The Rubin Report
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2017–2018
1:10:59 · 147K views · Jul 31, 2017
Dave Rubin interviews Patreon CEO Jack Conte about the removal of Lauren Southern's and IGD's accounts, free speech and Patreon's policies.
HN mostly cites it critically, as evidence that Patreon's CEO promised not to ban people for off-platform speech and then did.
5 comments from Hacker News
He used slurs, that's for certain. But it's critical to point out that the context in which they were used was to tell the Alt Right that they're behaving exactly like they see the groups they despise (blacks, Jewish people, gays etc.) through their bigoted worldview. Not to mention, your excerpt cuts off a crucial part of what he said. As other commenters pointed out, the whole part of this was: > It's not about, like, actually doing any good, it's about getting attention. And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!" In case the context isn't clear, saying that they "look like you're not full of Nazi" is sarcasm. Of course subscription to belief in a global Jewish conspiracy makes a group look like they're full of Nazis. It is difficult to claim that these statements were meant as an attack on blacks and Jewish people themselves. It's pretty obvious that this banning was carried out for ideological reasons. In the past, Jack Conte stated that Patreon would only ban people for speech that was spread on their platform.[1] This was flat out ignored. It looks like much of their userbase is calling them out on the questionable justifications for the banning, too.[2] 1. this video 2. See comments on [LINK] Edit: changed "they're behaving exactly like the groups they despise" to "they're behaving exactly like they see t
> But then the question becomes what do these guys offer which Patreon doesnt? Patreon censors conservatives off their platform. [Context if you don't know what I'm talking about -- this video ] To some non-trivial minority of content creators that is reason enough to not use it. As someone who makes youtube vids and is thinking about scaling a brand, I want nothing to do with a tech platform that believes it should be the sole arbiter of who can and cannot solicit p2p donations/payments for their videos. I want a politically-neutral technology / payment mechanism. Brave seems to be more ideologically aligned with myself, so I would rather go that route. Even though the current iteration has quite a few centralized stop-gates, I think it's feasible that Brave and the BAT system could ultimately provide a way for me to monetize my video content directly from users with BAT tokens and not have to deal with Jack Conte's moral grandstanding as a single point of failure for my revenue streams.
Also in an interview a year ago [1], Patreon's CEO explicitely promised they would not do what they just did. But in this case they are characterising as hate speech the simple use of slang, even when there is no hateful intention. This is just the political correctness ayatollahs becoming over-zealous, which I find hard to justify and certainly won't support with my money. [1] this video
They've already fucked it up. Here's an hour long interview with Patreon's CEO, Jack Conte, where he goes through some ridiculous mental gymnastics trying to justify why it's ok he is kicking conservative journalists off his platform. this video
This is the interview with Patreon CEO Jack Conte alluded to in the blog post. It's really extraordinary to watch. this video