PayPal was perfectly within their rights as a private company to decide not to do business with us because our content policy conflicted with theirs! We thought they were ridiculous to do it and four months of no income was a giant pain in the ass, but we found another provider and we moved on. It's happened before, it'll happen again.
Our deciding not to do business with Cloudflare because their values conflict with ours and we don't believe they've given their policies sufficient thought to balance the conflicting needs between maximizing permitted user expression and preventing verifiable, concrete offline harm: same deal. If Cloudflare's CEO ever sees this post, he's perfectly welcome to think we're ridiculous to do it. We aren't doing this to have any effect on Cloudfare; we're a tiny drop in the bucket of their revenue stream. Mark and I just agree on the ethical principle of Dreamwidth Studios, LLC, the company we co-own that runs dreamwidth.org, that say when we feasibly have a choice of providers for a given service, and we believe one of those providers is behaving in a fashion that conflicts with our principles as a company, we pick another provider who offers that service. It's happened before; it'll happen again.
We have regular discussions about all our business relationships and whether or not we believe we're making the most ethical choice of provider available, given our limited resources and the current state of the business. We fired our accountant this year because he tried to persuade us to take out a fraudulent loan under the governmental COVID relief loan program. Owning a business means making choices about who you do business with, and we choose to prioritize factors other than cost or popularity more highly in making those choices than some other businesses do (or are able to do).
I apologize that I apparently phrased the notification to our users of the potential downtime that comes with changing DNS and CDN providers, along with an explanation of why we're making the move, in such a way that you felt it was "a tantrum", but this is how we communicate around here; we're extremely casual in how we write and speak, because we're four individual people running this site and not an entire marketing team carefully crafting every message to be as bland as possible. If our choices of service providers, our reasons for choosing those providers, or the way we communicate is as much of a deal-breaker for you as Cloudflare's refusal to remove clients that are not only causing verifiable offline harm but also blatantly breaking Cloudflare's expressly stated AUPs is a deal-breaker for us, I genuinely do wish you the best of luck in finding a site that matches your values more closely. We are always sorry to see someone leave because they disagree with our vision for the site or our principles as a business, but we don't and won't change that vision and those principles just because someone objects.
no subject
Our deciding not to do business with Cloudflare because their values conflict with ours and we don't believe they've given their policies sufficient thought to balance the conflicting needs between maximizing permitted user expression and preventing verifiable, concrete offline harm: same deal. If Cloudflare's CEO ever sees this post, he's perfectly welcome to think we're ridiculous to do it. We aren't doing this to have any effect on Cloudfare; we're a tiny drop in the bucket of their revenue stream. Mark and I just agree on the ethical principle of Dreamwidth Studios, LLC, the company we co-own that runs dreamwidth.org, that say when we feasibly have a choice of providers for a given service, and we believe one of those providers is behaving in a fashion that conflicts with our principles as a company, we pick another provider who offers that service. It's happened before; it'll happen again.
We have regular discussions about all our business relationships and whether or not we believe we're making the most ethical choice of provider available, given our limited resources and the current state of the business. We fired our accountant this year because he tried to persuade us to take out a fraudulent loan under the governmental COVID relief loan program. Owning a business means making choices about who you do business with, and we choose to prioritize factors other than cost or popularity more highly in making those choices than some other businesses do (or are able to do).
I apologize that I apparently phrased the notification to our users of the potential downtime that comes with changing DNS and CDN providers, along with an explanation of why we're making the move, in such a way that you felt it was "a tantrum", but this is how we communicate around here; we're extremely casual in how we write and speak, because we're four individual people running this site and not an entire marketing team carefully crafting every message to be as bland as possible. If our choices of service providers, our reasons for choosing those providers, or the way we communicate is as much of a deal-breaker for you as Cloudflare's refusal to remove clients that are not only causing verifiable offline harm but also blatantly breaking Cloudflare's expressly stated AUPs is a deal-breaker for us, I genuinely do wish you the best of luck in finding a site that matches your values more closely. We are always sorry to see someone leave because they disagree with our vision for the site or our principles as a business, but we don't and won't change that vision and those principles just because someone objects.