Weirdly, Amazon sells TONS of porn and NSFW content, and yet doesn't lose their Visa/Mastercard processing.
Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.
Isn't this American culture? You can watch soft porn as long as you can claim it is not porn? The Spartacus Series comes to mind. Gore and Porn. But sure, it is "history"
A lot of the moralizing pressure groups are also against sexual content on TV (at least historically they have been).
One of the slippery slopes here would be that initially they go after smaller players and then work their way up. Would they ultimately go after Amazon or Warner Bros? It’s not totally clear to me that they wouldn’t.
I said this on the other thread, it's obvious they don't yet have the clout to go after big titles like GoT or GTA yet, and it would be a losing strategy for them to do so. Hence why they are going after battles they can win first.
Yeah, but not yet from Steam. Anyway the point is, people keep bringing up "why don't they go after GTA and GOT instead of fringe eroge" so, yeah, one - they have but it was a partial success at best - they aren't ready or able to make that leap YET.
This is absolutely a wedge to censor LGBTQ+ content. If you can separately argue that adult content should be blocked and LGBTQ+ themes are for adults, then you can block queer content online en masse.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
Yes, I think this is 100% the take we should come away with.
I don't have strong feelings around wether steam or itch sell adult content, but its the fact that a duopoly and using their power to exert political influence.
The group responsible also want to ban Detroit: Become Human, for context.
That game advocates staunchly for civil rights and the autonomy of women, children, and other minorities. The Holocaust allegory is so on the nose you can't even call it veiled. It says domestic abuse is unforgivably, undeniably wrong.
They don't even care about marginalized groups or even women themselves. Any piece of content that gives them the heeby jeebies, any media that has conflict: banned. Doesn't matter if it even supports their purported agenda.
This is why it is so tiring to see everyone reduce what is happening here to “they're trying to ban [specific thing I care about]!” rather than take the objective facts of the situation in total.
Is there any indication or reason why they would want to block LGBTQ+ content? Haven't both companies been very vocal supporters of LGBTQ+ in the past?
It's like those game companies, that support lgbt and donate to gay mental health foundations, but will block you when you mention some gay words in chat, because they are child friendly. I always found the hypocrisy funny. Then their auto-translate feature will routinely consistently swap pronouns to opposite.
Companies are not moral entities. They will go whichever way the wind blows. Right now it's more profitable and avoid being singled out by the current US admin to not vocally support LGBT. We saw this during pride month this year where most major companies either pulled their support or were not vocal at all. We've seen plenty of companies drop "DEI" policies to curry favor with the admin as well.
If a group this small can get Visa/Mastercard to hand out ultimatums, then it's not that far of a jump for the same group or another who is against LGBT to recontextualize LGBT as something sexual or something targeting children. We've already seen this rhetoric from the current admin.
It's crazy to me that people can simultaneously understand that censorship is bad and still think we can allow for exceptions for things like "obscenity/pornography" or "hate speech"
Free expression means that objectionable things will be said, even published. There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence that can put people in immediate danger, but stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category, and giving finance the ability to censor in this way is not signficantly better than governments doing so
I suppose I think what you've said - not specifically regarding itch, but I'm on board with some kinds of curbs on speech like hate speech.
I don't think it's a complex position though, I think free speech is good. But I think other things like people's ability to leave lives free from abuse is good as well.
Sometimes free speech can be in conflict with something else that's good. You don't have to agree on the specific, but I think it's at least a coherent non-crazy position.
> There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence
You seem to have chosen three hairy exceptions, why not four or five?
> stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category
Those categories?
Or are you saying that doxxing, slander and "incitement" to violence are three things that can put people into immediate danger, so the single category is "things that can put people in immediate danger"?
Are arguments that doxxing and slander are things that can put people into immediate danger any stronger than the arguments that pornography/obscenity and hate speech put people into immediate danger?
In fact, doxxing is usually extremely legal. The thing that should obviously be illegal is legal.
On the other hand, hate speech can aggravate criminal charges and obscenity is still actually illegal (while pornography isn't necessarily considered obscene any more.)
I guarantee you have a counterpart who thinks it's obvious to everyone that hate speech and pornography cause real harm, where doxxing and slander are journalism and incitement to violence is activism or self-defense.
This isn't censorship. This is VISA/MC saying "you can't pay for porn with our service" or more broadly, "you can't pay for things that we don't want to be associated with" which is their right.
They have a govt-supported duopoly in the States, which is generally speaking why some folks believe they lack the right to refuse service in this case.
>This is VISA/MC saying "you can't pay for porn with our service" or more broadly, "you can't pay for things that we don't want to be associated with" which is their right.
FALSE, they are not blocking customers buying adult games using their system, they are focing the stores to remove the adult content unless they will block all customers that would buy very christian products too.
Would make sense if you were telling the truth and VISA would refuse your money if you are not a religious extremist but the reality is they they force their duopoly to remove LEGAL products from market places.
Imo, using this argument in this context not just strains the credibility, it makes argument itself sound like fake excuse. VISA/MC would not be associated with porn at all if they did not pressured on steam to remove the games. That is simply not true and non existent threat. It is censorship, plain and simple in its true original meaning.
I do not think VISA/MC do care about freedom of speech or anything of the sort. Nor they ever claimed to do so. But we do not have to twist ourselves into pretzels to pretend this is not censorship just because censorship is ugly word.
The baker case I think was about the cake, thus having to produce "reprehensible" art. Editorial work (steam selecting what games to promote) is Sth I strongly think is their right to choose. But having a transaction run through your network? That's on the other side of the spectrum, way closer to the "no gay customer" situation. If they'd at least pretend it's because of, idk, higher card fraud rates...
I think hate speech is a separate case from porn, honestly. Porn is not ideal but it's not ideal as letting people mount hate against minorities, which imho is unacceptable
Mostly the principle that direct, tangible, and irreparable harm is being done by the speech. I called these "hairy" exactly because they are less clear-cut than most cases. The line between satire or speculation and slander, for example, can be kind of notoriously hard to draw, many "doxxing" incidents mostly involve finding already-public information, and incitement to violence is pretty difficult to demonstrate in a satisfying way
The reason I bring up these examples is that they are what I consider the edge cases of freedom of expression. There are genuinely difficult tradeoffs between values, but allowing stuff that bothers some people to be published is not one of them
This actually took longer than I thought.
It is really weird that for all my adult content I have to go to a dedicated adult store, yet for games I can find them on Steam and gog where kids shop for games.
You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?
Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
While being removed from general stores, porn has become very visible on big gaming platforms which majority of customers don’t associate with porn. Backlash is inevitable.
I think we can expect a bigger push against porn in general as pendulum swings back on the other side.
Bookstores sell kids books and adult material just fine. The adult stuff might be behind the counter or in a certain area, same as stores like Steam where you have to actively seek it out.
It’s a lot easier to ID-gate food based on whether it contains some amount of a substance (alcohol) than it is to ID-gate media.
For extremely explicit stuff, sure, the adults-only line might be clear for a lot of folks. But other stuff is not as clear cut: if media describes sex at all, is it adult? Even Supreme Court justices have trouble defining in this area.
…and all of that is ignoring the elephants in the room: whether or not explicit media even should be restricted for non-adults, the fact that there are highly variable and localized levels of people’s preparedness for adult media (even more variable and subjective than developmental cutoffs for alcohol sale), and the abundant historical evidence that attempts to draw an acceptability/adults-only line in subjective areas like this are inevitably extended to provide cover for political agendas (e.g. homophobia).
First, it's highly concerning that some companies have gained immense power through monopolization, a point also made by former FTC Chair Lina Khan. Separately, in physical stores, there's an incentive to comply with laws because police would intervene if pornography were sold alongside regular goods. However, online, there's hardly any punishment for distributing pornography. This has led to a proliferation of people trying to sell porn on mainstream platforms to maximize profits and gain attention. Online, pornography is consumed far too casually. While it doesn't need to be completely eliminated, I believe there needs to be a clearer separation. Also, it seems many of those currently criticizing Visa/Mastercard are Trump supporters, and I'm curious about the FTC's stance on mergers and acquisitions between large corporations.
I don't think any of that really has anything to do with my comment. I was commenting on the cultural normality of a business dealing in both adult and family friendly content simultaneously.
Dedicated porn sites are also being forced by the card companies to pull down porn. Also Steam/itch aren't where this started, they're in the third wave of companies getting held hostage over this. Digital tip jars and direct-payment creator services were hit weeks ago.
But the problem isn't porn. That's the low hanging fruit for a massive power grab The problem is that card companies can/will/did blackmail multiple companies into changing, and in some small cases shut-down their entire businesses.
In a post-cash world, this is completely unacceptable, and a blatant power grab. If the payment processors are allowed to set this precedent, then there will be nothing to stop these for-profit companies from blocking anybody, anywhere from buying anything - for any or no reason.
People are blaming a specific protest group. Personally I believe they are being scapegoated. And honestly if a tiny group from a tiny economy are so easily able to control international macroeconomics, then the root cause is still that the card services are vulnerable to such an attack.
The only appropriate response is swift and severe regulation of these critically necessary card and banking services, up to and including the dissolution of both Visa and MasterCard - and in the US strict caps on card fees, as well as an amendment to the Constitution ensure that our right to own property permanently includes the right to buy property.
Are the payment providers going to weaponize their de facto control over all purchases to target guns next? Churches? Birth control? Inner-City hospitals?
Which apps or social music companies do you think they'll allow to live, or die?
Will they blackmail the Internet service providers? Political parties? Entire countries? Which side of which wars do you think Visa will force us to support? Is a company called "MasterCard" for or against letting people with your skin color buy food?
You don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody should have to know.
It doesn't matter where you land politically, the point is that these companies cannot be allowed to wield this kind of control.
Our society really does depend on it.
...Because we can't go back to cash anymore, and they very much know it.
> But the problem isn't porn. That's the low hanging fruit for a massive power grab
I mostly agree with this. There are legitimate issues with even the biggest and most respected porn sites being very lax with taking down underage and nonconsensual content. The card companies AFAICT aren't being pressured to reform because of this kind of content, but more the LGBT content which is harming nobody.
I do like bringing up the potential for dissolution. I would add just the general ways in which they profit off distorting the economy for massive private gains, often to the ruin of many individuals.
Credit has become ubiquitous, in a manner that belies its supposed purpose, at least as was originally practiced before consumers were offered and employed credit for absolutely everything.
Then again, governments and "regulated" entities are also capable of blackmail. I'm not sure these private companies would ever have an incentive to care about what you spend their money on unless governments gave them a reason to - which is why this is happening. At the end of the day you run into the same perpetual problem - you want x, some mob wants y. Good luck.
It's not the same as an online store. There is a way for people to know kids are in a place they shouldn't be or to deny them access to adult content in real life. In Steam, there isn't
Adult content on steam is marked as such very clearly.
Under Community Content Preferences, you'll see an option for Mature Content and Adult-Only Sexual Content.
You'll also be preventing from accessing mature content depending on the filters in your account settings, and in the Family Management section of steam, for Family Shared Libraries.
It's not clear to me what kind of age controls Steam has, but I suspect that they require certain forms of payment before accessing the "super adult" portion.
(For instance you cannot see the "super adult" store pages at all if you are not logged in.)
So what? A kid can still go get adult content without anyone else knowing or seeing. Most parents aren't able to set the family settings on Steam or even know their kid knows what Steam is.
Yes that's my point. The Internet does not have the kind of separation or age-checking that real life has, and maybe that hasn't been good for kids or adults
I've been using Steam as an adult for the last two decades. I have hundreds of games in my library. I've never seen one porn title recommended to me or while browsing the site.
The lack of an opt-out filter was an issue that Collective Shout supposedly campaigned for that went through Steam Labs and was them implemented for everyone circa 2020.
> You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store.
I'd be more interested in questioning these than why porn is available on Steam. I mean, Disney is essentially an anti-porn product, so I get that, but Netflix is a perfectly reasonable platform for porn. I don't see any reason adult toys can't be sold in Walmart or whatever.
> Backlash is inevitable.
I don't know. This doesn't seem like a grassroots movement.
> You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store
In the US at least the classier vibrators have been starting to be sold first at shops like Sharper Image, and now, indeed, grocery stores. The packaging of course would not raise any questions from kids, and they are sold in the same aisles as condoms and lubricant. "Sexual health" is the umbrella term which feels like it is in play.
There is also a thriving wink-and-nod category of “personal massager” tools which are sold in many department stores in the US. They’re usually not in supermarkets, but I get the impression that’s mostly due to supermarkets not having many electronics/appliances in general, not because supermarkets are more family-friendly than, say, Target.
Your own examples show the slippery slope this is. Walmart, Netflix, and Disney all DO carry content that some people want banned†. No matter what you're talking about, someone is going to take offense and want the content removed entirely.
Collective Shout, the group behind this latest censorship push, also wanted Detroit Become Human to be banned because the story depicted someone abusing a child. If we're banning that, why not ban memoirs of child abuse survivors or "James and the Giant Peach"?
You suggest it would be easy for Steam and Itch to run alternative storefronts. Given that they removed content that was offensive to their payment processors, they'd need to engage with high-risk payment processors to power these new store fronts. To say nothing of the technical work involved, those high-risk payment processors certainly charge more for their services. That'd raise the already high 30% that Valve takes on most transaction.
Additionally, if a games journalism website also has relationships with payment processors, are they allowed to review adult games even if those reviews don't include pictures? Or are they going to be equally punished for giving adult content a positive rating?
This all limits the options available of responsible adult consumers and costs creators of LEGAL content revenue.
===
†Here's a longer look at your examples:
Define adult toys. I assume you mean dildos. Walmart doesn't sell those in physical stores, but they do sell them online. Additionally they, like most other stores, do sell lube, condoms, and vibrating rings in their brick and mortar store. Every clothing store that sells underwear sells something many would describe as lingerie. Target has an entire lineup of "after dark" board games stocked right next to Candyland.
"After Netflix published a marketing poster showing the [11 year old girls] twerking in revealing cheerleading outfits without any context, an online petition calling for the cancellation of the US release received more than 140 thousand signatures."
'According to a source close to the production, Pixar’s next feature film, “Lightyear” does feature a significant female character, Hawthorne, who is in a meaningful relationship with another woman. While the fact of that relationship was never in question at the studio, a kiss between the characters had been cut from the film. Following the uproar surrounding the Pixar employees’ statement and Disney CEO Bob Chapek‘s handling of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, however, the kiss was reinstated into the movie last week.'
I'm not sure is "very visible", there is some streisand-effect going on with this issue. I've been a subscriber to steam since...the beginning. Signed up for Steam to play half life 2 at its launch. And I didn't know there were porn games on steam until this issue with mastercard/visa came up in the last week.
I was in Belgrade aiport duty-free a few days ago and there was a Lelo stand in amongst the usual cosmetics. "Fly in Pleasure", definitely got a laugh out of me.
I'm curious how do you define "prude". My definition of it would be to be highly sensitive to sexual things, which is basically why you'd be weirded at seeing them in a daily place, for better or worse.
On their presence in the first place, I'd say if a shop is going to sell condoms and lubricant, also holding basic sex tools isn't a big stretch.
>Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
Because the payment processing is unreliable and prohibitively expensive. For all the whining about "moral pearl clutching", the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs. Visa and Mastercard couldn't care less about the ethical issues, it's simply a risk calculation for their business.
Even if that’s true (and it gets repeated as a very general statement without general data to back it up, so I’m not sure), then why couldn’t payment processors either a) charge retailers in high-risk segments a higher transaction fee, b) charge merchants penalty fees if the number of chargebacks from their transactions exceeds some threshold, or c) compete with each other to serve higher-risk markets?
The answer is, I think, monopoly environments: they contain poor incentive structures for competitive differentiation, and encourage extreme risk aversion by the monopolists. Add to that the “it’s not really about chargebacks, it’s a culture war” agenda (which isn’t just lobbying pressure on payment processors; plenty of the calls are coming from inside the house there), and the outcome of de facto censorship is likely.
>Even if that’s true (and it gets repeated as a very general statement without general data to back it up, so I’m not sure), then why couldn’t payment processors either a) charge retailers in high-risk segments a higher transaction fee, b) charge merchants penalty fees if the number of chargebacks from their transactions exceeds some threshold, or c) compete with each other to serve higher-risk markets?
They do all of the above. There are obviously an endless number of niche payment providers who serve the segments. And they are... expensive and unreliable. Not suitable to a huge business like Valve that derives the majority of their revenue from mainstream products.
> the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs
This gets repeated, but it's not the real reason. If it were, Visa/MasterCard would be fine with a store like Steam offering those games as e.g. crypto-only purchases.
Found an explanation: the reputational risk they're talking about is 2022 pornhub case. Most likely some saudi dude didn't like it and threatened to pull. That's why they don't talk about it: because it's literal sharia exported around the world.
That's the clause in the agreement they use to justify the increase in rates, but it's unclear it's actually "risky" when it's a large company like Valve.
>That's the clause in the agreement they use to justify the increase in rates, but it's unclear it's actually "risky" when it's a large company like Valve.
The risk is not from Valve; disputes pass through to the processor. This is the same problem dating sites, gambling, etc. all deal with. Any sufficiently large adult oriented business becomes a de-facto payment processor, where their entire core business function is in managing this risk, not whatever they actually do for the end user. It's either that, or charge the exorbitant fees that come with using a niche provider who takes on that risk.
Actually they don’t, visa heavily restricts those business and the amount of chargebacks they are allowed to have, other industries have much higher rates of chargeback.
It is alarming for credit card companies to take on a politically censorious role that supersedes legal activity. This really kicked off in 2021 when MasterCard started imposing restrictive rules on sex sites like OnlyFans. The ACLU has a campaign against it:
https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercards-new-p...
I strongly disagree about this being a recent thing, this has been happening for decades at this point.
2015 article that starts "For nearly a decade, PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa/MasterCard, and now Square, have systematically denied or closed accounts of small businesses, artists and independent contractors whose business happens to be about sex."
Last Tuesday we got a notice that one of our merchant accounts was shutting us down. One of the card companies contacted them directly and told the bank to stop processing for us. The bank asked for more information, but the only thing they could get from the card company was that part of it had to do with "blood, needles, and vampirism."
Yeah, it's a problem because there aren't really realistic alternatives, and starting an alternative payment processor would be impractically difficult.
Feels like we really need something like India's UPI that doesn't have a central company imposing beyond-the-law level rules.
The thing they figured out was "people can fight back and the credit cards will back down". Onlyfans is a lot of people's income, so they will naturally fight harder than a consumer market like games to keep the lights on.
Even before that, after Charlottesville, these payment processors were banning far-right wing people such as Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes. Same thing, really. Pressure from outside groups.
Its too bad that the old school anti-trust provisions against restraint of trade are no longer of interest to enforcers. This isn't a case where visa/mc are against a specific game/publisher transactions is where they are saying we will stop processing payments for your entire platform because of a few games we object to. And its worse because the pmt processors aren't really specific about their objections in public at least.
I read from a fairly reputable source that money laundering is a huge problem in online sex industry.
Which makes sense - you have buyers and sellers who insist on anonymity, services that leave no trace once rendered, buyers and sellers lying to family and friends about what they're doing, etc.
There's often no "normal" amount of consumption, for example, some sellers receive million dollar tips.
Money laundering is a massive problem, and it enables some really terrible things.
I suspect the fact that American banks are so anti-porn comes from the fact that the American financial sector has such strong anti-money laundering regs (as opposed to, say, the American real estate sector, or the UK financial sector).
One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws. Not many porn platforms could function that way.
If it was about potential for money laundering, they'd have gone after the Steam item marketplace way before random adult games. Valve has had to take action against it in the past: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-block-counter-strike-... , but AFAIK it's hard to actually solve.
> However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable.
Many users still suspect it happens, although it's hard to prove.
I've worked specifically on payment connected to porn. Money laundering is a fact, but this being the motivation for banks to pull away is not.
There have been several scandals related to payment processing and money laundering, and some of them connected to companies that do a lot of business with porn. Usually, you will see banks breaking away when those scandals break to the public.
However, banks do not break away just because they don't like the transactions they're seeing. What they actually do is to enforce stricter rules by financially penalizing those who make them lose money. Your transactions are getting canceled a lot (by having to be flagged/undone/paid back etc.)? You'll have to pay higher fees, and if it keeps happening, you will lose your license.
You know when they do often break immediately, however? When there are campaigns by special interests groups, usually connected to conservative groups, to paint companies as having illegal content, even when they don't have this problem any more than any social media platform. In those cases, they don't wait for any tribunal.
Don't kid yourself. Has nothing to do with laundering. Payment processors want more transaction volume. The only time they start doing this is if they get legal pressure.
The initial regulation also didn't suppress content, it just made you have to go through age verification, which everyone knows doesn't work.
That doesn't explain why Visa/Mastercard have gone after written erotica (gumroad, patreon, etc), Japanese manga/doujinshi distributors (DLsite), and video games.
I assume they just decided that the whole industry, even if run legitimately in some cases, has too high of a legal risk and hence don't decide on a case-by-case basis. With how often NSFW content gets reuploaded and the source becoming unclear, they probably see the biggest risk with undetected child porn on regular porn sites. If you are involved with that as a payment processor that's obviously a huge problem.
