Being collateral damage in the culture wars of the West | Hacker News Reader

Being collateral damage in the culture wars of the West

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114 pointsdragonbonheur45 comments

In April of 2018, when Vice Magazine’s lawyers pressured Patreon to drop my account, I had no other options that would enable me to keep my YouTube channel going.

ZOMG that's so evil! She complained that you didn't respect her desire to remain anonymous, so you destroy her livelihood? Why would any source trust Vice to safeguard her anonymity or indeed to do anything they promised after this saga of shitty behavior? Answer: they rely on sources not knowing anything about them, because after all the sources don't have the iron control of the social media "conversation" that Western journalists have.

[EDIT: removed speculation]

Well, ok, but why did Patreon agree to drop her account? That seems like important context.

Patreon's deplatforming policies are capricious and draconian because they have to keep financial partners happy, and the policies of those partners are capricious and draconian. Those with enough social media and commercial power can deal (in fact if TFA is believed it appears they can actually steer the machine of injustice). The author of TFA cannot deal, which is the entire point of TFA. We always knew in our hearts that "twitter as help desk" was unjust at some level. This is a concrete example of that.

[EDIT:] Now that I've read to the end of TFA, she buried the lede! This woman has been subject to so much shitty behavior! She was the third customer of a Patreon competitor, "SubscribeStar", and one of their largest customers, so the bastards just shut down the entire site. Now it appears that it's back up: https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/7863

Again, okay, but which specific deplatforming policy did they use in this case?

Covered here: http://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naom...

I have a solution to your Patreon issues, see my other comment below. I would be very interested in talking to you if collecting Ethereum is an alternative you are considering.

https://www.subscribestar.com/naomi-wu

Here’s another, better alternative, that actually works, right now.

Because Wu doxxed some of the journalists in retaliation.

Absolutely was not retaliation.

It's sad that an organization like the NYT would engage in unbecoming behavior to protect one of their own's bad behavior (going against an agreement not to basically doxx someone) and going so far as character assassination because what Naomi Wu claimed went against the NYT's narrative.

This is what power does without accountability.

This is the New York Times. This is not unusual. Journalists shit on people who can’t hurt them all the time. The New York Times is different only insofar as it can shit on more people from a greater height. Journalistic ethics is a lie.

There really should be a way to "roll your own Patreon" for individuals. Whatever your individual viewpoints on each of the de-platforming incidents in the recent past, having them all be lumped into one service makes it easier to take down and disrupt the users of said service. I don't think Bitcoin is necessary yet given the amount of additional complexity for the average creator and average patron, just a separate web page that allows for recurring subscriptions.

Payment processors are worse the Patreon especially mastercard so unless you manage to get around them you're not going to be able too.

"Build your own X" has its limits. The payment processors are the ones that will be and are the censors. Enough social-media shrieking and Mastercard and Visa willingly bend to the loudest voices. We don't yet live in a world of ubiquitous/easy crypto, and mailing cash or money orders around is not feasible at scale. Only government regulation will heal the imbalance.

SexyCyborg (and others): I would love for you to check out https://finneyfor.com. It is Ethereum based (not Bitcoin), but specifically designed to remove the problems that so many Patreon users have dealt with AND something that an average blog reader can use without understanding cryptocurrency at all (beyond getting some on an exchange like Coinbase).

"FinneyFor facilitates collecting Ethereum (ETH) from your customers (readers, fans, or otherwise). FinneyFor does not require your users have a special browser, nor browser plugins. Collection happens on your site, but requires no server side components."

FinneyFor works with Jekyll and WordPress. Would appreciate any feedback, positive or negative.

Sad story. And just one more stake in the heart of NYT's credibility.

Jeong was already infamous for defending[0] the U. of Virginia rape hoaxer[1].

[0] https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/11/04/report-jury-rules-...

[1] https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/03/flashback-new-york...

Found the story as written by SexyCyborg in the post very hard to follow, plus it felt a little too self serving to take 100% at face value.

I'll admit though, I saw her once on Hacker News the first time she went viral, later read that Reddit "expose" and then promptly never thought of her again. It took a while to walk back what I thought was happening so I could understand what was going on.

This video [1] helped me get the actual context of the article.

The West honestly doesn't come off well in this, but neither does China really. More of the same "are the people with power over others using it with decency and respect?"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0dkwwV_iaw

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