curate users

[chadwhitacre]

8chan has joined Gratipay. See FD1518 (copied below) and also gratipay/gratipay.com#3032. This brings to a head the discussion we started over a year ago about what kind of userbase we want to cultivate.

My inclination is to start curating our userbase more closely. We want users who align with our mission, to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. However, I'm not going to take any action before we have a conversation on this ticket, and even if a day were enough time (it's not), today is Christmas Eve and I'm offline with my family. I expect tomorrow's payday to include 8chan.

---

Update: The conclusion of this particular ticket was that we would not start curating our user-base based on alignment with our mission. However, we reversed this decision four months later, removing two users (8chan and weev) through an unfortunately idiosyncratic and non-transparent process. Then, a month after that, we went out of business for unrelated reasons, and as part of bouncing back we implemented a proper team review process.

tl;dr We now carefully curate our user-base.

[techtonik]

You can not enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love with force. It requires more than just banning people to sustain.

[colindean]

You can not enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love with force. It requires more than just banning people to sustain.

👍

This is a hard problem to address: How do we deal with users of our service who abide by the rules and terms we've set forth to protect our other users and ourselves, but do things we personally don't like outside of our service?

Right now, as written, our Terms and Conditions point #5, "Guidelines for User Generated Content", the result of #1425, seems to govern a user's behavior, but only within Gratipay.com, and specifically any communication facilities that Gratipay.com provides. Right now, that's limited only to usernames, "I"m making the world better by", and any other unvalidated, user-editable field.

A series of questions, expanding as I think of implications:

1. Should Gratipay extend its terms of service to include behavior outside of Gratipay's purview, i.e. gratipay.com, inside.gratipay.com, our GitHub presence, Twitter interaction with us, etc.?
   1. If Gratipay does decide to care about user behavior outside of Gratipay's purview, does that obligate Gratipay to police outside of its world?
      1. Would Gratipay be obligated to do some kind of background check before enabling a user to receive gifts?
         1. Should Gratipay then conduct ongoing background checks to ensure that a user hasn't become evil since signing up?
         2. This could occupy time and resources that Gratipay simply doesn't have available.
      2. If Gratipay does not police, would Gratipay then be obligated to have a mechanism set up for people (not necessarily Gratipay users) to report the terms-breaking activity?
      3. What would the response time look like on this?
      4. Would this diminish the promise of Gratipay as a safe and reliable method of receiving gifts?
      5. What happens if people fraudulently report activity that doesn't actually exist, or is an attempt to frame the user?
         1. What if Gratipay's kneejerk suspension or banning is wrong or erroneous, and we disrupt someone's income stream wrongly?
         1. To what level of legal risk does Gratipay expose itself in the event of erroneous or fraudulent service disruption?
   2. If Gratipay decides not to care about user activities outside its purview, what is its cohesive response to criticism that it is or may be enabling the funding of evil outside of its purview?
   3. What constitutes "evil?"
      1. Ilwill?
      2. Injustice?
      3. Hate speech is already a crime, but a crime with seemingly rare convictions despite being incredibly common online
   4. What does Gratipay have to do?
      1. Legal orders are already covered in the Terms and Conditions (I think? section 12); Gratipay must abide by injunctions and probably even garnishments.
      2. Is Gratipay equipped to assess legal and illegal behavior, and suspend/ban an account ahead of a legal order if Gratipay detects the illegal behavior outside of its purview before law enforcement due process is carried out?
      1. The implications of acting without a legal order return consideration to the above legal risk question.

There are a lot of (bad|good) actors in the world. Sometimes, they get a loud enough voice and enough attention that they can do and say (bad|good) stuff, then ask for money so they can afford to continue to act or speak.

I think Gratipay, specifically the Gratipay team and its community of users, is well within its right to ask bad actors to cease using the service. However, it should not ban them unless they are violating the law or effectively posting on Gratipay's properties content that violates its Guidelines for User Generated Content. Banning bad actors without a legal order may expose Gratipay to legal risk in addition to the social risk it faces by terminating a bad actor's permission to use its service.

