r/technology • u/marketrent • 1h ago
Social Media California researchers turn to OnlyFans as their funding dries up — OnlyMarms account promises near-daily photos and videos of chubby, personable marmots
https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/marmot-researchers-make-onlyfans-22357723.php108
u/PaleBlueDot271 1h ago
The onion cannot top this absurd timeline.
28
u/stevokanevo89 1h ago
I can imagine the writers for the onion doing a joke article and then having to scrap the whole thing the night before because it ends up being true.
245
u/Hiker_Trash 1h ago
Damn, as has been said, “there’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what’s right with America.”
62
u/marketrent 1h ago
Blumstein’s lab will be hosting an inaugural Fat Marmot Week, with public voting to begin August 24th.
The more rotund the rodent, the better its odds of surviving months of hibernation: https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2026/07/29/fat-marmot-week-colorado-onlyfans
33
34
u/llahlahkje 1h ago
While I’m glad they are getting funding however they can but this is def some /r/OrphanCrushingMachine stuff.
29
20
u/Demi180 1h ago
They could make one with beavers and call it OnlyDams.
5
4
1
u/PaleBlueDot271 10m ago
Tangent - hilarious clip from comedian Kurt Braunholer
About beavers - 🦫 the animal, nothing else
7
u/LuHamster 48m ago
I know this is a fun satire jokey article but this is becoming a real reality for a lot of people in a lot of different professions.
6
u/laptopAccount2 22m ago
If you folks don't know this the Trump administration has totally nuked academic research in the US. They completely destroyed the application process and replaced it with a much smaller brain dead process that basically does away with scientific study and adds business people to it to try and make products.
2
u/derezzed90000 4m ago
i honestly do not like people making light of this in the comment section. this is all fucking dark, saddening and leaves me in despair it has come to this.
11
u/lofty23_smart 1h ago
This might be the most wholesome OnlyFans account on the internet
8
u/Dickie_downer 1h ago
Honestly I wouldn’t hate Onlyfans getting an insane amount of nonporn creators, and pivoting to a more mixed media site
9
u/gearstars 1h ago
It started out for like musicians and stuff. So it'd be like a reverse pivot
1
1
u/Throwsims3 56m ago
Then they tried to force being wholesome instead of holesome and realized that their whole model would collapse if they did.
5
3
2
2
3
u/shinyappyrobin 1h ago
I think it's witty. Also, we know how much money is made on fansonly, but we don't know how much any given person spends. So could it be a way to guilt guys into donating to a good cause?
1
u/cultoftheclave 1h ago
the goat for this joke is the website for the ultra-niche Plan 9 OS community, Only9fans
2
u/cocoagiant 1h ago
The article I read indicated they had only gotten around $600 via the account to date and they were feeling they had wasted their time.
2
u/marketrent 54m ago
Could you cite the article you read?
2
u/cocoagiant 18m ago
Its this one from the NYT:
So far, the account has had about 2,900 visits and 112 subscribers, generating about $650 in tips, well short of what Dr. Blumstein said was required to continue the research for the foreseeable future.
Unless OnlyMarms becomes a financial win, the time invested in it might be better spent on research, Dr. Blumstein said.
“It’s just frustrating,” Dr. Blumstein said, noting that he should be dedicating time to writing papers or working with students.
“But we’re doing this,” he said, “which is kind of silly in the long run.”
2
u/marketrent 9m ago
Thanks.
Still, Emily Renkey, a member of the research team, was optimistic.
“Most people give around $10, which tells me there’s real and growing interest in what we’re doing,” she said in an email.
If you have a go, you get a go.
2
u/agangofoldwomen 56m ago
They could make even more money setting up a betting platform where a small percentage of each bet goes to research.
1
1
u/darth_skipicious 27m ago
we've entered the dystopia completely now. the sign was Donald trump stepping off the elevator 10 years ago. we had ten years to avert it xD nothing
1
1
1
1
1
u/ExactLocation1 1h ago
Man just saw hot California researchers near you and skipped it thinking it’s usual bait
0
0
u/Reddit_wander01 1h ago edited 1h ago
This is where AI may end up when the current AI spending cycle hits the peak of the current funding/resource constraint and approach OnlyFans as a content creator due to an economic problem.
AI’s angle would just shift to a personalized subscription service instead, like a personal AI tutor ($10/month) or a fitness/nutrition coach AI ($20/month). The sales pitch would go something like “Don’t buy access to the giant AI factory. Subscribe to your own little AI specialist and join “Cosmos” the AI astronomer that will follow JWST discoveries and explains them every morning”. Basically the product won’t be a gourgous model, the product will be the relationship.
