When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to.
When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.
What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.
Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform.
Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.
They're not "censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology"; read their policy carefully:
>>> It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies. <<<
Unfortunately, the reality is: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production, promotion and sale of ICOs, and it's no doubt creating expense, risk, and overhead for Mailchimp.
As a private company, it's entirely proper and reasonable for them to prohibit activities that directly affect their business.
>A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott.
You're being ridiculous and disingenuous.
MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/
When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical products, credit repair services, daily horoscope reports, or mortgages and loans?
This is just a pet issue of yours and that's why you're upset. Don't pretend this is some great violation of principles.
I disagree with this, not from the moral arguments that you are making, but from the importance you're seemingly placing on this vertical. E-mail delivery and marketing services are by far the most open market of those that you've listed. For example,
- Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than working with each publisher themselves; a difficult task to overcome.
- Facebook is still the leading social media network in the world, and not every user regularly uses multiple social networks. With those ads being banned, you know a user who isolated themselves to Facebook will never be seeing blockchain ads through a social media platform.
- Mailchimp? I don't see any exclusive factor to their business. They might be great at deliverability or a leader in their space because of their business processes, but a new company can easily pop up and be able to reach out to the same set of users. It's not like users only select to receive email from Mailchimp.
With such a high rate of ICO fraud, how can you blame them? They don’t want to be held liable in the numerous lawsuits that are to come. They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud.
It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
100% agree and it's nice to hear you're exercising your right as a consumer by boycotting Mailchimp. Having said that, can't Mailchimp do whatever they want? They're a company with their own set of rules and priorities. Seems fine to me as long as they disclose it to customers.
It's not really that different from Google. Mailchimp is a marketing/advertising platform that has every right to be selective about who their clients are^1. Their entire business is about managing their reputation with customers and email providers and blockchain scams are hurting that. Trying to pretend that marketing spam is deservant of free speech considerations and tantamount to 'discussion' is silly.
Recently people seem to being bit by the fact that just because you think of a company's product as 'infrastructure' doesn't make it so.
^1 Yada yada they can't discriminate against certain classes of people. That's not even close to relevant to this situation nor am I talking about their legal abilities.
Why is Facebook's decision okay but Mailchimp's is evil? If anything Facebook has a social network monopoly while Mailchimp is one of dozens of mailing providers.
Authorities are cracking down on all the blockchain scams and now companies don't want to be associated with them. It's easier to ban all blockchain-related businesses than to look for the few select legitimate ones.
I'm getting really tired of the misuse of the word "censorship" when it comes to topics like this. Mailchimp is not censoring anything. They are not preventing those advertisers from getting their message out. What they are doing is choosing not to partner and work with people they believe might be likely scammers. Something we all do. If you want to complain about that, then you're saying that a person should no longer be able to choose who they do business with. Do you want to be compelled to buy a car from the shady dealer with a reputation for selling lemons? If not, then why should Mailchimp?
None of this is censoring. The government is not prosecuting this speech (which falls under commercial and is not completely free) and closed platforms can do whatever they want. In fact, as the last 100 topics have shown, regulation in digital advertising is sorely needed.
Email is the most open API of all, you can send people anything from anywhere using a simple email server so I don't see what the big deal is, especially in dropping a service for doing something that doesn't have any affect on your business at all.
Google already bans ads for firearms, fireworks, and tobacco products. There are restrictions on adult content, alcohol, gambling, drugs, and financial services [1].
They've always been more selective about what can be advertised, versus what shows up as the result of a search. The product being legal to buy has never been the standard.
> they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
Good!
They can censor/ban whatever they want. I like it when a company takes a stand and doesn't hide behind "free speech" as their reason for not maintaining any standards.
> What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
It's always funny to me when people think they are entitled to free speech to say or send whatever they want on other people's platforms. If MailChimp doesn't want to send your emails, they don't have to. Straight up. Their TOS also likely prevent emails about gambling, or with adult content, etc.
The same issue happened recently with youtube banning videos from fire arms enthusiasts. One might disagree with their political stance but they are entitled to do so.
It would be great if comments like yours included a disclosure of personal crypto currency holdings at the bottom
The free speech free technology bullshit is great but I personally would not hold a vendetta against a company for taking measures to prevent getting sued (or whatever their rationale is for protecting their business by doing this)
But this is a pretty predictable result of having privately owned services like this be such a big part of the Internet. MailChimp, understandably, doesn't want to be associated with this content, and they are under no obligation to allow it.
