Zero indication that these things are related in any way.
The streamer is a self-admitted basket case who does not “believe in coincidences”. As far as weird internet belief systems go, this one seems even a bit weirder than people who refuse to believe in a somewhat spherical earth.
What indication would there be that the two are related? Do you expect them to write an email specifically stating that was the reason?
For what it's worth, that neobank received funding from his company, which definitely raises the odds of the two being related.
>What indication would there be that the two are related? Do you expect them to write an email specifically stating that was the reason?
I'd want to see a pattern of multiple critics being banned. In the same video he admits that neobanks have a history of banning clients arbitrarily for seemingly no reason. Just a few months ago there was a story of someone being banned from wise for seemingly dumb reasons made it to the front page[1], so it's certainly possible for people to get banned because of pure incompetence. Therefore you'd expect a base rate of Palantir/Thiel critics banned from pure coincidence alone.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45766253
>For what it's worth, that neobank received funding from his company, which definitely raises the odds of the two being related.
Right, just like you can come up with some spurious relationships from people being banned from wise, like the CEO hating pineapple on pizza (example, no idea whether he actually does) and the person being banned liking pineapple on pizza.
> I'd want to see a pattern of multiple critics being banned.
So it's cool if one person gets deplatformed, as long as it's not a pattern? Odd choice if you ask me.
Personally if one side is financially backed by someone as insane as Thiel, I tend to need very little evidence from the other side to believe it.
For what it's worth Wise was also funded by Thiel, so he'd be somewhat to blame (not fully, of course) for that incompetence as well.
> So it's cool if one person gets deplatformed, as long as it's not a pattern? Odd choice if you ask me.
No, it's not cool even if it's just one person. The point is that you should absolutely be upset at the bank for arbitrarily banning someone for no reason, but not at Peter Thiel or Palantir, since it being just one non-high-profile critic means there's no good reason to think they had anything to do with it.
>The point is that you should absolutely be upset at the bank for arbitrarily banning someone for no reason
Why? It’s the regulators who are to blame for that, not the bank.
Let me re-iterate this one more time: he invested in Qonto, he invested in Wise. Therefore, whether the actual reason is incompetence or a personal vendetta or both, he deserves some of the blame. He is the one that funded them. He is the reason they exist, as (in)competent as they are.
Shifting the blame to "incompetence" does not absolve him of any guilt, he is equally to blame for that as well.
It's extremely improbable that a random critique of Thiel led to one of the many many many companies he invests in banning this guy. It's not impossible, but - Occam's razor, it's not the simplest assumption.
Your initial post suggested that we should assume that there is a link; now you're backing up to "Thiel takes some blame from bad actions by companies he invests in," which is a much weaker but more defensible claim.
Was I the one to shift the conversation into "incompetence" or did someone else do that thinking it absolves Thiel of any blame? Which I've proven it doesn't and you just agreed with me that it doesn't?
We can go back to my original claim if you want to, but my stance would remain the same as it did it in my first comment: if on one side of the argument we have a company directly funded by Thiel and on the other side we have literally anyone else, I personally don't need any strong evidence to believe that other side, as I am well-familiar with Thiel.
>Was I the one to shift the conversation into "incompetence" or did someone else do that thinking it absolves Thiel of any blame?
If you're talking about my comment, you must be mistaken because "incompetence" almost by definition is blameworthy.
Cool, Thiel is still to blame.
That is the only business model of neobanks: be more incompetent than traditional banks, skirt the laws as much as you can get away with by being "new", raise prices through the roof once you have enough suckers because you have "better UX", raise the prices even further once traditional banks catch up and convince a certain percentage of your users to switch back, shut down entirely once you've burned through the market and cannot convince anyone new to use you.
>Cool, Thiel is still to blame.
Only weakly, and closer to "all boeing shareholders are to blame for the accidents associated with the 737 MAX" than what was originally claimed, which was that he was specifically banned as some sort of retribution for his criticism of Thiel.
