summonercat

Miah the Summoner

@summonercat

Summoner Mooncat

  • She/Her

A Miqo'te of 28 summers that is mainly a summoner, but always is willing to try different methods.

Birthday: 6th Sun, 6th Astral Moon (11-6)

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summonercat
@summonercat
ann-arcana
@ann-arcana
staff
@staff

May 2024 Financial Update + an update on Eggbux development

hi folks! we’re doing things in a flipped order this month; news first, then numbers.

Suspension of Eggbux development due to Stripe prohibiting tipping and restricting “content creation” subscriptions

as you may have seen, Stripe recently updated their Prohibited and Restricted Businesses list to ban tipping and restrict most types of “content creator” subscriptions. to quote from the prohibited section:

Content creation

  • Transactions that provide compensation to creators without an underlying piece of digital content associated. Examples include subscriptions to free, public content or a tip button on a profile page

and the restricted section (requires permission from stripe, which they are not obligated to provide):

Content creation

Content creation related transactions

  • Content-related tips and gifts
  • Purchases of access to exclusive content or digital goods

EDIT: After we published this, we learned that Stripe had once again silently changed their policy and wording. The quoted sections reflect policy as of when we made these decisions.

ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

Suddenly Tumblr unceremoniously dumping tipping makes a lot more sense

I wonder if this is Stripe acting alone, or if the payment processors have declared a new front in their war on creatives.

summonercat
@summonercat

Probably the latter. They don't want you to make money for yourself, only the 1%.

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in reply to @staff's post:

gwenverbsnouns
@gwenverbsnouns

i think a lot of it is actually the same small number of financial entities; in a past life when i was working at a payments processor they necessarily just implemented the strictest version of the requirements all the banks they partnered with required

in practice that means that, in the US, visa, wells fargo, and mastercard all have the power to unilaterally veto access to the economy

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Xuelder
@Xuelder

It's so funny cause Wells Fargo has fucked customers so much that in a more regulated economy we would have broken them up, nationalized them, or put them under a consent decree due to their regular disregard to regulations and laws. The fact that specifically they have effective economic regulation powers due to their size should be a scandal.

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iamarat
@iamarat

"Too big to fail" is too big to exist. Nationalize and break up. The same is true of any company whose total existence failure would paralyze infrastructure.

Also, investors should have no say in a company's policies or procedures. If they don't like what's happening they should sell their stock. They should not be allowed to use stock ownership for the purposes of social engineering.

I realize that with the current United States government hell would freeze over before either option could possibly happen.

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sleeps-darkly
@sleeps-darkly

investors should have no say in a company's policies or procedures.

Depends. See ExxonMobil suing its own investors because they wanted tougher actions on climate change and were voting for that on corporate sessions. I'm not sure though about how to handle this. Maybe selling their stock would be a correct action there, maybe not.

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Aepoh
@Aepoh

Investors having say in the company and having the ability to buy and sell stock are essentially one and the same. Even if you made it illegal for companies to hold voting sessions for investors they would still query or survey their investors to get an idea of what direction they would like the company to move in. Which is always going to be money.

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zandravandra
@zandravandra

thanks for the update! the stripe thing is a real heartbreaker, I was really looking forward to the subscription feature both for myself and others. I long for the day where we can give each other financial support without all waves at payment processors this bullshit

and thanks for making cohost! this is one of my most cherished places online and I want to see it thrive

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plumpan
@plumpan

Thank you for all the work you do. It's very not publicly customer facing but I've personally put in one or two bugs that have been fixed pretty quickly, so I know you all are working hard.

Sucks that Stripe is being evil but I guess if it was always going to happen, it's good that this happened before eggbux launched. Glass half full.

