The Internet's Largest Kink Community Isn't Going To Moderate Itself (2019)

In March 2017, Sandra, a 48-year-old submissive living in Alberta, Canada awoke to discover that the Erotic Hypnosis group she'd been a member of for years had suddenly disappeared from Fetlife.com, the largest online kink community in the world. 

The erasure had come without warning or explanations, and Erotic Hypnosis wasn't the only victim: groups and fetishes involving needles, blood play, race play and consensual non-consent also went away. The weeks after disappearances were a turbulent time. The kink community was scared. "It was like Fetlife was cut in half," Sandra said. "We felt we lost such a community of like-minded people. Some of us were scrambling to go to other places, and people were so fragmented and lost." 

Sandra joined Fetlife nine years ago, shortly after she discovered her budding interest in kink. She used it to find local in-person events like munches and play parties. "You can be so much more honest with people who are in kink because everything is out there," she said. "I like that, I really do." Two years and a half ago, Sandra became a lifetime supporter of the site for $240. "I wanted to support the kink community and look back on any videos and everything no restriction or whatever," she said. Fetlife was where she met HypnomasterD, the founder of the Erotic Hypnosis group. She loved erotic hypnosis as a submissive — how HypnomasterD could get in her head to make her do things. The hypnotist could make her remember or forget, feel hot or cold, get goosebumps or feel someone's touch. When the Erotic Hypnosis group suddenly disappeared (along with over seven years of archived stories and discussions and research), she began to question herself.

"People are thinking what I enjoy is harmful and taboo, very very dark," she told me. "I'm really a good person, so why would someone think this is a bad thing?"

Still, Sandra remained optimistic — she told HypnomasterD that she thought the group must have just been hidden, not completely gone.

It took a month after the fetishes disappeared before John Baku, Fetlife's CEO and founder, finally explained the changes in a site announcement that shook the community. "I have a lot to apologize for," Baku wrote. He apologized for the deletions, for leaving everyone in the dark, "and most importantly, I apologize for letting many of you down." According to the post, Fetlife had just lost its credit card processors. The bank had given the team vague reasons for the denial of service, including "illegal or immoral content" or "blood, needles, and vampirism."

To protect the community, Fetlife decided to remove any content that the credit card companies could deem obscene. "We've been one of the most liberal, if not the most liberal, adult site on the web which makes us the perfect target," Baku wrote, especially in the increasingly hostile political climate. The site's newly updated guidelines weren't intended "to be a negative comment against your kink or your fantasies," Baku wrote. But Fetlife's decisions could no longer revolve around the needs of just its members—it was about protecting the survival of the site itself. Fetlife was funded by ad sales (which weren't enough to cover the cost of the site's servers) and paid memberships. Without card payments for the latter, the site's revenue dropped overnight. When Baku first got the news, he said, "I felt like my world just fell apart."

Today, the climate for sexuality online is worse than ever. In December 2018, Tumblr, which had been home to a vibrant community of sex and kink blogs, banned all adult content, a week after Apple removed the Tumblr app from its App store for incidences of child pornography. While child pornography is never acceptable, banning all adult content from the site seemed an inordinate measure (adult content drove up to 20 percent of Tumblr's traffic, and it was one of the few platforms remaining on the web where sex blogs could be based around building knowledge and community, and not just getting off). In April 2018, President Trump signed the controversial FOSTA/SESTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) bills, which were ostensibly designed to stop sex trafficking (by punishing publishers for incidences of sex trafficking discovered on their sites). In fact, when sites like Backpage and Craigslist shut off its personals and adult services section, it took away sex workers' ability to screen clients, and made their life and work even more dangerous.

Fetlife, on the other hand, survived its credit card fiasco. Since 2017, the site's grown by almost two million members. Today, it has 7.3 million users from all over the world — from the U.S. and Europe to Bhutan and Fiji. It's the unrivaled heart of the kink community, and it's about to celebrate its 11th anniversary. All of it would not have been possible without John Baku. Baku is a personable, enthusiastic 40-year-old with a fluffy beard and a tweed newsboy who talks quickly and is even quicker with a joke. You can hear his voice on the site itself, where returning members are greeted with a hearty: Welcome home! We've missed you... big time! Or in the emojis and jokes liberally sprinkled into site guidelines and policies (People don't come to FetLife to be abused... unless of course that is their kink... in that case we don't judge :-p.) Baku wrote all the copy himself. "I have to write it, and then smile. And if I smile and I feel warm inside, then I knew I did the right thing."

It's the unrivaled heart of the kink community, and it's about to celebrate its 11th anniversary. All of it might would not have been possible without John Baku.

