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Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _politi
by ralusek 8y ago
Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _political_ disagreements with the purported beneficiaries of the donations through the platform. PayPal said that it was actually one of the underlying payment processors, and it was suspected to be MasterCard.
That incident was the first time I've ever taken the need for alternative payment processors very seriously.
- draw_down 8y agoIf MasterCard is doing it, how would an alternative payment processor help? You need to change the payment method.
- ddorian43 8y agoSame with wikileaks
- tubbs 8y agoFor context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Payback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Payback
- kyrra 8y agoThe CC networks are known cave to political pressure to shut down certain merchants. Apple is likely no better or worse here. example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/caving-government-pressure-visa-and-mastercard-shut-down-payments-backpagecom https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/caving-government-pres...
- throw0101a 8y ago> Apple is likely no better or worse here. Apple will be piggybacking off of MasterCard's network.
- wurzelzwerg 8y agoI have a news site too http://www.uptopnews.com/ http://www.uptopnews.com/
- nicky0 8y agoI can definitely see Apple caving in to activists trying to deplatform transgressors against the "progressive" orthodoxy.
- tokyodude 8y agoWhy would we assume Apple would be no worse. Apple has a track record of disallowing all kinds of media that credit card companies have much less issue with. You're generally free to buy all kinds of things with your credit card that Apple disallows in their various terms of service.
- sjwright 8y agoApple is not offering merchant services, so I don't see the relevance?
- ben_w 8y agoI’ve been told political campaigns focused on MC/Visa forced a policy change on Fetlife (specifically which kinks you’re allowed to admit to being into) a few years back. I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth. IMO, people should be free to discuss what they’re into, even when it’s something much more harmful than the kink involved.
- jackweirdy 8y ago> I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth The kink, or the policy change?
- daeken 8y agoYep, it also drove them to take payments primarily via an e-check service, which promptly got owned and a huge number of FL users had to deal with fraudulent charges.
- disillusioned 8y agoStripe de-platformed us because their payment processor (Wells fucking Fargo, paragons of virtue) didn't like what we were selling, which was fantasy adult toys. They tried micromanaging the complaint, asking if we could remove "flesh colored" options, but we weren't going to get dragged down into that. Ridickulous.
- ralusek 8y agoThat's beyond insane.
- hippich 8y agoWhat y'all ended up using to accept payments?
- throw03172019 8y agoI can only imagine how awkward it was for the Stripe employee to ask this.
- 8y ago
- lawn 8y agoAnd people still wonder what problem cryptocurrencies tries to solve.
- blowski 8y agoI don’t think people are wondering what problems crypto currencies are trying to solve, more whether they are a good way to solve them.
- snotrockets 8y agothe underutilization of modern cpus?
- Arbalest 8y agoUnderutilised? Modern CPUs are designed to be underutilised. Or more accurately, designed to be bursty. It isn't like they are executing NOPs at full speed. The heat they generate isn't free.
- simias 8y agoI think most of us are clear on the general idea of the "what", it's the "how" that's a bit fuzzy.
- manigandham 8y agoNo, people are wondering why cryptocurrencies haven't actually solved anything yet.
- velcrovan 8y agolink please
- rhegart 8y agoYes that scared me. Extreme activists can cut you off from access to payment processors. We are a relatively cashless society and you are potentially at the mercy of the mob to survive. The mob’s definition of a Nazi becomes broader every day. I truly believe the pendulum is swinging the other way however. Once corporations realize that, this should stop. 4 years ago the majority stood with the mob because they like me believed the mob had decent ideals but were overzealous. Every day more people discover that the mob are morons on a power trip and a sense of morality more infantile than good/evil children stories.
- eli_gottlieb 8y agoWe need a post-office bank and payment processor, which will then be legally subject to the First Amendment.
- r3un1 8y agoWell you kind of have that. It's called the central bank (Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. case) that processes bank account transfers without any restrictions that would go against the First Amendment. The extra stuff that you get with private companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal is just that -- extra.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago> We need a post-office bank and payment processor, which will then be legally subject to the First Amendment. Postal money orders already exists, and are exactly as expensive and inconvenient as you would expect. The actual problem is KYC laws that require payment processors to do the job of the police and refuse service to customers under purposely vague corporate policies without due process, instead of having the police do that job and only have payment processing service denied with a court order and an opportunity to contest it under the law.
