FurAffinity is an art hosting site that’s been around for over twenty years now, which — as the name implies — caters largely to the furry community. FA remains one of the last places online you can post and view sexually explicit artwork, and it turns out that’s a problem for some people.
This past Friday, FA’s news account posted about troubles they’ve been having with the third-party advertising services used to fund the site. These advertisers have concerns about “adult content” posted on FA — and their definition of “adult content” is, uh, this:
… they consider plus size characters, two characters hugging, and “barbie doll nudity” to be adult content, despite these being normal everyday things that are not adult at all.
…
We receive a daily list of items that they have flagged as violations and have to sort through them. If they’re legitimate violations, we re-rate them. If they aren’t, we don’t touch them. Submissions that are not violations of our policies are still held against us.
Because these companies consider benign images of fat people equivalent to fetish pornography, FA’s advertising revenue has fallen to the point where it’s no longer a viable way to fund the site. FA’s owner, Susan “Sciggles” Hess, has turned to FA’s users and the wider furry community for help and posted a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe.
The campaign hit its funding goal within two days, ensuring FurAffinity’s survival for at least the next year. The top donations are all thousand-dollar amounts.
(On a related note, the furry community is notable for including many, many senior IT professionals with a lot of disposable income.)
Considering how many sites have either had to cave on their content policies or shut down entirely within the past few years, it’s nice to see the little guy win for once.
Preorder: “The Safecracker’s Take”
When the young Beddington twins rob a tanning salon in east London, the last thing they expect to find there is ₤500,000 in illicit cash. Desperate to return the money before someone comes looking for it, they enlist the help of Jay Moriarty and his partner, Sebastian Moran.
The good news: Moriarty has figured out who the money belongs to. The bad news: it belongs to a pair of corrupt police officers. And they don’t just want the money back — they want the Beddingtons, and anyone else who came in contact with them, silenced.
The twelfth story in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, “The Safecrackers’ Take,” comes out on October 12!
Also, Ko-fi supporters at the Early Access tier ($5 CAD/month) can download the book for free, right now.
The Exploits of Jay Moriarty
The second collected edition of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty is available now!
This Week’s Links
Bastardica
A tool for making horrible web fonts.
Okay, NOW the Video Game Industry is Collapsing: a Lawyer Explains
From AI spending and rising borrowing costs to shrinking venture capital, geopolitical shocks, and a growing global liquidity squeeze, the financial conditions that helped fuel the modern games industry are rapidly changing. And the result of that rapid change might well be a genuine collapse of not just the video game industry, but the larger economy also.
How Schools and Universities Try to Censor Student Journalists
Student journalists, their advisors, and legal advocates say colleagues and administrators are attempting to undermine student reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, Gaza, and other issues that public institutions would rather not have their reputations connected to.
By the way, “Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act” is back down to $0 on Amazon US. I guess the automated price-matching system finally kicked in. Or maybe somebody at Amazon reads this newsletter.
-K
Leave a Reply