That's just crazy talk. Doujinshi isn't kitbash collages of free 4chan images. Or is that expectation of readers? If so it makes sense that those things don't come from anywhere Western.
>One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws
You’d think so, but nope. Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I ended up subscribing to someone who’s catfishing. All their pics on OnlyFans and other socials were just stolen from random Instagram models. I reported it to OF, but got no response.
Whatever verification system OF has, it’s bypassable. It doesn’t matter much when it’s just regular subscribers - nobody really cares about consumer rights in the adult content space. That’s why so many creators can get away with pretending they’re the ones replying to messages. But I’m betting there’s going to be a CSEM scandal linked to this in the next few years.
Don't we have something like net neutrality but for money transfers?
And besides, why do payment processors even know/care what their customers use their money for as long as it's legal?
If you want to ban porn, fine, but do it through the law, and don't let every company make their own laws. Especially if they are a quasi monopoly (have power).
Regulate Visa and MasterCard and the rest. As utility services, they should not have the ability to ban or deny service to any payment that is not clearly illegal. Or we should create a public alternative with private transactions.
I'm afraid regulators are happy with the current situation when they can make a phone call and Visa/MC will block whatever people in government don't like (e. g. porn), in exchange state allows Visa/MC to rake up fees.
It feels they should be a neutral payment system. They're implementing global policy otherwise due the monopoly they have, that's something that should handled at government/state level.
There is no "the rest". All the payment processors or aggregators ultimately talk to Visa or MasterCard. Even if there are alternative payment methods that include direct transfer etc. they still might get kicked off if they don't follow their rules.
This is exactly why governments should step in and regulate Visa and MasterCard, to prevent them from banning porn or other adult services.
If this kind of banning goes too far, there will come a point when even Joe Blow and his dog start using cryptocurrency. And once (truly private and anonymous) cryptocurrency becomes widely circulated, people will no longer need to exchange it back into fiat currency. Joe might start paying other people directly with crypto and eventually, perhaps even his rent, utilities, groceries...?
And then what? How will governments collect tax revenue?
Anyone heard of Monero? Kind of their whole purpose... I know, I know, crypto bad, but when censorship comes for [insert your thing/country here], it kind of becomes obvious why people talked about crypto before btc was six digits. Anyone who knows how tech works and also any history about how authoritarian states work should probably see why crypto got so big in the first place, long before [insert scam that makes otherwise sensible people disregard an entire class of technology here].
Yes I have and I've used it, a website required that rather than BTC and attempting to use tumblers. So far as I know it's private. Transaction fees were low.
I've tried a couple times looking up address/wallet history and of course nothing comes up and every time I have that "oh yeah" moment.
I heard somewhere that they still found people who used Monero. I am not sure how, but apparently the Government has the tech to do so... allegedly. It might have been at the cash out stage or the process before that.
This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentially criminal content needs to be reviewed.
If we don't get a section 230 for payment processors we're looking at serious consequences for 1A because everything will be a civil suit away from getting blacklisted. Economist reported that adult performers are having trouble keeping bank accounts open -- as soon as a bank or payment processor finds out it's porn-related it gets nuked. Now that this is established practice, what's going to happen when Visa/MC gets sued for handling payments to do with disagreeable political speech? Our right to freedom of speech is currently only as strong as what Visa/MC are willing to defend in court, or you'd better be willing to live without any access to the banking system -- even if you're a gazillionaire who doesn't have to work, you've got to keep your money somewhere (and satisfy KYC).
Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
I think they would be far more likely to support a gun exception than a general “no moralizing” rule.
They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible.
Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well.
But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media.
I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing.
Because one of the goals of project 2025 is to make porn illegal.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Bonus: it also aims to eliminate sex ed.
eliminate central promotion of abortion; comprehensive
sexuality education; and the new woke gender ideology
So they want to not have women abort children, but also not have them aware of how their bodies and sex works. Surely not a formula for a dysfunctional future generation.
It’s not a contradiction at all, they want women to get knocked up as early as possible because (the thought is) that makes them easier to control. That’s what all this “tradwife” propaganda is about.
That they really want is to eliminate any sort of ground truth so that whoever holds the power can resolve related issues by fiat. Less policy, more kissing the ring and such.
This way, abusers can disagree about what constitutes abuse in private, but can form a bloc in public, unifying around the common ground that the boss's whims should be respected in matters where the bandying about of facts is taboo. Might makes right, etc.
Most of the people I've seen advocating for this kind of pressure, for the purpose of suppressing this sort of content in video games, would describe themselves as very much the opposite of "conservative". But perhaps it's for the better that they are recognized as such. Because it really is a conservative instinct, no matter what American party politics might currently be dictating.
If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again.
Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again.
If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble.
And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking.
You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
> If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point.
Yes but no. Currently the issue is that these two payment systems - both credit/debit card networks - (1) have the power to decide with impunity, because they have critical mass. And (2) have visibility into who each vendor is and what they are selling. If there is one case of abusing market dominance, this is it - and for all we frequently hear, this is REALLY not all that common. (And it's "funny" that we hear a lot about Apple's app store - but not about their anti-adult content rules!)
For example, right now a bank would have a VERY hard time preventing you from paying for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT with crypto. That bank would have no visibility into who you are paying with that crypto. There are other crypto intermediaries but they are "diffuse". Nobody in there has both visibility and power.
For example, right now some vendors accept gift cards as payment. Buy a Home Depot gift card in cash at your local store and use it to pay for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT. Obviously this is not a very efficient payment infrastructure but it exists.
But yes of course, imposing to credit card networks to be content-blind would be helpful and soooo much more efficient.
It's hard for the big companies which want to stay big - and so feel that they can't live without credit cards. But indeed that's not an issue for newcomers.
The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
>These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly
Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.
> I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.
If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
The impression I get is allowing them to be purchased at all is grounds for the payment processor to suspend their account. So this solution is a no-go.
Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
Like I said, that smell like anti-competitive behavior. It basically means the payment processor denies competitors a business opportunity for cases they don't want to service.
Just get people to mail you cash. Sounds stupid, but that’s how I built my first ecommerce business in the 90’s, and it was a pretty normal way to pay for stuff online. Cash, money order, bank cheque, whatever.
> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
You can’t realistically target anyone inside the US with it either. USPS is allowed to seize cash in packages if it believes it’s being used for illegal purposes.
They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
> Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks.
This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.
But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
> if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!
Most of the games that have been deindexed on itch.io and some of the ones that were banned/removed were free or Pay-What-You-Want/Donation-Ware (some even via Patreon or SubscribeStar rather than itch.io's own payment processing).
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
>Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough.
Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.
Even if you manage to sidestep the issues with payment processors mentioned elsewhere, you don’t end up as a “popular platform that just happens to take a principled stance and also hosts some controversial material.”
Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.
Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
One thing that might be a possibility for attracting developers of non-banned games is focusing on having lower fees than Steam's 30% or Epic's 12%, but Itch.io already does that (you can choose the split from 0 to 100%).
>Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
when you start talking about a business for serving “the few”, you’ve already removed the incentive for most entrepreneurs (unless those “few” are the extremely wealthy and you can charge them exorbitantly).
I've watched hikaru on kick and the only offensive thing about his stream is how he repeats himself. I don't really like how he says the same thing over and over. Chat, it's kinda starting to bother me how he repeats himself. Yeah I'm starting to think he repeats himself a bit too much for my taste.
