line reading: ‘Important: Changes to Payments – Please Read’ from WishTender. The email I received read:
“Hi miss mirage,
This month, we’re parting ways with our current financial partners. Due to a sudden policy change, our financial partners have decided to part ways with WishTender. Rest assured that we are actively working to implement a new solution with your best interests in mind. For more information about this transition and how it may affect you, please read the following article with the essential action items for your account.”
The information available from WishTender on what was happening was at the time vague and frightening. An unexplained sudden “policy change,” by payment processor Stripe (owned by Irish brothers Patrick & John Collison) meant that all WishTender creators would have exactly ten days to withdraw any remaining funds held by Stripe on the back end before all our accounts would be temporarily deactivated, and then…what? Not even WishTender’s founder, Dashiell Bark Huss, seemed to know exactly.
WishTender’s initial messages and updates about the process of trying to secure new payment processors to keep the site active were upbeat. Yet after beta-testing for select users was announced on February 15th, 2024, an announcement on Tuesday March 5th indicated that issues had surfaced with the new system; new additions to beta testing were paused less than one month after they began. The invitation-only beta testing round reopened in late April 2024.
The announcement from WishTender on May 1st, 2024 about the status of reopening the site was hopeful, stating that functional issues had been resolved, and that there was a slow-but-steady plan to shift back to normalcy on the site. The same update also addressed frustrations by some WishTender users that they had not been invited for the beta testing. Those selected for beta testing the new systems seemed to be among the elite ring of earners on WishTender, which meant that niche or new creators felt they had little chance of being selected.
Some creators took out their frustration on Dashiell Bark-Huss personally, likely in part because Bark-Huss had tried to be a human, transparent, and easily reachable face of WishTender. In an X update posted on July 24, 2024, Bark-Huss tweeted that since the launch of the beta testing portion of trying to restart WishTender, that she had faced death threats, stalking, and intense criticism. I personally had heard in one sex worker group chat that fellow workers thought that WishTender was a massive greedy corporation owned by rich people—rather than a start-up created by Bark-Huss, a self-taught coder who created WishTender while living in a van.
WishTender was an extremely popular and relatively easy way for adult content creators and sex workers to receive gifts and tips from fans and clients. As someone who had planned on shifting to online content creation to supplement most of my income while traveling abroad this year, I felt the first announcement in February like a sucker punch to my beautiful stomach. I had just set up my WishTender in the fall of 2023 and was preparing to launch my online content creation career as my own erotic version of the ‘digital nomad’ life. At the time, there were no alternatives I knew about. The deactivation of our accounts came so suddenly after the announcement that I, and I am sure many other workers, were flailing, panicking, and trying to figure out how to cope.
Well-known payment sites such as PayPal—which was co-founded by Elon Musk—and CashApp—which in August 2024 was accused of negligence following two data breaches, and will pay out a $15 million USD settlement to affected users—offer ‘chargeback’ services to gifters. This means that a gift purchaser or a tipper can change their mind and reclaim their money at the expense of the creator. WishTender offered chargeback protection for creators, and prevented any second-guessing on the part of the gifter. WishTender always emphasized safety and ease in its marketing, which were two things our community valued immensely.
It was also wonderfully private. Apart from the name attached to our linked bank accounts and the bank account itself, WishTender required none of the invasive confidential personal information that other gifting sites like Throne or Ko-Fi do. For those who were receiving tips from fans they met in person, WishTender made much of that extra labor that we face around in-person work—worrying about whether the person was real, or if they would actually show up—much smoother.
When I signed up for WishTender in 2023, users did not need to provide a photo of their official government-issued ID to Stripe to receive payments. I felt safer receiving payments without my legal name and photo being held by Stripe, a company with no public ties or affinity to the sex worker rights movement. WishTender, comparatively, according to Bark-Huss’s IndieHacker profile was developed as a way to try to help her sugar baby friend receive gifts from her clients safely.
While morosely doing research for alternatives to WishTender through my FetLife profile in April 2024, I noticed that a fellow adult creator had a website called ‘Throne’ linked in her page. I had never heard of it before. I clicked on the link, and realized that it was another gift website in a vein similar to WishTender. As I trusted this creator, I signed up. I quickly noticed that Throne, like WishTender once was, is partnered with Stripe. But a key difference was that now I was required to provide a photo of my government-issued ID to Stripe so that I could receive payments.
