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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been told political campaigns focused on MC/Visa forced a policy change on Fetlife (specifically which kinks you’re allowed to admit to being into) a few years back.

I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth. IMO, people should be free to discuss what they’re into, even when it’s something much more harmful than the kink involved.

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Stripe de-platformed us because their payment processor (Wells fucking Fargo, paragons of virtue) didn't like what we were selling, which was fantasy adult toys. They tried micromanaging the complaint, asking if we could remove "flesh colored" options, but we weren't going to get dragged down into that. Ridickulous.

Imagine the guidelines they must be following. Somewhere there must be a rule written down that was once debated by a committee of pious folk that literally states that flesh-coloured¹ sex toys are not okay (but purple is fine).

1: So that's what? Anything from deep charcoal black to a subtle off-white?

What y'all ended up using to accept payments?

I can only imagine how awkward it was for the Stripe employee to ask this.

That's beyond insane.

More information for those interested: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are...

Yep, it also drove them to take payments primarily via an e-check service, which promptly got owned and a huge number of FL users had to deal with fraudulent charges.

The payment industry as a whole is in the stone age.. ignoring the antiquated technology behind it all there are still a ton of industry discussions about even allowing now-legal medical marijuana dispensaries and things like that to become customers. Given that it all goes back to Visa/MC/Banks I don't expect it to change much soon.

(I work in payments)

What's fetlife? Seems like a risky google

Curious, what does that mean "risky google"? If you're avoiding seeing some graphic images, that makes sense. If you're avoiding searching it because of implications for google's tracking profile about you and how it might then rebalance future searches, then that's a pretty upsetting reflection on google / tech status quo, and fairly on-topic here. We shouldn't be afraid to seek knowledge like from a library, because of analytics, y'know?

Exactly the latter

As far as I know, there is no evidence that Google tracks or records anything in incognito mode.

I have a bridge to sell you ...

Still believe they do.

It's a social network for different sexual preferences & fetishes.

Why not use an encyclopedia? Wikipedia is safe for work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FetLife

there are definitely wikipedia pages that are nsfw...

How about if they’re into pedophelia?

I would be surprised if telling people they can’t admit to that changes how many of them there are that.

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