the spirit is weak. woe be the spirit. the body is weaker still. Siërra R
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ask me about horses
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i cant wrap my head around why we're letting payment processors determine if we get to buy/sell pornography? the system is just like that? and the system's definition of what counts as porn is getting, shall we say... broad?
im no booklearnin politics knower but i feel like we gotta start doing some. stuff. soon
this is a big reason why i hope someone figures out how to do a cash-like payment method that doesn't involve enormous energy and pollution production bc a big part of the issue is that these are the kinds of problems we would just solve by, using cash
for sure.
the engineering mindset tells us to start by enumerating the constraints
a lot of these goods are digital and their audiences aren't physically nearby. that's why cash isn't usable. hm. what do we do about that.
the short answer is that allowing consolidation in payment processors, and the decline of cash with the rise of online transactions, created this situation where it only took some vague legislation to create this massive multi-year crackdown
I hope we start voting by going to strategically chosen peoples houses together
payment processors are being used as a cudgel more than acting of their own accord, i think. the rumors i've heard is that they're afraid of getting slapped down by some federal regulator who decides to look just a little closer at how "risky" the transactions they're processing are. since "porn" is classified as "high risk," financial institutions that deal with it are required to do more extensive.... finance stuff i guess to derisk it. most don't want to bother, so they don't deal with anything that smells like it could get them slapped with a fine.
i believe the keyword is "operation choke point" if you want to take psychological damage. there are people working on it but it's damn hard vs conservative oil barons/tech airheads.
it's worth noting here that there are a number of payment processors that will process adult content
but they're more expensive than the big payment processors. this is for a variety of reasons, at least some of which are actually good reasons that make sense. for example, nsfw content tends to see high rates of chargebacks and fraud, which is inconvenient and expensive for payment processors to deal with
a big general platform that serves mostly SFW material is going to be using one of the big, cheap, mainstream payment processors. if that payment processor complains about content, what is that big general platform going to do? dump their payment processor for one that charges 2-3 times as much for every transaction, including the SFW stuff that makes up most of their sales? unlikely.
so NSFW creators get pushed off of general platforms and onto separate, dedicated platforms that have much smaller customer bases and pass those higher costs onto creators
