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Does anyone else recollect the expression “no one owes you a business model”? There’s many reasons Patreon should want to avoid being a porn payments processor

Does anyone else recollect the expression “no one owes you a business model”? There’s many reasons Patreon should want to avoid being a porn payments processor. Blame American Puritanism or whatever, but that’s the milieu in which they operate. They don’t owe it to anyone to bear excess risk just so that someone else can have a profitable hustle at their expense. If this is such a big issue for the LGBT community Fund a goddamn KS to make a porn-friendly Patreon clone. Or just to Fund starting a porn-friendly payments processor. If the model is profitable rather than a charitable infusion by the processor, then it’ll be good for everyone, wont it?

Qw3r7 9y ago
I agree completely. They might be just adding in the persons of colour and LGB stuff to try and gain a larger audience for support. And to try and portray Patreon as racist and bigots if they contradict so. It's a shitty but effective way to gain an audience. Does anyone know the percentile of LGB represented within the effected populace?
falcolas 9y ago
If you explicitly court particular industry (amateur/niche porn) to build out your own business model, yeah, I think you do owe those businesses a business model. Perhaps not legally, but morally. > Fund a goddamn KS to make a porn-friendly Patreon clone Pretty sure you can't KS an adult business (which such a clone would be considered). That's part of the problem. Nobody wants to touch that industry once they become "respectable".
- tobylane 9y ago
  Patreon courts amateur and niche. But I haven't seen any sign they invite porn on their platform, just that marking as adult content is an option. Same can be said for Youtube and DeviantArt. Patreon's homepage says they protect from chargebacks. I can see why that appeals to content creators but this feels inevitable.
- arkades 9y ago
  I’ve seen no evidence that they have actively courted that niche, though. As far as I can see, they’ve had a policy of benign neglect - which is far from the same thing.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    If you make the charitable assumption that the letter's writers are not lying, this relationship is clearly spelled out at the top of the second paragraph: > Over the last couple years we have been courted by you, worked closely with you on promotion, creation, and even website features, and have been assured by you that Patreon was a home for all types of creators – including those that make adult content.
    - arkades 9y ago
      Without accusing anyone of lying at all, the letter writer goes out of their way to make it seem like the LGBT community, adult content community, and porn community are the same thing, and they’re representing all 3. I don’t know which of these Patreon has courted, though, or how much. To quote, “However, there has always been an issue with your stance on “porn” versus “adult content.” This stance has never been clear and is reminiscent of the phrase “I know it when I see it”, most infamously used in 1964 by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity. This is an outdated, legally unclear, and importantly, extremely problematic view of adult media.” So, to Patreon, this doesn’t seem to be a distinction without a difference. I happen to agree: an artistic nude is adult content, but isn’t the same adult content as a blowjob video. Even if no one is lying, I have no trouble reading that letter as “you courted and reassured us (LGBT, adult content), and now you’re abandoning us (pornographers)”. Which doesn’t require deceit - I’m sure there’s overlap and gray areas. But it doesn’t require Patreon to be playing dirty either.
dmerfield 9y ago
Right, when Patreon started kicking off people on the fringes of the political spectrum (Nazis, Antifa, Alt-right) they moved to a 'free-speech' alternative called Hatreon: https://hatreon.net/ https://hatreon.net/
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  That's.... kind of hilariously self-aware.
- arkades 9y ago
  I thought you were being ironic, but... Yeah. Case in point. Don’t like Patreon? Roll your own.
solatic 9y ago
If Patreon is worried about associating their brand with pornography, they could still spin off a sister site under an entirely different domain, brand, and infrastructure, but with the same underlying codebase. If Big Food and Big Opthalmology and Big Others can present the illusion of competition by having one parent company own all the brands on the market, why not Patreon?
- jasode 9y ago
  >, they could still spin off a sister site under an entirely different domain, brand, I think it's a decent idea but my guess is that it wouldn't be enthusiastically received by the adult creators. The "Patreon" brand has already accumulated legitimacy and trust. The adult-themed content creators would want to continue to leverage that. The creator selling sex performances gets to be in the same "digital inventory" (because it's the same patreon.com url) as the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, the Crash Course history education videos by John Green and his brother, the electronics disassembly videos by AvE, etc. Yes, the NSFW creators are already filtered out of general search pages and therefore hidden -- but at least they are still in the same patreon domain as the other respectable content creators. They wouldn't want a separate url such that the customers' credit-card bill would have a line item such as Adultreon.com or Porntreon.com. Yes, the url domain name doesn't have to blatantly shout "rated X" but it does have to be sufficiently different from "patreon" so as to not taint that growing brand name. Even if you gave it a non-obvious name like noertap9.com, people would eventually mentally associate "noertap" with "rated X" anyway. (E.g. people already know that "redtube.com" which has an innocuous name -- is not about the color "red": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedTube)
  - arkades 9y ago
    They may want the legitimacy and trust of Patreon, but if the alternative is “(being) scared for their lives”, presumably they’ll get over that preference and try it out.
noobermin 9y ago
No one owes anyone anything, it doesn't make it wrong to post a letter.
- rootlocus 9y ago
  It doesn't make it useful either.

