Why is this no longer on the front page of HN?

This should be the top article. It's only an hour old and has hundreds up upvotes.

The payments industry is strong arming free speech to promote religious fundamentalism.

There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic. Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives.

We don't need the religious oligarchy dictating how you can live.

Edit: it's back. Halfway down the page. A few minutes ago it was not on the home page at all and I had to search for it.

No it isn't. It's struggling on the front page because this is a very old story and it's the same conversation every time: payment processors hate this stuff because digital goods are fraud and chargeback magnets, and that's doubly true of adult content.

If U.S. credit-card issuers were worried about fraud, they would have implemented the other half of "chip-&-PIN," which the rest of the world has been using for decades.

U.S. customers pretty much JUST got chips in our cards... but issuers "forgot" to implement the PIN part.

Zero sympathy for this scumbag monopoly.

In my country you usually need to confirm payments with SMS OTP, except for trusted merchants (but they take the risk of fraud by opting out from confirmation). So simply stealing a bank card doesn't get you far. And pretending that you did not pay is also more difficult. Is US different? Do banks and clients trust each other in US and do not require OTP?

Yep. If I take someone's credit card, I can use it all I want, until either 1) they notice and cancel the card, or 2) I trip the fraud protection with unusual spending patterns.

Chip & pin doesn’t help with chargebacks or merchant fraud which is what costs credit card processors and issuers in adult content.

I'm talking about day-to-day transactions, not specifically adult content.

Those are valid facts, but this is missing an underlying point: HN’s community is not concerned about this form of discrimination, so each time it crosses the front page, we see lots of threads about deregulation but few about the spectre of ethics raised by these acts. Ethics aren’t typically in-scope for HN unless the party harmed is either a for-profit corporation or a tech worker; since HN doesn’t as a community tend to openly self-identify with the fields of sex work, the ethical issues here are effectively out of scope here. One can imagine a different HN that gave the ethical threats to Others as much airtime as it gives to ethical threats to Self. I remain hopeful.

Lots of products have the same fraud/chargeback dynamics are are similar disfavored by payment processors.

If only all moral objections had such plausible-deniability ready to promote disregarding them, we’d never have to teach or debate morality and ethical practices in tech at all! Fortunately, the core debate — should payment processors be required to provide service so long as the operator is cooperative with escrow and other such ‘avoid money going out the door fraudulently’ restrictions on high-chargeback enterprises? — remains a ‘brass ring’ desirable outcome of techno-libertarians and so the issue continues be fought about. (Even if it’s only indirectly a morality debate over sex products.)

This isn't responsive to anything I've written. It's not in any sense a moral debate over sex products. It's a practical debate over how expensive it is to underwrite transactions in these markets. The people involved in making those payments work are extending credit.

Payment processors have constructed a “moral ordering of sexuality” [1] that would be entirely unnecessary if, as you claim, their intentions are purely legal and/or related to high chargeback rates.

If it’s not a moral issue, then the rules should be simple and easily communicable. Examples: Comply with the law of your jurisdiction. Keep your chargeback rates below x%. Instead, payment processors intentionally refuse to enforce consistent rules across platforms. Not the behavior of an economically-motivated, entirely rational agent.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634607241305579

This is all a pretty naive take on dealing with transaction fraud. You're not going to get the transparency you're after.

I’m not calling for “more transparency,” I’m calling into question your assertion that the payment processors are acting out of rational self-interest.

It’s a little strange to complain about no one being responsive to you when you’ve summarily dismissed every comment in this thread.

Once again this is like the 10th time this discussion has played out on HN. If you want to see a less conclusory set of arguments, use the search bar and go back a couple years.

The counterargument here doesn't even make sense. You think payment processors are run by people with weird puritan takes on adult content? No, they're exactly the same nerds that work everywhere else in the industry. I'm sure someone will come up with some just-so story about how payment processors, and only payment processors, are suspectible to influence from religious radicals or whatever, but: special pleading is special pleading.

> Once again this is like the 10th time this discussion has played out on HN.

