If you live anywhere in the comics world, whether as a creator, crowdfunder, or reader, chances are you already know what happened.
Kickstarter announced new guidelines affecting NSFW projects after Stripe, its payment processor, refused to process payments for some NSFW projects. Following significant backlash, Kickstarter reversed course and returned to its previous policy. Many applaud the reversal as, a blow to censorship, looking to get back to normal
But was one set of guidelines really going to be worse?
The answer depends on your perspective.
On one hand, many creators view these restrictions as a form of censorship. Stripe argues that it must comply with requirements imposed by the financial institutions and card networks it works with. Ultimately, however, decisions about acceptable content are still being made somewhere within that chain of authority.
I’m no fan of the flood of AI-generated NSFW projects that have appeared on crowdfunding platforms in recent years, and I wouldn’t be sorry to see many of them disappear. At the same time, Kickstarter has historically taken a hands-off approach to content and to projects that fail to deliver. Given that history, it’s not surprising to see the company reluctant to become the final arbiter of what can and cannot be funded.
What concerns me is the uncertainty.
If creators are expected to follow Kickstarter’s rules, but approval does not guarantee that a project can be processed by the platform’s payment partner, then the real standards become difficult to define.
And if those decisions are increasingly automated, that uncertainty only grows. Anyone who has watched content moderation struggles on large platforms knows that automated systems do not always understand context particularly well.
Would leaving the new guidelines in place have caused disruption?
Almost certainly.
Would it have been the worst thing to happen to the platform?
I’m not convinced it would have been.
For creators, clarity may be more valuable than flexibility. Even rules we dislike are easier to navigate than rules that seem to shift beneath our feet.
Keep Creating,
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