Really what you're saying is "start your own credit card."
Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1]
If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off.
So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition.
So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform.
We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite.
> To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."
People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them.
History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch.
This comment goes very bad when you start accusing the other person of reeducation camps, reign of terror, mass murder, and all the rest of it. Please review the site guidelines and keep this vicious, tedious slop far away from HN, if you want to keep commenting here.
Among many other rules that your comment broke, there's this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." You're required to follow that rule, and all the others, whether the other person does or not.
Edit: it looks like this account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed, as the guidelines explain, and we ban accounts that do it. I've banned this one. If you keep creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we will ban your main account as well.
Let me be clear: I do not see it as an inherently bad thing if Nazis have to put in more effort than other people to find or build a platform on which they can spew their thoughts. I do not see it as the first step on a slippery slope to a "sanitized, P.C.-friendly" world. I do not accept the dilemma you pose, in which either we must allow Nazis to run around threatening mass murder or else nobody can say anything.
I think a world without Nazis in it would be a better world than the one we have, and I think the fact that several countries already have laws in place to restrict the speech of Nazis, and they haven't led to your dystopian outcome, is a strong empirical counterargument to what you suggest.
A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."
You accidentally mixed up your scripts -- you're in favor of the people who argue for rounding up their enemies into death camps, remember? You think those people are great, and need special support and protection. So if I were to argue for rounding you up and throwing you in a death camp, you would suddenly be on my side and offering every resource you have to help me further my glorious cause. Right?
Posting like this is unacceptable on HN. Nazi evil doesn't entitle you to pour acid all over the container here. Regardless of how right you are, venting bile and taunting others helps nothing and is destructive of everything we're trying to achieve here, such as hopefully have a place for discussion that isn't flaming shit. We need experienced users like you to help build that, instead of breaking the site guidelines blatantly. This whole subthread has been hellish, and it's extremely disappointing.
Please review the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Your key flaw, and HN's key flaw -- and to be fair, one shared by a lot of other people! -- is the pursuit of civility as an end in itself. Horrendously evil people can accomplish their goals while publicly conducting themselves with perfect civility, as history has taught us again and again. And HN's stance is that that's OK, because all that really matters is they're civil about it.
This isn't the first time you've been told this. It's not going to be the last time you'll be told this. And I know telling you this isn't going to change anything, but I have to try anyway. We know now beyond any doubt (and a legion of Cassandras were telling us long ago) just how easily social-media sites (and yes, HN is one) can turn into instruments and enablers of radicalization despite openly enforcing "civility".
You know what the solution is. You know, on some level, that civility isn't an end in itself; you know that the actual ends to which people use civility as a means matter. You know some of those ends are very, very bad. And you know how to recognize the people doing it. You also hold in your hand the power to do something about it.
Abandon the civility-at-any-cost policy. Stop being an enabler for the stuff I've been responding to in this thread. Take it from an "experienced user" who's had to learn this the hard way when moderating elsewhere. Or, in keeping with the season, treat this as a visitation by a spirit who warns you of the chain you're winding about yourself, link by link, and change it while you still can.
Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1]
If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off.
So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition.
So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform.
We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite.
> To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."
People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them.
History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon [2] https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank