Am I misunderstanding this? Has their website also been suspended?
I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.
But, in the comic it says "We still have our website" and the address in the panel is electricraccoon.com, but I think that if I open that site it says:
> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente
> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador
Nube.
> ---
> The online store has been momentarily suspended
> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.
Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.
The author bio at the bottom says "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here"." Which are up https://electricbonescomic.comhttps://www.alwaysraininghere.com I think they just decided to blow their self-promotion opportunity for an inside joke.
In some countries books are removed from the store if you say "Free Palestine".
I live in the Netherlands- a country that prises itself in hyper individuality. It can be a little tiring but never boring. People here are born without filters. Cold, blunt, callous, rude, insulting but always free.
Isn't this exactly what certain webcomic authors wanted? The platforms are showing them the door. As they say if it is not government making the rules it is not censorship. It is something that some webcomic authors fully wanted and have actively supported politically.
Glad to see this comment here. "It's a private platform, they can ban whomever they want" leftists chanted ad nauseam! "I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs leftist who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
Uhm, first off, Sir this is a Wendy’s. I appreciate the attempt to try to claim the Leopards meme but it only vaguely applies to bluesky. Credit card companies, the company that bought Tumblr, Meta, Twitter, etc. are not big lefty institutions. Do we even have institutions?
Agreed. Only one side in academia, on college campuses, etc. has called for censorship and the "sanitation of online spaces" over the past two decades: the left.
The "ads" for other articles in the middle of the comic are jarring, disruptive, and keep making me wonder if that was it but then you scroll way down and there's more
I am absolutely confident that the people who created this comic would not be happy with everything that isn't illegal being allowed on the websites and social medias they frequent.
Any time furry stuff gets banned, people claim it’s an attack against queer people because seemingly most furries are queer. Of course many queer people do not identify as furries, but they’re getting dragged in by those that do because claiming persecution for being a furry is going to garner much less sympathy than claiming persecution for being queer.
Hosting on your own website is a GREAT solution for avoiding platform censorship, and the tools to do so easily and cost effectively exist.
That leaves two key issues: getting paid, and discovery.
Getting paid (at a minimum, enough to cover hosting bandwidth and art supplies, but I like to dream some artists earn at least a tiny bit from their work) works now but is VERY fragile. Just a couple of vendors offer mostly-not-censored payment services (eg: Patreon) and if they stopped due to pressure from credit card networks, governments, or billionaires it would be difficult to replace them.
As for discovery, we need to build platforms that aren't the major social networks that can help audiences find new comics. This is a fairly easy problem to solve.
Everybody with any interest in their work not being ephemeral and out of their control should self-host it and syndicate it elsewhere. I believe the acronym other prosyletisers of this approach use is POSSE but what's important is that the idea is made into a consistent best practice.
I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”
When you are mostly just shown content that you’ve agreed to see, there’s less of an issue when you see something that offends your particular sensibilities, values, etc. because you agreed to see it, or you went looking for it.
But when the potential content you’ll see can include literally anything, there is a real incentive for the platform to make that content as neutral as possible. Because if you’re shown something that you really don’t like, you’ll stop scrolling and the engagement stats will go down.
The core issue is that now the internet is full of non-technical people so you're not getting the critical mass to make self-hosting a thing. So you absolutely need a platform. And when there's a platform, there is social pressure that the admin should ban certain types of content. Once people decide to ban some content, it's a matter of time before the tides shift and you have a huge crowd screaming "I never thought that Leopards would eat MY face!".
> I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”
It's a shift from social media to entertainment media. Even Zuckerberg said it himself, his apps are NOT social media anymore.
That doesn't make sense. If the algorithm worked, you get none of offending contents. And the algorithm usually works on most platforms.
The problem, clearly, is that there are people who can't accept the public preference of contents. It's just that. They want ragebaits, politics, rich guys talking, whatever it is, to be more popular and influential than whatever being targeted this week. That is the root cause of this problem.
For the algorithm to work it needs to have data, and to get that data it needs to show you a variety of things.
I can imagine that some people don’t want to see extreme content, even briefly in order to train the algorithm. Hence the drive toward making all content neutral.
If I create a new Instagram account, and the first 5 things I see are various extreme things (of different "ideological stripes"), I'm closing the app, not waiting for the algorithm to adjust itself to me.
The only subreddit I've ever been banned from in 20+ years is /r/comics. Lifetime ban for a single offence of questioning a comic strip. According to the mod: "This is a fan subreddit, this is not a discussion subreddit." There's plenty of discussion on there, but I now realize it's highly filtered. It took me too long to figure that out because it mostly aligned with my views up to that point.
We're in bubbles everywhere now. Enforced by mods and payment processors and social networks. I'm now much more careful about what I post online. We don't have an actual public square to discuss things.
We barely get indie anything online now. We have fake indy outlets like Buzzfeed and Vice, but blogs are excluded from search results. IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes carry some public reviews but even they are being deprioritised for AI summaries.