If the conversation is too boring and repetitive for you personally due to your long, long history as a commenter, you could always choose not to participate in it. That’s more or less what you’ve done here in any case, with the added efficiency of one fewer step.

This is what, past the thirtieth anniversary of Eternal September? I’d think you’ve had plenty of time to cope with the social phenomenon.

> I'm sure someone will come up with some just-so story about how payment processors, and only payment processors, are suspectible to influence from religious radicals or whatever, but: special pleading is special pleading.

A lot of that going around, huh. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129408

First off, great article, everyone involved in this discussion should read it.

Second, agreed, if this was primarily about chargeback rates, there'd be no differentiation between disallowing things like hypnosis, (fictional) non-con, BDSM, etc. over vanilla sexual material. Instead it seems to be a mixture of pressure by (primarily religious, though some feminist) anti-porn activists, negative media portrayals (e.g. Kristof's PornHub article in the NYT), and understandable fear of lawsuits resulting from hosting actual illegal material (Visa/Pornhub case in California).

Thanks for taking the time to read the article. I’m glad you appreciated it.

This would be a reason for processing such transactions to be more expensive.

Are you viewing by the default page or active? Several of these articles were discussed last year when the processors were pressuring Valve. Maybe a little topic fatigue?

> This is not free speech. Adult content is not a protected class.

Why does adult content not count as speech?

US civics 101. The first amendment mostly restricts government action. This is not a free speech issue unless you want to legislate that adult content is a protected class or want to make a special clause for payment processing.

This is a perfect use case for crypto imo.

If you are making an argument that new legislation needs to made, great but unfortunately people jump to the idea that this is immediately a free speech issue.

Freedom of speech is not defined by the US constitution. Free speech is an ideological stance, not a legal definition. US laws protects some forms of free speech and not others.

Good luck with that. We can all day long discuss what is free speech and not free speech but unless it’s a protected class or a carveout for payment processors it does not matter. Propose solutions instead. You could argue that payment processors control so much of the market that it’s like the government limiting speech but I would counter argue that they could use crypto easily.

Not to mention usually businesses use payment processors as the scape goat. Very few business, other than purpose built, want to deal with adult content.

Could a case be made not from a free speech POV but from a antitrust one?

There is no "religious oligarchy" dictating anything.

Feminist groups are responsible for the last few waves of censorship. Collective Shout was specifically named in the itch.io/Steam campaigns and the previous PornHub campaigns were waged by a litany of left-wing media sources hyperfocused on particular types of content (mostly rape, hypnosis and incest). Jewish groups applied similar pressure when people were uploading antisemitic porn.

"Religious" groups haven't been relevant to censorship discussions since the early 90s.

> Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives.

Normalizing leaving a paper trail of extramarital misdeeds is the sort of opsec disinformation you're supposed to use on enemies. Don't lie to your allies.

Anyone that wants out of their marriage that badly can just as easily come out as bisexual or propose redefinition of their marriage to embrace interracial cuckolding. Women love having such salacious leverage in divorce court.

> There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic.

Such a diversion that there is an entire cottage industry of guides for prospective e-thots to mitigate chargeback risks?

Every commercial site I've ever seen engages in fraudulent billing or dark patterns. "$1 for a week, then only $24.99...billed weekly."

The chargeback rates are real when an industry exists to part horny fools from their money.

Collective Shout is a Christian anti-rights organization wrapped in feminist cloth.

The founder of Collective Shout previously successfully lobbied against mifepristone and opposed changes to legislation requiring pro-life pregnancy-counseling services to disclose their affiliations in their advertising.

In 2004, she founded the anti-abortion lobby Women's Forum Australia.

Why are you jumping from "anti-abortion" to "Christian"?

That’s not a jump, it’s a straight line. These fundies like to dress it up but it’s transparently obvious to anyone who has dealt with religious fundamentalists that is their core driver.

Collective Shout's primary PR release platform is "Eternity News", self-described as:

> Published by Bible Society Australia, Eternity is a national media platform for Christians, designed to encourage, equip and inspire them by revealing what God is doing in our nation and beyond.

> There is no "religious oligarchy" dictating anything.

You might inform Peter Thiel.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...