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A Quiet War Rages Over Who Can Make Money Online

24 points| miiiiiike | 7 years ago |wired.com

12 comments

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[+] DanielBMarkham|7 years ago|reply
There's some interesting math/statistics at work here.

Whatever group you want to identify with, given a large enough group size, will display very bad behavior in some individuals.

The tendency is to ignore that behavior in the groups you are a member of (After all, aren't we all mostly right? There are just a few bad apples.) and emphasize that bad behavior in groups you are not a member of. (All of those folks are crazy/evil/dangerous/etc!)

Social media companies are caught directly in the middle of all of this.

I don't want to get into who is the _real_ villain, what to do, or any of that. The general principle holds no matter what the groups are. So even if you ban groups A, B, and C, it won't go away. In fact, my gut tells me you'd just make matters worse, cramming more and more unhinged and unpleasant people into larger and larger groups.

For that reason, punishing the group for the actions of the members isn't going to work.

[+] arkh|7 years ago|reply
> The MGTOW community—a more extreme offshoot of the incel movement whose adherents consider women subhuman—

That's some fine journalism there.

It's always fun to read parallels made between platform removing people for political reasons and platforms removing people because they did not adhere by their usage policy.

[+] squozzer|7 years ago|reply
Get enough crusaders with differing viewpoints in the same room (or internet) and you have scorched earth.

My only anger comes from the new definition of the word "thot" - which I had been using for decades as a substitute for the word "thought."

[+] circlefavshape|7 years ago|reply
Why don't paypal etc allow payment for sex-related stuff?
[+] DerekQ|7 years ago|reply
Chargebacks, I think.

That's why most payment collectors don't allow payments for porn sites. Husband pays for XXX.com on his credit card, wife sees the charge, husband cries out "It wasn't me, my card details were stolen." He initiates a chargeback as his wife stands over his shoulder watching.

[+] zerogvt|7 years ago|reply
And why sex-workers and porn industry (I'm talking about legal stuff here) have not created their own paypal all these years?

Note: For the most part I agree with the sentiment of the article and I am allergic to all harassment but the "financial domination" thing rings other bells. The people having a taste for it seem to me akin to gambling addicts and in need of protection.

[+] Kurtz79|7 years ago|reply
Just the first paragraph is depressing, what a world we live in.
[+] esotericn|7 years ago|reply
This is why systems like Bitcoin are essential.

Middlemen in payment systems hold far too much power.

[+] orcdork|7 years ago|reply
It's not a war over who can make money online, it's the personal vendetta of a bunch of right wing sexless misogynists.