They are trying to get out of the way of the oncoming train of lawsuits and criminal charges that's going to hit us when the ICO/crypto bubble really deflates.
There's a lot of handwringing over whether Mailchimp did the right/wrong/good/bad/neutral thing, or why ICOs in particular.
But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations.
In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would want to operate in such a cesspool?
A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years.
Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it.
The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore.
> We asked a few more questions about how MailChimp can actually delineate between emails from people involved in the shilling and profiteering of blockchain and ICOs versus people having news-related discussions of blockchain and ICOs (because, LOL, in the current moment, most non-algorithmic humans have a justifiably tough time distinguishing between the two)
The fact they can't is of course the most obvious justification for a blanket ban on hosting mailing lists focused on a topic which frequently involves securities marketing campaigns of questionable legality even when not outright scams.
Their AUP policy also discriminates against "work from home" and credit repair services for the much the same reasons; it's really not worth their effort trying to scrutinise which services aren't shady when so many of them are for a few bucks a month in mailing list fees. That's especially the case for a business like MailChimp whose continued existence also depends on staying on the right side of spam filtering services.
Sentopia.net founder here, I don't believe this is just Mailchimp, we have received a warning from Paypal entitled "Cryptocurrency warning." where it states "(...)we noticed that your activity involves the trading or transfer of crypto currency which is prohibited under our Acceptable Use Policy. As this is not permitted on the PayPal platform we ask that you cease any activity that results in the trading or transfer of crypto currency."
We are a digital marketing business.. we don't trade or transfer any crypto, so this can only be because several of our customers have sent blockchain related campaigns and the campaign title shows up on Paypal's product description on checkout. If this is the case, then it doesn't seem fair at all.
Edit: we have no plans to restrict crypto related campaigns for our current or new customers.
Every time something like this happens when company XZ decides they will block any content about YX or people associated with it, there's always a lot of discussion about it being considered censorship or why it isn't because they aren't the government but instead a business.
I don't really understand where the line is drawn though in censorship/discrimination. This mailchimp case is a really bad example but it's on the topic which has been coming up very frequently over the last year where we have seen a lot of sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter banning topics/people/content from their platform.
I'm wondering how close they get to the case of the infamous bakery people who were determined to be illegally discriminating against the gay couple for not making them a wedding cake [0]. I'm curious when one of these bans is going to be challenged in court and what might happen as a result.
It makes more sense if you consider that accounts relating more directly to cryptocurrencies and ICOs are juicier targets for spear-phishers, which makes Mailchimp a target for social engineering and direct intrusion.
If there is an account that announces a sale on semigloss paint at Brick'N'Mortar's this Saturday, that's not much for Mr. Blackhat to work with. If there's an account that announces that phase 2 of their ICO is going live this Saturday, Mr. Blackhat might want to hack in and send out an "update" just as that is happening, to trick people into sending Bitcoin into his own account, while also preventing legit e-mails from going out.
It's not just that ICOs and cryptocurrency mailings are more likely to be spam. Information-based money transfer systems allow manipulation of information to be more easily monetized, which puts an information-dissemination hub at greater risk.
Not sure why people are so upset with Mailchimp when they are simply reacting to what the blacklist operators do, which is their whole value proposition. They don't want to send content that triggers blacklists, whether that content is for ICOs or Beanie Babies.
People are getting real confused about "blockchain" as a technology and several specific use cases (cryptocurrencies and ICOs). The article seems to only draw a distinction between crpto and news about crypto.
Is Mailchimp banning all blockchain related content, or just cryptos and ICO-related content?
So now there will be blockchain-specific mail deliverability providers? Seems like a straightforward enough business.
21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.
I think this make sense for Mailchimp. The tweet says in 4 weeks advance which I consider long enough to migrate out.
Mailchimp also doesn't lock you in. It's easy to export contact out. I run a news letter and use Mailchimp to manage subscriptions, but sending email with SES(Export contact out to csv and call out SES). So I know how hard it's to ensure the complain, the bounce rate...
Hm.. We use Mailchimp for our rather smallish mailing list at hashcash.io, and we are "producing", so I guess we are about to be slashed..
For other projects recently I started using Mautic + Sovereign Ansible playbooks to setup mail server. You are on your own to get trust from big mail providers, but after that you will have full control over whole process. Probably worth it.
I filed two abuse reports with Mailchimp just in the last week over unsolicited ICO mailings. One was for an AIDS vaccine ICO (I don't even know what that means and I don't want to know).
