I'm not really aware of this PayPal, Patreon and Honey thing. I'd like someone to explain it to me.
From my basic understanding, American/Western payment processors (PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, etc.) have started getting very aggressive over the past decade when it comes to specifically cracking down on sexual content because they don't want to be associated with it, so they've been trying to apply pressure by "starving" online distributors like DLsite (not allowing you to buy things from their website if you are using one of their cards or accounts) until they agree to remove any and all content that the payment processors deem to be objectionable and harmful to their brand.
That trickles down to a site like Patreon, which doesn't
really care because that content makes them more money... but is putting them in an awkward spot where it is only able to exist because it provides a convenient and organized way to funnel money from consumers to creators. Now, if PayPal arbitrarily decides that Patreon is allowing "too much" questionable content like DLsite, they could easily blacklist Patreon from using their service as a payment method. And if people can't easily pay for Patreon with a service that they are familiar with and trust, their numbers would drop
dramatically across the board. DLsite can survive because they make most of their money at home in Japan, using their own payment companies so losing overseas customers is just bonus money to them. Patreon doesn't have that luxury, because most of their money comes directly through PayPal/MasterCard/Visa and having that pipeline turned off would essentially be a deathblow.
What you are left with is a very strange pseudo-enforcement, where Patreon simply doesn't have the manpower to moderate the content on its site... but in order to keep the payment processors happy, they will regularly find a bunch of creators who are skirting the guidelines and ban them just so that they can pretend that they are taking it seriously. You can
theoretically survive for a long time on Patreon even when you are blatantly breaking the guidelines, but it's pretty damn stressful because you might go from having 3000 supporters and making $10,000 per month to losing
all of that overnight and scrambling to try and find a way to coax your supporters over to a new platform where you have to start from scratch.
Honey is an entirely different controversy, where it was a heavily-advertised browser extension and subsidiary of PayPal which claimed to automatically scour the internet to find coupon codes or anything that could be used to maximize your deals while shopping online with a single click, but recently turned out to be a ~huge~ scam that was stealing literal
millions of dollars by using their browser extension to secretly overwrite referral links — like when some YouTuber you follow does a promotional video to show off a new game and has a link to buy in the description, if you click that link and buy it there with the YouTuber's code, they get a 5-10% cut of the sale — so that the commission which would normally go to the person who gave you that link went directly to Honey instead. And also that Honey was directly collaborating with certain vendors to intentionally hide the best discount codes and only show you ones that were specifically approved by the seller in some weird good cop/bad cop routine.
tl;dr — it's like being scolded about how immoral and dangerous hentai is by someone who has been going to restaurants and swiping tips off of the tables for ten years to buy a brand new Ferrari.
