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Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

OP missed the elephant in the room. Patreon is the only platform that allows you to launder softcore (nothing explicit from in front of a camera) NSFW content with legitimate payments. There is an incredible amount of erotic artwork, drawings etc. that are sold through Patreon instead of having to resort to niche adult video site payment processors.

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That's an interesting fact, but it doesn't seem to be an essential a part of competing with Patreon like having a basic understanding of artists' lives and business models is. The author's goal wasn't to document all the ways in which someone might try to take part of Patreon's business, they're simply documenting a few of the essential elements of a creator funding platform that Patreon competitors have heretofore failed to understand.

Allowing or disallowing specific categories of content is a lower-level business decision than understanding your customers' basic needs.

> Allowing or disallowing specific categories of content is a lower-level business decision than understanding your customers' basic needs.

It's not when your sites majority income comes from a specific theme of posts. Patreon knows this, because they thought of it as a low level decision in the wake of credit card companies NSFW adversity. They then had top pursue other avenues of clearing NSFW content, because their business have tanked. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/patreon-to-roll-out-tools-...

Subscribestar has successfully pivoted from "Patreon but you can post right-wing propaganda" to "Patreon but with less restrictions on horny stuff". Patreon is slowly but surely becoming more hostile to horny stuff; right now I'm in the middle of going around with their support over horny creators having to provide some additional identity verification through a third-party site that isn't working on my computer or my phone.

SubscribeStar still features the golden one, an open neo-nazi, as one of their hand picked "success stories" on their frontpage, so I don't believe they really pivoted, if anything they expanded.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Neo-nazis and pornographers, to this day, are still at the forefront of payment shenanigans.

Genuine question, do you use the term pornographer merely descriptively or derogatorily?

Descriptively.

Thank you.

The issue is that "less restrictions on horny stuff" means "more restrictions from payment processors" nowadays. Doubly so if you're a Russian platform like Subscribestar is.

hahahhaa Subscribestar is Russian? Well that's gonna be fun for all the furry artists posting super-gay stuff on there once it gets big enough for the Russian government to notice.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the Russian government actually cares about homosexuality. It's for internal consumption only, for the purposes of establishing a convenient domestic 'other'. If they have to choose between a revenue source and enforcing the morality policies of the state in a way that doesn't interfere with the internal propaganda machine it's clear which option wins.

I don't get the impression Russia's censorship laws are applied outside Russia. You can find tons of gay stuff on Yandex's image and video search without being coy about the search terms.

yandex left russia

yandex operates from moscow

Whether or not it's tolerable enough for the Russian government probably depends on whether or not SubscribeStar is keeping up with giving the appropriate people in the Russian government a cut of their money.

Wonder if they will care if it's mostly a foreign audience.

Russia's MO - and the only thing they're good at - is information warfare. They don't care about the furry porn as long as it lets them propagandize the far-right in other countries.

The Russian government will probably subsidise them to further weaken the West.

Then they’ll be disappointed. Accepting gay stuff does not weaken any country or region.

That's not Russia's MO. Their goal is to continue funneling money to far-right westerners and having a funding platform lets them do that. Furries using it provides plausible deniability in the same way that anti-censorship activists using Tor provides deniability for CIA agents.

Getting $country to pander to $minority_population is a pretty universal tactic for subjugating a population.

…but tricking millions of men into lusting after big booba vixens instead of other humans (of either gender) may.

Yes, but they operate from american llc.

There's a non zero amount of hardcore artists that kind off manage to avoid patreon's restrictions, I've not looked too deep into it, but at least one does it by making all the explicits public, the patreon rewards are mainly WIP's before they're too graphic or coaching and crediting without showing anything

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