Yet another Hacker News

Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics

69 points Tomte 2 hours ago 55 comments

atomicfiredoll 1 hour ago | parent

Am I misunderstanding this? Has their website also been suspended?

I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.

Black616Angel 1 hour ago | parent

Meh, the audience comes with the content.

If only every third NSFW-artist from tumble migrated into the fediverse, the audience would follow and maybe even lead some of the other artists to join as well.

atomicfiredoll 1 hour ago | parent

That's my thought too. As the comic illustrates, artists have had to community hop before. It feels like there's some potential for a good match, despite occasional technical challenges like instances winding down.

yorwba 1 hour ago | parent

The dedicated fanbase, sure. But not people who don't actively seek out sexy raccoons, although they might read the comic if it shows up in their feed when they're bored. So not being able to post on popular platforms costs them a customer-acquisition funnel.

The usual solution is to put conspicuous censorship markers over everything the platform finds objectionable and then let the audience know where they can buy the uncensored edition.

mschuster91 59 minutes ago | parent

> If only every third NSFW-artist from tumble migrated into the fediverse, the audience would follow

... and at least a fair few fediverse instances, especially ones based in Europe, would defederate with NSFW friendly instances in order to stay compliant with relevant laws.

numpad0 19 minutes ago | parent

That happened for Twitter and then defederation happened. The benevolent dictator of Mastodon did NOT stand up for freedom of speech for art, and that headshot Mastodon dead.

Same almost happened with Bluesky later at much smaller scale due to skepticism and again moderation happened.

That's why Twitter reigns supreme.

thaumasiotes 1 hour ago | parent

The headline doesn't really describe the content. Their website is fine.

atomicfiredoll 1 hour ago | parent

But, in the comic it says "We still have our website" and the address in the panel is electricraccoon.com, but I think that if I open that site it says:

> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente

> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador Nube.

> ---

> The online store has been momentarily suspended

> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.

Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.

yorwba 49 minutes ago | parent

The author bio at the bottom says "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here"." Which are up https://electricbonescomic.com https://www.alwaysraininghere.com I think they just decided to blow their self-promotion opportunity for an inside joke.

atomicfiredoll 42 minutes ago | parent

Ah, thank you! I thought I must be doing something wrong, and even clicked the contributor link at the bottom, but couldn't find it. Oddly, I seem to see a different bio and no links on the page.

> "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here". "Always Raining Here" is a Canadian slice of life romance published in 2025 by First Second books and is now available in bookstores across Canada. Hazel and Bell have been working together since 2011, with a focus on telling stories set in their home province of British Columbia."

I wonder if it's something region specific.

makeitdouble 45 minutes ago | parent

> While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues

As I understand it, money is the core of it. Everything else would be accessory if the payment processor part got solved.

Black616Angel 1 hour ago | parent

Good thing, it's only webcomics! Would be a shame if everyone f*cking self-censored online and wrote stupid sh|t like "unalive" or "seggs".

Ygg2 1 hour ago | parent

~~YouTube~~ Google ads and its advertisers have been a plague upon Video essay creators.

gambiting 1 hour ago | parent

It's more TikTok and Instagram which aggressively filter these words no matter the context.

Ygg2 1 hour ago | parent

Ok, but why? Because advertising wants maximum audience. Which means you can't show horrors of war or else Nestle won't allow you to show their product banner down.

roenxi 1 hour ago | parent

There is probably more to it than that. If the platform can censor the content then it is capable of identifying it and so can choose not to display a Nestle ad. That would be a more palatable solution for the ad platforms and also probably acceptable to most companies. If users want to watch something on a platform what do they care? The article makes a good case that this is something more like Operation Choke Point or the itch.io deindexing where the financial system is being mobilised for political ends.

It is an interesting use case to monitor because there are obvious need for something like crypto, but so that has not come close to taking hold.

wtch98 18 minutes ago | parent

Can you show the horrors of Nestle and the 10 million babies they killed, not for ideology, just for higher dividends.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24452/w244...

kotaKat 1 hour ago | parent

The official COPS YouTube channel posts episodes now with even the tamest word of all - "narcotics" - bleeped and all the paraphernalia is blurred.

I didn't know you could get arrested for possessing a half ounce of blur, but here we are in 2026.

walrus01 48 minutes ago | parent

> ads

the advertising industry in general is a plague on a great many things, in the current instance of late stage capitalism we exist in.

expedition32 51 minutes ago | parent

In some countries books are removed from the store if you say "Free Palestine".