I guess from the down votes I'm getting that people don't have the full context here and won't seek it out on their own - something I should have foreseen.
I'm speaking of Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best chess players in the world. He is also a streamer on kick, and actually talks in the way I demonstrated. It's not an exaggeration, he actually repeats the same thought ~5 times in the regular.
He is the only kick streamer I know, so that's what I think of when I hear kick.
The major problem is the payment processors though. Unless you defeat that duopoly or only accept cash how do you stop this exact situation?
There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.
There's the Fair Access to Banking Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401), currently stuck in committee, which would make it illegal for various financial services, including payment processors, to deny service for mere reputational reasons.
I wrongly assumed this was a D bill, and would die in committee. Turns out it's actually an R bill, with exclusively R sponsors, and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.
Though almost all of the sponsors are from almost 6 months ago, so it might die in committee anyway.
I agree that the text sounds good. I'm worried about the consequences I might not think of. What legal services are the Ds and Rs thinking of that currently have trouble with payment processors, and which are causing a lot of Rs to sponsor and no Ds? Because I'm sure it's not porn and video games.
> Operation Choke Point was an initiative of the United States Department of Justice beginning in 2013 which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies that, while operating legally, were said to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
There's a whole list on the Wikipedia article of the kinds of legal businesses that were targeted by this. Some of them make sense, but others look like very serious 1A and 2A violations.
Debanking is a form of social deplatforming that (for now) mostly targets right-wing causes. That's not at all to assert that the bill is wrong or that censorship is right—I'm just clarifying why it's Republicans on the side against censorship, in this context, when in other contexts the roles are flipped.
You can read the bill's author (Kevin Cramer) discussing that bill and his motives for writing it:
> [Senator Kevin Cramer] "...I've heard that one from some pretty big bank presidents - but they get a lot of noise in their left ear and you have activist investors and whatnot that are saying, hey, you know what? We don't like coal. We don't like oil, we don't like natural gas. We don't like private prisons, or we don't like ammunition shops or gun manufacturers or whatever the case might be, the entire category or industry and says, "Well, so we're not going to bank them. We're going to debank them. We're not going to bank them. You're disqualified from getting money from us.”, and they're starving these industries out. And all this really is, in my view, you guys is this is a political agenda where they're utilizing the leverage of the financial services sector to accomplish policy goals that they can't accomplish any other way."
> and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.
Had to look into it a bit.
From looking at the text of the bill, it looks like the sponsor did not like Operation Choke Point [0], which was specifically targeting banks that did business with Payday Lenders, Ponzi Schemes, and other shady vendors.
This also included pornography, but I'm willing to bet that's not what Sen. Cramer was upset about. More likely, he's simply serving the interest of his donors.
He also might have extremist "small business" constituents that are perhaps selling racist/sexist/homophobic merch, and they don't like being told that their bank/credit card processors are refusing to process payments on that swag.
> Turns out it's actually an R bill, with exclusively R sponsors, and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.
It seems to me like if you thought something was good and then switched to thinking it was bad based just on who proposed it, you need to stop being prejudiced. Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.
Being a member of a political party is cosigning their platform, and based on a consistent 60+ years pattern of behavior they do not deserve any benefit of the doubt. It's not prejudice if it's based on observation. It's entirely reasonable to wonder what ghoulish motives they might have for an idea I initially thought sounded good.
> Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.
Ideas? Sure. Bills? No.
So much of how a piece of legislation affects society has to do with the agendas of the people behind it (no matter what it says in text) and the means by which the executive implements it (often hand-in-glove with the agendas of the legislation’s originators).
Yeah and it isn't just you accepting cash. Let's say you decide to go with cash (or, more realistically, manual bank transfers) and even get some host like 1984 that'd go to the court for you, but what stops Visa/MC to go directly at your host and tell them to either drop your site or they'll drop them?
In theory, if you went "full crypto", there's probably options like Filecoin and web3 domains (I'm not in that space enough to know what the current versions of these are) that could make something "uncensorable" by Visa/MC, but it also would limit its reach heavily.
Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain.
The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally. That’s worth the investment than that pipe dream of a global, frictionless cryptocurrency.
>Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain.
But you're doing this with credit cards already? Different amounts, but still supporting everyone in a chain. If you want to "buy" something without supporting intermediates, then barter is the only way to go. Everything else requires common trust, and common trust comes with operating cost.
> Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it.
That's not true, at least not in general. Polygon (and USDT/USDC on Polygon) fees are near zero, Ethereum is lately very cheap, and even Bitcoin fees are no longer outrageous. EDIT: ...and Bitcoin Lightning is cheap.
A lot of p0rn payment processing is done in crypto for exactly the censorship reasons. If you can't use the payment processor, who cares what their fees are? (not saying they are cheaper or more expensive than crypto - I don't know)
A node in the Lightning network (to simplify a lot) become the payment processor that would be targeted.
(But it's kind of spurious- in practice, Coinbase, Block, etc. would be targeted far before someone running a Lightning node would be. The larger point is that very few people would interact with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as a peer in the network.)
Even still I have put money into my bank then put it into cryptocurrency. My customers just want to use their bank, not a pseudocurrency. My customers aren’t trying to escape the payment processor. They can just pirate the game.
> The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally.
Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.
What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.
Perhaps. You're right that it's currently unlikely, but I still argue that it would be easier to legislate than split up. It's not like the financial industry doesn't already have an insane amount of rules and regulations at both the state and federal level preventing them from being too nefarious. Having a rule that states "You're not allowed to cut off vendor foo just because they sell bar" doesn't seem that much of a stretch, especially if you look at credit as basically another form of legal tender.
The spirit of Visa/Mastercard isn't wrong. If a platform is doing something illegal they will break ties or give them a chance to course correct. When Pornhub was exposed for hosting lots of revenge porn and illegal porn Visa/Mastercard pulled back, Pornhub cleaned house and put up new stronger barriers to prevent that kind of material being uploaded. But instead of doing business again they said "just kidding" and did not come back.
In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong.
Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.
It is already here, it is called Bitcoin (with Lightning possibly). And this is not fantasy, the exact same story happened to Pornhub in 2018 - in which they got banned from Visa/MC and purged 60% of their content. They are banned to this day, and now accept Bitcoin/Crypto Payments as well as SEPA transfers in the EU.
CSAM means material of actual kids, meaning actual victims from the real world have been harmed/abused. Weird video games on the porn side, are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed.
When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic?
None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal.
BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored.
So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt?
Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!
> When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore?
I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.
IANAL, but I understand there are varying definitions of CSAM which is also why I said “and other potentially criminal content”. I’m also not equating CSAM to the actual reasons people are using financial censorship, I’m highlighting a challenge of a censorship resistant platform.
I think OP is saying someone should make a platform that hasn't lost marbles and would allow this content, but you would still want to block CSAM and that is not easy to do.
Itch hasn't lost its marbles, they're forced to remove this content by payment processors. They're critical infrastructure, they shouldn't be allowed to arbitrate on behalf of an entire society. We need laws to require them to carry payments for any legal transaction. Paying for porn games is legal.
