Patreon Is Hardening Their 'Adult Content' Guidelines. Discussion Thread

[OhWee]

So what started this whole mess? Why did they started cracking down now. I remember someone wrote an article about incest stories in amazon that resulted in the purge, forcing many writers to move on to goodreads. How about here. Was there an article written or something?

Someone mentioned in another thread that some new Federal guidelines or a request was made/came into effect within the last week. Patreon needed to show that they were meeting the request. It's buried in another thread, but perhaps that person will post here. As in other countries, sometimes a simple request by the government is enough to get companies to change. They have to decide if it's worth battling in court or not, and the government can make their lives very uncomfortable if it wants to.

Also, Paypal my be getting leaned on again. Personally, I think it's both, and I woudn't be surprised if some religious/decency groups are leaning on them too. As I have said, it's a different environment in the U.S. at the moment, and the 'opposition/protectors of free speech' are being crowded on a number of fronts as a result, and are trying to find new footing. And the current administration just loves to 'discredit' any source that contradicts them.

So yeah, short form is that yeah according to another poster the Justice Department is in play here... and what has happened fits the administration's M.O. perfectly. As for why now, well it takes time for directives to be put into place. This administration has only been in place for about 9 months now, so the timing makes sense.

 

[kzk0987]

I don't live in the US and don't fully get their politics, but here I thought the Republicans getting on power would make the cracking down on anything sexual because of how "wrong" and "objectifying" it is the American left was promoting slow down, not geven even worse. Guess I forgot to take the religious side of the conservatives into account. I just didn't expect the insane orange man who allegedly had prostitues pee on a bed out of spite for the former president would pander to this kind of people.

 

[Ignazzio]

Weinstein was banging slutty actresses for years like probably half of those guys there and now their government tries to show its puritan nature by acting defensively. Such a reactional behaviour is typical for USA unfortunately

 

[Pantisocrat]

I don't live in the US and don't fully get their politics, but here I thought the Republicans getting on power would make the cracking down on anything sexual because of how "wrong" and "objectifying" it is the American left was promoting slow down, not geven even worse. Guess I forgot to take the religious side of the conservatives into account. I just didn't expect the insane orange man who allegedly had prostitues pee on a bed out of spite for the former president would pander to this kind of people.

Vice-President Mike Pence will not eat meals alone with a woman who is not his wife. But then, he also calls his wife 'Mother', so who knows?

 

[Bloo]

Someone shared with me Mr. Dots (DMD creator) recent private post regarding this matter and it pretty much confirms some of my assumptions below.



So far, what seems to trigger Patreon is the following:

• Banner with nudity (speculation) or banned keywords in the title and other pornographic words.

• Banned keywords (incest, rape, bestiality...) in the Patreon overview page, (unsure if private messages trigger it).

• Adult sample images, specially nudity and other sensible content. (unsure if private messages trigger it).

• Just general descriptions/mentions of hardcore content in a crude fashion.

What to do:

• Remove any of the banned keywords from your titles, overview.

• Re-phrase your overview to a more professional dry text of what you offer.

• Remove any samples/banner that contain hardcore nudity and banned keywords captions.

• Branch, don't put all your eggs in one basket (more on this below).

Branching out from Patreon:

You shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, it's fine to use the Patreon platform but you should expand your reach. Start by creating your own website where you can control the message and content, you can then simply link to Patreon and from it (Know that they don't allow linking to material they are banning in the first place, so be smart about how you link your content). Social media is important and it's also a good way to retain user interest in your products. This is your livelihood at stake and it's on the hands of a companies whim, protect yourself by being smart.

You can find Patreon guideline here:

You must be registered to see the links

take what i said above with a grain of salt, inform yourself, try to get ahead of this whole mess.

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According to the new Patreon guideline for adult content (

You must be registered to see the links

), some of you might get your accounts suspended pending review for it's content. It's already happened to Mr.Dots and Lewdlabs, the creators of Dating My Daughter and Dreams of Desire. Since then Mr.Dots has been re-instated but his overview page is completely different from before. We advise you to try and minimize damage to your Patreon by trying to abide to their guidelines by changing mention of content they deem bad, (just remove direct mentions of incest, rape... not the content itself). Alternatively you can wait and get flagged by Patreon in the future (or not who knows). In the end we don't know where this will lead, it started early today and by tomorrow a lot of you could be suspended or not. In 5 months maybe it'll all be ok. EDIT: Others took the initiative and cleaned their overview pages, including Dark Silver, Icstor...

 

[Pantisocrat]

Google News has nothing on any DoJ action, statement or policy wrt Patreon, or at least not that I can find.

 

[kzk0987]

Vice-President Mike Pence will not eat meals alone with a woman who is not his wife. But then, he also calls his wife 'Mother', so who knows?

Right, I keep forgetting Mike "Christian first, conservative second, republican third" Pence is the vice president and due to the erratic behavior and international focus of the actual POTUS he probably has a lot of influence in domestic politics.

 

[Bloo]

Google News has nothing on any DoJ action, statement or policy wrt Patreon, or at least not that I can find.

It's simply a PR move to clean their image while retaining the creators (their revenue source) to appease executives and investors. Their platform became the wild wild west for pornographic content and they had to enforce certain rules because it's the law in the USA and like i said before, to clean up their image, they don't want to be known as the porn donation site.

EDIT: Even if it was a 3rd party forcing them, blaming those doesn't change anything and it's pointless to this conversation. We're looking for information on how to prevent and if we can prevent games from going down. Simple.

 

[vir_cotto]

Control for the sake of what though? When you try to control something that is actively making money circulate, you need to have some actual goal for it.