- Larrikin 8y agoThe thing is I don't expect the post office to be expensive and inconvenient. They work wonderfully in many countries for basic banking services to all residents. What is awful is that I expect it to be inconvenient and awful in the US because there is this idea that anything the government does will inevitably be bad and then there are multiple political parties that try their hardest to make that idea come true when they get elected. There's no reason for the system to not work in the US other than people trying to sabotage it to the detriment of large parts of the population so their personal tax burden is lower since they don't believe they ever will need the service.
- AnthonyMouse 8y agoThere is a specific reason the US does everything poorly. The US is the EU. The EU in general doesn't provide government services, the UK does, France does. When you're already the size of a state, there are basically no more economies of scale to be had by doing something at the size of a union of states. Your fixed costs are already being amortized over something like a million people or more, so the variable costs already dominate and spreading the fixed costs over even more people is past the point of diminishing returns. But it's not past the point of expanding overhead. So suppose you want to do this in the US -- have the Post Office compete with Mastercard. You propose the bill. The banks hate it because it's them you're competing with, they have billions of dollars, but more importantly they're a major industry in some states (e.g. New York) which have large numbers of legislators. So they not only use those votes against your bill, they trade their legislators' votes on other bills to get more votes against your bill. Moreover, their legislators are the ones who care most about things like finance, so guess who is on the finance committee. Then you have states like Virginia where the major industry is defense. They want to destroy privacy protections, because you can't get a lucrative government contract for hoovering up and data mining financial data if you're not allowed to hoover up and data mine financial data. Guess who is on the committees related to that sort of thing. And New York is all for that -- data mining financial data for private purposes is lucrative too, and that amendment also makes it harder to pass the bill they don't like. Then you have states where the government itself is a major employer, and what they want is more government jobs for their people. So they don't want your program to be efficient, they want it to be labor intensive, which is the opposite. But then it costs more, charges higher fees, requires the users to fill out more forms to use it etc. You may also see private companies looking for the same thing, because they then sell a solution to it, as with Intuit opposing tax simplification. And so it goes down the line, at each stage making the program worse and harder to pass, until it either dies in committee somewhere or gets passed as some horrifying abomination that makes things worse rather than better. This isn't some individual proposing to make the bill worse on purpose to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of government, it's a structural issue that produces that outcome systemically. Now you expect I'm going to suggest having the individual states do it. There are some states that aren't full of big banks or spooks or government bureaucrats, all we need is for one of them to do it. Which would work if they weren't subject to the same problematic federal laws as private enterprise is, created by the same problematic process, which is the reason the market isn't already taking care of this. In order for the states to do things better, first the feds would have to stop standing on their feet.
- joeyrideout 8y ago*Patreon said ?
- noelsusman 8y agoSubscribeStar was composed almost entirely of people banned from Patreon for various reasons, including things like dropping n-bombs in videos and blocking search-and-rescue boats from saving migrants in the Mediterranean. It's not surprising that big, mainstream companies don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole. Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on how to commit terrorism, but that doesn't get as much attention for some reason.
- davidb_ 8y agoSubscribeStar servicing assholes doesn't make that level of collateral damage acceptable, though I do agree it is not surprising. https://twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/1073697264932052993 https://twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/107369726493205299... > I am not alt right, I am not a nazi. I've been on @SubscribeStar since @Vice terminated my @Patreon account in May. I haven't even recovered from that hit to my income. I am tired of being acceptable collateral damage in your culture wars. You sacrifice your livelihood- not mine.
- ralusek 8y agoSargon of Akkad told a group of white neo-nazis they were a bunch of "n-words," ironically, in the context of accusing them of having the same poor behavior they attempt to associate with black people. If you're familiar with the entire rest of his body of work, he is a vehement liberal in opposition of any such identity politics. He said this on somebody else's channel, not only off of Patreon, but off of his YouTube account altogether. But all that being said, it's all irrelevant. Let's say he said the n-word maliciously and was a racist, is it the role of MasterCard to prevent that person from being able to pay for a burrito? To get a paycheck from their legal employment? Why can't the expectation be that MasterCard is neutral up until the point of legality? There is a really bad authoritarian trend on the left wing to go after absolutely every neutral cog in the machine. If Reddit doesn't ban /r/The_Donald, Reddit is right wing. If Twitter doesn't ban TERFs, Twitter is right wing. Now payments? Are we going to get mad at the government for letting Been Shapiro drive on their neutral roads?
- 8y ago
- plankers 8y agoThis is good for bitcoin.
- ztratar 8y agoLinke? Stripe has a policy for not de-platforming due to political reasons.
- on_and_off 8y agoPaypal has been completely atrocious at this since its beginnings. Many horror stories of project cancelled and companies closing because Paypal had decided to close their account. We really need something better.