I don't think it's fair to blame an investor who's not the founder and has no executive/managerial control of a company for what that company does. Do you have a retirement account that invests in the S&P 500? Should you be responsible for the decisions all of the companies in it make?
First, we would need to understand if he was actually de-banked.
Then, we would need to understand what his actual criticism was. Have other people made similar criticisms and faced de-banking?
Then, we would need to understand his other activities, and whether they could have led to a de-banking (if he was in fact de-banked).
It raises the odds I suppose, but through what mechanism would something like this even work? Like, the story would have to be:
* Peter Thiel, a man who does not speak French, discovers that a French streamer is saying mean things about Palantir. Lots of people say mean things about Palantir, since they do so many bad things, but this particular criticism is just so cutting Thiel feels he has to do something about it.
* He searches through every investment he's ever made, singling out all the French ones, and sends their executive teams an email saying that this one specific French guy sucks and they shouldn't do business with him.
* The executive team at Qonto, a profitable company with 600,000 customers and almost €500M in annual revenue, receives the message and decides that they'd like to help one of their dozens of investors with his personal revenge campaign.
It's not 100% impossible, but it's so implausible I don't think it's reasonable to believe based on a coincidence.
It's kind of wild to not consider that Peter Thiel pays a business to monitor mentions of him online. This is a very common thing in industry. Thiel is well known for being extremely thin skinned. He's also funded surveillance tech businesses. It's very unlikely Peter spends his time looking for internet references, but that someone he pays does so. From everything the public knows about him, he's absolutely someone who compiles and reviews lists of "enemies".
As for speaking French, it's trivial to translate languages.
The evidence that a company is profitable or large has zero relation to it's decisions around dropping a customer?
You've created a strawman of suppositions that are not accurate, and then casually blow away the strawman.
It seems even more implausible that a reputation monitoring business would raise a random French streamer's criticism of Palantir to Peter Thiel's attention. How could they possibly think that's worthy of his time? Here, let me try something:
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I don't like Palantir, and I don't like Peter Thiel because of his role in creating it. It's a bad company that does bad things. I won't work for Palantir, it's shameful that anyone does work for Palantir, and the world would be much improved if Palantir went bankrupt tomorrow.
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I'll come back and admit defeat if I get booted off of Thiel-funded technology platforms in a few days, but I know and I strongly suspect you know that's not going to happen.
Right, but if you could do it using a meaningless portion of your wealth, and it didn’t morally bother you, why not silence all criticism of you? Once you hire the people, it should run itself like any traditional PR firm.
Through what mechanism would a PR firm that you hired to monitor online sentiment convince a French bank to close someone's accounts for criticizing your companies? Who at the PR firm has the power to reach decisionmakers at the bank, and what would they say?
>It seems even more implausible that a reputation monitoring business would raise a random French streamer's criticism of Palantir to Peter Thiel's attention.
It's "more implausible" to you that a company who's job it is to monitor online sentiment about a particular company would be able to identify negative sentiment? So your argument is that these online monitoring businesses do not offer a real product?
> I'll come back and admit defeat if I get booted off of Thiel-funded technology platforms in a few days, but I know and I strongly suspect you know that's not going to happen.
Could you look up what a strawman is, and stop using them in your arguments?
Yeah, even with the usual guidance around editorializing headlines and the inherent difficulty in trying to summarize a tweet into a headline-sized snippet, it's worth noting that the title on this comment thread itself doesn't even directly claim any connection. Someone could just as easily state "French streamer Unbanked by Qonoto after eating a salami and cheese sandwich", and if that's what they ate for lunch the day before, it would be equally accurate but unlikely to be considered noteworthy.
"Not believing in coincidences" is a standard canned quip, a meme of sorts, for just about any internet conspiracy nut, used selectively to defend their baseless theories but not actually a principle they apply literally to everything (unless they have profound schizophrenia I guess.)
I know, but it’s useful to point this out. “I’m batshit crazy” is hardly a sound basis for an argument.
I think you're making too much out of it. "I don't believe i n coincidences" is just a dismissive way to say "I don't think THIS is a coincidence." It's not meant to be taken literally.