I think the implication with saying "a company that hasn't lost its marbles" is that Itch and Steam have lost their marbles. You can argue that Steam should have pushed back, but Itch definitely lacks the leverage to refuse here.
> are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed
I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with.
If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting.
Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.
> I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.
> So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.
> Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.
Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits.
What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.
Oh be realistic. Hosting smut isn't exactly respectable at this day and age. Your choice for sponsors dwindles to illegal gambling sites and shady dating sites who scrape monthly fees from lonely men. Maybe an MLM scheme if you are lucky.
> Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
Don't forget the D&D satanic panic! I also remember my local Baptist youth group burning Harry Potter books back when they came out. These people are unreasonable, they don't care about logic. They care about imposing their views and morals on those around them.
Well, that's not precise. They are simply objecting. Others are listening to them. I have a right to tell you to go eat a pile of dung[0], for instance. Should you then go eat the dung, it is not that I exercised my right to make you eat dung.
They are simply participating in the once-maligned "cancel culture" which was protected as "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". These kinds of escape hatches always have these results because one's enemies find a way to use them as well.
0: Just for the sake of argument. I'm not actually insulting you.
I am absolutely against the concept of "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" in the same way I am against Soviet "freedom of speech but not freedom after speech".
That makes no sense. Frequently the "consequences" of speech is other speech. Are you going to try to argue that the original speech should be privileged over the response?
I do not give a shit about people responding to speech with speech. I am arguing that responding to speech by using your authority over the speaker to hurt them, or by lobbying an authority to do so is something different than speech. Did you see the context for this thread? This is the rhetorical question I responded to: "Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?". I hold that they absolutely do have a right to object to such speech, any speech in fact, but "objecting" is not the same as lobbying Visa/Mastercard to ban speech they believe "promotes and normalizes violence against us".
>>"objecting" is not the same as lobbying Visa/Mastercard to ban speech they believe "promotes and normalizes violence against us"
Why not? Like, I'm a full on anarchist, but how do you create any sort of functioning society without out people being able to say "we as a group don't like that shit and are going to do things to stop it from happening"? Like if burger king comes out and says "We sell dogs here now" am i not allowed to say "fuck this, I'm allergic to dogs but I loved whoppers, I'm going to picket outside BK until the king fixes this travesty of hamburgers?"
Again, I'm an anarchist so I have weird views on a lot of topics, but isn't this a problem that "the capital class wants to continue to have profit go up and to the right on their charts, they're cowardly and uncreative so they fear anything that destabilizes this movement on their charts, and large networks of people are the only thing that can utilize this fear to cause them to change their behaviors"?
> lobbying an authority to do so is something different than speech
Really? How is it different, specifically?
If you're a guest in my house and you say something racist and I ask you to leave...
Or you're a customer in my restaurant...
Or you work for the company I'm a ceo of...
Which one of those freedoms should I be disallowed from using?
(The actual issue here is that mastercard/visa are effectively a duopoly with no competition. The only reasonable way to have a monopoly provider of a vital service is to make it part of a democratic government)
Murder is not the only violent crime. Please don't construct such obviously poor strawmen. Both men and women suffer similar rates of violence, albeit typically different violence.
Trans people suffer a wildly higher rate of violent crime than either cis gender.
The decision to provide or not some services or products should be free from considering downstream use.
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
Some people actually care for the whole, or for the wholesomeness of a specific subset. This includes (on the face) most people who participate in public life. Which is a lot of people!
>Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes!
Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?
>As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
There is a good difference between something being generally available to access (and getting promoted even), and being technically available to some. There is material worthy of being suppressed, hate speech and calls for violence being some of them. Did this censorship stop anybody to access Mein Kampf or other such vile stuff? Not really, but it helps a lot that these are not in the front and center.
I'm not a downvoter, but I have a few minutes to kill, so sure, I'll bite.
> Why do you then tell others how to live their lives?
In all reasonably-free societies, the default stance is "Mind your damn business, and everyone else will mind theirs.". Deviations from that default veer into "telling other people how to live their lives" territory. Sometimes it's right and proper to actively interfere in the lives of others. It is occasionally even extremely important to do this. But -the majority of the time- the folks doing this are nothing more than busybodies sticking their noses in other people's business.
You might think that US-based businesses should not be permitted to accept payments tendered by the two major credit and debit card processors for the sale of more-extreme pornographic content. I think it's none of those processors' business what legal goods consenting adults purchase using their systems.
Given Visa and MasterCard's enormous size, I think it's absolutely essential that they not be permitted to refuse any legal purchase for any reason other than credible suspicion of fraud. You may feel differently. You're totally entitled to that opinion.
I definitely agree on the payment processor situation. In my opinion, businesses should also be free to refuse business for whatever reason, but, with the very important caveat that when they so large that to be considered a utility, they can't refuse legal business, like in this case Mastercard and Visa. There is not exactly an alternative to them.
The point I'm more interested in here is the "Why do you people always presume they know what is best for other people?". To which my answer is that many people make it their job to care about what people are exposed to. Often it's rooted in extensive experience and literature. I don't think it's a good notion to outright disregard everyone who seems to have a better idea on how people should live. Among other things, not everyone needs to make the same mistakes over and over again, like falling into an addiction, just because "they can't tell me to not fall into this addiction".
And yeah, there will be a lot of busybodies as well. When there's power, there will be abuse as well.
> "Why do you people always presume they know what is best for other people?"
Well. Let's examine the context of the conversation. You replied to the statement "Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes!" with "Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?"
Most folks have a healthy relationship with porn, and a reasonably-healthy relationship with sex in general. Given that the US is a reasonably-free society, its default stance is "Mind your damn business, and everyone else will mind theirs.". You rejected the call to avert your eyes from something that is moderately offensive. This indicates that -when it comes to porn- you're not content to mind your own business while people quietly go about their own. This means that you are the busybody poking his nose in other people's business.
No, it's not about their freedom to haggle you, it's about their duty to haggle you. And by implying a correct way to live, you also do actually impose that on others, even though on the face, it looks like you are granting personal freedom. Similar to how not voting is also a participation in the political system, how people can lie by omission, or how not making a decision ends up being a decision itself.
People in a community can't leave each other to their own devices, because that's simply not how people and communities work. What do you think about tradition, and laws?
What I would like to know is why is it any business of VESA or any other payment processor, what I am buying with my own money. vESA has no business knowing what game I’m specifically buying. They just have to give money to Steam in my behalf and that’s it.
What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society".
I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
> No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.
> The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society"
That's their framing, it's not what they actually do.
If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand.
They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does.
In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.
If a special interest group is acting in bad faith, then it is still incorrect and confusing to frame it as "they just don't like that thing". We should just be saying they are acting in bad faith, weaponizing arguments, etc. Why they are against something also is explainable, so ideally we could also state their real motivations (they are racist, fascist, reactionary, etc.)
It's a description, not a claim. If a group tries to ban a thing, it obviously follows that they don't like the thing in some sense. Referring to them as "trying to ban stuff they don't like" describes their behavior, it's not a claim about what their motivations are or aren't.
Ganging up to enforce your political will is only bad when it's "the woke mob" but totally cool when it's my mob.
And idiots eat that shit up thinking fighting the woke mind virus is the real censorship, jumping straight into the arms of moralistic fascists like this.
