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I don't know if it's centralisation so much as personification. Patreon wants to be a a friendly brand, part of people's self-image. And having chosen this, per

• orthecreedence 8y ago
  Personification makes sense to me, at least in regards to Patreon. But then you get to Youtube...a stroll through the comment section of any video makes you realize you're in the digital version of Mos Eisley. There is no brand to protect, yet they wave their censorship wand quite often, including just this last week (https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for-problem-content-takes-down-58-million-videos-in-quarter-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for...). It seems a lot of these videos weren't violating any Youtube policies, they were deleted "just because." Regarding Visa being neutral, I think there are cases where this is actually not true: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/23/david-horowitz-visa-mastercard-cut-off-payments-to-my-think-tank-based-on-splc-hate-group-label/ https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/23/david-horowitz-vis.... Obviously, excuse the source, but I believe the core idea is still fact. So, censorship is being exercised in areas even where you'd expect neutral carriers. I would call that worrying.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    Not really worrying. Just different individuals and organizations taking different positions on different subjects. Most importantly, all of it happening on private property. I have an unpopular opinion. I believe people should be able to fly nazi and confederate flags on their private property. (Even if their private property overlooks yours.) I believe football players should be able to kneel during the national anthem. And I believe private companies should be able to exercise their freedom of Association rights based on their beliefs or their bottom line. All of these are just people having opinions. If you don't like their opinions, don't associate with them. That's the freedom that you have. I don't think any of this is a problem. Certainly none of it is censorship. The man flying a nazi or confederate flag in his yard alongside his JEB Stuart statue is not censoring MLK by refusing to put up an MLK statue as well. The people who want an MLK statue should go put the MLK statue someplace else. The people tossed from Patreon should go raise money elsewhere. They're all perfectly free to do so.
    • KozmoNau7 8y ago
      >"I believe people should be able to fly nazi and confederate flags on their private property." The people doing this are advocating for violent ideologies, that have as their foundation extreme racism, including the oppression of minorities and violence against them, literally to the level of genocide. They don't stop at just putting up flags. They organize, march and perpetrate violent attacks. They invade subcultures and infiltrate their ideologies into them. They plan for the creation of a fascist white ethnostate. None of this is exaggeration on my part. How do you propose we stop this tide of hate-fueled ideology? The "marketplace of ideas" approach does not work, they simply use the exposure to further spread their viewpoints, feeding on the controversy. How can we fight these ideologies, if not by exposing them and deplatforming them, and constantly keeping them on the back foot?
    • jstarfish 8y ago
      > All of these are just people having opinions. If you don't like their opinions, don't associate with them. That's the freedom that you have. At the risk of starting a tangent, this doesn't work when it comes to business. Businesses (or any relationship of dependency) should not be allowed to have "an opinion" because before long it becomes collusion and shunning. How well did "no, no, you have the freedom to go somewhere else" work for blacks just wanting to buy a hamburger in America pre-1968? We had to pass laws telling businesses to get the fuck over themselves and indeed, it's still challenged to this day when gays try to buy wedding cakes. If you don't like mandatory arbitration clauses in every single contract you sign, you literally can't do business anywhere. Everything from your job to your car purchase has them. If you don't like being subjected to credit checks, you literally cannot procure the utilities required by law to make your dwelling inhabitable-- all utilities run credit or make it prohibitively expensive to go without. It's an imbalance of power. You can't just "go somewhere else" when you depend on the service being offered or provided, that you are denied for arbitrary reasons.
      • bilbo0s 8y ago
        It's like the difference between Sam's Club and a typical grocer. The grocer offers services to the public, Sam's Club does not. It is members only. And it can have any requirements it pleases for membership. It doesn't have any racial exclusivity policies, but that would be well within their rights if they did. (For instance, country clubs have often had racial exclusivity clauses, even after the civil rights act.) Sam's Club is not a company for the public. When you need consideration for membership, there really is just no way you can claim that to be non-private. That includes Patreon, it's private. It's their rules. Full stop. It's like adwords, if you want to use it, you have to start giving Google more consideration. Normally to use the public parts of Google, you don't need to give any consideration at all. (Of course, Google takes the tracking information from you anyway with their public facing services, but they don't ask you to actively give them any consideration.)
