Important Campaign Update (Patreon)

TLDR:  https://subscribestar.adult/corablue 

When Patreon announced that my campaign was in violation of community guidelines over Arcadia, which is essentially a survivor story, there are a few things I knew that I had to do.

1. Insist that Arcadia had a place on Patreon and argue for its merit as an artistic work and point out that just because something is porn doesn’t mean it’s devoid of a message.
2. Refuse to even attempt to scrub its presence from the internet, Discord, or my personal website. If it came to that, my campaign would have been left as it is, to be suspended in protest.
3. Do my honest best to abide by Patreon’s policy otherwise.
4. Inconvenience my Patrons in the smallest amount possible.

Patreon did its best to frustrate every part of this process. They were vague about what they wanted me to remove. They referenced URLs that aren’t on Patreon. They presumed to tell me - the author of the work - what Arcadia was and wasn’t for. They asked URLs be taken down only to change their mind later. Every email meant another day or two of waiting while a warning of suspension hung over my campaign.

In the end it was enough for them that I removed all links to my website, all thank you messages, and all posts from Arcadia. But this isn’t the end. Nobody from Patreon found my page, looked at everything I drew and then picked Arcadia to single out. Arcadia was singled out because it was reported. Two days before my campaign was put on notice I banned a racist from my Discord channel which is quite a funny coincidence if nothing else.

Three factors are at play here.

1. Patreon’s shifting community guidelines that are constantly closing in around adult creators.
2. Patreon’s inability to police their own website due to the sheer mountains of content to sort through.
3. The report functionality, which will always flag a page for shallow review

These three factors combine to make every adult creator vulnerable to vindictive attacks by anyone. This has the ironic effect of giving the sexist, racist, homophobic bunch Patreon is trying to remove from the platform all the power on the platform.

Any roads Patreon could have taken to avoid this fate were realistically missed a long time ago. I told them face to face in meetings that expanding their adult content guidelines and banning people over it with no notice was a horrible idea. I told them that their hiring spree, a massive influx of hundreds of people, was a recklessly poor financial decision. A team that is now called Trust and Safety. Jack knew about this exact problem over three years ago and nothing has changed. Here is a portion of a community drafted letter which Jack not only read but directly responded to.

“Your fuzzy position on ‘adult content’ versus ‘porn’ gives you the freedom to discriminate at will and it makes content creators live in fear of that discrimination, itself leading to self-censorship of important viewpoints.”

Nothing has changed. Years of frustrated pleading. Nothing. This is a painful moment.

So I will continue to post as clandestine as ever. I will attempt to give you everything you have been getting. I will await the next bad actor to shine a spotlight on me. But I would be stupid not to do anything about it now.

https://subscribestar.adult/corablue

Please support me here if you don’t want to deal with that shit anymore. This is not a requirement. It is an option. For those who want to speak with their feet to a company who has long since stopped listening.

I’ll be answering questions in the comments. More Deadbeat soon.