I was cruising around on Bluesky today when I found out that Kickstarter had briefly jumped on the adult content banwagon before creator outcry led them to backtrack and issue an apology. This follows on the heels of Itch.io blocking adult-oriented content due to major payment processors threatening to revoke Itch's access. Apparently a lot of this has to do with some sort of campaign or conservative front out of Australia. A lot of people are upset about this for a multitude of reasons, and rightly so. But the conversation about payment processors acting as de facto censorship boards has me wondering if there are other alternatives. After all, what if Mastercard, Visa, banks and other payment processors decide that they don't want people buying books from PM Press or listening to the likes of Neckbeard Deathcamp? How do we buy and sell goods without sending digital inputs over digital signals to pay with digital money?

Then I remembered that we had the answer to this question back in the early 2000s. 

I was first clued in to Gothic Auctions by a college friend, who recommended it to me after I lamented that my attempts to sell items on eBay. The site was exactly what was on the tin — an auction site created by goths who wanted a place to sell gently used items that appealed to other goths. But despite the name, GA wasn't just a place to sell niche fashion or media. You could list just about anything, and it often sold in short order. (I was amazed when the pair of used, forest green Chuck Taylors that I listed received bids within hours of being listed, rather than sitting neglected like they did on eBay.) Buyers were easy to work with in my experience, as were sellers. There were forums where people discussed things like music, movies and fashion, but they were also used to warn about unscrupulous users, scam artists and other dangers to the community. (Bad actors tended to be dealt with swiftly.) And since these were in the days before Stripe, Apple Pay and other plug-and-play options, GA users had to get creative when sending or receiving money. I remember reading more than a few listings in which the seller stated that they took, "PayPal, check, money order, or well disguised cash," as payment.

While I'm sure that the site wasn't perfect, as no site is, I still have fond memories of it. I was never able or allowed to be part of the subculture, living as I did with strict parents in a suburb so conformist that I refer to it as Stepford. However, the users of GA were kind and welcoming, caring less about whether I was part of their subculture and more about whether I was honest with my listings and USPS shipping info. I think the site eventually disappeared due to...well, probably due to the same reasons so many other independent sites went under with the rise of Big Social. 

It's a damn shame, to be honest. GA was an excellent model of what an ecommerce site could be as long as the userbase trusted each other enough. It would be incredible to see something like that come back today, both as a middle finger to censorship and as a community building exercise. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why it couldn't work today, especially when you throw the logistics of digital content into the mix, but it's nice to dream. Who knows — maybe the indie web will surprise me. Maybe Gen Z and Gen Alpha will rebuild something similar. Maybe people will once again be able to buy things as mundane as Chuck Taylors and as exotic as...well, some of the things you could buy on Gothic Auctions. An elder millennial can dream, right?

They should keep the old layout, though. It was beautiful and perfect in its simplicity.