I don't think Gratipay should be in the business of deciding what is (bad|good). That's for the legal system and users themselves to decide. This stance could cost Gratipay users, but neutrality is the preference of business when acting any other way could harm the innocent bystander customers of the business, let alone be even more detrimental to the business itself.

[rummik]

A slightly related situation that CloudFlare found themselves in where a client wasn't violating their terms of service, but they didn't particularly like the nature of their client: http://blog.cloudflare.com/58611873/

Snippets of relatable bits from paragraph 4 in the article:

[...] First, CloudFlare is firm in our belief that our role is not that of Internet censor. There are tens of thousands of websites currently using CloudFlare's network. Some of them contain information I find troubling. [...] While we will respect the laws of the jurisdictions in which we operate, we do not believe it is our decision to determine what content may and may not be published. That is a slippery slope down which we will not tread.

So yeah, pretty much just going with what @colindean already stated. Unless there's a violation of the terms, or some other legal reason to remove someone (like Gratipay being put at risk by allowing these transactions to process), I don't think Gratipay can make that decision.

[chadwhitacre]

Copying over from https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1518:

One of the sites on gratipay is known to host exploitative child and teen pictures.

https://gratipay.com/infinitechan/

https://medium.com/@FoldableHuman/the-mods-are-always-asleep-7f750f879fc

This is on top of 8chan being a known board for harassment campaigns and doxxing.

https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/gamergate-harassment

I will not go to the site to get direct links to these events, but I believe that this all violates the TOS of gratipay. Thank you for looking into it.

[seanlinsley]

We are not the government. It's impossible for us to censor them by banning them. They can go elsewhere. We shouldn't accept them after they've been forced off of Patreon simply because we're too unorganized to create and enforce the necessary policy (yes I am volunteering :-).

@colindean could you elaborate on the possibilities for legal risk? Copying from the TOS:

Notwithstanding any of these Terms, Gratipay reserves the right, without notice and in its sole discretion, to terminate your license to use the Site and/or to block or prevent your future access to, and use of, the Site.

That should be updated to say that we will contact them before / upon termination, but it seems pretty clear that we reserve the right to boot people off.

---

Let's take a look at the Patreon community guidelines. This section clearly explains that you're liable to be banned if you do harmful things to people anywhere else outside of Patreon:

Facilitating Harmful or Dangerous Activity:

We don’t allow funds to be collected for organizations that promote, forums that distribute, or anything else that primarily facilitates harmful or dangerous activities. For example, an organization that promotes sexual abuse, intellectual property violations, weapons, commercial spamming, self harm, drug manufacturing techniques, or property crimes would be prohibited from receiving funds through Patreon.

People Who Can’t Use Patreon:

Because Patreon empowers people financially, we impose restrictions not only on the types of media and projects that can be funded on Patreon, but also on which people can and cannot receive funds through Patreon. After creating a Patreon page, any creator caught in the act or convicted of making credible violent threats, committing violent crimes, malicious doxing, coordinating nonviolent harm such as fraud, or encouraging others to do the aforementioned harmful activities may be banned from using Patreon.

People with a dangerous criminal history or known affiliation with violent or dangerous groups including terrorist or cyberterrorist organizations, organized criminal groups, and violent hate groups, cannot receive funds through Patreon, no matter the purpose or apparent intention of their Patreon page. Similarly, anyone who has ever been convicted of child sex abuse, fraud, or money laundering is not permitted to collect funds through Patreon.

This is a good policy, and we should adopt something similar. My only contention with their rules as a whole is on porn, which I think we should allow as long as the individuals aren't violating our other policies. We can get away with this where Patreon can't because there isn't strictly speaking an exchange of goods with Gratipay, whereas Patreon has a Kickstarter-style incentive system to provide donors with actual content.

[chadwhitacre]

An unexpected twist: in researching 8chan, I discovered /christian/, and I am smitten.

[clone1018]

@whit537 8chan is just the reddit of chans. You'll probably find the best this world has to offer and the worst, it's up to the user.

[colindean]

I changed the bullets to numbering in my above post for easier reference to its contents.