  • Noos 8y ago
    We are talking about the same Patreon that is host to a tremendous amount of porn and fetish artists, right? Many of whom are in the top 50 of creators? Personfication suddenly matters now?
    • iguy 8y ago
      Thanks, I didn't realise this. Maybe one more sign that sexual fetish has largely stopped being taboo.
• losvedir 8y ago
  > Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think). Heh, well I hope so. But that recent NYTimes story[0] about how mass shootings used guns and ammo bought with a credit card makes me unsure about that. I'd have thought using cash vs credit was more or less interchangeable, and either the person should be allowed to buy the firearms or not. But given the focus on how it was bought, makes me think there's some movement towards expecting Visa and the like to not be simply neutral facilitators of transactions. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/business/dealbook/mass-shootings-credit-cards.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/business/deal...
  • monksy 8y ago
    I have a huge concern over anyone who is stating that the CCs are to partly to be blamed. Yes, they were used for firearms. Firearms are expensive and plastic (for the most part) is the currency in the US. For me that's flipping the bozo bit for that individual. It's not "fascism" or "trump" that we should be afraid of. It's the mob rule.
    • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      > It's not "fascism" or "trump" that we should be afraid of. If you don't have anything to fear from Trump, that's nice for you, but given that he's openly calling for me and people dear to me to have our civil rights revoked, it's pretty shitty of you to tell me that I shouldn't be afraid of him.
      • monksy 8y ago
        In America, we have 3 branches of government with checks and balances additionally we have very difficult to modify rights given in the constitution. Things are not likely to change.
        • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
• Mindwipe 8y ago
  Visa is extremely censorious, especially of sexual content. It is very odd how they and MasterCard get let off this debate, despite the fact their vague rules are often the reason for such closedowns. It will be really interesting to see if 2019 brings a change in the outrage that is currently directed at public facing platforms over their content policies to the actual architects of many of those decisions, which are Visa/MC and a handful of advertising brokers. We can argue about the role of individual platforms, but Visa/MC in particular have a cast iron, long term monopoly with much stronger effects on the public than any national government does. Their editorial policies should be under huge public scrutiny.
  • someguydave 8y ago
    To what degree is Visa protected from competition through federal regulation? I don't think you can benefit from government subsidy/protection and also claim to act as a completely private actor.
• rabidrat 8y ago
  Bell Telephone was a peer-to-peer communications infrastructure, not a publishing platform. To the extent that it did provide a medium for publication (the phonebook), they absolutely had standards for what could be published. Were those standards arbitrary? Was the Jewish Defamation League allowed to have their business listed, or advertise?
  • iguy 8y ago
    Part of this is that we haven't quite figured out what "publishing platform" means. It's not like a printing press (renting time on machine which applies ink) but also not like a magazine (with an editor pushing a view, his name on page 2). Facebook certainly carries a lot of peer-to-peer communications, but wades deep into deciding what's acceptable. Yet unlike magazines, which were always numerous, they have something close to a monopoly.
    • XorNot 8y ago
      Facebook wades in on the parts of the platform which are publication like, or undirected. They don't discriminate at all in private peer to peer messages.
  • smelendez 8y ago
    There were also some restrictions on lines used for broadcasting purposes, where you could dial in to hear a recorded message. This was used by mostly right wing commentators from the '60s-'80s and sometimes derided as "dial-a-hate." The lines had to announce the subscriber's name and the recordings could be required to be taken down if found defamatory. When 900 numbers with paid recordings, like messages from celebrities or gambling advice, became available, they had to announce their fee structures upfront before people were connected to the paid programming.
    • iguy 8y ago
      This is true, but these were side services. The core service of having a phone number was, I think, universal the way having a street address is. I mean not so much legally as in popular imagination. Like you can write fan letters to serial killers on death row, if you wish, and nobody is scandalised that the USPS will deliver your letter like any other.
