Gumroad no longer allows most NSFW art, leaving its adult creators panicked (opens in new tab)

I'm sure this will end well for them. I guess if you go out of business, you don't have to worry about running afoul of your choice of payment provider's requirements.

So far as I know, Gumroad is basically the artists' OF. Without porn, what will they really have left?

Aren’t there payment processors that allow adult content? Makes me wonder why a platform like Gumroad couldn’t just use a different processor for customers that mark themselves as NSFW.

> “We have been asked to be more rigorous in enforcing our ToS and must comply,” Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia told TechCrunch. He declined to say which company asked Gumroad to enforce stricter rules.

This refusal to even name which payment provider is being an ass irks me, and makes me worry that this may just be a convenient excuse to get rid of adult content 'because the payment providers made me do it'.

Gumroad already was hostile to adult content by forcing anyone looking for sex-related content (regardless of its type) to repeat every search by explicitly ticking the 'Show NSFW' checkbox way down the bottom of the filter list, and have to repeat this for every search, with no way of opting in in the settings.

> “Should Gumroad hire a lobbyist?” he asked in an email to TechCrunch.

Yes? I'm a little confused as to why platforms that feature adult material wouldn't be lobbying around payment processing requirements and regulations. I don't know much about the porn industry, but are there seriously not lobbyists in that industry?

OnlyFans got (effectively) banned from multiple states. They absolutely have a legal team and a PR team that's focused on the government. How would any platform that features adult content not be looking at OnlyFans and thinking, "maybe we should start prepping for legal/regulatory battles."?

I mean, heck, how are they not "lobbying" payment processors? TikTok basically unleashed its entire userbase on the government over a potential ban. When a payment processor starts messing with the content you can allow on a storefront, is there a reason why Gumroad isn't making contact information available for those payment processors and encouraging users to write to them? I'm sure it wouldn't help Stripe's relationship with Gumroad be any more chummy, but like... this is a business relationship, not a friendship. I don't know, these platforms act like they just got an edict from God rather than that they are being pressured by a business partner to make a business decision that their userbase dislikes. Am I out-of-line on this? I feel like when business agreements get restricted and that affects customers, it's relatively common for businesses to use that discontent as leverage in negotiations and not just say, "well, hands are tied, sorry everybody." When Sony restricted Spiderman, Disney was not shy about encouraging people to contact Sony.

I guess I assume there are complications with business relationships with payment processors that makes that harder? I don't know if there are any payment processors that do work with adult content, maybe Gumroad just knows that it doesn't have any bargaining chips to work with?

But I kind of get whiplash between looking at how companies respond to things like iOS restrictions vs how they respond to payment processing restrictions. I would have assumed that these types of businesses were already lobbying, everybody else seems to be. Maybe Gumroad is too small to have those kinds of legal resources? Is Patreon working with lobbyists? Is Kickstarter?