TL;DR: Moving forward we’re going to be more transparent and work with the community to iterate over our content guidelines one-by-one to clearly define where the line is drawn, including rationale.

On multiple occasions, we've announced changes to our content guidelines, only to not follow through with them.

We didn't follow through because we didn't feel comfortable with either the way we were going about the changes, or with the changes themselves. It didn't feel right, it didn't feel good, it didn't feel like we were doing things the FetLife way.

We’re sorry about the emotional rollercoaster we’ve been taking you through. It wasn’t fair to you and it wasn’t fair to the community. I’m sorry, I know it sucked!

We pride ourselves in being transparent with the community. Unfortunately though, we haven't been as transparent as we would have liked when it comes to our content guidelines. Both when it comes to what our guidelines are and the rationale behind them.

It's not because we've wanted to hide anything from you. Nothing makes me happier than being transparent with you. It's because we believed that not being transparent was the best overall strategy of all the potentially shitty strategies we could take.

Let me try to explain.

When it comes to anything that happens between consenting adults, we want to be as permissive as possible. Unfortunately, regulations and financial institutions don't draw the line at the same place as the community. Not only that, but the lines are far from clearly defined.

Over the last decade, I've spoken to easily over a hundred people in both the financial and adult industries, and asked them for a copy of the official content rules. Everyone says they've heard that there are rules, but nobody seems to have seen them or can even get their hands on them!

In the ten years I've been asking this question, this is the only rule that we we've been able to get our hands on:

    The Corporation considers any of the following activities to be in violation of this Rule:

        The sale or offer of sale of a product or service other than in full compliance with law then applicable to the Acquirer, Issuer, Merchant, Cardholder, Cards, or the Corporation.

        The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of non-consensual sexual behaviour, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material the corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with the mark.

The kicker being:

    any other material the corporation deems unacceptable

Yup, that's it, that's all.

Truth be told, if any of us were part of the leadership team at a large financial institution, we would probably take a similar stance. Otherwise, we would be out of a job!

Why would a financial institution want to get into the nitty-gritty details of documenting what is allowed and what is not allowed? Documenting it would just open up a can of worms and result in a PR nightmare. It would only end up limiting what they allow to try to please as many stakeholders as possible.

And that is the exact same strategy we've been using.

We believed that if we wanted to be as permissive as possible when it comes to what people can post on FetLife, that the best plan of action was to both not publicly state where the line is being drawn and to make it harder to find certain content on FetLife by programmatically returning zero results when a member searches certain terms using FetLife’s search feature. This was a strategy that was suggested to us by "reputable" people who work closely with both the largest financial institutions and sites in the adult industry.

It can be argued that we took the wrong stance, we’ve debated the pros and cons of it for years internally. But to argue it, you would have to be in all the conversations we've had with financial institutions over the years. The second anyone heard the term BDSM, they would run for the hills. Believe it or not, from my last check, there is only a handful or so of financial institutions in the world that will take on a site that does BDSM. Crazy!

I can hear it now, someone will say they know someone who can easily solve our problems and let us be free as a bird. I've heard this a bunch of times before; either the person has good intentions but is ill-informed, or the solution they are offering is far from above board.

But John, why do you guys even need to accept credit cards? Good question!

When we lost CC processing just over two and a half years ago, our revenue decreased by 50%. That alone drastically decreased our ability to move FetLife forward.

But on top of that, even if we decided to never accept CCs ever again, the financial institutions would still have a big impact on us because of how intertwined they are for the day to day running of an organization like FetLife, both directly and indirectly. It directly affects us in needing bank accounts, payroll services, and ways to pay our bills, to indirectly affecting us through all of our service providers.

We live in a new world where, instead of having things like this play out in court to determine if something is lawful or not, what governmental and political organizations are doing is putting pressure on financial institutions, service providers, etc. to cut access to funds, critical services, etc. to get rid of things they don't like. After all, it’s easier, faster, and cheaper for them to do that.

I'm not saying that is what happened or that it’s currently happening to us. I'm saying that this happens all the time, and it could easily happen to us. Sadly, we don't even know what happened in our case, nor do I think we will ever know.

And as much as we want to believe everyone will move to cryptocurrency and we will no longer need to rely on financial institutions, we are not there yet. For instance, we’ve accepted Bitcoin for many years now, but Bitcoin accounts for just less than 2% of our revenue. Maybe in the future it will account for more, but not anytime soon.

Even if we can get past all of that, we still have to worry about government regulations. As all of you have probably noticed, governments are becoming less permissive and are clamping down on what they believe to be acceptable. What makes things worse, just like the opaque rules that financial institutions have set, governments also have similarly opaque laws concerning “obscenity”, “extreme pornography”, and other related concepts.

At the end of the day, the world sadly doesn't always work the way we wish it did.

Why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you all this because I want us to move forward, but I want us to move forward the right way.

What does that look like?

Moving forward, we will work with the community to iterate over and define our guidelines. We want to make sure we’ve clearly documented what our guidelines are and why they are what they are. Sadly, that precision comes at a cost though. The cost is that we can no longer be as permissive as we've been historically.

The way we are going to improve our guidelines is by reviewing each content type, one by one. Part of the process will be to reverse engineer what different adult sites do with that content type. That will include reviewing multiple sites, looking for patterns amongst the sites, and sussing out a hypothesis of why things are the way they are. Then we are going to document each proposed guideline, including our research findings and rationale.

For each content type, we are going to share everything with you and open the floor to feedback to see if anyone finds something we've missed before we finalize the related guidelines and publish them to FetLife. The goal being that everyone, including the caretakers, will have one complete set of guidelines to refer to.

Please be patient with us, this will take a lot of time, and we need to review dozens of different kinks. Not only will we be iterating over our guidelines during this process, but we will also be iterating over the process itself. This is new for all of us so there will be a lot of lessons learned along the way.

If we don't learn something completely new from posting this announcement that makes us pivot, we hope to have our first guideline to share with you by the end of next week to get your feedback and to give you a feel for the initial process.

I'm really sorry for all the frustrations we've caused over the years when it came to our guidelines. Even though it hasn't always been obvious, we've always wanted what is best for the community.

It’s really sad that we can't be as permissive in the future, but we are optimistic that the updated guidelines will do a much better job of setting expectations and also explain the source and rationale of the expectations.

What say you?

P.S. When it comes to any specific content type we don’t have any news for you nor can we answer any questions about them. We will need to do the proper research before we can say anything. We know it’s hard but we ask for your patience. In the meantime, I would just do what you’ve been doing all along until updated guidelines are published.