I hear they also shut down some legit blockchain newsletters in this sweep though so that's unfortunate.
I'm sure there are many people who think this is ok, because it's not the government doing this, but a "private company". Who needs a totalitarian dictatorship when plain old capitalism works as well if not better?
The difference is that no one is prohibited from creating a marketing automation (spam) organization to deliver ICO and blockchain information over email. In fact, anyone with an email server can do it. If there is a market for ICO and blockchain related email then MailChimp has just created a business opportunity for someone.
What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly to the ethical and legal liabilities associated with this field.
Well, guess I am shutting down my mailchimp account for this reason. I planned on using it for my marketing purposes but I guess I will go with leadpages or DIY.
[+] [-] stoev|8 years ago|reply
When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.
What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.
[+] [-] spamizbad|8 years ago|reply
Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.
[+] [-] payne92|8 years ago|reply
>>> It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies. <<<
Unfortunately, the reality is: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production, promotion and sale of ICOs, and it's no doubt creating expense, risk, and overhead for Mailchimp.
As a private company, it's entirely proper and reasonable for them to prohibit activities that directly affect their business.
[+] [-] Sangermaine|8 years ago|reply
You're being ridiculous and disingenuous.
MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/
When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical products, credit repair services, daily horoscope reports, or mortgages and loans?
This is just a pet issue of yours and that's why you're upset. Don't pretend this is some great violation of principles.
[+] [-] chrononaut|8 years ago|reply
- Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than working with each publisher themselves; a difficult task to overcome.
- Facebook is still the leading social media network in the world, and not every user regularly uses multiple social networks. With those ads being banned, you know a user who isolated themselves to Facebook will never be seeing blockchain ads through a social media platform.
- Mailchimp? I don't see any exclusive factor to their business. They might be great at deliverability or a leader in their space because of their business processes, but a new company can easily pop up and be able to reach out to the same set of users. It's not like users only select to receive email from Mailchimp.
[+] [-] prklmn|8 years ago|reply
It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
[+] [-] lawnchair|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spivak|8 years ago|reply
Recently people seem to being bit by the fact that just because you think of a company's product as 'infrastructure' doesn't make it so.
^1 Yada yada they can't discriminate against certain classes of people. That's not even close to relevant to this situation nor am I talking about their legal abilities.
[+] [-] foepys|8 years ago|reply
Authorities are cracking down on all the blockchain scams and now companies don't want to be associated with them. It's easier to ban all blockchain-related businesses than to look for the few select legitimate ones.
[+] [-] s73v3r_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manigandham|8 years ago|reply
Email is the most open API of all, you can send people anything from anywhere using a simple email server so I don't see what the big deal is, especially in dropping a service for doing something that doesn't have any affect on your business at all.
[+] [-] skybrian|8 years ago|reply
They've always been more selective about what can be advertised, versus what shows up as the result of a search. The product being legal to buy has never been the standard.
[1] https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=e...
[+] [-] paulcole|8 years ago|reply
Good!
They can censor/ban whatever they want. I like it when a company takes a stand and doesn't hide behind "free speech" as their reason for not maintaining any standards.
[+] [-] vlucas|8 years ago|reply
It's always funny to me when people think they are entitled to free speech to say or send whatever they want on other people's platforms. If MailChimp doesn't want to send your emails, they don't have to. Straight up. Their TOS also likely prevent emails about gambling, or with adult content, etc.
[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aiCeivi9|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvr219|8 years ago|reply
A private company cannot censor.
[+] [-] aje403|8 years ago|reply
The free speech free technology bullshit is great but I personally would not hold a vendetta against a company for taking measures to prevent getting sued (or whatever their rationale is for protecting their business by doing this)
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wuliwong|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourwork|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lev99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesLeonis|8 years ago|reply
But ICOs did this to themselves. This is the collateral damage from our terrible stewardship of Blockchain and cryptotoken reputations.
In the sprint to massive investments and skirting regulation, the whole cryptotoken space collectively harmed it's whole reputation. Fraud, scams, poor security -> hacks, flagrant money and securities crimes, etc; the list keeps growing! That collateral damage is why Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, and many others are pulling out of this. The winds of winter are howling for cryptotokens because we weren't stewards of our collective reputation. Who would want to operate in such a cesspool?
