I'm not sure the comparison to the phone company is very applicable. This would be the case if Patreon would be a pure payments proessor, like Mastercard or Visa (or maybe Stripe). But Patreon provides pages on their own website within their own brand identity for these creators, stores their digital media, promotes them through their search interface etc.

In my opinion, Patreon is more akin to a newspaper deciding which ads to show next to their articles or to a shopping mall deciding which shops to rent space to. And of course every newspaper will reject ads that would infuriate their readers (or journalists) and shopping malls will not rent to businesses that might damage their reputation (depending on how "upscale" it is this might be everything from soup kitchens over gambling outfits and payday lenders to brothels).

Now, you might disagree with them whether they have drawn the right line there and consequently take your business elsewhere (just as you might not want to visit a shopping mall with the wrong mix of shops), but I find it a bit of a stretch to frame this as a "free speech" issue.

How is it not comparable... When it comes down to money transfer, imagine if you are the one blacklisted by Visa and Mastercard... now you suddenly cannot make online payments, oops, you also can't even have a bank account at a major bank.

Things like this are in fact happening. From people who've used a bitcoin exchange connected to their Chase bank account to people that are a bit too right leaning for those at Patreon, regardless of where those opinions are expressed. While they allow similar language with a different bent on their actual platform.

When the gatekeepers of money start acting as censors, is that really not as bad or worse than the telephone company doing the same?

> Patreon provides pages on their own website within their own brand identity for these creators, stores their digital media, promotes them through their search interface etc

Which is exactly the kind of useless functionality that they don't need. Most of the creators I've seen either migrate away from Patreon or diversify themselves end up using payment processing services like Stripe or Paypal.

> Which is exactly the kind of useless functionality that they don't need.

So says you, yet the vast majority of people I subscribe to on Patreon use it as a delivery platform for advance content to subscribers. One of the major ways it promotes higher donation amounts is by letting those people have gated access to content. How else would this be easily accomplished except for this "useless" functionality? A single password that is handed out? A large list of passwords that the artist needs to manage?

It quickly becomes obvious that this useless functionality has a very real use case, and I think it's in fact one of the drivers of high donation rates in some cases.

Interestingly, I've found this doesn't work equally well for all media. Digital artists, webcomic people, etc. can often use patreon as a way to give fans access to unsellable WIPs. Similarly, writers will use patreon as a way to display trunk stories (although in this case patreon is a draw through its network effects more than it is the genuine best place to do this).

I'm not arguing for or against censorship in any particular manner. Merely that if SubscribeStar/bitPatreon want to compete with Patreon they will have to appeal to more than freedom of speech moral stance, since the majority of Patreon's artists are already either within Patreon's moral stance, benefit from the moral stance, or do not apply to this matter entirely.