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gwenverbsnouns
@gwenverbsnouns

that's so frustrating. im glad the artist alley at least seems to be doing pretty well though, and im hopeful that will continue to grow

im also glad you're prioritizing your health. i love cohost, but ultimately the people behind it will always be more valuable than the website

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lori
@lori

It's really not. Think about it: let's imagine this wasn't Cohost but some other site. Stripe lets them let their users start sending payments to each other. I guarantee this is mostly going to be used for porn, scams, CSAM, drugs, and money laundering. That's just how the internet is, and Stripe doesn't want to deal with that.

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bdorf
@bdorf

Stripe already has to deal with all those things. They have a huge money laundering and financial crimes division. Bizarre choice to just flat out ban valid use cases in ToS as if that will actually stop scammers from using the platform.

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lori
@lori

It's been banned by Stripe since...I'm going to guess probably forever in one way or another but their FAQ page about this goes back at least two years. You do not want your users becoming middlemen for money transfers. Nor does Cohost honestly because there's a lot of legal stuff that ends up happening when you start doing that, not just Stripe-related. You can't just start facilitating money transfers with nothing attached to them without becoming responsible for a whole lot more oversight. It's not just about Stripe, it's also about what the government is cool with, and Stripe especially doesn't want to become the middleman in that. Cohost goes from being a social media site to a financial service, the rules are not the same there.

Plus, even if it was that easy, think about how many transactions Stripe deals with a day, nobody could hire a team big enough to keep that in check without a ton of rules and restrictions.

I don't LIKE Stripe, but there's really no other way for something like Stripe to operate without it becoming a massive nightmare for everyone involved.

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mouri-sunlight
@mouri-sunlight

Probably why it got silently reverted, honestly. It also is directly hypocritical with things stripe advertises directly and it's highly likely it was a bad idea that nobody there realized until a chunk of their partnerbase making up... what, 5%? 10%? of their platform revenue saw the wording and brought it up (likely threatening to sue).

Stripe is the primary processor for a significant number of services that are the type of service named in the policy; liberapay, github sponsors, etc. and it's a thing that would've threatened enough companies' worth enough of stripe's revenue that I doubt stripe would survive sticking to such a policy.

I'm seeing in these comments, though, someone thinking this is a policy that's always been there silently? They might be confusing that with a specific set of US laws that allows rapid legal victory in lawsuits against companies hosting services which allow users to view pornography, that's been used to strongarm a lot of the "content creator" type websites since it was codified and has been pushed against stripe for providing payment processing to sites like OnlyFans.

They may be trying to think of some usage policy that would allow them to quickly reject possible pornography providers to avoid needing to fight the existence of these laws, without pissing off business partners like sponsorship services and medical/educational institutions, and coming up with nothing helpful.

I don't know for 100% certain what the actual reasoning is, though.

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goaty
@goaty

good luck jae!

have y'all considered pivoting to a gaia online sort of vibe? i think people would gladly pay money for little hats and shirts and hairs and stuff for a lil character with different poses/expressions next to their posts.

you could also collab with on-site artists who are interested and share proceeds with them. i'm sure people would be interested in making an outfit or some anime wings or whatever

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lori
@lori

I've actually said this same thing, the only way I could see a big influx of revenue is pivot to freemium pet site. It sounds like a joke, but if something like Lioden can still exist in 2024 and pay several employees, there's gotta be some money in it, and the audience here is the exact right kind.

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lori
@lori

Every time I've suggested it it feels like it's coming off like a joke (like "franchise a steak n shake") but I can genuinely picture it. I'm serious about this one. Get some eggbug adoptables going, give them some genetics and rare markings, monetize that, it could work.

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Hapships
@Hapships

Virtual pets and avatars would be cute, but a full game is so drastic. Would Cohost have enough staff and money to shift into another project? Sites like Dappervolk and Flight Rising relied on crowdfunding to even launch.

Also, new users purely interested in the game aspect would be comparing Cohost to competitors like Everskies. Players are going to expect monthly items, mini games, in-game currencies or trading.

