- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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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
- Prohibited Businesses
[…](38) sexually-oriented or pornographic products or services, […]
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
I read Kickstarter and thought Patreon. That would be a huge blow to nsfw content. This is still upsetting.
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. :(
Valve didn’t capitulate tho.
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”.
But your original question was why doesn’t somebody just decide what’s bad for society?
My original post wasn’t a question at all, it was a statement that somebody does need to have the capacity to enforce acceptable behavior, but defining it and deciding who that falls to is difficult.
But shouldn’t someone prevent bad things? Yes, but that someone isn’t Visa.
We’re due for a second sexual revolution.
