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Patreon made similar decisions about four years ago when they began to tighten their terms for NSFW creators.

https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-27-patreon-adult-content-cr...

Much of the pressure came from payment processing partners and banks, much like is described in this article.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension-of...

It seems like for any crowdsourced funding platform there is a volume cap for NSFW content imposed by the need of those platforms to seek wider audiences and funding sources.




Patreon went one step further - if you post content against Patreon's rules anywhere else, even if you don't link to it, if Patreon finds out, they'll ask you to stop doing it, and threaten to suspend your account if you keep doing it.

This is why many people who post fetish-y art (even stuff like mind-control kink) moved from Patreon to SubscribeStar. Even erotic roleplay site F-List moved to SubscribeStar.


Patreon went one step further - if you post content against Patreon's rules anywhere else, even if you don't link to it, if Patreon finds out, they'll ask you to stop doing it, and threaten to suspend your account if you keep doing it.

That sounds outrageous. Is there a link to more info about this policy?


The only example I remember was a little less bad, but still pretty bad in my opinion - the artist in question uploaded contra-TOS artwork on his Twitter account, and had a link to his Twitter account from Patreon. However, Patreon's own terms of service state that they look where traffic is coming from to see what kind of things you're funding with the money, and can ban you on that alone:

>Because you are raising funds on Patreon, we may be held accountable for what you do with those funds, so we may also look at what you do with your membership off our platform. As a result when we talk about “On Patreon,” it means the creations you are funding on and through Patreon. When reviewing a page, we look at how creations are shared, where the page is linked to and where the traffic comes from. No matter what happens, we always give creators the opportunity to appeal a decision by contacting us and sending any relevant information they believe was not considered. We may not change our minds, but we will always listen.

From: https://www.patreon.com/en-GB/policy/guidelines

This means that you only need to link to your Patreon, not even link from your Patreon for them to find you objectionabe.

About NSFW creators leaving the platform because of tighter content restrictions on fiction:

https://www.dailydot.com/irl/patreon-hypnosis-porn-ban-sexua...

https://thenextweb.com/news/patreon-continues-to-crack-down-...

Further, Patreon has communicated to artists that regardless of the age of a fictional character, certain art elements common to anime/manga style drawing (even of adults - "big head, big eyes, short height") may be considered as marking the artwork as a child - and even adding adult-like proportions such as large breasts may not be sufficient to evade Patreon's ban: https://twitter.com/Waero_Re/status/1238408555507539968

Another artist in the thread noted that Patreon decided their content was "violent" because their drawings featured people not smiling during orgasm.


Because you are raising funds on Patreon, we may be held accountable for what you do with those funds

Wow.

That is not good. Any hypothetical employer could justify any hypothetical abuse using that rationale.


Not generally about the policy, but there is one famous instance I'm aware of: Sargon of Akkad. It was something to the effect of him calling the neo-Nazis the N-word on someone else's Youtube channel. To be clear, he used the slur AGAINST the neo-nazis. Then Patreon dumped him. Here's the first Google result I found about it, no guarantees of accuracy.

https://heavy.com/news/2018/12/patreon-sargon-of-akkad-jorda...


Thinking that's ok cause you're saying it to a bad person is some... high levels of mental gymnastics


There's a very large gap between thinking something is okay and thinking they should not be able to participate in the economy and feed their family.


I assume this will lead to Onlyfans's effective death, much as Tumblr's porn ban seems to have led to, or hastened, its death.

Reddit seems to have resisted whatever calls it must be getting to eliminate porn. So far at least. It will ban or quarantine some heretical ideas, but porn is still there.


> Reddit seems to have resisted whatever calls it must be getting to eliminate porn

Not entirely. They purged all NSFW subreddits from the r/all and r/popular meta subreddits. They also go on a purging binge whenever a remotely taboo subreddit makes the news.


What "remotely taboo" subreddits were banned after making the news? The ones I recall weren't "remotely", they were "extremely". As in, sexual images of children, pictures taken of women without their knowledge, legitimate hate subreddits, ones dedicated to spreading misinformation re: COVID, etc.


r/The_Donald was "quarantined", which is not banning but kinda. The excuse I think was that they did "organized brigading" or something like that.


They were eventually banned after the quarantine.

But they also spent years promoting racism, hate, dangerous conspiracy theories, a neo-nazi rally that resulted in murder, etc. It's hard to look at all of that and think it was just "kind of taboo".


I went to the Donald all the time to get a different perspective and if there was racism and hate any worse than /r/politicalhumor or /r/politics I never saw it.


Or your are too ignorant of all the dogwhistles to realize how packed full of racists that place was.


It's equally as possible that some people have become so overly sensitive to the idea of dog whistles that they see them everywhere, even when that wasn't the intent.


I started doing the same after the Pulse Nightclub shooting when literally the rest of Reddit was censoring and preventing discussion because it was almost immediately known the shooter was Muslim. It was the only place you could go for a live thread and actual info.

Over time, the signal to noise was low. But occasionally there was a good point or funny meme.

I can't say for sure I saw any racism worse than anywhere else. I really don't like when people use whatever this is ((( ))) to talk about Jews, saw that a couple times on t_d, but I've definitely also seen it on /r/politics /r/atheism etc


> The excuse I think was that they did "organized brigading" or something like that.

It was actually for "violence against police". Hillary Clinton's MediaMatters group found a few comments and made an article on it, this was pushed as far as possible, presenting Reddit with enough cause to "quarantine" them.

