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Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

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271–280 of 433 posts

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#271
post #198
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon is not a government body. If you host a bake sale open to everyone in your house, you can and should kick out the screaming lunatics that keep making a mess. The screaming lunatics are free to host their own bake sale at their house.

>>Patreon is not a government body. Ok, and. Do you believe only governments are a threat to free speech? Free Speech is a concept that every person, every company, every government should work to up hold. While governments can and have been the source of censorship, that is not the only source. Today free speech is under massive assault not by Government but by Society at large, society it seems have lost all respec…

Mostly, society at large has - finally! - lost all respect for the screeching lunatics who try to incite violence and destroy democracy, and we're starting to kick them out of places.

I'm all in favor of that.

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#272

Patreon is starting to take off for open source, too, which is great. I set one up and it offsets a good deal of the infrastructure costs for my projects. Many FOSS Patreons have pretty low figures - please go looking for them and support your tools!

how do I find them?

Go look at the home pages and git repos and such, there'll probably be a link.

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#273
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Patreon is not a government body. Ok, and. Do you believe only governments are a threat to free speech? Free Speech is a concept that every person, every company, every government should work to up hold. While governments can and have been the source of censorship, that is not the only source. Today free speech is under massive assault not by Government but by Society at large, society it seems have lost all respec…

No it isn't, it's an exercise in property rights and a reminder that most of the "internet" as we know it, including this very board, is private property. Barring a legally binding contract or criminal activity, no one is under any obligation to protect the civil rights of those on their property. If I wanted to hold a "whites only" house party and turn away minorities at the door, I can do that. If I refuse to allow…

" forcing people to listen is only going to worsen the situation you describe."

Personally I don't think these companies should be legally forced to support freedom of discourse on their platforms by the government.

I think that consumers should force the companies to support free speech, and they should punish companies that support censorship by boycotting those companies into bankruptcy.

The world is a better place when it is free from censorship. Censorship is still bad, even if it is legal and done by private parties. Censorship supporting people and companies should be bankrupted by the market.

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#274
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh... Such a predictable response I should have address this in my original comment Sure the Right of association, and I suppose property rights give them the legal ability to this. However most of these platform publicly and loudly proclaim themselves as "Free Speech Platform", open to all points of view, open to all. Even in the public responses to the outcry over the bannings on Patreon their first statement was…

Well fine, sue them for false advertising. Or if that's untenable than let's get a law passed that says if a business claims, as part of its marketing, to support a right then they have a legal obligation to civilly enforce said right at their place(s) of business. I'd be on board with that. As for the rest, it would appear I'm thinking more from an (American) legal perspective and the implications of various measure…

>As for the rest, it would appear I'm thinking more from an (American) legal perspective and the implications of various measures that might be taken,

No you are seeing me state that is a violation of Freedom of Speech and jump the erroneous conclusion that I desire some kind of law, or legal penalty for that violation. I do not.

I merely want to people recognize that it is infact a violation of the concept and stop defending companies when they violate the concept or at least stop saying that is "not a free speech violation" when it clearly is.

If you support the censorious actions have the balls to call them censorious and stand by them.

> Am I violating someone's right to free speech if I refuse to listen on account of exhaustion? Would my old college dormitory's "quiet hours" be considered "societal sanction"?

Aside from the fact this is strawman lets address it anyone

Inaction on your personal part of not listening would not violating the other persons right to express themselves.

You showing up where the person is speaking with a bull horn to suppress their speech is, setting fire to a building to shut down speech is, blocking the entrances to building where speech is taking place is, boycotting advertisers is, calling employers and getting people fired is.

See all of the examples I give are POSITIVE actions people use to SUPPRESS the speech of others.

As to your college dorm "quit hours", this likely would not be a free speech violation either provided the dorms where not promoted or advertised a public space where people free to express themselves and that the hours where clearly known , established and enforced uniformly. How if there were not published quite hours, and tue night there was a vegan rally that was allowed to occur, but then on wed night there was gun rights rally that was shut down because of "quite hours" then yes I would consider that to be free speech violation.

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#275
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us be honest though, github is bad enough that so many free software projects are using a proprietary web service for project organization. Having the primary source of proceeds to keep the project afloat also on a proprietary web service is really, really dangerous.

It's a difficult problem for sure. I actually built an open source donation platform before I did a Patreon page [0]. Over the past 2 years, I've earned $1500 on it. I've always had an average of maybe $20-30/mo in recurring donations, plus anywhere from $0-$300/mo in one-offs (usually on the left of that scale). Until last month, I had been making $30/mo in recurring donations on the FOSS platform, and now I'm up to…

I can echo this, my Patreon isn't for software, but I get more per month on Patreon than I was getting per year through donations with basically the same level of marketing.

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can an American business serve "whites only" ? Are you advocating that American businesses should have the right to restrict service based on skin color ?

No and no, I'm not advocating anything of the sort. My point is simply that property holders, at least in America, are under no obligation to enforce rights. They are under obligation to not commit crimes, and as a nation we've decided that a business refusing service on the basis of skin color is a crime. Refusing to rebroadcast or support the opinions of someone you don't like is at present not a crime, and I since…

>> as it would to many pro-gunners who are usually big on personal property rights.

You do know there are many gun owners that advocate for passing laws that make signs stating a property is "gun free" to be unenforceable as a matter of law right?

And view "gun free" government buildings to be unconstitutional

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very US-centric view of free speech. In many other (developed, democratic) countries, a lot of the shit 8chan does would be viewed as incitement to violence, hate speech, and/or invasion of privacy. The absolutist conception of free speech in the US is an outlier.

It's a very libertarian (puerile) view of free speech. The rest of us understand principles like civility, that your rights stop where mine begin, don't yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, balancing rights and responsibilities, and that hatespeech is a form of assault.

That's a very (puerile) characterization of the libertarian view of freedom of speech. It's entirely possible believe both that one should be civil to others and that a centralized body should not actively punish speech.

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#278
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Patreon is not a government body. Ok, and. Do you believe only governments are a threat to free speech? Free Speech is a concept that every person, every company, every government should work to up hold. While governments can and have been the source of censorship, that is not the only source. Today free speech is under massive assault not by Government but by Society at large, society it seems have lost all respec…

Mostly, society at large has - finally! - lost all respect for the screeching lunatics who try to incite violence and destroy democracy, and we're starting to kick them out of places. I'm all in favor of that.

Antifa seems to have alot of support, they are inciting violence....

Do you support them?

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#279

There should be no middle men. Only a direct P2P model will truly benefit everyone.

I disagree. There are shared services that Patreon provides that would be a pain for creators: - Payment processing: Patreon consolidates all payments under one gateway account so fees are low for everyone. - Support: What happens if the payment fails? Creators don't want to deal with that mess every month, it's less time to do useful stuff. - Abuse handling: Patreon can deal with spam comments and the like. - Servic…

I would also like to add Ease of Use to your list.

I have had to help several of my Patrons with basic tech support issues, like setting up RSS feeds in their podcast app. And I doubt that they would be able/comfortable with working with a service that is not as easy and straight forward as Patreon.

Re: Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very libertarian (puerile) view of free speech. The rest of us understand principles like civility, that your rights stop where mine begin, don't yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, balancing rights and responsibilities, and that hatespeech is a form of assault.

Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater and immediate incitement of violence are not allowed in the US either.

>>Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater

Actually you likely can

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

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