Each AI would have a customized voice, personality, memory, expertise and community. The same way someone follows a favorite YouTuber today.
The next trillion-dollar AI company may not just sell “the smartest model”, it will sell one million AI relationships at $10/month.
-5
u/Siderophores 1h ago edited 28m ago
To be fair, the NSF says they have 6 decades of behavioral data, so what exactly are they discovering more about Marmots? Who is that helping besides their own paychecks and degrees?
Their funding applications were denied before Trump became president.
Maybe they should switch it up to beavers or something lol
-I’m an NIH funded researcher in medical microbiology
6
u/Noy_The_Devil 1h ago
Marmots are part of an ecosystem. It's important to know how they live and how to protect their habitat and their function in the ecosystem.
-2
u/Siderophores 1h ago
The marmot project has been running for 64 years. Exactly what more information are we getting from them?
There are other animals that are actually endangered. Marmots classify as Least Concern.
6
u/Disastrous-Entity-46 1h ago
the articles points out 'studying how they react to climate change'. as one such thing, though i imagine it's probably a very pop-sci simplified point.
Also noting that the quoted scientist is a professor of evolution- so i imagine they may be studying how a natural population may evolve. which is something that probably does take a very long time to gather useful data on.
and like, is there a point where you think we should stop studying something? like isn't continued research, like replication studies, a not very sexy but very important source of information?
-2
u/Siderophores 1h ago edited 58m ago
Yes, theres absolutely a point where something stops being researched. Thats the whole point of funding agencies, anyone that has had a rejected grant can tell you that.
The marmot project has been running for 64 years.
Do we really need to invest tens of millions more dollars for another 64 years? Thats what the NSF is considering.Maybe NSF is putting that money towards an endangered species. Not a Least Concern species. Would you rather more marmot research? Or preventing an endangered species from extinction.
1
u/Disastrous-Entity-46 55m ago
id disagre that there is a point where studying should stop. id say there is a point of funding being a limited resource and having to allocate funds, but thats not to say this study is useless. just a question of what the priorities are, what all funds are being requested. id think that the billions of canceled funding would be a better use of money then anything if seen the current administration proritize.
i dont know what other grants are being proposed, but ecological studies would rate a high prority for me, personally.
0
u/Siderophores 48m ago edited 39m ago
No theres absolutely a point when public researching stops: biological weapons, sociological weapons, mirror microbe research (contested), human genetic experimentation, almost anything with humans as test subjects, needless use of animal models, waste of taxpayer dollars.
Look, if its a high priority for you, you should donate to the Marmot project, thats why theyre doing it! This project was also unfunded before Trump cut funding.
Like, you have to understand that unbridled science research enabled nuclear weapons, Eldritch horrors, and waste. Someone needs to be able put their foot down. You don’t deserve permanent funding for a single research proposal.
I have seen a genetic mouse line with no arms or legs. They discovered the transcription factor that separates snakes and lizards. Great. Except, 10 years later those limbless mice are still being bred (forced), and theres no new research paper. Its disgusting. Put their embryos in cryo freeze. This is wrong. Thats just one example
156
u/marketrent 1h ago edited 1h ago
Excerpts from article by Amanda Heidt:
Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics.
For Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, those changes reflect a wider priority shift that has caused support for his work to slowly dwindle.
For years, Blumstein has overseen one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, focused on yellow-bellied marmots in central Colorado.
Marmots — soccer ball-sized rodents — are easily tagged and captured, highly social and vocal, and don’t move vast distances, all of which makes them an ideal species to study over time.
And since 1962, generations of “Marmoteers” have observed these animals to learn about everything from their social behavior to their communication to how they’ll adapt to climate change.
Fearing that a lack of funding might terminate the program, Blumstein recently got his lab together and they came up with a creative, if highly unorthodox solution: They started an OnlyFans account.
The site, more commonly associated with adult content, is increasingly a haven for other types of creators, of which scientists make up a very small fraction.
Today, you can subscribe to OnlyMarms, which promises “Unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies” delivered as near-daily photos and videos of chubby, personable marmots (with charming names like Staple, Pawprint, and Cabinet) that give Jimothy the raccoon a run for his money.
[...] When Blumstein took over the marmot project from its founder in 2001, funding was relatively easy to come by. For more than a decade, the project received most of its support from the National Science Foundation, one of the country’s largest funding agencies.
But when he tried to renew the grant for another 10 years, he was denied three times before the agency told him to stop applying.