Baku was born and raised in Montreal to rowdy Greek parents, two of the best people in the world, he says. "They gave me ridiculous amounts of confidence. No matter what I did wrong." Baku thought it was because they thought he would never amount to much: when Baku was very young, his ADHD was misdiagnosed as epilepsy or a mental handicap. He attended a special needs class in elementary school with five other kids. "I thought it was funny," he said. It didn't bother him because he knew who he was inside. He was a dreamer — "always in my head." He liked looking at things and looking for ways to improve them. He remembered seeing government forms that his mom had left on the table as a kid, looking at the words, thinking, why are they making this so complicated? Then he started redesigning the page in his head.

When Baku was 10 years old, he wanted a remote-controlled car. His parents offered to buy it, but he wanted to earn it himself. So Baku started working at his father's hairdressing salon, spending summer mornings sweeping the floors, changing the towels for $20 a day until he saved up enough for the car, which cost over two hundred dollars. What he remembered most about the salon were the conversations he had with Manny, a loud, cheerful, gay Israeli hairdresser who wore tank tops and tight jeans and had a suntan all year round. Baku used to sit in the lunchroom and listen to his stories. Manny was vibrant and cheerful, and so it had stunned Baku when he heard Manny say, "If I could choose to not be gay, I would in a second. Life would be so much easier."

"I saw him growing up," Baku said, "and this whole time he's the happiest guy in the world. I thought even if he had a choice, [being gay] would be the choice he made." Baku was shocked to learn that Manny, for all his color and personality, still disliked a part of himself. It was a feeling Baku would grow to know, too.

Baku was always a boundary pusher, eager to see what he could get away with. He went to a private, bilingual high school in Montreal, where he often got detentions for small infringements: leaving his shirt untucked, getting up without asking, speaking English in the hallways. The principal explained to him, once: "you're not a bad person at all. It's just wherever the line is, and everyone stops, you always just do it one step further, and that gets you in trouble."

The thing was, Baku wasn't interested in the rules, he was interested in learning about people. "I never wanted people to feel alone," he said. When his dad dropped him off at school in the morning, Baku made his rounds around the school: saying hello to the secretary, the librarian, the principal, the janitor. Despite his lack of interest in class, he loved high school. "I didn't want it to come to an end. I was so close to everybody."

He hopped around friend groups, geeky and awkward, surprised when a girl first showed interest in him. They ended up dating for eight years. While other teenagers experimented with drugs or sex, Baku had his first sip of alcohol at 25, and wanted to save sex until after marriage. He knew it was unusual — but he knew there was something else that was unusual about himself. He was raised to respect women, to defend them and protect them. But his fantasies went against what he'd been taught. He remembers an early fantasy in which he took on the role of a militant gym teacher, commanding girls to do push-ups and sit-ups. He knew it wasn't what he was supposed to dream about, but he still returned to it, even if he also thought something must have been wrong. "There was a point when I wanted to cut off my own penis," Baku says. "It messed me up, big time."

When he finally started looking for other people who were like him, he signed up for a membership at one of the largest kink websites he could find at the time, ALT.com. In order to message anyone on ALT, he had to pay for a premium membership. For a full year, he sent out messages and got no responses. "The day after my subscription lapsed, I got three messages." He was in his mid-twenties, and couldn't afford the hundred dollars to sign up for another year's membership. "But the allure of somebody messaging you, who is similar to you, who can understand you and accept you for who you are sexually," it made him stupid. He paid for the membership, then the same thing happened again the next year. "I didn't feel better sexually, I felt worse." Baku told me. "I felt like I was being taken advantage of."

Baku decided to come up with a solution of his own, a way to make people feel comfortable with their sexuality. "I always said, if you just find one person, if they meet somebody who's just like them, that moment, it changes their lives."

In the fall of 2007, Baku was working two jobs: as a user experience designer at Cloudraker, a technology agency in Montreal, and as a software engineer on contract with Bell when he decided to embark on his new project: Fetlife.com. In those days, he lived alone in a basement level apartment. He'd recently joined Weight Watchers (his sister had done it and lost 100 pounds), and kept a strict schedule: he rose early, ate the same breakfast (banana and cheerios), went to work, then rushed home to work on the site. To avoid distraction, he made sure his apartment didn't have Internet or a TV. He worked late into the night, finishing each day with a piece of the Weight Watchers chocolate that he loved. He looked forward to weekends because it meant having more time to work on Fetlife. A few months later, Cloudraker laid off a big team of its employees. Baku took the news with glee: he was excited to devote more time to Fetlife.

Fetlife launched on January 3, 2008. And then, slowly, membership grew. He messaged each new member, asking them about their experience, and for suggestions and improvements. "Those were fun times!" Baku recalled. He could work on a cool idea, right away, and message that person two hours later and say, "okay! It's up, what do you think?" (Now, if he tried doing the same thing, "I'd have one person happy and a thousand mad.")

Six months later, Fetlife had made it to the top 50,000 sites on Alexa, which ranks site popularity. (Today, Fetlife is ranked 1,700 globally, and is the 600th most popular site in the U.S.)