I wish I knew how we failed. (I am "woke" but I disagree with mob tactics, and think it's done more harm than good, and there are a lot of disingenuous abusers of said ideology to boost their personal cred, chasing online clout over any substance. And plenty of the right-wingers will notice this, and "fight it" but fail to notice the same thing in their own side; because to them it's not about a principle it's about "punishing the bad guys" who don't like what I like).
"Cancel culture is bad akshully unless I'm the one cancelling you (c.f. bud light, etc...)"
> It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things;
In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.
If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.
> that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.
Thank baby jebus that this sort of thing never happens. Can you imagine if our government were to, for instance, threaten to deport our own citizens, publicly, for disagreeing with the government. That would be a fucking shit show! Thank you, first amendment!
I think the issue would be more that people don't accept this is censorship - the surface level here looks like companies negotiating who they will and won't do business with which is actually encouraged. If companies have a moral objection to something then they don't have to be involved. In theory stopping a flow of money takes a lot more than some crazy from Australia getting upset.
The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation.
Some people think porn is worse than censorship. Some of those people even feel that censorship is good, not damaging at all, and should be mandatory. I’m not one of those, though it does seem like there’s a possibility that some of the things we’re doing a lot of in society today, like porn and also social media and AI, are changing society in ways we don’t understand yet and don’t have control over. I don’t think it’s wrong to have fears about that.
Anyway, some people wouldn’t even call it censorship if private businesses disagree and decide not to do business, for any reason, even if it’s public pressure. Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? If not, why not? Be really careful with your answer, because taking away their freedom to choose is a type of censorship, and possibly a worse one because it would be a public/government censorship and not a private transaction censorship. Steam and Itch.io do still have the right to ship all these games, they’re choosing not to. They also still have the right to use other payment processors, and/or create their own.
I’d be willing to bet the payment processors in question would rather not be forced to cut off business, and do not care whether people pay for porn. They are simply trying to avoid public backlash and avoid being blacklisted by a large number of people who happen to believe porn is damaging.
> Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process?
We shouldn't have private payment processors. Access to the economy should not itself be a product that you have to buy and then worry about whether you own it or it owns you.
Notionally, opening new banks and/or buying an existing one that lacks current customers is feasible. Presumably once you do that, you could easily plug into FedWire/FedACH/FedNow, which would allow you to process electronic payments on behalf of whomever you choose to bank, as long as you comply with all the KYC/AML and other finance regs. You might not be able to process visa and mastercard, but virtually any of your customers' customers presumably still have financial accounts that are enabled on Fed rails, which will not be as likely to discriminate. Requiring end-customers to initiate payment (push) as opposed to doing pull, would also reduce transaction reversal risk.
I don't really the ultimate purpose of the position taken by either side here, but it does seem to me that there's a path by which both can coexist, even if difficult.
I don't think blockchains are the way forward, but the crypto people had one thing right: The incentive towards providing storage/compute/connectivity for transaction settlement should be built into the protocol, not provided by some corruptible institution. The idea that coins would be mined by the people providing the compute has unacceptable consequences, but it did solve the problem that it set out to solve. So we need something like that, but with fewer problematic side effects.
If I were to take a stab such a protocol, it would live on a web of trust that kept track of interpersonal debts. So if Alice owes Bob, and Bob owes Charlie, then Charlie can "pay" Alice by instructing Bob to cancel both of those debts. In this case Bob is the clearinghouse. Some network connectivity is needed (Alice, Bob, and Charlie all on the same network) but it still works if the internet partitions. We incentivize Bob to keep his device available for this by creating a new debt when the transaction settles: this time it's one where Alice and Charlie owe Bob for having been the transaction processor.
If Bob didn't want to act in this capacity, he wouldn't have trusted Alice and Charlie to begin with. Charlie would then need to find a different path to Alice if he wanted to use the network to pay her. (Presumably they don't trust each other directly, otherwise they'd be creating new debts instead of cancelling transitive ones). In this scenario I suppose Bob would be acting as "censor" but his capacity to do so is not greater than any other user of the network.
For Charlie to be fully denied the ability to pay Alice, one of them would have to be behaving so badly that everyone refuses to trust them. That's a desirable outcome, if we must have something like censorship, it should not depend on the feeling of some guy who owns a bank but is otherwise unconnected with the parties of the transaction. It should be decided by the people who are near to Alice and Bob on the trust graph and therefore have to deal with the real world consequences of Alice and Bob's behavior. If they want to collectively prevent those two from doing business, that's their right since it's their community that that business is happening in.
One imagines this featuring in cases where some rich foreigner wants to set up mining operations that would poison the drinking water. The locals can collectively prevent that foreign money from buying local groceries, thereby limiting the ability of the foreign actor to harm them.
So that's my harebrained idea. But I'm not making up fictions and asking people to treat them like money. The people involved with USD are. If they want us to continue participating in their harebrained idea, they should recognize that giving us a system with problematic properties represents a risk that they might lose their privileged position. My point is just that it's on them, the designers of the system, to figure it out how to make it all work--we need only accept or reject it.
Yeah, circles was the inspiration. I decided to deviate from the Circles design because I want partition tolerance--and you can't do token-issuance-on-a-schedule in a partition tolerant way (no way to agree about what time it is).
Sure you can, if you can resynchronize the time whenever partitions reconnect.
Some clock drift might even be ignorable. I say it's 5:00 and I have 100 tokens, you say it's 4:55 and I only have 99. Doesn't matter, I'm only spending 5 tokens anyway.
But how do you decide, when they come back together, which side was right?
I'll confess to sort of making this up as I go along, so I don't have any sources to cite here, but when I sit down and think about it I come to the conclusion that partition tolerance means that when you come across a disagreement of this kind, you can't just let the more powerful partition win (We already have that, both in banking and in blockchains. Snore.)
Consensus has to come from the circumstances of the transaction. What's the intersection of the people I trust with the people you trust? Are there transitive trust pathways between us? Calculate the consensus value based on those pathways. It comes not from whether one of us is backed by a bigger bully, but rather because we've both personally chosen to trust the people that we have, and we've provided incentives for them to continue to be trustworthy.
They may both be damaging, but currently we have a lot more porn than censorship, so it looks like it's causing more damage. If we flip to having a lot more censorship we'll feel that damage more clearly. Or we won't, depending how successful the censorship is.
How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.
I can say that I think my past use of pornography has harmed me. I haven’t used it in over 2 years, but I still on a daily basis observe the effects it had on me. Others might argue that it is only because of my views that the effects are “harmful”, but I think they are wrong.
I’m against censorship, well, except for stuff that would already be illegal.
But as to the potential harm, I recommend “Homemade” by Sebadoh.
Example verse:
“There’s still pictures in my mind. I’ve been addicted all this time. It taught me everything I know. Tell me girl, did it leave me cold?”
We don’t need to ban porn. We need better sex ed, ideally starting at home.
It sounds like you're saying porn either "gave" you a fetish, or uncovered a latent fetish you didn't know you had (and /or preferred not to know about). If that's an accurate read, can I ask what harm it causes you to have a fetish? Provided it doesn't harm anyone else, what's wrong with liking what you like?
I don’t buy the “revealed a latent fetish” explanation. I don’t think people are born with a fetish baked into their soul.
