So, the updates to Gumroad’s policies have been making the rounds in the furry circles, and it worries me. I felt it would be good to summarize my thoughts here.
This is another kinda boring one, if you don’t care, skip to the tl;dr at the end.
I’m a pretty big “DIY / bootstraps” type guy, but I understand the centralization of the internet has been good for a lot of people. It’s allowed people to connect, acquire skills at an unprecedented pace, etc. However, the centralization also means it’s much more vulnerable to single points of failure - you remember the big stink everyone kicked up when Twitter was acquired by Elon?
“Back in the day”, the internet was extremely fragmented. It had its advantages and disadvantages, but it is the internet I personally prefer. People didn’t step on each other’s toes as much, there was a niche for everything, and every site had its own personality.
Nowadays, most of us use PayPal. Most of us use Twitter / FurAffinity / Discord. It’s convenient, yes, but when any of these services leave us dissatisfied (especially Discord for me, oh my god venture capital destroys personality), we’re stuck with it. If you told your friends about Revolt or Matrix, how many would make the jump? Very few, if your friends are like mine.
For what should be really obvious reasons, financial institutions do NOT like anonymous transactions. It’s very difficult to detect fraud and money laundering when you’re doing no checks. In the age of instant purchases, this is even more the case. For furries and other adult content creators, who try to stay anonymous either for privacy or to avoid retribution, this really fucking sucks. Setting up a business helps, but it’s not viable in every country, and it makes you more known to financial institutions.
In October 2021, OnlyFans banned adult content for a few days. An organization called Exodus Cry found illegal sexual content on Pornhub, and urged Mastercard and Visa to pull their services from the site. Stripe in particular uses credit cards, so that removed an entire payment processor. OnlyFans pre-emtively said they wouldn’t accept porn on their site anymore, everyone said it was asinine, we laughed, we cried, whatever. OnlyFans walked it back shortly after.
PayPal, by the way, does not allow adult content in any form to begin with (a lot of furries don’t know or ignore this and cross their fingers they don’t get deleted). Patreon and PayPal have an uneasy handshake, where adult-content creators can use PayPal through Patreon for adult stuff, provided Patreon does the moderating themselves. It probably will not surprise you to learn there are heavy restrictions. When I worked for HeatVR, Edef emphasized we could not spawn copies of a character, because it could be interpreted as incest by Patreon. Now, I don’t really disagree with Patreon’s restrictions, but it’s the principle of fictional works being restricted that I don’t like. They’re fairly lenient with furries - furries are likely Patreon’s biggest moneymakers - but I digress.
Understandably, when money changes hands, all organizations involved are doing everything they can to verify there’s nothing illegal going on with that transaction. Unfortunately, this means completely legal products (like yiff) get caught in the crossfire. Prostitution is illegal is most places, and you could make the argument yiff is a kind of prostitution (because it sexually gratifies), so it’s pulled under. Considering not even their own community can decide what’s morally acceptable (cubs / loli / shota being the most hotly debated one), how the hell would an outsider make that judgement call?
Have you ever been on /b/? That place is a fucking shithole. How about Twitter? The bowels of Reddit? Discord? Literally any semi-populated website?
Sites have to moderate their shit. Unfortunately, humans are vile creatures, and will create and upload similarly vile things, which increases the vile-ness of the recipient site.
As mentioned earlier, some of this user-generated content is hard to discern as illegal or not, so a lot of sites will make intentionally vague guidelines to give them an easy ruleset to ban shit they don’t like (or could get them in legal trouble). Remember the FA site rules change that banned some Pokemon? The site rules change that’s basically never enforced? It’s like that - they cover their asses from real problematic content by implicating stuff that’s fine or on the border. It’s a ward, a scare tactic - Argon Vile’s gallery was probably never in danger, but the fact that he and everyone else thought it was means the tactic worked.
Now I’m talking very negatively about this, but I totally get it. Five minutes on the FA frontpage will make any normie’s brain melt. What a site does to keep its garbage content under wraps will shape people’s perception of it - e6 blocks cub stuff by default unless you log in, not because the content isn’t there, but because it looks a hell of a lot better to an outsider.
Pornhub couldn’t verify whether or not a majority of their user-uploaded content was sex trafficking or otherwise illegal content, so they did a massive purge, only letting creators they trust to upload from then on. I am in support of this policy, as there really is no way to tell with some of those camera angles, but I think it exemplifies my point in this section - you cannot trust users.
The running theory is Mastercard and Stripe’s changes to its terms of service (ding, dang, and dong - older than I expected really) have finally caught up with them, and Gumroad is changing its own policies to align with the payment processors. Maybe there was some threatening from the payment processors to Gumroad, but there’s no way to know for sure.