Running Fetlife hadn't come without its pitfalls. In 2013, Fetlife faced heavy criticism in regards to a site policy that didn't allow its users to publicly name alleged abusers. A writer called M. Lunas on feminist blog Disrupting Dinner Parties posted a five-part series on consent in the BDSM community, thoroughly criticizing Fetlife's role. Lunas described a litany of FetLife's failings, which included not allowing users sufficient privacy controls, the inability for users to export site data, and silencing victims of abuse. "There is a strong relation between FetLife's for-profit business model and all their actions," he argued. For proof, Lunas pointed to the Fetlife support option, which gives users access to video uploads, aka: "the benefit of paying is the ability to perv endlessly on other users' amateur porn. According to Lunas, it was "in FetLife's direct financial interest not to provide security and privacy features."

It's incredibly difficult to be fair to everyone — someone usually suffers the consequences. The balancing act isn't easy, and neither is managing a massive community of opinionated kinksters.

And then, of course, there came the credit card fiasco. Baku told me that he didn't know what had caused the site to lose its credit card processors, but he knew that the site didn't have much leverage for fighting back. The credit card companies were just managing their brand, after all. If they decided they no longer wanted Fetlife as a client because of bukkake (a sex act that originated in Japan when several different men ejaculate on a man or woman), it was easy to quit transacting with Fetlife without consequences. They had billions more clients beholden to their services, after all. "The only thing [the credit card companies] have to do is mitigate their risk. How do you mitigate your risk? By not saying a word," Baku exclaimed. "I would do the same thing!"

Jeremy Malcolm, executive director of Prostasia Foundation and previously a senior global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to "protecting civil liberties in the digital world," told me that the credit card companies' actions (or, in fact, the actions of the Apple store) were not unusual. The EFF had coined a special term for this: shadow regulations, when private businesses and intermediary companies start to function as de facto lawmakers. "It has the same outcome as if government has put it into law — except without any due process or accountability." And in many ways, it's even more alarming. With shadow regulations, there are no paper trials, no official records, no legal recourse. "You're just really disempowered."

As a result, "there starts to be a chilling effect where just to avoid possible liability, websites will refuse to carry content that's completely legitimate." This cuts into First Amendment rights, of course, and it can also threaten the safety of sexual minorities. Communities are the backbone of BDSM culture, Susan Wright, a spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) and a research consultant for Fetlife explained. It's how people get education on how to tie a rope or how to negotiate a safe word to stop a scene. If Fetlife members no longer had a space to discuss how to play safely, they might be forced into experimenting on their own, hurting themselves or their partners in the process.

A month after Baku posted the "Changes" announcement, he shared a new update, titled "Always Go Left." "It didn't feel right to just blindly follow the guidelines that were put in place to protect the card companies' image," he wrote. Instead, Fetlife was going to focus on improving site guidelines and moderation, and continuing to offer premium memberships using alternative payments (direct bank transfers, gift cards, Bitcoin, or cash sent through the mail). The site gave members whose groups or fetishes were deleted an opportunity to submit their content to be potentially restored — Sandra's erotic hypnosis community was among the rescued. 

'We've always been like — whatever two consenting adults agree to, they can do. That might have been the wrong approach.'

Since then, Fetlife has updated its content guidelines to follow newly passed regulations — recently, it banned any photos or videos that involved blood from public view (users can still share them with Fetlife Friends), and limited access to financial domination from the site. While it continues to offer support communities for sex workers, it's cracked down on removing and banning any talk of escort or sex work services from the site.

"This whole problem we ran into with the credit cards, maybe it's a blessing in disguise," Baku told me last year. "Maybe it gives us the opportunity to reevaluate a lot of decisions we made in the past. We've always been like — whatever two consenting adults agree to, they can do. That might have been the wrong approach." Now, he believed in balancing everybody's needs: that includes the kinksters, and those who are uncomfortable with kink. "It hurts when other people are being cynical towards you and they always think you have this mal-intent," Baku said. "I'm like, man, if you just knew me, you'd know that all I want is the best for everybody!"

But of course, it's incredibly difficult to be fair to everyone — someone usually suffers the consequences. The balancing act isn't easy, and neither is managing a massive community of opinionated kinksters. Baku's role as community manager is still very, very new. There isn't an official playbook, and the rules are being rewritten every step of the way. Big sites like Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter have faced similar problems with murky results. Fetlife deals with even more layers of complexity, hosting sexual content that can appear taboo to the world at large.

"I have everything I have because of the community," Baku told me, early on. "It is my life's work. It's what I was born and made to do." He saw himself as the one to uphold its integrity, even if that meant making difficult decisions or mistakes. I asked Baku once what he would do if Fetlife did exhaust all its options, and had to shut down. "I would wake up in the morning, same time. I'd grab my school bag and I'd put a book in it. I'd go to a coffee shop. I'd put on my noise-canceling headphones, and I'd just read, and think."

In a way, it sounds appealing — not shutting down Fetlife, but pulling out a book, "knowing that I can read for as long as I need to read."

And the next step, he said, will come to him.