Qw3r7 9y ago

I agree completely. They might be just adding in the persons of colour and LGB stuff to try and gain a larger audience for support. And to try and portray Patreon as racist and bigots if they contradict so. It's a shitty but effective way to gain an audience. Does anyone know the percentile of LGB represented within the effected populace?

falcolas 9y ago

If you explicitly court particular industry (amateur/niche porn) to build out your own business model, yeah, I think you do owe those businesses a business model. Perhaps not legally, but morally. > Fund a goddamn KS to make a porn-friendly Patreon clone Pretty sure you can't KS an adult business (which such a clone would be considered). That's part of the problem. Nobody wants to touch that industry once they become "respectable".

tobylane 9y ago
Patreon courts amateur and niche. But I haven't seen any sign they invite porn on their platform, just that marking as adult content is an option. Same can be said for Youtube and DeviantArt. Patreon's homepage says they protect from chargebacks. I can see why that appeals to content creators but this feels inevitable.
arkades 9y ago
I’ve seen no evidence that they have actively courted that niche, though. As far as I can see, they’ve had a policy of benign neglect - which is far from the same thing.
- falcolas 9y ago
  If you make the charitable assumption that the letter's writers are not lying, this relationship is clearly spelled out at the top of the second paragraph: > Over the last couple years we have been courted by you, worked closely with you on promotion, creation, and even website features, and have been assured by you that Patreon was a home for all types of creators – including those that make adult content.
  - arkades 9y ago
    Without accusing anyone of lying at all, the letter writer goes out of their way to make it seem like the LGBT community, adult content community, and porn community are the same thing, and they’re representing all 3. I don’t know which of these Patreon has courted, though, or how much. To quote, “However, there has always been an issue with your stance on “porn” versus “adult content.” This stance has never been clear and is reminiscent of the phrase “I know it when I see it”, most infamously used in 1964 by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity. This is an outdated, legally unclear, and importantly, extremely problematic view of adult media.” So, to Patreon, this doesn’t seem to be a distinction without a difference. I happen to agree: an artistic nude is adult content, but isn’t the same adult content as a blowjob video. Even if no one is lying, I have no trouble reading that letter as “you courted and reassured us (LGBT, adult content), and now you’re abandoning us (pornographers)”. Which doesn’t require deceit - I’m sure there’s overlap and gray areas. But it doesn’t require Patreon to be playing dirty either.

dmerfield 9y ago

Right, when Patreon started kicking off people on the fringes of the political spectrum (Nazis, Antifa, Alt-right) they moved to a 'free-speech' alternative called Hatreon: https://hatreon.net/ https://hatreon.net/

mfoy_ 9y ago
That's.... kind of hilariously self-aware.
arkades 9y ago
I thought you were being ironic, but... Yeah. Case in point. Don’t like Patreon? Roll your own.

solatic 9y ago

If Patreon is worried about associating their brand with pornography, they could still spin off a sister site under an entirely different domain, brand, and infrastructure, but with the same underlying codebase. If Big Food and Big Opthalmology and Big Others can present the illusion of competition by having one parent company own all the brands on the market, why not Patreon?

jasode 9y ago
>, they could still spin off a sister site under an entirely different domain, brand, I think it's a decent idea but my guess is that it wouldn't be enthusiastically received by the adult creators. The "Patreon" brand has already accumulated legitimacy and trust. The adult-themed content creators would want to continue to leverage that. The creator selling sex performances gets to be in the same "digital inventory" (because it's the same patreon.com url) as the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, the Crash Course history education videos by John Green and his brother, the electronics disassembly videos by AvE, etc. Yes, the NSFW creators are already filtered out of general search pages and therefore hidden -- but at least they are still in the same patreon domain as the other respectable content creators. They wouldn't want a separate url such that the customers' credit-card bill would have a line item such as Adultreon.com or Porntreon.com. Yes, the url domain name doesn't have to blatantly shout "rated X" but it does have to be sufficiently different from "patreon" so as to not taint that growing brand name. Even if you gave it a non-obvious name like noertap9.com, people would eventually mentally associate "noertap" with "rated X" anyway. (E.g. people already know that "redtube.com" which has an innocuous name -- is not about the color "red": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedTube)
- arkades 9y ago
  They may want the legitimacy and trust of Patreon, but if the alternative is “(being) scared for their lives”, presumably they’ll get over that preference and try it out.

noobermin 9y ago

No one owes anyone anything, it doesn't make it wrong to post a letter.

rootlocus 9y ago
It doesn't make it useful either.