Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics | Hacker News Reader

Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics

xtramagazine.com

127 pointsTomte117 comments

I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”

When you are mostly just shown content that you’ve agreed to see, there’s less of an issue when you see something that offends your particular sensibilities, values, etc. because you agreed to see it, or you went looking for it.

But when the potential content you’ll see can include literally anything, there is a real incentive for the platform to make that content as neutral as possible. Because if you’re shown something that you really don’t like, you’ll stop scrolling and the engagement stats will go down.

> I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”

It's a shift from social media to entertainment media. Even Zuckerberg said it himself, his apps are NOT social media anymore.

The core issue is that now the internet is full of non-technical people so you're not getting the critical mass to make self-hosting a thing. So you absolutely need a platform. And when there's a platform, there is social pressure that the admin should ban certain types of content. Once people decide to ban some content, it's a matter of time before the tides shift and you have a huge crowd screaming "I never thought that Leopards would eat MY face!".

That doesn't make sense. If the algorithm worked, you get none of offending contents. And the algorithm usually works on most platforms.

The problem, clearly, is that there are people who can't accept the public preference of contents. It's just that. They want ragebaits, politics, rich guys talking, whatever it is, to be more popular and influential than whatever being targeted this week. That is the root cause of this problem.

For the algorithm to work it needs to have data, and to get that data it needs to show you a variety of things.

I can imagine that some people don’t want to see extreme content, even briefly in order to train the algorithm. Hence the drive toward making all content neutral.

If I create a new Instagram account, and the first 5 things I see are various extreme things (of different "ideological stripes"), I'm closing the app, not waiting for the algorithm to adjust itself to me.

The algorith works by showing you angering and radicalizing content. Angry people scroll longer. Frustrated people scroll longer. And people who feel bad a out themselves scroll longer and but fad diet stuff. Which makes ad price go up.

Algorithm works, because it prevents people from consciously curating own feeds.

I don't see much logical integrity in that comment...

The only subreddit I've ever been banned from in 20+ years is /r/comics. Lifetime ban for a single offence of questioning a comic strip. According to the mod: "This is a fan subreddit, this is not a discussion subreddit." There's plenty of discussion on there, but I now realize it's highly filtered. It took me too long to figure that out because it mostly aligned with my views up to that point.

We're in bubbles everywhere now. Enforced by mods and payment processors and social networks. I'm now much more careful about what I post online. We don't have an actual public square to discuss things.

I'm banned from /r/domains/ for daring to question the land rush of speculators buying .SI "Super Intelligence" domains and trying to resell them to the die hard true believers of a certain political figure. No great loss. If you ever want to see a subreddit that makes bitcoin true believers look like rational, sane individuals...

show of hands on how many of us have been banned from /r/worldnews for talking in less favorable terms about that middle east country that starts with an I.

This is why people need to meet in person even more. We do have a public square and it's outside and offline.

I got shadow banned on Duolingo forums for questioning why a billion dollar company was not paying some of the people who helped develop their language courses.

Duolingo is flawed anyway. It's influenced heavily by strong form of Universal Grammar theory which is like differences between languages ought to be superficial to our brains that mere exposure to another language should allow us to spontaneously perfect that new language, which is the kind of a view that is easily disproven by existence of LLM itself. Recognizing values of efforts made by volunteers or creators of supplemental materials unique to each languages also contradicts with the theory too, so it's consistent for Duolingo to treat such complaints against neglected recognition to be worthless.

How does the existence of LLMs disprove that theory?

LLMs are like walking and talking physical form of language determinism. They think in English, their non-linguistic performance e.g. spatial reasoning is limited, and also their performance drop when dataset linguistic purity drops. They're like a lossy compressed archive that decompress into the most appropriate response given the prompt as the key, or they are "intelligence" defined by a repository of language as opposed to being a standalone intelligence that can talk through a thin I/O wrapper which should be what intelligence should be according to that form of UG theory.

I don't think they think in English. It's a whole lot more complicated than that. The external auto generative loop can use English or whatever other language is supported by the token embeddings. But internally the 'thinking' happens on a far more abstract level than the tokens themselves, those are merely the indices to the first and last layer components.

