Patreon suspended my account. They have not notified me • Hacker News Board

Re: Patreon suspended my account. They have not notified me

#171

Post by smsm42 » Fri, Dec 28, 2018, 7:54 AM UTC

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #153

smsm42 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most definitely censorship. It is not state censorship, and it is not prohibited by the law, but it's definitely an activity targeted to suppress expression of ideas Patreon censors do not like, and it is clearly fitting every reasonable definition of censorship. The fact that it's not state censorship and thus not aided by state repressive apparatus makes it less abhorrent, but still harmful enough. Especially…

Again: these are private businesses, free to do business (or not) with whomever they choose, for completely arbitrary reasons. If you want to fight that, you have to fight capitalism.

Again, you are confusing "something is not currently prohibited by US government" with "something is moral and ethical thing to do". US government is prohibited from exercising content-based censorship by US constitution. This does not mean a private business - which everybody knows is not prohibited by the US constitution from exercising censorship, so you can stop reminding everybody about it and pretending it somehow is a serious argument that somebody didn't hear first 1000 times - is right to produce censorship. The fact that doing this is legal is the lowest bar, but it's not an excuse that magically makes it OK. It just makes whoever does it to avoid jail. Fine, they're not in jail. They should still stop their attempts to institute censorship, even though we can't jail them for it.

> If you want to fight that, you have to fight capitalism.

Bullshit. People regularly fight legal actions by private corporations, and regularly win. Society has hundreds of ways for corporations to stop doing something that is legal but is seen by society as harmful. Capitalism is still alive and well.

Re: Patreon suspended my account. They have not notified me

#172

Post by xrd » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 7:26 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #170

xrd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good point, agreed. It seems like, however, you will be more subject to taxation issues (Coinbase is likely going to report big transactions to the government) than to arbitrary evaluations (that lead to frozen accounts) made by payment processors. Put another way, I think it will be relatively easy to do something like Patreon in cryptocurrency. Ingress will be simple. Converting that into a fiat cur…

> It seems like, however, you will be more subject to taxation issues (Coinbase is likely going to report big transactions to the government) than to arbitrary evaluations (that lead to frozen accounts) made by payment processors. Definitely both. Banks have tons of "know your client" requirements. And in most cases, you wouldn't be large enough client so they'd bother to even call you before freezing your account on…

I stand corrected. It does seem like you are constrained in either case. Until you can do everything inside one of the cryptocurrency ecosystems, you will be indeed subject to the whims of the current financial system. That control bleeds into everything it touches.

Re: Patreon suspended my account. They have not notified me

#173

Post by asabjorn » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:41 AM UTC

ryanlol wrote: post #166

asabjorn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than what the outrage over the censorship of other viewpoints are? To me what they are doing seems more like an act of faith in social justice that is most likely really bad for their business

I rather doubt that outrage over Patreon banning users to keep their payment processors happy would hurt their relationship with said payment processors.

In the call with Matt Christiansen they said this was entirely their decision.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...