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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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I might as well mention it here, even though it's very tangential: today, Gumroad announced that NSFW content will no longer be allowed on the platform (well, I say "announced," but it's more that this KB article was uploaded/updated today).

For those who don't know, Gumroad is a sort of storefront service, akin to Etsy and the like: you open your storefront, add products (generally digital, but there's some allowance for selling physical goods), and people can buy from you. Simple as. The thing that's notable about Gumroad is that probably something like 80% of all products available on Gumroad are NSFW art of various kinds--many 18+ artists who take commissions or run Patreons and the like tended to open up a Gumroad storefront to sell monthly content and such a la carte to fans and others interested.

Now, granted, even previously, Gumroad did have limits as to what you could sell, but I think the hardest line was essentially "no porn of or between living humans." It was otherwise pretty permissible and you could indeed find anything from explicit cosplay to explicit illustrations and everything in-between.

However, some months ago, Gumroad added PayPal support (and/or they had it even further in the past, but removed it at one point?), and was already also using Stripe for credit card processing. Both these companies, as you may know, tend to disallow their services being used to purchase adult stuff (and they themselves attempt to pass the buck to the credit card companies themselves, who have had a policy of not supporting adult stuff because of allegedly high chargeback rates from embarassed men). The announcement today was perhaps inevitable, but still quite disappointing.

If Gumroad didn't do this, they'd presumably lose support and be choked off from money for too long. The CEO did at least try and bargain for an extension to the deadline, but no dice. Every day, the argument of "just build your own financial system" seems like less and less of a ridiculous proposition.