The way it "teaches" Turkish downright proves your point.

At this point calling them courses is giving DL too much credit.

Good thing, it's only webcomics! Would be a shame if everyone f*cking self-censored online and wrote stupid sh|t like "unalive" or "seggs".

~~YouTube~~ Google ads and its advertisers have been a plague upon Video essay creators.

The official COPS YouTube channel posts episodes now with even the tamest word of all - "narcotics" - bleeped and all the paraphernalia is blurred.

I didn't know you could get arrested for possessing a half ounce of blur, but here we are in 2026.

It's more TikTok and Instagram which aggressively filter these words no matter the context.

Ok, but why? Because advertising wants maximum audience. Which means you can't show horrors of war or else Nestle won't allow you to show their product banner down.

There is probably more to it than that. If the platform can censor the content then it is capable of identifying it and so can choose not to display a Nestle ad. That would be a more palatable solution for the ad platforms and also probably acceptable to most companies. If users want to watch something on a platform what do they care? The article makes a good case that this is something more like Operation Choke Point or the itch.io deindexing where the financial system is being mobilised for political ends.

It is an interesting use case to monitor because there are obvious need for something like crypto, but so that has not come close to taking hold.

>>If users want to watch something on a platform what do they care

Because on both TikTok and Instagram people don't actively choose(most of the time) what they want to watch. The algorithm chooses for them. So if you're a content creator and you self censor yourself then you're making it more likely the algorithm will pick you, because they can show ads around your content. They will say they aren't censoring because the other videos are not technically banned, but no content creator wants to be skipped by the algorithm.

Can you show the horrors of Nestle and the 10 million babies they killed, not for ideology, just for higher dividends.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24452/w244...

I'm aware of the irony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_Nestl%C3%A9

It takes a lot to get your own attrocites page on Wikipedia

> ads

the advertising industry in general is a plague on a great many things, in the current instance of late stage capitalism we exist in.

In some countries books are removed from the store if you say "Free Palestine".

I live in the Netherlands- a country that prises itself in hyper individuality. It can be a little tiring but never boring. People here are born without filters. Cold, blunt, callous, rude, insulting but always free.

> In some countries books are removed from the store if you say "Free Palestine".

What countries remove books from the store if you say “Free Palestine”?

UK - Sally Rooney

> In some countries books are removed from the store if you say "Free Palestine".

I am skeptical; which countries are these?

Are they similar in any way to Palestine in terms of censorship and lack of human rights?

I see what you did there

Look. This has been bugging me for decades. Every time a topic like this gets brought up, I can't square it with the fact that, right now, I can go find a hundred different websites where I can pay with a normal credit card or bank account number to watch videos of people pissing and shitting on each other, stuffing bed posts or larger into every bodily orifice a human has, man on man, woman on woman, trans galore, dressed as animals, doesn't matter. It's on platforms specifically meant for such content, they have to keep records proving the people depicted are 18 and consenting to what was filmed, and they have to pay the CC Bill tax, but none of this requires self-hosting or crypto or bulletproof domain registrars. Tbey're all .com sites not being DNS-blocked, discoverable on Google.

What is it people actually want? If you want to be able to create anything whatsoever legal and get paid to sell it, you can do that. If you want it to be as easy and controversy and bureacracy free as putting today's stock prices and last night's sports scores on a public ticker screen in Times Square where ten million eyeballs a day can see it without specifically asking for it, sorry, I don't think that's happening.

You shouldn't have to go to PornHub to read a comic book depicting an exposed nipple.

> You shouldn't have to go to PornHub to read a comic book depicting an exposed nipple.

And we didn't; I clicked the link and saw exactly what you said we have to go to Pornhub to see. What's the problem here?

> What is it people actually want?

They want their specific content shown to as many people as possible. They don't want to have their content limited to over-18 or NSFW websites.

The thing is, I think that the content-hosting platforms' broad "NSFW content is not welcome" rules is great. While I may not object to seeing a male nipple pop up in my feed, I won't object if male nipples never pop up either.

