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0 pointstavavex1mo ago0 comments

This is the common explanation I see when this topic comes up, but it always made zero sense to me. It frustrates me that people fail to realize the amount of purchaseable things that could qualify as 'explicit'. This is Kickstarter. Do we really think that someone crowdfunding a risque board game or comic is as likely to ask for a chargeback as some middle-aged man trying to hastily cancel a subscription on some porn site?

And there's just so many more things you can pay for. Physical stuff. Art prints and comics. Game mods. Art commissions. Services that aren't just video platforms (social media, hookup apps and so on). There's so much more stuff out there that's not child-friendly, and I bet that all of these categories have different amounts of financial risk atrached to them.

So why are all these different things grouped under the widest net, with the worst offenders being used as reason to deny processing to the entire market segment? Why did they ban all explicit content and not just porn site subscriptions or whatever else has the most chargebacks?

This comment thread is confidently trying to steer around this topic, but there is ideology mixed up in this, and probably to a way larger extent than you think.

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4 comments · 3 top-level

majorchord1mo ago· 1 in thread

How do you define the difference between explicit content and porn?

tavavexOP1mo ago

When we're talking about the examples people bring up in this comment section to illustrate high chargeback rates ("Uncle Derek bought a $500 subscription in a stupor and his wife is about to find out"), the definition would be something like "live action video recordings of humans engaged in sexual activities". Explicit content is a superset of that, also including all the other examples I gave.

Note that I'm not saying we should ban that. I'm just saying that if the 'unbearably high chargeback' excuse had merit, they would've been precision-striking just those categories of sales, instead of opting to nuke everything that humans find sexual, regardless of medium, type of product/service, artistic merit, popularity and so on.

danudey1mo ago

Note that, under my reading of these rules, Baldur's Gate 3 would not be allowed on Kickstarter. Nor would Mass Effect, since it has "sex acts or implied sex acts" (depending on what they mean by "implied").

antoniojtorres1mo ago

Why are they casting such wide net? I’ve always wondered the same thing, my experience with adult content in the digital advertising world is that there’s a group dynamic that emerges and all but erases the “political will” that would cause certain businesses to make the first move in clearly defining what they carve out categories are, so it all backslides into fairly broad categories. It’s lot of heat in some scenarios and it paralyzes companies (motives varying depending on market position and situation of course)

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