Hey everyone! I just wanted to send out a quick update about my Patreon. I wanted to wait for a resolution on this before making a post about it, but the process is taking longer than I expected. So as you may know, the primary point of my Patreon aside from a place to take donations for the sake of increasing my production quality was to post videos that were not acceptable for YouTube (mostly energetics). My logic here was that after speaking to friends who post on Patreon and after reading their community guidelines thoroughly it did seem that they were more lax about the type of content you could post there (especially if it was behind a paywall) As it turns out this is not the case. After I uploaded my TNG video there my account was frozen so I could not post or message pending an investigation in response to a report (so apologies if you tried messaging me there). A few days ago the "investigation" concluded and in response my Patreon was terminated and Patrons refunded.
I did immediately appeal this decision as:
1) There are 7 other videos on Patreon right now that show the EXACT same process I demonstrated in my video.
2) The representative who notified me said that the reason for the termination was quote "Creators may not offer discounts, promotions, coupons, or other incentives to purchase or obtain weapons, offer weapons as a benefit, or create instructional works related to making, handling, or modifying explosives." The word "explosives" was added by him and does not exist in the actual community guidelines. Feel free to check. If something so incredibly broad as "handling explosives" was truly against their policy than a vast number of videos on their platform would be in violation of their own policy (including fireworks).
There is also a stated exemption that videos featuring explosives are allowed if done through an educational or historical lens, and I'd argue that my video is both. He/they ignored this exemption entirely.
3) TNG in its pure form is simply not a weapon, despite being an extremely dangerous energetic. My video was akin to showing how to purify gasoline from crude oil insofar as gasoline CAN be weaponized. Taking an energetic and fashioning it into a usable weapon is an entirely different process that I did not show in my video, and in fact the procedure I showed could not be easily modified to a scale necessary for weaponization. This was intentional and I actually got several comments about it.
4) I feel that total channel termination is a rather harsh first strike policy for something that I genuinely uploaded in good faith and had no idea would be an issue.
Anyway, I'm still hoping for an appeal and I'll update when I hear back on that front. In the case that the account can't be restored I'd love to hear any ideas on either some other platform that would be safe to upload such videos for you guys and/or somewhere else you guys would be interested in donating to help fund my work. Worst case scenario I could always contact those sponsors that are always emailing me.. they do offer more money for a single video than Patreon paid out in a year, but I did like the idea that all my videos could be crowdfunded.. Regardless let me know your thoughts, and I've got a new upload scheduled for Saturday!
PS: As always I am beyond grateful to those of you who believed in and enjoyed my work enough that you helped to financially support it. Even if I can't get the Patreon back, I'll I'll continue to credit those of you who had active subscriptions at the point I could last sign in for at least the next month or so.
Apoptosis
Hey everyone! I just wanted to send out a quick update about my Patreon. I wanted to wait for a resolution on this before making a post about it, but the process is taking longer than I expected.
So as you may know, the primary point of my Patreon aside from a place to take donations for the sake of increasing my production quality was to post videos that were not acceptable for YouTube (mostly energetics).
My logic here was that after speaking to friends who post on Patreon and after reading their community guidelines thoroughly it did seem that they were more lax about the type of content you could post there (especially if it was behind a paywall)
As it turns out this is not the case. After I uploaded my TNG video there my account was frozen so I could not post or message pending an investigation in response to a report (so apologies if you tried messaging me there). A few days ago the "investigation" concluded and in response my Patreon was terminated and Patrons refunded.
I did immediately appeal this decision as:
1) There are 7 other videos on Patreon right now that show the EXACT same process I demonstrated in my video.
2) The representative who notified me said that the reason for the termination was quote "Creators may not offer discounts, promotions, coupons, or other incentives to purchase or obtain weapons, offer weapons as a benefit, or create instructional works related to making, handling, or modifying explosives."
The word "explosives" was added by him and does not exist in the actual community guidelines. Feel free to check. If something so incredibly broad as "handling explosives" was truly against their policy than a vast number of videos on their platform would be in violation of their own policy (including fireworks).
There is also a stated exemption that videos featuring explosives are allowed if done through an educational or historical lens, and I'd argue that my video is both. He/they ignored this exemption entirely.
3) TNG in its pure form is simply not a weapon, despite being an extremely dangerous energetic. My video was akin to showing how to purify gasoline from crude oil insofar as gasoline CAN be weaponized. Taking an energetic and fashioning it into a usable weapon is an entirely different process that I did not show in my video, and in fact the procedure I showed could not be easily modified to a scale necessary for weaponization. This was intentional and I actually got several comments about it.
4) I feel that total channel termination is a rather harsh first strike policy for something that I genuinely uploaded in good faith and had no idea would be an issue.
Anyway, I'm still hoping for an appeal and I'll update when I hear back on that front. In the case that the account can't be restored I'd love to hear any ideas on either some other platform that would be safe to upload such videos for you guys and/or somewhere else you guys would be interested in donating to help fund my work.
Worst case scenario I could always contact those sponsors that are always emailing me.. they do offer more money for a single video than Patreon paid out in a year, but I did like the idea that all my videos could be crowdfunded..
Regardless let me know your thoughts, and I've got a new upload scheduled for Saturday!
PS: As always I am beyond grateful to those of you who believed in and enjoyed my work enough that you helped to financially support it. Even if I can't get the Patreon back, I'll I'll continue to credit those of you who had active subscriptions at the point I could last sign in for at least the next month or so.
1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 134