I was under the impression Gumroad was exclusively for digital goods, but that seems to not be the case. As such, there’s potential for the same illegal and maybe-illegal content Pornhub purged in late 2020. Gumroad is covering its ass by preventing the problem in the first place. I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, but it fuckin sucks for the 3D modellers that hosted their titty and cock VRChat avatars. I’m being glib, but it genuinely is nice to have a place that’s not a fucking subscription site to sell your shit.
I have seen from comments discussing Gumroad’s change that a lot of creators want to move to itch.io. Having used itch.io, I can confirm it also uses PayPal and Stripe, so it’s only a matter of time before it’s not viable either. Even worse, a huge influx of furries onto itch.io, who all link PayPal and start using it, will absolutely draw PayPal and Stripe’s attention, accelerating this process.
The boogeyman!
A couple years ago, NFTs made their debut, and the internet hivemind (rightfully) bashed them as the scams they were. Unfortunately, the conversation got generalized (as it tends to) to encompass all crypto stuff. I am a fan of cryptocurrency myself, though I haven’t found much practical use for it yet - entirely because of the opinion it was decided everyone will have on crypto.
Cryptocurrency is decentralized, so there’s no good way for a single point (i.e., a Mastercard) to decide they don’t take your money anymore. Especially if you keep all your assets in crypto, it’s basically untouchable. There’s transaction fees, so we’re not escaping that, and the inevitable power usage conversation1, but I think overall crypto is the future - even if that future is 2040.
But cryptocurrency is very unpopular. The internet hivemind decided it is the worst thing in the history of the world for a year or so, before moving on to something else. Now that the dust has settled, there’s potential for normal conversations about crypto to happen - though shitheads trying to get rich quick will always exist. Please do your research.
I like Monero (XMR) the best - it’s a bit unwieldy (all crypto is), but I am a fairly technically-minded person, and I believe more people should try things before dismissing them as “too hard”. It has a focus on privacy, it’s open-source, and there are a few fun things you can do, like mining pools (p2pool, etc.). I am considering adding a Monero option for donations, Wrangler, and future projects. Obviously this would all be above-board. Do your fucking taxes.
Patreon and PayPal are able to shake hands and allow adult content on the platform, with some heavy restrictions. A new platform which allows digital-only goods could sway PayPal and its ilk. It would need to be heavily moderated, and only allow non-”real” content - i.e., no non-fantasy ferals, drawings / 3D only, etc. It could allow selling image packs, 3D models, and video games.
This platform would take a lot of work, but I think it could take the place of Gumroad and itch as an adult-content-first digital marketplace. Not unlike Subscribestar, but without the subscription requirement. One-and-done transactions are more my style anyway…
Furry branding would be nice too, would help keep the site focused. I talked earlier about the fragmented internet; sites nowadays make themselves generic to attract the widest audience possible. I, however, believe in making 3 websites that are focused, instead of 1 that is generic / reusable - though only stylistically. DRY and all that.
Like in the DOS days!
I think this one would get you into even worse legal trouble.
yeah right like Edef’s gonna just walk away from $90k/month are you joking
I think paid yiff is gonna have to adapt or die out. I can say I think locking off an HD version of an image, especially in the age of generative “AI” (ML), is kicking the can down the road. Some artists put a lot of work into their creations - and others are just sponges that suck up money while not producing anything.
Crypto is more of a stop-gap solution than a long-term one, though again, I think it would help prevent this shit from happening in the future. A new platform would be a good long-term solution, provided PayPal and other payment processors are willing to cooperate (unlikely).
Maybe I’m the guy to get this shit fixed, maybe I’m not. I genuinely don’t know, and I don’t have the answers, just ideas. If you wanna chat about this, send me an email - regentenxing [at] proton mail dot com - or a note on FA, or a message on itaku. I am genuinely interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this issue, possible solutions, etc.
Thanks for reading, sorry for another long and dour one. Short whatever stuff I just talk to with my friends, and fun stuff I also talk to with my friends. Sorry!
we live in a society fuck you
Please consider how much energy and materials are used for creating a single Euro or US dollar. Ink, cloth, plastic, heat, metal, and electricity all go into creating coins and bills. A lot of it is recycled, yes, but it’s still a lot of resources used for physical currency. Cryptocurrency’s resources are semiconductors (which are arguably worse than paper, I know) and electricity. Electricity can be from a renewable resource, which leaves just semiconductors as an “input” that can’t be recovered. In my opinion, it is a better use of materials to set up a few Raspberry Pis than printing millions of paper or metal currency. ↩