Throne also seemed to mimic some of WishTender’s sign-up language about which language to use on item listings, and advised creators on how to describe their business. When I heard of a website a few weeks later called Ko-fi, where fans can buy users a ‘virtual coffee’ or make larger gifts, and tried to sign up to test it out, I noticed the same thing: it was partnered with Stripe and required a government-issued ID to permit me to receive any payments.
I felt backed into a corner—I needed to work online, and this was the available option that other workers I knew were using. I ended up sticking with Throne, and received my first payout from an online fan via the platform in mid-April 2024. I quickly noticed a few key differences to Throne from WishTender: in addition to the option for cash gifts, which was WishTender’s defining original feature, Throne has an online marketplace where clients can purchase items directly for creators, almost like a much smaller version of Amazon. I was irritated by Throne taking what seems to be a much higher percentage off the top of my gift transactions than WishTender, and that it took about 10 days to pay out my first gift to my bank account.
I am hesitant about engaging with a company with a large user base of adult creators but no outward connection to the sex worker rights movement. A March 8, 2024 article by the startup-focused tech outlet TechCrunch claimed that Throne’s creators–German 20-somethings Patrice Becker, Leonhard Soenke, and Heiner Stinner–had come up with the idea for Throne because they had creator friends who had privacy and delivery issues; yet the tweets on Throne’s X account indicates that they focus on ‘streaming’ creators, like gamers on Twitch, rather than adult creators. Throne, like WishTender, conceals the addresses of their users during gift purchases—although there was an alleged data breach of Throne in 2023 where user addresses were revealed.
Bark-Huss reportedly began coding WishTender herself in July 2020, and launched the site in July 2021. While she reported single-digit profits in the first few months, over the next two years, WishTender quickly grew to be an adult industry standard. It was used with a smile by every worker I knew. “Have you heard of WishTender?” was the common phrase passed out over brunch, or via Telegram message, or backstage at the club. WishTender was the cool wishlist that everyone wanted to be on. According to Business Insider, Throne launched in late 2021, and only just passed 600,000 users in the first week of August 2024. Throne even boasted about its incredible user growth in February 2024, without mentioning that growth was simultaneous with the shutdown of WishTender. Throne received an official endorsement from Stripe on Stripe’s website in June 2024; I was unable to locate any mention of the dropping of WishTender by Stripe on Stripe’s website.
The quick shutdown, and the scramble to find previously unknown alternatives like Throne, also damaged creator credibility. If you, as a client, had just gotten used to WishTender and were suddenly asked by a service provider to start sending your financial information through Throne, Ko-fi, or another online platform you had never heard of before, you may have been a bit hesitant to comply. Yet this wasn’t the fault of creators or service providers or even WishTender; it was the reality of the situation and the inherent fear of some fans that they are going to be scammed.
As creators continue to try to find the best and safest solutions for us so that we can continue to create and deliver the experiences our fans love, there may be more requests from service providers to fans and clients to try new websites for payment processing. In the past few months, I’ve learned about wishlist sites who are filling up the WishTender-shutdown vacuum: TipTopJar, YouPay, Ko-Fi, Buy Me a Coffee, TipFunder. As PayPal, CashApp, and even Amazon Wishlists become less preferred by adult creators due to their privacy issues, chargeback services, and hostility to certain kinds of transactions, the need for a site like WishTender continues to grow.
As creators, we are taking great pause—and greater risk—on our end to submit our government IDs, addresses, legal names, biometric data, and our bank account information to large corporations run by non-sex workers who may think more about the percentage profit they gain off of each of our gift transactions than they do for our well-being. I can personally attest to the daunting extent of verification procedures payment processing platforms use, which ask us to submit bank statements showing our real addresses, a national identity document such as a passport, a 3-D face scan harvesting our biometric data, and detailed answers about our incomes and the nature of our businesses.
As someone who is candidly tin-foil-hat adjacent when it comes to digital security of the online world, the amount of personal data required for I and other workers to make our living online is frightening. Anyone able to hack into the back-end systems of these platforms could at a minimum steal our identities with the information we are forced to provide; at most, they could blackmail the most vulnerable of us under the threat of doxing our identities to the public.
