You should have seen the massive amount of Bella thorne posts online before her onlyfans. Tons of 4chan threads, reddit posts, and subreddits for her pics, etc. (Though, the same could be said for any celeb, she was definitely a "thing").

She was pretty risqué in her social media photos/videos before onlyfans and garnered quite a following online because of it. Most of her popularity online had nothing to do with her acting career at all.