Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics

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 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.

Oh no, people don't want to host your furry porn.

How terribly oppressed you are!

Good thing, it's only webcomics! Would be a shame if everyone f*cking self-censored online and wrote stupid sh|t like "unalive" or "seggs".

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.

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

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.

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.

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; more importantly, nothing about this seems to be specific to the sexual orientation of the banned content, despite the spin.

The only thing that actually seems to be an issue here is the credit card processors.

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.

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.

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.

The deep dark secret you’re all shrivelling from here is Google is a monopoly and visa mastercard is a duopoly.

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.

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.

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May I suggest that if you have a message, you put it in text above the endless scrolling comic panels?

And if you do comics that size, please think of the poor laptop/desktop users and lay out more on one line...

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.