@seanlinsley, you're right on with the Patreon policy citation. I think that adopting a policy like Patreon's would take Gratipay down the path of 1.i.b. I'm OK with that, but then we get into outcries of censorship despite being in the right. We will definitely lose some users while also reducing risk created by disallowing users who fall into those categories.

Also, I, too, believe that the termination clause (TOS #13) would cover us, but by clearly stating intentions and exclusions upfront, we certainly mitigate the risk of enraging infringing users and reduce the possibility that such a user might come after Gratipay regardless of the termination clause should they feel they Gratipay has terminated their account wrongfully.

What would really strengthen this policy is citation of statutory and case law for each exclusionary reason, but I'm not sure that's an effective use of time. Also, we non-lawyers are neither qualified or do we have the resources to find specific examples. I'd take it as a challenge myself if I didn't believe it to be incredibly laborious.

[colindean]

Personally, some of the above exclusions are too vague for my tastes.

organization that promotes

• sexual abuse - definitely exclude, pretty well-defined socially and legally, using progressive definitions of abuse 🚫
• intellectual property violations - ❔
  • Host links or howtos? 🆗
  • Host pirated content with no takedown process according to the site's local laws? 🚫
• weapons - ❔
  • Talks about guns, e.g. NRA? 🆗
  • Coordinates a site for gun trading and advocates following laws regarding transfer? 🆗
  • Smuggling guns? 🚫
  • Advocates build WMDs to kill people 🚫 🙅 ⛔
• commercial spamming - clearly defined 🚫
• self harm - ❔
  • Techniques? 🚫
  • Where to get help/counseling? 🆗
• drug manufacturing techniques - information is 🆗
• property crimes - I'm not really sure what this means, other than maybe graffiti ❔

After creating a Patreon page, any creator caught in the act or convicted of making credible violent threats, committing violent crimes, malicious doxing, coordinating nonviolent harm such as fraud, or encouraging others to do the aforementioned harmful activities may be banned from using Patreon.

100% OK with this, because they are all clearly defined in legal terms. Fraud can be little more unclear, and I think that's one we'd have to act only on conviction. Maybe Gratipay needs a part of its terms that more clearly indemnifies Gratipay in the event of fraud and protects Gratipay against chargebacks resulting from a user's feeling defrauded.

People with a dangerous criminal history or known affiliation with violent or dangerous groups including terrorist or cyberterrorist organizations, organized criminal groups, and violent hate groups, cannot receive funds through Patreon, no matter the purpose or apparent intention of their Patreon page.

Gratipay is not equipped to define these, so we'd have to decide on someone else's list. US State Dept List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations would suffice internationally, and we're technically required by law not to do anything with them. Hate groups defined by the SPLC is a good list for that one.

Would we permit a user who claims to associate with Anonymous? What about other domestic organizations that are considered by some to be terrorists, such as eco-terrorists?

Similarly, anyone who has ever been convicted of child sex abuse, fraud, or money laundering is not permitted to collect funds through Patreon.

100% agreement with excluding those convicted of fraud or money laundering. I hate child sex abuse just as much as any rational person, but when state courts are convicting without the presence of or under antiquated Romeo and Juliet laws, I rollback that agreement to a case-by-case basis, defaulting to excluded.

Determining with whom one can do business is hard, especially when one wants to be upfront about it.

[chadwhitacre]

@colindean Thanks for the thorough taxonomy in #118 (comment).

[colindean]

a little attention from twitter: https://twitter.com/feedmeyourtears/status/548890123249909760

[seanlinsley]

Also in Freshdesk (login required):

• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1533
• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1534

[chadwhitacre]

FD1533 is a +1 for removing 8chan.

FD1543 is the follow-up from #118 (comment) re: RHExcelion.

[chadwhitacre]

I've asked for permission to copy comments from both FD1533 and FD1534 over here.

[chadwhitacre]

As a basis for comparison, I started looking into what PayPal does. Here's their Acceptable Use Policy, and here's the eBay/PayPal Law Enforcement Center. They use a third party called LeadsOnline.