The specific anti-police messages were about a congressional walkout in Oregon, and threats to use the police to bring them back for a quorum. A rep replied "Send bachelors". This was the cause and theme of the comments MediaMatters focused on. None were made by mods, their own posts, or even upvoted (under 20 or so). Reddit used this to say the mods there were not removing extremist content, eventually forcing the sub allow only mods "approved" by Reddit Inc. They shuttered the sub before allowing this to happen.

The big joke to is that these anti-police messages were before the summer when it was non-stop ACAB, Kill The Police, etc, in practically every other sub-reddit as part of the riots and protests. Standards applied evenly, Reddit would be left with a knitting and a windsurfing section.

Reddit wanted the_donald gone, end of story. MediaMatters helped, and the reason was surface level deep, but they didn't need some iron clad reason. Interestingly, Reddit removed the "violence against police" reasoning, and replaced it with a more generic cause, as the hypocrisy was warming up.

I researched this shortly after it happened.


This statement feels a bit misleading.

For starters, the comments got considerably more explicit than "Send Bachelors". I'm unfamiliar with this specific event, but researching it, I see:

“none of this gets fixed without people picking up rifles” and “[I have] no problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens.”

Perhaps these are what you meant by the "theme", but those seem considerably more explicit, especially for a subreddit already linked to an event that resulted in someone being murdered.

>Reddit wanted the_donald gone

Then why didn't they get rid of them until a year later? The event you're referencing seems to be part of the quarantine, not part of the banning. The banning took place after the mods of the subreddit tried to evade the quarantine by moving to another sub and continued to support breaking Reddit rules.


> Then why didn't they get rid of them until a year later? The event you're referencing seems to be part of the quarantine, not part of the banning. The banning took place after the mods of the subreddit tried to evade the quarantine by moving to another sub and continued to support breaking Reddit rules.

Except that what actually happened was they had moved off Reddit, locked the sub down as an archive, and then finally banned when they refused to accept the Reddit provided mods.


They tried to move to a non-quarantined subreddit first, but yeah? We're not in disagreement on that.. The scenario you just described is very different than the one you were talking about a post ago, which is why I called it misleading. They weren't banned over the Media Matters story.


They were initially quarantined because of posts highlighted by MediaMatters.


But not banned because of it, as you implied.

I just checked, and it looks like the website they moved to lasted only months, before the operator shut it down over concerns about racism, concerns from their host, and FBI inquiries. Painting it like it was just media matters picking up on one thing is far from the whole story. The place was septic.


I actually don't think that Reddit wanted T_D gone - the Subreddit had a massive amount of subscribes and generated activity all over the site. It surely was controversial, but in the end it probably helped Reddit more than it damaged it.

It just seems that Reddit has a policy of cutting subreddits loose once they get mainstream media attention, in order to avoid overly negative press. It happened to T_D, WatchPeopleDie and quite a few other Subreddits; basically all bans came after they went into the spotlight despite existing (in some case, peacefully) for years. To me it seems that Reddit is totally fine with hosting controversial opinions as long as it doesn't generate press.


Hah the funny you should say that about windsurfing, as the mod of the most popular surfing subreddit was banning anyone who posted in the Donald.


I'm sure there is some law for the most ridiculous example you can think of off the cuff, someone will find has been true somewhere. :)

I never saw that back then, that subs would ban you for that, but recently I posted a negative comment to No New Normal. I was instantly banned from almost every popular reddit sub.

A couple of them sent me a think saying they might unban me if I promised never to post there again. It wasn't a supportive comment, I was mocking one of them. How insane is it that the people that admin and mod Reddit are so fragile that they literally ban anyone who talks to people they don't like?

This can't continue. I suppose I appreciate their acceleration.


R/watchpeopledie and similar got banned.

All of the porn subreddits that still exist banned domains that serve "unverified" content. The amateur porn scene has been leveled, most of which was legitimate content. Also a lot less user submitted content simply because the hassle of verification and also you have to formally identify yourself at one point. Claims of Reddit hosting illegal content is hugely overblown.


Reddit's gone to lengths to hide it, so casual users aren't hitting it by accident two clicks off an unrelated Google search result page, not on "/r/all", which gets advertisers what they want, without the uproar that banning porn would cause.


Reddit doesn't let people pay directly for content. You can gift awards but those aren't really worth anything.


> Reddit doesn't let people pay directly for content. You can gift awards but those aren't really worth anything.

Worth noting this scenario is even less similar than as you wrote it.

Not only can’t you pay content creators on Reddit, but the awards, are you paying Reddit for hosting the creator.

Reddit gets money, creator gets a png. It’s a really bad deal, and I’m not sure what kind of lunatic buys Reddit awards.


So basically this just begs for the owners to create two clearly differentiated brands: (1) the current one will probably die like Tumblr but they have some high-profile non-porn creators so I think they will keep going for a while, (2) the second one geared towards porn mainly and accepting alternative payment methods like Webmoney, Paysafecard and others. They can start accepting credit cards and Paypal initially to gain users, and when the pressure builds up, drop the banks and hope that the users are so attached to their content they'll use the alternative methods.


It's a dollar cap - process enough dollars per month or per year, and Visa/Mastercard takes notice (as mentioned by Vice). For all the furor, taking payment via crypto's not viable outside of specific niches. Or rather, OnlyFans did the X vs Y of kick x-rated content off the platform vs get kicked off Visa/Mastercard's "platform", and is going with option 1.


Somehow they manage to get away with DMCA violations however. Lots of 'reaction' channels (where people watch along with a TV show or Youtube clip) now only post heavily truncated preview videos on Youtube. The full videos, which include the copyrighted content, sits on Patreon.




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