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Kickstarter Reportedly Forced To Ban NSFW Content By Stripe
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alessandro
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No doubt the threat of a Stripe ban on Kickstarter is predicated on the expected ban on Stripe by MasterCard and or Visa.
In other words, online censorship is being controlled by two credit card companies.
We really need more payment processors, preferably not based in the USA.
I know this isn’t new, but I think we can officially consider our society a cyberpunk one, where corporations control global policy.
Plus: AI assisted omnipresent survailance, Police states, needless tech everywhere, no one owns anything just subscriptions…
We need more of every company that is not American. There are no global companies just American ones that operate in other countries. And yes I know there are other countries that have global companies but if they operate in America that still poses a risk. As if they continue to want to they may have to do what American Government wants like MS has admitted to.
We have that, it’s called crypto and everyone seems to hate it.
Lol nobody gonna want to use an extremely volatile currency as payment processor. Rest of the world just needs to implement system similar to PIX from brazil.
one with… fuck, last i checked (a while) something like $40 transaction fees. vs 3% to $3.50 transaction fees. Can’t remember which, i’m trying to fall asleep and remembering will wake me up..
Crypto isnt a payment processor, and it has no backing as a currency except current social agreement (yes thats most money but issued currencies are backed by central authorities) and it basically exists for ponzi schemes. Its so insanely volatile that its not for every day people.
That’s not even mentioning that its sole value is to convert back into regular backed currency.
That is the funny thing use crypto but its only value is to convert to real currency if you couldn’t do that no one would use it.
Yah no, it has to be more stable I don’t want to one minute be paid a fair price and the next have nothing or have paid 2x what the thing was worth.
Businesses deciding what rights we have is the part of capitalism no one talks about. I’m so tired of unelected people making rules for my life.
When people ask if I trust the government on any conversation that things like this come up I tell them my motto is “Don’t trust the government, unless it means trusting a corporation. Then DEFINITELY don’t trust the corporation.”
I like this a lot, well said
Fuck them all why can a company decide what is “right” If Kickstarter doesn’t want NFSW content then fine that is their choice it is their platform. But why should a payment processor be able to tell you what you can and can’t have.
It’s also because of “Karens”. Your average business wouldn’t give a shit what you do, if there wasn’t other losers making trouble because somebody else doesn’t live by their standards.
True. We’ve been there for ages with the advertisement ecosystem we live in ofc
We desperately need sovereign digital currency like the digital euro project
Good luck using those digital euros if you criticize Israel. Or try to use them to buy a unapproved VPN service. Or any thing now or in the future deemed inappropriate.
Yeah and I’m sure Visa and MasterCard will be very accommodating
The alternative to corporatism isn’t fascism, in fact they’re the same thing at different stages. Accepting the fascists because they are an ‘alternative’ to corporations is like accepting castration because it is an alternative dentistry.
But what I propose wasn’t fascism at all, saying there should be sovereign currency is a separate point for how it’s governed
Regardless of what power structure we have in the future the need for that currency to be accessible to all and free from corporate interests is paramount
Unfortunately what you’re suggesting is crypto. Which as we’ve seen isn’t really compatible with any world where capitalism still exists; as capitalists will just monopolize it.
Mullvad, VPN provider, takes cash sent by postmail for payment.
So we have at least that!
You’re conflating two separate things: currency infrastructure vs. the economic system it runs under.
All the problems you’re describing are problems of capitalism, not problems of digital currency.
The point is: right now, Visa and Mastercard are an unelected, profit-driven gatekeeper. Replacing them with a state-backed, insured, physically-backed digital currency isn’t “crypto” it’s just removing a parasitic middleman.
Same money. Same banks. Same insurance. Just no corporate toll booth.
Will capitalists try to capture it? Absolutely. So build it with guardrails. But “they might capture it later” isn’t an argument against building it better than what we have today. Otherwise you can’t support anything short of revolution.
As if sex workers were treated fairly in the EU…
This is more about a country not being beholden to corporate interests for their laws
Puritans
We’re due for a second sexual revolution.
I’m just picturing a riot but instead of axes and pitchforks they are holding body pillows and fleshlights
I read Kickstarter and thought Patreon. That would be a huge blow to nsfw content. This is still upsetting.
Dumbasses, should have told stripe to pound sand like Master card and visa. This platform is going to die in this econ if they pull that.
Mastercard and visa are likely who made stripe do this
Just curious if kickstarter is in the wrong here or not. Because when it was Valve, lots of folks were losing their minds blaming Valve for capitulating to Stripe and Visa/MC.
People really like to hate on Valve. Well, some people and lots of bots.
I still remember when we used to own games. :(
Go full opensource. Sure that restricts the games available. But then no one owns the game, and no one will ever take it from you.
Valve didn’t capitulate tho.
The way you’d have heard them tell it, Valve folded like a cardboard box.
They did, they removed all content that Mastercard / Collective shout doesn’t like.