I don't really understand the topic: if I go to Hazel and Bell website it says that the comics are meant for 18+ adults. But the article is ablout school librarians for children not allowing the comic.
School libraries were always censored heavily.
Using online payment processing for censoring is a separate issue that unfortunately comes up heavily (money is supposed to be neutral as long as its used legally), but they shouldn't be mixed together with the school library question.
This reminds me of Altered Carbon's Head in the Clouds, where exceedingly wealthy Bancroft kills prostitutes during sex, because he can afford it.
What if there was a massage parlor downstairs, perfectly legal and allowed, which marketed and sent wealthy patrons upstairs?
But whatever. Aside from the slippery slope argument of OnlyFans which I guess can be dispelled, I think using the raccoons for broader appeal and calling porn "queer" is poor.
Even less popular: I think there's a simple business argument to credit card companies and regulating porn. The sector has way higher fraud, disputes and chargebacks.
For what it's worth, I find the Bluesky moderation system quite reasonable. I would like it to be part of the sign-up flow rather than getting buried in the settings, though.
I've never seen someone actually get blocked on Bluesky, but post filters do block things the Puritan American media would dislike by default. Blowing people up is fine but nipples aren't, same with any social media site, really.
Payment processors getting into the whole thing is gross, though. I wish cryptocurrency was good for more than just speculation, gifting, and crime. Maybe when the mythical Digital Euro comes, which is supposed to be a self-managed cryptocurrency wallet system tied to real money, we'll be able to get over Mastercard and Visa.
Look. This has been bugging me for decades. Every time a topic like this gets brought up, I can't square it with the fact that, right now, I can go find a hundred different websites where I can pay with a normal credit card or bank account number to watch videos of people pissing and shitting on each other, stuffing bed posts or larger into every bodily orifice a human has, man on man, woman on woman, trans galore, dressed as animals, doesn't matter. It's on platforms specifically meant for such content, they have to keep records proving the people depicted are 18 and consenting to what was filmed, and they have to pay the CC Bill tax, but none of this requires self-hosting or crypto or bulletproof domain registrars. Tbey're all .com sites not being DNS-blocked, discoverable on Google.
What is it people actually want? If you want to be able to create anything whatsoever legal and get paid to sell it, you can do that. If you want it to be as easy and controversy and bureacracy free as putting today's stock prices and last night's sports scores on a public ticker screen in Times Square where ten million eyeballs a day can see it without specifically asking for it, sorry, I don't think that's happening.
They want their specific content shown to as many people as possible. They don't want to have their content limited to over-18 or NSFW websites.
The thing is, I think that the content-hosting platforms' broad "NSFW content is not welcome" rules is great. While I may not object to seeing a male nipple pop up in my feed, I won't object if male nipples never pop up either.
It is working the way I want it to, but it sounds to me that the complaint is that I should at least see this type of content occasionally even if I don't seek it out, which seems completely bonkers to me.
I do think it's important to have intermediate categories. A world in which there is only "family friendly" content on the mainstream platforms and everything else, including extreme fetishes is shoved together into the sketchy no-name sites would be bad. On the one hand, it would associate a lot of people whose content is reasonably close to the mainstream with the extreme ends, on the other hand, it would confront a lot of users with extreme stuff even if they don't really have an interest in it.
As a concrete example: What the queer community wants is do become more accepted as a normal part of societies. Telling them "you're not welcome here, but feel free to promote at pornhub with the other freaks" would be the exact opposite.
Lastly, "content" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's possible that large commercial platforms can show stuff that small indie artists would be getting banned for.
> As a concrete example: What the queer community wants is do become more accepted as a normal part of societies. Telling them "you're not welcome here, but feel free to promote at pornhub with the other freaks" would be the exact opposite.
That's not a bad example; what would the other "freaks" be in this situation? Transgenders? Furries?
The IRL people I know who are the L, G and B in LGB<insert rest of alphabet here>... are most definitely not on board with being lumped in, as a group, with transgenders. Or furries.
Censorship means someone took your freedom of speech. That hasn’t happened here. They’ve only lost freedom of reach. Webcomics in the old days just had normal old web sites. Nothing stops them from continuing to do it the old way. Many webcomics do.
If you want the reach of a big platform, comply with their TOS. To the extent possible use the big platforms to steer people to your normal web site where your uncensored content is. This isn’t hard.
One potential option (not without downsides, admittedly) is to publish a clearly-self-censored version on social media and link back to the website for the full one. Also RSS.
The pisser about third party websites is they have full control over the content and there's really not much of a way around that. Enough outcry can do it, but it's a tough time to get enough of that.
63 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 4.5 ms ] threadI was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.
> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente
> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador Nube.
> ---
> The online store has been momentarily suspended
> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.
Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.
As I understand it, money is the core of it. Everything else would be accessory if the payment processor part got solved.
the advertising industry in general is a plague on a great many things, in the current instance of late stage capitalism we exist in.