I live in the Netherlands- a country that prises itself in hyper individuality. It can be a little tiring but never boring. People here are born without filters. Cold, blunt, callous, rude, insulting but always free.

Ekaros 1 hour ago | parent

Isn't this exactly what certain webcomic authors wanted? The platforms are showing them the door. As they say if it is not government making the rules it is not censorship. It is something that some webcomic authors fully wanted and have actively supported politically.

allarm 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder how soon someone will leave a comment here saying something like, “Aaactually, this isn’t censorship.”

gambiting 1 hour ago | parent

One minute after your comment, as it turns out.

Black616Angel 1 hour ago | parent

The comment you mean was posted the minute, your comment was posted.

Coincidence? I think not.

GaryBluto 59 minutes ago | parent

Pre-emptively announcing the existence of an opposing view doesn't invalidate it.

PostOnce 1 hour ago | parent

The "ads" for other articles in the middle of the comic are jarring, disruptive, and keep making me wonder if that was it but then you scroll way down and there's more

GaryBluto 1 hour ago | parent

I am absolutely confident that the people who created this comic would not be happy with everything that isn't illegal being allowed on the websites and social medias they frequent; more importantly, nothing about this seems to be specific to the sexual orientation of the banned content, despite the spin.

The only thing that actually seems to be an issue here is the credit card processors.

nkrisc 29 minutes ago | parent

Any time furry stuff gets banned, people claim it’s an attack against queer people because seemingly most furries are queer. Of course many queer people do not identify as furries, but they’re getting dragged in by those that do because claiming persecution for being a furry is going to garner much less sympathy than claiming persecution for being queer.

mcherm 1 hour ago | parent

Hosting on your own website is a GREAT solution for avoiding platform censorship, and the tools to do so easily and cost effectively exist.

That leaves two key issues: getting paid, and discovery.

Getting paid (at a minimum, enough to cover hosting bandwidth and art supplies, but I like to dream some artists earn at least a tiny bit from their work) works now but is VERY fragile. Just a couple of vendors offer mostly-not-censored payment services (eg: Patreon) and if they stopped due to pressure from credit card networks, governments, or billionaires it would be difficult to replace them.

As for discovery, we need to build platforms that aren't the major social networks that can help audiences find new comics. This is a fairly easy problem to solve.

OgsyedIE 1 hour ago | parent

Everybody with any interest in their work not being ephemeral and out of their control should self-host it and syndicate it elsewhere. I believe the acronym other prosyletisers of this approach use is POSSE but what's important is that the idea is made into a consistent best practice.

torben-friis 1 hour ago | parent

And build their own payment processor and universal social media platform to link it in I assume?

magackame 41 minutes ago | parent

> payment processor

If only crypto was actually used as intended...

I do wonder how easy is it for buisnesses, that only accept crypto (lets say monero), to turn it back into fiat, and how willing are regular people to set up and acquire crypto to pay.

alexgieg 27 minutes ago | parent

In principle crypto solves the first problem, but suffers from networking effects: creators won't list crypto for payment because most people don't use it; most people don't use it because there's nowhere it can be used.

As for a universal social media platform, that used to exist. It was called "webrings". Every website would link to other websites they vouched for, so you could browse around them, and sign up for those you liked by clicking a single button on your browser of choice, adding it to your RSS feeds, after which you'd be notified whenever a creator you subscribed to posted something new.

Most of that died when Google decided to oppose RSS as a public-facing feature, and pressured Firefox in doing the same. So nowadays it suffers from the same networking effects problem crypto does.

The whole thing is deliberately engineered to centralize decision-making in the hands of as few people as possible, aka elites, and, through that, to steer most of the masses in whatever direction most benefits those elites.

nkrisc 1 hour ago | parent

Turns out not everyone wants to see furry smut.

It’s not a matter of censorship, it’s a matter of taste.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

> Turns out not everyone wants to see furry smut.

I don't want to see furry smut either, but for fucks sake I think that everyone should be able to pay money to their favorite furry smut artists if they want to. Credit card processors should only be allowed to refuse transactions if they actively break a law.

nkrisc 36 minutes ago | parent

That part I agree with. Payment processors should be legally neutral in what is rapidly becoming a cashless society.

Other than that though, I think platforms should be free to ban smut if they want. I’ve abandoned several sites over time because they became inundated with cartoon smut, which I am not interested in.

mschuster91 28 minutes ago | parent

> Other than that though, I think platforms should be free to ban smut if they want.