By the second-to-last update by WishTender on their struggle to come back to full operating status on May 1st, 2024, many of us had already moved on to Throne or another platform. I feel stuck with Throne; I don’t like it, much less love it, but this is what I have in a post-WishTender world. As a sex worker, I feel that there is a tightening ligature around my community in the world of online commerce—one which keeps growing tighter with every passing year. It feels like there is an ongoing buildup towards complete repression of our ability to work online. An inability for adult content creators or in-person sex workers to receive gifts and tips safely online could result in many workers being forced out into the streets for work, with higher risk.
Despite insistence via tweet on February 7th, 2024 on WishTender’s official X account that WishTender was not closing down, I and my colleagues who used WishTender all received a message announcing shutdown of the site on July 15th, entitled “The Future of WishTender.” While the entire message is too long to quote here, it can be read on WishTender’s website. The announcement included mentions of, “…backup processors shutting down, functional payment issues, compliance issues, and limiting bad actors.”
Additionally, the text included a concerning mention that WishTender, while still in beta, was attacked by card testers. According to Stripe, “Card testing is a type of fraudulent activity where someone tries to determine whether stolen card information is valid so that they can use it to make purchases.” WishTender mentioned that these card testers, “…attacked without trying to profit financially. This is highly unusual. Most card testers want to make money. This tells us the attacker’s motive was to irreparably harm WishTender. Unfortunately, the attacks happened while we were more susceptible, and our resources and efforts to combat the attacks were not good enough.”
The announcement also reiterated that WishTender’s ability to handle the card tester attacks, and previous issues in beta, is limited because it has no investors or large financial backers; the financial resources available to the WishTender team to do the relaunch came solely from what WishTender had produced in revenue. Bark-Huss described in a personal note attached to the announcement, “This is a harsh industry. From financial discrimination to bad actors and lack of tools and funding, I completely understand why it is so rare to build as openly and fairly as we strived to do. It became harder for us over time.” It seems that the question Bark-Huss proposed in her 2022 interview with the publication Bootstrappers—"Will another company put us out of business?”—has been answered.
If you are a non-sex worker, the regulations under which payment processors operate may not seem political, but trust that they are. In a whorephobic world, the personal information of sex workers being mined with excruciating specificity is alarming. It is the same reason why an estimated 90% of sex workers in Germany, a country where sex work is legal but regulated with a registration process, are unregistered; I would no more want a country that persecuted sex workers during its fascist era to have my name and address than I would a world which is aggressively discriminatory towards sex work in its policies and attitudes. According to Throne’s website, user data is hosted on Google servers in the U.S. Given that U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposed ‘Project 2025’ seeks to effectively ban pornography, with measures including, “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned…And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered,” I feel considerable anxiety as an adult content creator that my data, even if it is just connected to my wishlist for my online content creation, is held in the U.S.
The increasing influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world makes this potential threat of sex workers’ data security using online payment processors even more ominous to me. What might a bot do with my information, especially if that bot decided to replicate the whorephobia it learned online? To create the content and provide the experiences which the world loves to consume, we have to work online in varying capacities. Shifting regulations and tightening restrictions make it difficult to do that. Over our heads, there is always the looming threat of our personal information being used against us or our accounts being shut down, which makes it difficult for us to work joyfully and with ease.
Seeing how quickly WishTender was made inoperable by Stripe stepping away as their payment processor made it clear to me that anything can be taken from us, as sex workers, at any time by forces outside of our control. One positive result of this debacle is that I see sex workers getting in their Girl In the Dragon Tattoo bag and becoming interested in learning technology skills and promoting digital rights. Tryst’s ‘Sluts for Security’ blog section offers helpful advice for workers looking to improve their digital security. The European Sex Worker’s Alliance (ESWA) has recently launched a new Digital Rights Programme, which is happily funded by the European Artificial Intelligence & Society Fund as well as a global civil society organization called Luminate. Sex workers should be invited en-masse by digital rights protection advocates and politicians to collaborate on digital rights activism; we would have some valuable insights to share if anyone ever thought to ask us.
NOTE FROM OUR EDITOR: Considering the significance of these platforms to our readers' livelihoods we will be following up on the points raised in this piece with our resident finance expert, Mia Lee, who will walk us through these issues and why she chose the platform she currently uses.
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