I live in the Netherlands- a country that prises itself in hyper individuality. It can be a little tiring but never boring. People here are born without filters. Cold, blunt, callous, rude, insulting but always free.
What countries remove books from the store if you say “Free Palestine”?
I am skeptical; which countries are these?
Are they similar in any way to Palestine in terms of censorship and lack of human rights?
Coincidence? I think not.
Is there something wrong with commenting a factual statement? This is objectively not censorship.
That leaves two key issues: getting paid, and discovery.
Getting paid (at a minimum, enough to cover hosting bandwidth and art supplies, but I like to dream some artists earn at least a tiny bit from their work) works now but is VERY fragile. Just a couple of vendors offer mostly-not-censored payment services (eg: Patreon) and if they stopped due to pressure from credit card networks, governments, or billionaires it would be difficult to replace them.
As for discovery, we need to build platforms that aren't the major social networks that can help audiences find new comics. This is a fairly easy problem to solve.
It’s not a matter of censorship, it’s a matter of taste.
When you are mostly just shown content that you’ve agreed to see, there’s less of an issue when you see something that offends your particular sensibilities, values, etc. because you agreed to see it, or you went looking for it.
But when the potential content you’ll see can include literally anything, there is a real incentive for the platform to make that content as neutral as possible. Because if you’re shown something that you really don’t like, you’ll stop scrolling and the engagement stats will go down.
It's a shift from social media to entertainment media. Even Zuckerberg said it himself, his apps are NOT social media anymore.
The problem, clearly, is that there are people who can't accept the public preference of contents. It's just that. They want ragebaits, politics, rich guys talking, whatever it is, to be more popular and influential than whatever being targeted this week. That is the root cause of this problem.
I can imagine that some people don’t want to see extreme content, even briefly in order to train the algorithm. Hence the drive toward making all content neutral.
If I create a new Instagram account, and the first 5 things I see are various extreme things (of different "ideological stripes"), I'm closing the app, not waiting for the algorithm to adjust itself to me.
And if you do comics that size, please think of the poor laptop/desktop users and lay out more on one line...
We're in bubbles everywhere now. Enforced by mods and payment processors and social networks. I'm now much more careful about what I post online. We don't have an actual public square to discuss things.
School libraries were always censored heavily.
Using online payment processing for censoring is a separate issue that unfortunately comes up heavily (money is supposed to be neutral as long as its used legally), but they shouldn't be mixed together with the school library question.
What if there was a massage parlor downstairs, perfectly legal and allowed, which marketed and sent wealthy patrons upstairs?
But whatever. Aside from the slippery slope argument of OnlyFans which I guess can be dispelled, I think using the raccoons for broader appeal and calling porn "queer" is poor.
Even less popular: I think there's a simple business argument to credit card companies and regulating porn. The sector has way higher fraud, disputes and chargebacks.
I've never seen someone actually get blocked on Bluesky, but post filters do block things the Puritan American media would dislike by default. Blowing people up is fine but nipples aren't, same with any social media site, really.
Payment processors getting into the whole thing is gross, though. I wish cryptocurrency was good for more than just speculation, gifting, and crime. Maybe when the mythical Digital Euro comes, which is supposed to be a self-managed cryptocurrency wallet system tied to real money, we'll be able to get over Mastercard and Visa.
What is it people actually want? If you want to be able to create anything whatsoever legal and get paid to sell it, you can do that. If you want it to be as easy and controversy and bureacracy free as putting today's stock prices and last night's sports scores on a public ticker screen in Times Square where ten million eyeballs a day can see it without specifically asking for it, sorry, I don't think that's happening.
They want their specific content shown to as many people as possible. They don't want to have their content limited to over-18 or NSFW websites.
The thing is, I think that the content-hosting platforms' broad "NSFW content is not welcome" rules is great. While I may not object to seeing a male nipple pop up in my feed, I won't object if male nipples never pop up either.
It is working the way I want it to, but it sounds to me that the complaint is that I should at least see this type of content occasionally even if I don't seek it out, which seems completely bonkers to me.
As a concrete example: What the queer community wants is do become more accepted as a normal part of societies. Telling them "you're not welcome here, but feel free to promote at pornhub with the other freaks" would be the exact opposite.
Lastly, "content" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's possible that large commercial platforms can show stuff that small indie artists would be getting banned for.
That's not a bad example; what would the other "freaks" be in this situation? Transgenders? Furries?
The IRL people I know who are the L, G and B in LGB<insert rest of alphabet here>... are most definitely not on board with being lumped in, as a group, with transgenders. Or furries.
If you want the reach of a big platform, comply with their TOS. To the extent possible use the big platforms to steer people to your normal web site where your uncensored content is. This isn’t hard.
How terribly oppressed you are!
The pisser about third party websites is they have full control over the content and there's really not much of a way around that. Enough outcry can do it, but it's a tough time to get enough of that.