A lot of people will reference the Dot Bomb era, but a more fitting example would be the Video Game Market Crash of 1983 [1]. After Atari vs Activision opened the floodgates, loads of low quality but expensive games flooded the market. ET is the crowning turd, but that was atop a pyramid of turds. Customers, unsatisfied with the products they bought, deserted the market en masse and games disappeared for two years.
Both video games and cryptotokens have very low economic utility. Nobody wants to play a bad game, much less pay full price for it. Nobody wants to have a useless token, much less pay a high premium for it.
The classic Market For Lemons is setting in. As customers leave the space, stung by these lemon tokens, the reputable providers will start to exit the space as well. Mailchimp, Google, and Facebook are some of those reputable providers that left. They don't want to be associated with the taint ICOs are leaking from every pore.
Winter came, and it was us.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
[+] [-] notahacker|8 years ago|reply
The fact they can't is of course the most obvious justification for a blanket ban on hosting mailing lists focused on a topic which frequently involves securities marketing campaigns of questionable legality even when not outright scams.
Their AUP policy also discriminates against "work from home" and credit repair services for the much the same reasons; it's really not worth their effort trying to scrutinise which services aren't shady when so many of them are for a few bucks a month in mailing list fees. That's especially the case for a business like MailChimp whose continued existence also depends on staying on the right side of spam filtering services.
[+] [-] CamelCaseName|8 years ago|reply
I still get ICO emails that slip through from time to time and they always get marked as spam.
[+] [-] _asciiker_|8 years ago|reply
We are a digital marketing business.. we don't trade or transfer any crypto, so this can only be because several of our customers have sent blockchain related campaigns and the campaign title shows up on Paypal's product description on checkout. If this is the case, then it doesn't seem fair at all.
Edit: we have no plans to restrict crypto related campaigns for our current or new customers.
[+] [-] idontpost4389|8 years ago|reply
I don't really understand where the line is drawn though in censorship/discrimination. This mailchimp case is a really bad example but it's on the topic which has been coming up very frequently over the last year where we have seen a lot of sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter banning topics/people/content from their platform.
I'm wondering how close they get to the case of the infamous bakery people who were determined to be illegally discriminating against the gay couple for not making them a wedding cake [0]. I'm curious when one of these bans is going to be challenged in court and what might happen as a result.
[0] https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...
[+] [-] logfromblammo|8 years ago|reply
If there is an account that announces a sale on semigloss paint at Brick'N'Mortar's this Saturday, that's not much for Mr. Blackhat to work with. If there's an account that announces that phase 2 of their ICO is going live this Saturday, Mr. Blackhat might want to hack in and send out an "update" just as that is happening, to trick people into sending Bitcoin into his own account, while also preventing legit e-mails from going out.
It's not just that ICOs and cryptocurrency mailings are more likely to be spam. Information-based money transfer systems allow manipulation of information to be more easily monetized, which puts an information-dissemination hub at greater risk.
[+] [-] creeble|8 years ago|reply
Shouldn't the ire be directed at the blacklists?
[+] [-] philipodonnell|8 years ago|reply
Is Mailchimp banning all blockchain related content, or just cryptos and ICO-related content?
[+] [-] rdl|8 years ago|reply
21.co/Earn (the pivot to bounty-paid spam inbox) is interesting, but not a great implementation of the "email anti-botherance bond" idea from the mid-1990s.
[+] [-] kureikain|8 years ago|reply
Mailchimp also doesn't lock you in. It's easy to export contact out. I run a news letter and use Mailchimp to manage subscriptions, but sending email with SES(Export contact out to csv and call out SES). So I know how hard it's to ensure the complain, the bounce rate...
[+] [-] hippich|8 years ago|reply
For other projects recently I started using Mautic + Sovereign Ansible playbooks to setup mail server. You are on your own to get trust from big mail providers, but after that you will have full control over whole process. Probably worth it.
[+] [-] rargulati|8 years ago|reply
- A reasonable to use API
- A transactional component (or integrations with Sendgrid/other provider)
- Not painful to use
[+] [-] eco|8 years ago|reply
I hear they also shut down some legit blockchain newsletters in this sweep though so that's unfortunate.
[+] [-] TearsInTheRain|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trophycase|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arisAlexis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhemgla_corp|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nukeop|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veen|8 years ago|reply
What would be totalitarian is forcing a company like MailChimp to expose itself unwillingly to the ethical and legal liabilities associated with this field.
[+] [-] pavlov|8 years ago|reply
That's been well known since at least 1848...
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?
[+] [-] jasonlotito|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhsabbagh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarchowdhury|8 years ago|reply