Author: Alex Heberling

alexheberling:

We’ll help resolve payment-card disputes.
If a backer of your project disputes the charge with their card issuer,
we’ll handle re-presenting the charge to settle the dispute with the
card issuer. You’ll be notified that a dispute has been filed, and
you’ll be able to provide evidence to help us resolve it in your favor.
If the cardholder’s dispute is found valid, you authorize us to charge
the credit card number you provided when you started your project for
the amount of the chargeback.

Nearly six years later, I’m browsing Kickstarter’s TOU on a leisurely Saturday night as one does, and I’m happy to see this policy in place. When I (and others) got kicktrolled, there wasn’t a word for it yet, and there was nothing in place at Kickstarter to deal with this sort of thing. It was a very insecure time for me, yikes.

I don’t know what I would have done if that guy hadn’t reached out to me. Wonder what all those folks have been up to?

Dammit, now I’m thinking about this again. When I got laid off, in January 2013, Patreon didn’t EXIST yet. It was a scrap of paper in Jack Conte’s pocket at that point. It wouldn’t launch until a few months later, in May, and in August I launched my first KS campaign. That was the one that the troll backed.

I don’t know who all was in on Patreon in those very first months, but it hadn’t hit comics yet. That was proooooobably February or March of 2014, judging from the date I joined.

Getting laid off a year too early for a paradigm shift in the industry was very inconvenient.