And what was this material, still seems to be hentai on the store. This is basic shit that can be disprove immediately.
Hint: it wasn’t ALL adult content. Like they’ve already said.
These things are tricky, I would generally like to say the platforms and associated processors, hosting, etc should be neutral. However, there are plenty of things that are just plain bad for society if they get created which despite being massively unpopular might get enough niche support to be brought to existence given the chance.
It could be by law, decree of the platform, or vote of the users, but somebody has to have the ability to draw a line on what can be done in public, the broader consensus on the question the better though.
Edit: Curiosity since this seems to have irritated some people. Would you suggest that a platform not be regulated in some way if it where enabling the creation of exploitive and hateful content? Note that I didn’t specify sexual content but rather things that can be bad for society.
The reason people are down voting you is you’ve created a who watches the watchers situation. Whose job is it to determine what’s bad for society? We’re already having that problem right now with the won’t you think of the children bullshit and people trying to get books out of libraries just as one for instance. Censorship is censorship and censorship is bad.
Which is why I say it’s difficult but necessary at some point. As a thought experiment, take a list of things in a topic, in this case it was brought in as porn things because apparently the credit companies are prudish. Array out that list going from mundane safe hetro sex all the way to snuff films. Somewhere in there any given person would find ‘their’ line and perhaps a separate ‘the’ line which they see as acceptable to film and diseminate.
So who orders the list, who draws the line, and by who/how does it get enforced? To say all censorship is bad would imply that no line should be drawn. One can’t just say it should be based on ‘common sense’ because I guarantee there are people who would think what’s sensible to you is either too outlandish or tame out there.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re being intentionally obtuse or if you just really haven’t thought about this. But for the record the line between porn and snuff films is murder, murder is wrong and society has agreed on that. You are the one who is saying it should be based on “common sense“.
I’m saying there is a whole list of things between, but I suppose that might not be obvious if you’re looking for someone to be mad at.
Someone is going to want things that society has agreed are unacceptable, if not then we wouldn’t need to bother making rules to prohibit them. To those people you, or the law, or the platform owner are the censor. Is it still bad then or is there some place where a watcher is valid then?
I see, you certainly seem to be being intentionally obtuse. For the record I was just letting you know why you’re being downvoted. But that’s some pretty big projection there with the “looking for somebody to be mad at”. You’ve clearly got something stuck in your craw about this and I have no idea what it is.
At the end of the day even the Supreme Court couldn’t come up with this one with the chief justice at the time saying “I don’t know how to define porn but I know what it is when I see it”. Those things that we can agree on are law, and we’re still arguing about the ones we can’t hence this article.
But your original question was why doesn’t somebody just decide what’s bad for society? And the answer is because censorship is bad, whether you like that answer or not. To paraphrase a famous quote, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
Not that hard if its legal they can’t stop the sale of it. If its illegal sure whatever. Society and by extension the government gets to decide what is bad for society not some unelected corporation. And yes it is not perfect and there is and well be mistakes but what is the alternative allow corporations free reign like we do now.
Well we have legal stuff and illegal stuff. Snuff films are illegal so. Anything that is legal they should not be allowed to stop the sale of.
But shouldn’t someone prevent bad things? Yes, but that someone isn’t Visa.
Nope, they should not get to decide don’t care what it is. And OK maybe they block the sale of CSAM but what they are talking about is not illegal. Adult content is not illegal sex toys are not illegal. So they should not be able to stop the sale of legal stuff. Also every country has different rules so they should not block globally but only in the country requesting it, like Americas fear or sexuality.
And they still wont introduce crypto payments
Crypto is only better because of the hosters.
Watch the Video Line go up by Folding ideas. Crypto is just as much controlled by the people having the means as the banks are
What people controlling means? These are decentralized automated systems.
The ones with the most servers can just fork the chain when something that they don’t like happens
Generally, zero trust means zero privacy: they can at any point just discriminate anyone
But now its everyone instead of those who have money, so yay I guess?
Not really, at best large opearators in BTC can censor transactions, ETH devs are working on encrypted mempool, so even that shouldn’t be possible there soon.
I understand why people would think that this could be due to influence from the morality police type groups, but there’s also a pretty boring explanation. Kickstarter is seeing an increase in NSFW content and Stripe has never allowed that.
So, knowing how risky it is to try to go on social media and examine a situation with nuance… It’s pretty well understood in the industry that fraud rates are much higher for NSFW-related content
This is why your favorite porn website doesn’t charge your card directly and uses a third-party processor who charge them an increased fee (insurance) to eat the charge backs and fraud claims rather than having Visa or Mastercard block them.
Stripe doesn’t do adult-industry payments. Here’s the oldest page I could find in the Wayback machine, from 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120511082217/https://stripe.com/terms
Kickstarter uses Stripe and so is bound by their terms. The terms are not new, they are at least 14 years old.
The thing that is new is Kickstarter is increasingly being used for NSFW content which violates the contract of the payment processor that they use.