• evil-olive 8y ago
  > It's very difficult to imagine Bell Telephone (in their 100% monopoly days I mean) feeling responsible for what people discuss on their wires, or feeling a need to deny (say) pornographers service so that its other customers wouldn't feel tainted. Bell in its monopoly days was a common carrier [0], regulated by law to treat all phone lines equally. > Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think). Visa and Mastercard are not common carriers - they can and do discriminate. One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier 1: https://qz.com/1381708/twitter-finally-banned-alt-right-conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones/ https://qz.com/1381708/twitter-finally-banned-alt-right-cons... 2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    If you have freedom of commerce, but no individual freedoms outside of that, like freedom of speech, then you basically have China. So it's a very reasonable trade off to make: give up a little freedom of commerce to ensure more basic personal freedoms. The recipe for boiling the frog in introducing totalitarianism is the same: First you go after the least popular people and get tacit approval. Then you extend that to someone else, then someone else. Eventually, you get to a point where everyone is at least a little leery of speaking up. Then you turn it up just a little more. Rinse and repeat. This is where we are now. We are in the middle of the process above. It doesn't matter how idealistic the people who are implementing it. Control thought and speech, and you lock in absolute power, and absolute power corrupts. All of the worst totalitarian regimes throughout history had idealistic, flowery sounding language to justify their actions. All of them.
  • consp 8y ago
    >> ... types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. Isn't businesses deciding what they want exactly less regulation? The line they are walking is pretty thin at Patreon but my image of the company is mostly supporting general content creators in the non-ideological spectrum of content. If these people do not fit with their point of view (specified in general in the terms) they may simply be polishing up their image to what they want to look like. It is their choice as they throw away some, at this point still marginal, income. Though as stated in the article, the people leaving could use it as a rallying point and maybe even get out better in the end (subscriber/monetary wise).
• ubernostrum 8y ago
  I'm always a bit surprised by people who want to bring up historical analogies without admitting that the US has a long history of censorship; if anything, the type of hard-line free-speech stance assumed by many internet forum posters is an incredibly recent development in American law. And both public (enforced by law) and private (enforced by industry associations or the like) censorship regimes continue to exist in the US today.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  And having chosen this, perhaps they can't afford to live and let live. This is how oppression operates. First it's, "Well, we'd live and let live, but we can't afford the consequences if we serve you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we're at all associated with you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't loudly support the 'right' things." Finally, it will become, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't turn you in."
  • voidpointercast 8y ago
    Good lord the hyperbole. This isn't the government doing this, and stop trying to construe it as some great 'issue of our time'. I'd argue this is the natural selection of ideas at work. If you don't like it, raise hell, and gather enough people to make a difference, that's what everyone's done since it became an option to do so. If you can't harness the momentum perhaps it means that your idea just isn't cut out for life on the grand stage of society. Life after all, is not fair.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      This isn't the government doing this When it comes to control of information, I don't think it's only the government that we have to worry about. stop trying to construe it as some great 'issue of our time'. This is the great issue of our time. I'd argue this is the natural selection of ideas at work. No, that would be those ideas getting downvotes and no one listening to them. That would be the circumstance where no one wants to fund them. Instead, people want to fund them, but a few powerful people want to throw roadbocks in their way. This is a powerful organization that controls financial transactions pulling the strings to suppress ideas they don't like. If you can't harness the momentum perhaps it means that your idea just isn't cut out for life on the grand stage of society The ideas have momentum. It's that large organizations are pulling the strings and pulling the plug. It would be as you say, if individuals were pulling the funding. Instead, it's a big company not letting many, many individuals fund as they would like. Your talking point is just another example of this: People in media trying to sell the idea that this is "the marketplace of ideas in action." No. It's the marketplace of ideas being manipulated. (And if you want to see the long arc of history bend in the right way, the wrong thing to do is to manipulate the marketplace of ideas. That is precisely what gives ammunition to the toxic extremists and the flim flam artists.)