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twi
@twi

i'm a member of a Legitimate Ungulate-Themed Video Game Site (invite-only so i'm just gonna leave the name out entirely, i guess) that has a system like this (you spend a currency that you earn via non-monetary contribution; you can't actually buy it with real money — not to say that makes any sense for cohost, that's just how it works) and a lot of people do seem to use it even though you can also have a regular image pfp.

you can also buy a bigger pfp filesize cap; username badges and profile themes; items that change the styling of your username (e.g make it blue or give it a glow or whatever); or privileges to an expanded set of bbcode tags you can use in posts e.g a marquee, and one that's auto-replaced with the username of the user who loaded the page. i guess the cohost equivalent of the last would be slightly de-restricted CSS privileges but i dunno what that would look like

some of these are one-time-use, some of them you buy and have forever (such as the advanced BBcode) and others have an option for both. there's even ones that let you change someone else's avatar or forum title but even though there's much opportunity for pretty great bits there i dunno if staff would necessarily wanna take on whatever kind of additional moderation burden that would entail

i could absolutely see people paying for some kind of fancy profile/username thing the way that steam has so many of those, or like a pet that chills on their profile page and follows the cursor or something. hell i'm sure people would go apeshit for the ability to set custom CSS on their profile

EDIT: realized that advanced markdown would probably actually be more like the advanced BBcode feature. many people don't come here to spend hours crafting a CSS crime, there's all sorts of graph/chart/diagram tools they could add i.e mermaid, and there's plenty of other things currently only doable with HTML tags / CSS for which a markdown syntax could be made available

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lori
@lori

It would definitely have to be closer to an old school adoptables site than something actually the scope of Lioden. But I bet there are users on Cohost who would pay more than anyone should on rare eggbugs. And in terms of monetizable features it's a lot less coding than anything else because anything else is going to be way more complex mechanically than serving up images.

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emojis-are-cool
@emojis-are-cool

legitimately, seconding this: i think it would work well. cohost is already well known for lighthearted fun customization (like css crimes and the This user can say it meme), and i'm sure y'all at staff could create some things - i would personally prefer hats on avatars rather than whole character dolls - that would be fun while not being too intrusive.

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Bonbon
@Bonbon

miniscule pet [eggbug?] hugging the corner/edge of your post such that it slightly extends beyond what in-post css can touch.
have a toggle for displaying your pet in a particular post or not.
maybe even give the option to pick a particular pet for each post if we can have multiple pets.

alternatively, the pet can substitute the like button to be especially unobstrusive.
to prevent confusion, leave like buttons as empty hearts that morph into your pet when clicked.

..alternatively yet, maybe literally just have heart-shaped like-button pets.
still clearly looks like a like button, but has a cute face and maybe accessories.
not sure if heart-only pets would be endearing enough to the userbase at large, but... maybe???

..alternatively at last, just having an emoji-sized pet by our pfp/name in posts and maybe comments might be enough.

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elden-things
@elden-things

yeah I agree, people love customization and there is a reason Gaia online has existed for like 20 years, there will always be people paying money to customize their little avatars, I think it could be a great source of income for the site

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cadence
@cadence

discord has something similar I think with the profile customisations except the discord ones are actively annoying and cringe. if the customisations were good I think it could work

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jcolag
@jcolag

Idle recommendation, speaking as someone who likes Artist Alley, wants it to succeed, but never remembers to click over there: It's be great if it produced (optional, presumably, maybe by category) notifications telling me that new ads had appeared since the last time I clicked over.

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SnepShark
@SnepShark

On desktop, I could see making the Artist Corner browser extension's (edit: userscript's) functionality (which adds Artist Alley as a sidebar on the first page of your timeline) something you could toggle in settings rather than requiring an extension.

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jcolag
@jcolag

That would definitely work. I tried the extension, early on, but it conflicted with something and got rid of the sidebar completely. But it's also a good reminder that something in this space does exist, so thanks for that, too!

