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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Fucking porn again.

Would you get kicked off Stripe if your users use your platform to post porn? Or, if you're a generative AI product, to generate it?

Do you have to ban porn outright, or can you be porn-inclusive but not predominantly porn? What if that area of your product / site is cordoned off?

Twitter uses Stripe and is filled with porn. Reddit and Patreon are filled with it too and they take credit card payments.

If only 10% of your users use your service for making/sharing/viewing/whatever porn, does that mean you're okay? What about 49% or 51%?

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There's no clearly defined line. This is by intent. The idea is to send a message - you can be a bit risque, but don't cause us problems or we'll suddenly decide whatever your percentage is is too much.

So many rules, especially in compliance, are like this. They all boil down to "we'll look the other way for minor violations but as soon as you piss us off, you have our full attention and not in a good way". Keeps everyone on their toes and is probably better than trying to define some kind of exact threshold (which everyone would then brazenly ride exactly on the edge of).

Note I'm not agreeing with it in the slightest.

It's very likely because Visa and MasterCard forced them to. Porn is an industry with high chargeback rate and thus problematic for credit card companies. Instead of fixing their system to verify transactions (like forcing 3d secure like system on all cards instead of dragging their feet until EU regulators forced them to) or at least give merchants any kind of way to do it themselves (today they tell you to call/email the scammer if you're not sure using the phone/email they provided - no access to message the real card owner) they just prefer to ban the whole industry.

It probably depends on how much money Stripe can make from you for dealing with the risk. For HN readers, you probably get instantly banned for life if any user uploads porn. For Twitter, they can probably take the right person out for dinner and make the issue go away.

Don't think it's solely about the money. Reputation, history, everything else is in the mix. Of course Twitter would have an excellent argument that porn is only a tiny subset of its content and it has much larger, legitimate uses.

As a founder, you don't have that reputation and track record to point to, so you'll need to be more careful, especially in the early days.

But I doubt it's about the pure dollars and cents. There's plenty of money in porn, even now. It's about having a plausible story to tell the card companies and PR. Twitter and Reddit are safe, and it's about that story, not steak dinners.

These very likely aren’t Stripe’s rules, they’re a composite of various regulations and rules imposed by banks and card networks.

Is it that hard for a company like Twitter to setup their own payment gateway or even a personal "Bank"? I know it's just kicking the can down the road, because ultimately Visa and MasterCard will block them for hosting porn.

Wanting a well-defined open deterministic rule is in large part an engineering instinct. The reality is that a degree of “it depends” makes a whole lot of sense. The entire legal system is built on the word “reasonable”.

Wasn't onlyfans also using stripe?

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