It is working the way I want it to, but it sounds to me that the complaint is that I should at least see this type of content occasionally even if I don't seek it out, which seems completely bonkers to me.

I do think it's important to have intermediate categories. A world in which there is only "family friendly" content on the mainstream platforms and everything else, including extreme fetishes is shoved together into the sketchy no-name sites would be bad. On the one hand, it would associate a lot of people whose content is reasonably close to the mainstream with the extreme ends, on the other hand, it would confront a lot of users with extreme stuff even if they don't really have an interest in it.

As a concrete example: What the queer community wants is do become more accepted as a normal part of societies. Telling them "you're not welcome here, but feel free to promote at pornhub with the other freaks" would be the exact opposite.

Lastly, "content" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's possible that large commercial platforms can show stuff that small indie artists would be getting banned for.

> As a concrete example: What the queer community wants is do become more accepted as a normal part of societies. Telling them "you're not welcome here, but feel free to promote at pornhub with the other freaks" would be the exact opposite.

That's not a bad example; what would the other "freaks" be in this situation? Transgenders? Furries?

The IRL people I know who are the L, G and B in LGB<insert rest of alphabet here>... are most definitely not on board with being lumped in, as a group, with transgenders. Or furries.

Everybody with any interest in their work not being ephemeral and out of their control should self-host it and syndicate it elsewhere. I believe the acronym other prosyletisers of this approach use is POSSE but what's important is that the idea is made into a consistent best practice.

And build their own payment processor and universal social media platform to link it in I assume?

> payment processor

If only crypto was actually used as intended...

I do wonder how easy is it for buisnesses, that only accept crypto (lets say monero), to turn it back into fiat, and how willing are regular people to set up and acquire crypto to pay.

Isn't problem in initial coin distribution/conversion into crypto rather than out of it? If each of your 1000 fans had 3 creators they want to support, there has to be minimum 1k and up to 3k conversions from fiat to crypto, plus up to 3 total in reverse. The reverse process can be deferred and delayed a bit, but the forward process cannot be.

At an individual level, the forward process is only done 3 times and you can reverse it in batches as slow as you wish. And after the first time you have to do it, all of the friction is gone, since you've already setup your exchange method.

In principle crypto solves the first problem, but suffers from networking effects: creators won't list crypto for payment because most people don't use it; most people don't use it because there's nowhere it can be used.

As for a universal social media platform, that used to exist. It was called "webrings". Every website would link to other websites they vouched for, so you could browse around them, and sign up for those you liked by clicking a single button on your browser of choice, adding it to your RSS feeds, after which you'd be notified whenever a creator you subscribed to posted something new.

Most of that died when Google decided to oppose RSS as a public-facing feature, and pressured Firefox in doing the same. So nowadays it suffers from the same networking effects problem crypto does.

The whole thing is deliberately engineered to centralize decision-making in the hands of as few people as possible, aka elites, and, through that, to steer most of the masses in whatever direction most benefits those elites.

https://xmrchat.com

The "ads" for other articles in the middle of the comic are jarring, disruptive, and keep making me wonder if that was it but then you scroll way down and there's more

I am absolutely confident that the people who created this comic would not be happy with everything that isn't illegal being allowed on the websites and social medias they frequent; more importantly, nothing about this seems to be specific to the sexual orientation of the banned content, despite the spin.

The only thing that actually seems to be an issue here is the credit card processors.

Any time furry stuff gets banned, people claim it’s an attack against queer people because seemingly most furries are queer. Of course many queer people do not identify as furries, but they’re getting dragged in by those that do because claiming persecution for being a furry is going to garner much less sympathy than claiming persecution for being queer.

Am I misunderstanding this? Has their website also been suspended?

I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.

> While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues

As I understand it, money is the core of it. Everything else would be accessory if the payment processor part got solved.

Meh, the audience comes with the content.

If only every third NSFW-artist from tumble migrated into the fediverse, the audience would follow and maybe even lead some of the other artists to join as well.