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chimerabytes
@chimerabytes

Thank you for the update and for making CoHost. :eggbug-classic:

It is unfortunate what happened with Stripe, but it ultimately was the better choice to drop them. Doubly unfortunate that Eggbux had to be suspended as a result, but y'all made the best possible choices you could make otherwise in such a situation. Payment processors are just getting more restrictive which really sucks.

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asalwaysimani
@asalwaysimani

Stripe's choices to change their policy was so random and weird. Honestly what where they thinking?

Thanks for the detailed update and best of luck continuing to work on cohost I really enjoy the site and what you've all been working on.

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asalwaysimani
@asalwaysimani

Something definitely changed because I had to email their support line because they sent an email to me about closing my account because I was "unable to support your business as it falls under one of our restricted business categories," and the transitions in question were all donations from Ko-fi. Mind you it took all of 15 minutes for me to get sorted out but something definitely happened 2ish weeks ago that they walked back.

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lori
@lori

They may have changed something but the fact that they don't allow tipping as Cohost envisioned it has been true for years, so it doesn't really affect the current situation at all. It wasn't allowed to begin with.

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asalwaysimani
@asalwaysimani

They changed the wording about how you can support and tip for content creation on various platforms as well as for crowdfunding (which is what I'm assuming CoHost would have fallen under). Only they realized it was a bad move and walked it back. This wasn't a thing prior to two weeks ago that I knew of because I've been using Stripe to process Ko-Fi payments for at least the last two years with no issues.

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lori
@lori

Ko-Fi is pre-approved to do this with Stripe, you have to work with them and get approval, and you are going to require a lot of legal and financial staff and overhead for them to say yes, which is why platforms like Patreon and Ko-Fi can do that and Cohost likely can't. So if it seems like Ko-Fi and Patreon are playing by different rules...it's because they are! They were pre-approved to do so because they meet the requirements to not be a huge liability for Stripe. But Stripe has had an FAQ saying that (unless you are approved to do so) you can't have user tipping without it being attached to some kind of digital content or services since 2022. I didn't go all the way back through the archives, but as of January 2024 Stripe added the bit about tipping quoted in the financial update that banned it, then in May they reworded it a bit to be more clear but it still banned it, and the current page was updated "June" (not sure what day) but still bans it. So it's been banned the entire time, unless you have special permission from Stripe, which Ko-Fi does. Tipping is only allowed if it's tipping for goods/services (including digital content), not just tipping in general for anything. I can't find any time that Stripe actually allowed you to do this, just different ways they've worded the policy over the last two years.

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krveale
@krveale

I think Stripe sucks, the wider landscape of payment processors suck, and their bullshit is having a horrifying impact on lots of people around the globe - many of them already marginalised folks.

That said, I have to admit I was concerned when this plan first came up because It Is Very Important Not To Get Mistaken For a Bank. That leads to problems. It is even more important not to take on any of the roles of a bank.

And it felt like this was already edging up on that, with all of the regulatory horrors involved - particularly for international payments?

It sucks but may ultimately be safer for the site to shed the skink's tail now and focus on alternatives like the artists' alley.

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Veni-Vidi-ASCII
@Veni-Vidi-ASCII

"We still want to try and break Patreon’s effective monopoly." Thank you specifically for saying this. Patreon is nosediving it's integrity with no-warn bans of accounts that follow their TOS, and people should be able to have non-corporate options for supporting individuals.

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doodlemancy
@doodlemancy

i got personally screwed by this change to Stripe over on Ko-Fi too. it's so ridiculous that they've decided to exclude so many people, and i'm shocked there hasn't been a bigger outcry. 🙃 just... unfathomable. i guess they make enough as a middleman that they can afford to turn down whatever isn't Business Enough(TM) for them.

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Strawberry-Fox
@Strawberry-Fox

May I suggest something?

You could try putting a little dot on the artist alley button when there's a listing the user hasn't seen yet, kind of like how the notifications button tells you if you have a notification you haven't looked at yet.