While I agree on principle, I also see the dangers of platforms caving before Evangelical pressure campaigns. And once this is established, the threshold to cross from "ban furry smut" to "ban anything even smelling like LGBT" is much much thinner. My personal patience with and trust in platforms to behave sanely is all but gone.

Cthulhu_ 59 minutes ago | parent

But the platform shouldn't get to decide that.

GaryBluto 56 minutes ago | parent

What do you mean, platform? Should Hacker News be forced to permit pornography?

makeitdouble 49 minutes ago | parent

From the TFA:

> restrictions from payment providers are making sharing queer stories online even harder.

1317 54 minutes ago | parent

why not? it's their site

nkrisc 32 minutes ago | parent

I disagree. They should be allowed to decide and make such editorial decisions.

But along with that, if they are making decisions, they should be held to account for what they do allow.

xg15 58 minutes ago | parent

And turns out not everyone wants to allow others to see furry smut...

nephihaha 46 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately it doesn't stop there.

keiferski 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”

When you are mostly just shown content that you’ve agreed to see, there’s less of an issue when you see something that offends your particular sensibilities, values, etc. because you agreed to see it, or you went looking for it.

But when the potential content you’ll see can include literally anything, there is a real incentive for the platform to make that content as neutral as possible. Because if you’re shown something that you really don’t like, you’ll stop scrolling and the engagement stats will go down.

anal_reactor 37 minutes ago | parent

The core issue is that now the internet is full of non-technical people so you're not getting the critical mass to make self-hosting a thing. So you absolutely need a platform. And when there's a platform, there is social pressure that the admin should ban certain types of content. Once people decide to ban some content, it's a matter of time before the tides shift and you have a huge crowd screaming "I never thought that Leopards would eat MY face!".

nottorp 59 minutes ago | parent

May I suggest that if you have a message, you put it in text above the endless scrolling comic panels?

And if you do comics that size, please think of the poor laptop/desktop users and lay out more on one line...

pedrocr 50 minutes ago | parent

The only subreddit I've ever been banned from in 20+ years is /r/comics. Lifetime ban for a single offence of questioning a comic strip. According to the mod: "This is a fan subreddit, this is not a discussion subreddit." There's plenty of discussion on there, but I now realize it's highly filtered. It took me too long to figure that out because it mostly aligned with my views up to that point.

We're in bubbles everywhere now. Enforced by mods and payment processors and social networks. I'm now much more careful about what I post online. We don't have an actual public square to discuss things.

walrus01 49 minutes ago | parent

I'm banned from /r/domains/ for daring to question the land rush of speculators buying .SI "Super Intelligence" domains and trying to resell them to the die hard true believers of a certain political figure. No great loss. If you ever want to see a subreddit that makes bitcoin true believers look like rational, sane individuals...

nephihaha 49 minutes ago | parent

This is why people need to meet in person even more. We do have a public square and it's outside and offline.

I got shadow banned on Duolingo forums for questioning why a billion dollar company was not paying some of the people who helped develop their language courses.

nephihaha 50 minutes ago | parent

We barely get indie anything online now. We have fake indy outlets like Buzzfeed and Vice, but blogs are excluded from search results. IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes carry some public reviews but even they are being deprioritised for AI summaries.

xiphias2 35 minutes ago | parent

I don't really understand the topic: if I go to Hazel and Bell website it says that the comics are meant for 18+ adults. But the article is ablout school librarians for children not allowing the comic.

School libraries were always censored heavily.

Using online payment processing for censoring is a separate issue that unfortunately comes up heavily (money is supposed to be neutral as long as its used legally), but they shouldn't be mixed together with the school library question.

yorwba 13 minutes ago | parent

I don't see where school libraries are mentioned.

big_hacker 32 minutes ago | parent

This reminds me of Altered Carbon's Head in the Clouds, where exceedingly wealthy Bancroft kills prostitutes during sex, because he can afford it.

What if there was a massage parlor downstairs, perfectly legal and allowed, which marketed and sent wealthy patrons upstairs?

But whatever. Aside from the slippery slope argument of OnlyFans which I guess can be dispelled, I think using the raccoons for broader appeal and calling porn "queer" is poor.

Even less popular: I think there's a simple business argument to credit card companies and regulating porn. The sector has way higher fraud, disputes and chargebacks.