I’d agree with you if “platforms” were automated entities that just happen, like rain.
But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with.
It’s easy to sit back and complain about the precedent these people are setting that could be abused by other people at some point in the future. But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
> But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with.
Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding. It's the website you go to first to try to crowdfund something. That's why unstable diffusion wound up there to begin with, not because they thought it meshed well with the website or its owners, but because Kickstarter has always marketed themselves as being the all-inclusive go-to crowd funding website. In such a place, whose moral compass should guide a decision like this? The CEO? Some angry employees? Credit card processors? etc.
> But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
I mean, yes, of course. I'm pretty much making it clear that I would do that, for the principle of it. In my opinion that's basically what you're signing up for when you decide to run something like this. Until like 2012 or so, that used to be basically how most internet companies would operate with some exception. And like I said, I understand why it's not as applicable as it used to be; some things have changed. But this decision in particular? Not seeing the point. Seems like an unnecessary concession for a perfectly above-board project. Seems like the middleman getting in the way of the will of two parties without any real valid reason to do so.
> Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding.
I think this is really the crux of the issue: That there are these quasi-monopolies for certain online services.
What's possible in crowd funding comes down to what Kickstarter does. Expected behavior of a search engine is what Google does. The standards of an online dictionary look like what Wikipedia does. And what microblogging looks like is now determined by Elon.
If in each area there was a small ecosystem of, say, three to five different players, they could each find their niche, competing on something like leniency towards such projects like Unstable Diffusion, or on how to interpret free speech etc and the users could choose the service that suits their own standards.
But since for many popular online services there is effectively a single go-to site, this one site gets to set the rules that everyone has to play by.
So how do we get more variety? I don't know. It seems to be inherent in how this market of online services works that there's always one who ends up with 99% market share.
Marketing is always reductive, the real world has nuance and context.
When a company says “we’re the best platform for X”, what they really mean is “. . . Subject to terms and conditions and our right to refuse business that we find objectionable” and so on.
Try pulling up to an all-you-can-eat buffet with a trailer and cleaning them out of every last bit of food in the place with the “one simple trick” that they didn’t specify you had to eat it on the premises, just that you “could” eat it.
Taking any marketing (or really, any) statement as absolute and universal without bounds no matter what the context is disingenuous. Everybody knows that, even the “one simple trick” people who try to use reductive literal arguments to get away with stuff.
Of course Kickstarter as a company can do nearly whatever it wants and ban certain types of crowfunding campaigns, it's just sad to see this happening left and right in many fields.
At least in this case someone can just choose a different platform (and in fact Unstable diffusion has switched to some else); if you run a website and CloudFlare thinks your website is morally bad (likely because some people complained, otherwise there is no incentive to do anything), good luck defending yourself from DDoS attacks; if the Mastercard/VISA duopoly caves to public pressure and bans your organization you are basically done (even if what you're doing is completely legal).
I'd be more worried about all the obvious scams that Kickstarter supports the same amount and ignores reports about because there's not enough publicity.
To let the campaign run, they didn't have to do anything. To shut it down they had to, as you said "put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with".
What, you would be fine if they just took the donated money and didn’t transmit it to the campaign operators? If their devops just ignored the campaign if there was any issue? And somehow they don’t need to handle support inquiries from happy (or unhappy) customers?
If you really think a business like kickstarter is all fixed costs and there is zero work for a marginal campaign, sounds like you’ve found a great business opportunity. VCs will beat your door down if you’ve found a model that scales with zero marginal cost and zero work for a new customer.
But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with.
It’s easy to sit back and complain about the precedent these people are setting that could be abused by other people at some point in the future. But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?