You could even make it so the user can decide what tags an entry needs to actually make the dot appear. (so a person who is only interested in NSFW games doesn't get constantly baited by other things they aren't gonna click on.)

I've had a bit of a read through the comments here and it looks like at least a few people forget to check the Artist Alley, so a little poke for those who want it could be nice!~ (Although if you make it, make it optional. Some people may find it annoying.)

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van-goghs-smoking-skull
@van-goghs-smoking-skull

It was a nice thought, but if it can't be done as it is now, it can't be done now, and that's life. The blame on that is all on Stripe. punting Stripe into the sun And I hope you feel better soon, jae. Thank you and the rest of Cohost Staff for all you've done and all you do

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kaceydotme
@kaceydotme

Thanks for the update!

Personally, I would appreciate if Artist Alley had a faster turnaround from purchase to approval. I tried it out for my last video and it took nearly a week from the time I paid for the ad to when it was approved, and that's not great. I intended to use it to help promote my new video during the ever-important first couple of days that determine if it gets pushed to the algorithm, and that can't happen if it takes a week for a human to click "yes" on it. Until that changes it's unlikely I will be using it for promotion again.

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kaara
@kaara

Oh, this is a payment issue. We should probably add a notice to the listing page or the stripe checkout page.

Listings are (barring some kind of extenuating circumstance) reviewed within 1-24 hours. However, we can't approve your listing until your transaction is approved. For most payment systems this will take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. ACH payments, such as direct debit or a bank account payment, can take days to come down the pipe. The reason why it took so long for your listing to be approved was due to this fact. We should be more transparent about this (but i also want to be careful about the number of infoboxes on the listing creation page. ill sleep on it!)

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stardew
@stardew

i hope you will consider the whole thing with, "we promised no ads" vs "if we don't do user-run ads the site will die and at that point having promised no (user) ads doesn't matter bc the site is dead" (* i mean ads on dashboards or sidebars or footer of the site etc rather than just artist alley)

user ads are a vastly different thing than generic evil capitalism ads and i think the absolute majority of ppl view it that way and considered the "we wont use ads" statement to be about evil capitalism ads rather than promoted content from fellow cohosters and small businesses. not all ads are equal the same way not all algorithms or all ai usage is equal. nobody is mad about ai that helps diagnose cancer, and more or less nobody is gonna be mad about user-made, organic, locally grown ads either (as long as they're not really annoying and really intrusive and behaving overall evil).

but yeah aside from that, maybe consider what someone else here said about adding some bonus features to profile images or blog layouts or whatever that can be one-time silly purchases as an option to subscriptions (even if its not an entire gaia online dressup system), and like ive said before, your merch shop is pretty invisible and hard to find.

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AverageFanEnjoyer
@AverageFanEnjoyer

Corpos really can never make a decision people like, eh?

It sucks to see the future state of Cohost buckle due to on crap like this. Despite not using this site nearly enough (though maybe that’s the point, considering your organization’s philosophy), I absolutely love it. Hopefully your expenses get to stabilize and finally start breaking even within the year. I truly wanna see this site succeed.

Thanks for sharing this update, though! And please, thank you for letting me use this site.

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nyxe
@nyxe

boop, to add my 2cents to the ad-comments, i personally would not enjoy ads directly-on-dashboard, and quite like having the artist alley as it is right now bc as a curious human i like to look at it and delve into a completely new world every now and again. but only when i am in the mood for it and choose it. no matter if the ads are homegrown or not, i do not wish to see something i did not explicitly choose to see. anxiety and all that.

if such a thing became implemented (having them on dashboard), i'd really hope for an opt-out and also to not obligatorily have a "notification dot" next to it bc that would give an unpleasant brain itch.
i was actually quite surprised to see so many in the comments immediately jump to "add ads on dashboard".

i still like to pick and choose and manually navigate the internet all by myself, thank you :)

edit: where are my manners! thank you for creating the site, cohost admins.

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