The dedicated fanbase, sure. But not people who don't actively seek out sexy raccoons, although they might read the comic if it shows up in their feed when they're bored. So not being able to post on popular platforms costs them a customer-acquisition funnel.

The usual solution is to put conspicuous censorship markers over everything the platform finds objectionable and then let the audience know where they can buy the uncensored edition.

That's my thought too. As the comic illustrates, artists have had to community hop before. It feels like there's some potential for a good match, despite occasional technical challenges like instances winding down.

That happened for Twitter and then defederation happened. The benevolent dictator of Mastodon did NOT stand up for freedom of speech for art, and that headshot Mastodon dead.

Same almost happened with Bluesky later at much smaller scale due to skepticism and again moderation happened.

That's why Twitter reigns supreme.

I literally can't make out what you're trying to allude to.

Mastodon isn't the entirety of the Fediverse and is decentralized, so artists can just start create their own instance if they really need to. But, there are actually already multiple art related instances, like mastodon.art.

> If only every third NSFW-artist from tumble migrated into the fediverse, the audience would follow

... and at least a fair few fediverse instances, especially ones based in Europe, would defederate with NSFW friendly instances in order to stay compliant with relevant laws.

Federation between instances is nice, but it's not necessary for the Fediverse to deliver freedom from Big Tech censorship.

Even in the extreme, theoretical case of full defederation you could just browse your communities by having a sperate account on every relevant server using a multi-account client.

It also reduces the impact if you lose an account: Since they are all single-purpose, you can easily create a new one replacing the one you lost.

Federation was supposed to be the key to ActivityPub revolution until Mastodon blew up and got flooded by legitimate non-Western contents. Then everything became "optional" and "discretion" became important. That also caused stats fetch from Misskey instances to mysteriously stop functioning, despite the main Misskey.io instance now having 4.25x more posts from just 15% less users compared to the official mastodon.social instance and therefore must be a very important part of the Fediverse.

(or 20x more statuses and 2.5x more users relative to baraag, FWIW)

Or you could use Nostr, where there is no “account” and you simply republish all your content at whatever relays allow it. If your identity is banned from one relay, people can still get your content from others, and the identity never needs to change.

The headline doesn't really describe the content. Their website is fine.

But, in the comic it says "We still have our website" and the address in the panel is electricraccoon.com, but I think that if I open that site it says:

> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente

> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador Nube.

> ---

> The online store has been momentarily suspended

> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.

Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.

The author bio at the bottom says "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here"." Which are up https://electricbonescomic.com https://www.alwaysraininghere.com I think they just decided to blow their self-promotion opportunity for an inside joke.

Ah, thank you! I thought I must be doing something wrong, and even clicked the contributor link at the bottom, but couldn't find it. Oddly, I seem to see a different bio and no links on the page.

> "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here". "Always Raining Here" is a Canadian slice of life romance published in 2025 by First Second books and is now available in bookstores across Canada. Hazel and Bell have been working together since 2011, with a focus on telling stories set in their home province of British Columbia."

I wonder if it's something region specific.

It's not. You see the same bio, which is why your quote begins with the exact text that yorwba provided.

The comics have dedicated sites; the artists' website is https://hazelbell.ca/ . None of those sites appear to have any problems.

You should be aware, if you weren't already, that you can find the websites associated with artworks or people by searching for them; it isn't necessary to follow links that may or may not appear on an unaffiliated website.

When everything is either extremely anodyne or extremely provocative, you have follow one line OR the other to a T, with absolutely no inbetween.

So if you're writing about "cute" racoons in a relationship, either they have to be the most ragebaity, most anger inducing, most obnoxious stereotypes of people like Lesbian Space Princess, or be 100% Bland and show absolutely no nudity, no relationships, and just be blank slate cute racoons. Ironically, only being 50% committed to some ideology is the new Bland.

It works both ways too, see the Instagram Comments section, or even just Instagram.

The deep dark secret you’re all shrivelling from here is Google is a monopoly and visa mastercard is a duopoly.

For what it's worth, I find the Bluesky moderation system quite reasonable. I would like it to be part of the sign-up flow rather than getting buried in the settings, though.

