Comment by halbritt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halbritt | Hacker News Reader

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I think one of the bigger complaints as I understand it, is that Patreon is a de facto monopoly in this space and their rules for these circumstances are arbitrary and capricious.

The outstanding question seems to be whether this merits a degree of outrage, not whether we as a society should pass some laws that would protect creators from Patreon.

I know very little about Sargon of Akkad, but as I understand it, his comments were made in a video in which he was being interviewed, not a video that was being funded by Patreon. There's some question about the context of the comments, as to whether he was making them as an example of something a nazi might say or whether they were directed at a particular group. I don't really know.

Patreon's response was that when one of their creators exhibited behavior they didn't approve of outside of their platform (i.e. videos funded through them) that they would demand contrition and be the sole arbiter as to whether that contrition was sufficient.

Sounds worthy of a little outrage to me.

Patreon is not a de facto monopoly. There is twitch (for subscription/donation), ko-fi (direct donation), mailing a check, PayPal, stripe...

Patreon may not be a de facto monopoly but the MasterCard Visa cartel are and they leaned on the downstream payment processors to ban the Patreon competitor SubscribeStar as soon as they took on Carl Benjamin.

https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1076886857445711872?s...

And MasterCard and Visa operate their cartel in cooperation with banks and federal regulators. To what degree does the first amendment apply to entities that are regulated and protected by the federal government?

Just FYI, you're linking to a Nick Monroe tweet. Monroe is a well known internet harasser who fancies himself a journalist because he digs up information to doxx people. What he characterizes deep dive investigations are mostly just him publishing the personal details of people, primarily on the left, and calling them pedophiles. He also, from my experience, seems to have pretty severe psychiatric issues.

It's possible you are linking him because you believe he's a good source. It's possible you aren't aware of this and got the link to him via someone you follow. It's possible you just did a global search because you remember the story and his tweet came up. I'm not making an inference about you.

I am instead assuming you didn't know this, and that you might want to be told about it so you can be cautious about to what extent you trust his ability to relay the situation. This doesn't mean he's intrinsically wrong, but in the same regard that if Alex Jones says something he's not intrinsically wrong, but you might voluntarily opt not to cite him as evidence that Queen is a lizard.

I don't see why this character assassination was needed - are the facts in question here? Here's a transcript of the interview that the "well known internet harasser" linked: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...

You can clearly see the lines he quotes in it. The words are by Patreon's own Trust and Safety representative:

MATT: Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?

JACQUELINE: No - this was entirely Patreon’s decision.

MATT: Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.

JACQUELINE: No, I’m not passing the buck off. The thing is we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated.

MATT: Well if it’s your mission, then payment processors are irrelevant. It’s your mission. That’s what you’re pursuing.

JACQUELINE: We’re not visa and mastercard ourselves - we can’t just make the rules. That’s what I’m saying - there is an extra layer there.

Ok, let's make it hypothetical (and I think it's worth discussing because there are other examples / it will happen soon anyway) - is the blocking by payment processors on more-or-less arbitrary grounds good idea? Don't THEY have the monopoly? (not treating BTC & co. seriously, sorry)

Because I (as I think most people) would be fine with the Patreon ban, had the payment processors' cartel stayed neutral (in our theoretical case). But once they side with Patreon, it is truly complete deplatforming, that you can't really solve by going to "another, more permissive, website".

And that is the real problem.

I assume every word of what you wrote is true and it still does not mean he’s not a journalist. Sarah Jeong is a racist and harasser and she’s on the board of the New York Times.

More importantly, some nobody with a twitter account did a better job of investigative journalism than the New York Times and you’re criticising the nobody?

The winner-take-all phenomena of tech is described elsewhere in this topic at length.

Patreon has no viable direct competitor for subscription based donations. You may not consider that to be a de facto monopoly, but that’s a semantic argument that’s orthogonal to my point.

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