Control of masses. "Yeah, he was super rich producer, but we will save the day! Only we can take care of all you people and only we can prevent that so... We'll (once again!), instead of preventing real crimes, start blaming THE ART."
I explained that recently. When some s**** happened in 50's they didn't want to REALLY do anything to prevent it in the future. No! That would require some work and they would admit their responsibility (society and government etc.) - so... Rock'n roll is Enemy of the State! And when same thing happened again - in 60's? Burn the movies! 70's,80's90,s... Comic books, TV, video games - they're all to blame because some John Doe raped and killed like 10 or 20 women...

And that garbage is not even new. Throughout history, art was always guilty for s**** people did. Rulers wouldn't want to explain to masses that maybe they're incomptenet/lazy/don't care... And masses believed them. Always till this day.

It doesn't matter that most simple definition of art is "imitation of life". No... Art is guilty for pointing out what is wrong in the real life.

 

[kzk0987]

It's simply a PR move to clean their image while retaining the creators (their revenue source) to appease executives and investors. Their platform became the wild wild west for pornographic content and they had to enforce certain rules because it's the law in the USA and like i said before, to clean up their image, they don't want to be known as the porn donation site.

EDIT: Even if it was a 3rd party forcing them, blaming those doesn't change anything and it's pointless to this conversation. We're looking for information on how to prevent and if we can prevent games from going down. Simple.

"they don't want to be known as the porn donation site."
kek, at this point I'd just say fuck it and create a sister site for porn, and that's it. Patreon is still the friendly platform for youtubers, indie artists and so on, while whatever the name of the sister site is the place for porn and stuff.
I mean, while I doubt it is most of their revenue, a big slice of the money flowing into Patreon comes from people supporting porn creators.

Would that move damage their image as well? I's sad we still don't have a big porn game and comics site in the west when Japan alone has dozens upon dozens. No one is willing to try that because of all this puritan bullcrap. And yes, Japan has an actual professional market, but there are plenty of sites for independent creators as well. DLSite, for example, just takes a share of the money the games make.
Now, these are just retailer sites, but given how strongly crowdfunding for porn caught on in the west, would make sense a similar platform here would focus on that instead.

 

[Dasati]

The way in which Patreon has gone about it suggests some sudden outside pressure. The reaction of most dev's has been a defensive as they were caught off-guard, which suggest Patreon didn't alert them to the rule change of give any warning before suspending accounts. Either its sudden pressure forcing Patreons hand, or they decided to go about the rule change in a way that maximises confusion and disruption.

 

[Pervy Lad]

Hopefully Patreon is just promoting the illusion of giving a shit concerning what people fap to. Would be a real blow to the industry if they seriously started purging their site.

 

[Carlo S]

That's what I really think is going to happen, many developers can gather in other countries, or have another host the same way, a new Patreon, uncensored. It's not the first time something like this are made.

 

[Dasati]

Sociologists even have a name for it, a moral panic.

 

[kzk0987]

That's what I really think is going to happen, many developers can gather in other countries, or have another host the same way, a new Patreon, uncensored. It's not the first time something like this are made.

The problem is that a structure for crowdfunding like Patreon has doesn't rise overnight, and it seems no one wants to be the company that creates "The Patreon for porn", or really the anything for porn, despite historically porn making a lot of money for the first few people to notice a new trend and capitalizing on it. Porn basically pioneereda lot of new tech and business models, from VCR tapes to Streaming services, yet for some reason money companies act like porn is a spawn of the devil destroying society.

 

[User_51567]

I wish i had the time and friends to put our hands together to make a "adult" Patreon.

It is the best option at this point because it's not going to end with this....
Now every Dev is looking for loopholes and doing the bare minimium to avoid trouble, but we all now that once the ball starts rolling, there is no going back.

I Hope that all of the (bigger) devs are going to put all of their hands together and make a new "patreon" without these rules.

But i can not get my head around the fact that Patreon is willing to lose 10 to 20% of their income of Patreon for this.
They already made sure that you can not find 18+ stuff searching on their website.
Logical next step would be to put every 18+ Dev behind a extra paywall so no one can see it accidentally..

If i go to my boss and say to him....... Hey i got a great idea, we will improve our public image, but lose 20% revenue....
I would be send to a mental institution right away.....

But i think we are going to lose a couple devs in the coming months because of this (Mostly newer ones), but at this point there is so much demand for these games/content that the bigger ones will find a way to do this optimally and pave the way for the newer ones...

1 step back, 2 steps forward..... Like everthing that's worth it in live.....there will be some obstacles to overcome.

 

[Carlo S]

@vir_cotto: You're fully right, they need always some excuses for the incapacity for solve simple problems, and blame what the majority like but others think that is controversial, if cut some text, scenes or anything only showing that are doing something for their, and try shut the mouth for those that complain, but forget that we're in the world with 6 billion peoples doing many things, and for the best or the worse. And now I ask who can stop this.

 

[Carlo S]

@kzk0987: Not long ago the same happened to the file hosts, many of them went to other countries and are much stronger than before, as everyone can see. Things change, and almost always for the better, just start.

 

[xןʞ]

Gonna find out that Amazon or some place is purchasing Patreon in the next few days and all this will have made sense.

 

[Raava20009]

somebody is going to to benefit how much you want to be some dude sitting in his basement in some other country where sex is cool is going to make and adult version to Patreon and become a million over night cause once you take away something from majority 0f people one guy is going to be like hey my thing does the exact same thing that there thing does but none of that sissified bullshit they have am surprise but made somebody on this site hasnt started to make one already