I've never seen someone actually get blocked on Bluesky, but post filters do block things the Puritan American media would dislike by default. Blowing people up is fine but nipples aren't, same with any social media site, really.

Payment processors getting into the whole thing is gross, though. I wish cryptocurrency was good for more than just speculation, gifting, and crime. Maybe when the mythical Digital Euro comes, which is supposed to be a self-managed cryptocurrency wallet system tied to real money, we'll be able to get over Mastercard and Visa.

Hosting on your own website is a GREAT solution for avoiding platform censorship, and the tools to do so easily and cost effectively exist.

That leaves two key issues: getting paid, and discovery.

Getting paid (at a minimum, enough to cover hosting bandwidth and art supplies, but I like to dream some artists earn at least a tiny bit from their work) works now but is VERY fragile. Just a couple of vendors offer mostly-not-censored payment services (eg: Patreon) and if they stopped due to pressure from credit card networks, governments, or billionaires it would be difficult to replace them.

As for discovery, we need to build platforms that aren't the major social networks that can help audiences find new comics. This is a fairly easy problem to solve.

Censorship means someone took your freedom of speech. That hasn’t happened here. They’ve only lost freedom of reach. Webcomics in the old days just had normal old web sites. Nothing stops them from continuing to do it the old way. Many webcomics do.

If you want the reach of a big platform, comply with their TOS. To the extent possible use the big platforms to steer people to your normal web site where your uncensored content is. This isn’t hard.

One potential option (not without downsides, admittedly) is to publish a clearly-self-censored version on social media and link back to the website for the full one. Also RSS.

The pisser about third party websites is they have full control over the content and there's really not much of a way around that. Enough outcry can do it, but it's a tough time to get enough of that.

Facebook for example heavily punishes, or even makes certain accounts pay, for linking out of their ecosystem.

We barely get indie anything online now. We have fake indy outlets like Buzzfeed and Vice, but blogs are excluded from search results. IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes carry some public reviews but even they are being deprioritised for AI summaries.

There's plenty of NSFW stuff on Bluesky. You just have to set your account as able to see it.

Why are visa and Mastercard doing this?

Homophobia

I wonder how soon someone will leave a comment here saying something like, “Aaactually, this isn’t censorship.”

Pre-emptively announcing the existence of an opposing view doesn't invalidate it.

One minute after your comment, as it turns out.

The comment you mean was posted the minute, your comment was posted.

Coincidence? I think not.

>I wonder how soon someone will leave a comment here saying something like, “Aaactually, this isn’t censorship.”

Is there something wrong with commenting that factual statement? This is objectively not censorship.

Here you go )

There facts go )

You guys do everything in your power just to avoid calling a spade a spade. What you call “facts” is really just juggling terminology and devaluing meanings. Honestly, I just don't understand what's stopping you from simply admitting that you just like censorship - that's a valid point, and I can respect that. So why don't you just say so? Huh?

This reminds me of Altered Carbon's Head in the Clouds, where exceedingly wealthy Bancroft kills prostitutes during sex, because he can afford it.

What if there was a massage parlor downstairs, perfectly legal and allowed, which marketed and sent wealthy patrons upstairs?

But whatever. Aside from the slippery slope argument of OnlyFans which I guess can be dispelled, I think using the raccoons for broader appeal and calling porn "queer" is poor.

Even less popular: I think there's a simple business argument to credit card companies and regulating porn. The sector has way higher fraud, disputes and chargebacks.

I don't really understand the topic: if I go to Hazel and Bell website it says that the comics are meant for 18+ adults. But the article is ablout school librarians for children not allowing the comic.

School libraries were always censored heavily.

Using online payment processing for censoring is a separate issue that unfortunately comes up heavily (money is supposed to be neutral as long as its used legally), but they shouldn't be mixed together with the school library question.

I don't see where school libraries are mentioned.

May I suggest that if you have a message, you put it in text above the endless scrolling comic panels?

And if you do comics that size, please think of the poor laptop/desktop users and lay out more on one line...

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