Like, the people with the “blueberry expansion” one, you really think they were born with that? No, of course not, that would be dumb.
I think the main reason people put forth the “latent fetish” explanation is in order to argue that pornography is harmless.
As for why it harms me?
The purpose of sexuality is for relations with one’s spouse. On average, I expect it to be counterproductive in that regards. Most women wouldn’t find it appealing, and looking for specifically women who would find the idea appealing would substantially restrict the pool to search among. Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible?
> I don’t buy the “revealed a latent fetish” explanation. I don’t think people are born with a fetish baked into their soul.
There’s a 3rd explanation: fetishes aren’t inborn, but they’re not instilled by porn either. Instead, they develop through a complex interaction of psychological, developmental, neurological, and cultural factors.
One theory is that, if a person repeatedly experiences sexual arousal in the presence of a specific object or situation (even coincidentally), the brain may begin to link that stimulus with arousal (classical conditioning). Or if the experience isn’t repeated but it is intense, it can become imprinted as erotically significant. In both cases, the fetish can be considered “latent” in the sense that it existed prior to one’s encounter with porn related to that fetish. Porn simply revealed what was already there (and showed the viewer there are others out there like them, too!).
So-called “normal” sexual behavior is just the median of millions of data points. There is not one person who fits that median in all respects. Even if you can’t find a partner who finds your specific fetish “appealing”, there are plenty of women out there who won’t specifically judge you for it either. Failing that, just enjoy the fetish in your own mind and don’t divulge it to your partner. You’re entitled to an inner life, after all.
Just as we have a biological imperative to procreate, we also have one to eat. But I’d disqualify any potential partner who thought less of me for liking tacos. Again, as long as one’s fetish doesn’t harm others, why should sex be any different?
To add: I had never heard of the "blueberry expansion" fetish before. But that sounds like it fits the above explanation. Five bucks says people with this fetish had a childhood experience where their parents sat them in front of a TV, put on "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", and went to make love in the next room. The kid probably figured out what was going on around the same time Violet Beauregarde turned into a blueberry.
There's probably a greater-than-zero number of people who had that experience, and there are probably similar fetishes around chocolate rivers, pneumatic tubes, and little orange people.
I've heard of expansion fetish before; my immediate hypothesis was that it's about mental wiring normally related to pregnancy (the same way foot fetishes are hypothesized to be related to wiring meant for your genitals). I've never heard of someone specifically wanting to be a giant blueberry but it's not hard to guess that once the general pattern of a fetish exists, specific details could be impressed by various conditioning processes.
I can't think of an analogous reaso someone might like chocolate rivers or pneumatic tubes. There probably are people out there who really like little orange people but by a totally different mechanism.
I think it is mostly consumed by men wanting to watch a woman turn into a giant blueberry, not women wanting to turn into a giant blueberry? But I’m not sure, haven’t talked to anyone who was into it.
== I think the main reason people put forth the “latent fetish” explanation is in order to argue that pornography is harmless.==
I think the main reason people blame their fetishes on porn is in order to avoid confronting their inner compulsions.
== Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible? ==
I’m not sure, but it’s probably something you should unpack with a therapist. Blaming porn is the easy way out. Exploring why you are personally drawn to it is the hard work.
If that was true, everybody who watches porn would have anal fetish, because anal in porn is regular, but instead anal fetish has geographic distribution.
Sex is an older institution for marriage. Or are there all these lizard weddings I've never seen. "Sexually reproducing animals, plants, fungi and protists "
Man, I can't wait to get invited to the next fungus wedding, seeing a little penis shaped mushroom with a little tophat, and the brides dress, why it must be a literal carpet on the forest floor so long and stretchy.
LOL this doesn't harm you int he slightest.
You should like, read a(actually man, from diverse positions, and not just your little right-wing fundie) psychology book and get out of your bible-thumping bubble.
> The purpose of sexuality is for relations with one’s spouse
That's not actually true.
That doctrine has been used to guilt-trip people and control their lives for many hundreds of years - but it isn't true. People are complex. We're not self-replicating machines whose sole purpose is to breed.
for me it really hurts life satisfaction. my porn tastes are basic. i like beautiful women in their 20s. when i was in my 20s that seemed fine, but i got older and my tastes did not change. coincidentally, my wife also got older.
she is awesome, and very responsive in the bedroom, but she is no longer a beautiful woman in her 20s. if i've been watching porn in the last month or so, my satisfaction with our sex is much lower. if i haven't, i'm happy.
there is also a lot of stuff that seems default in porn, like choking or anal. when i watch porn, i want those things. when i do not watch porn, i don't. my wife does not enjoy those things, but will do them if i ask. but they honestly do not make the sex any better for me.
you will say, "well don't watch porn then." but it isn't easy to not watch it. it has a powerful draw. i enjoy watching it in the moment. and it is always just a few taps away on the phone. it takes willpower not to watch it. if all the tube sites were banned, my life would be better.
the damage to me is small. i do not have an addictive personality. i do have a lot of willpower. other people might not be as lucky.
> it takes willpower not to watch it. if all the tube sites were banned, my life would be better.
Now imagine if this was done for different proclivities: alcoholics, speadfreaks, over-eaters, game-addicts. Do you want the government limiting those activities for everyone because a minority lacks self-control?
regulating drugs, highly processed foods, and addictive games sounds good to me. they all exploit vulnerabilities in the human brain. if your product triggers a dump of dopamine, it is suspect.
It raises your dopamine tolerance - part of why people tend to get into more and more crazy types of porn to get the same fix (see randy in south park :) ).
Also, since your dopamine tolerance is higher, you enjoy real life less, which is bad mkay
Yeah, but that's also true for video games, board games, social media (HN included), and yummy food. Pretty much everything anyone ever enjoys, actually. The difference is that some of them (like, I'm assuming, board games) are associated with other outcomes you want (real life socialization)
I am writing this from the tail end of a 4-day techno music festival. I haven't taken any mind-altering substances, but I've enjoyed dancing to the music. Should it be banned?
I'm not of the opinion it should be banned. Demonize it, yes. Also I think the repeated daily dopamine spikes, which are also much higher with porn, is much worse. It also probably has an adverse affect on young men that would normally better themselves to find a women.
I don't think there's a good way to compare the amounts of these things. I think the best you could do is ask how many bits would be flipped/added/removed had the thing not existed/happened.
Porn might involve large media files which gives it an up-front advantage re: "more", but it doesn't create shockwaves the way censorship does. Remove a porn video and the world stays largely unchanged. Undo an act of censorship and, well, maybe the world stays unchanged, or maybe everything is different.
I would say we are already pretty severely censored. We no longer have social tools to vet misinformation. We can't publicly insult dumb people and their wrong ideas to their faces. There are people -professional trolls- who, while they should not be deplatformed, should have their ideas publicly scrutinized and yes, humiliated. But we can't do that, because it's cyber bullying, or whatever.
Irl, if a crazy person gets on a soapbox and starts shouting at everybody, then people can shout back.
Online, anybody who flamebaits is protected by the platforms and can censor the responses. They delete opposing comments, shadowban users, harsh language usually gets automatically deleted by the platform - and all that shouting-down is actually just counted as "engagement" which algorithmically boosts and spreads the bad idea further. The argument just directly profits the person with the bad idea, and incentivizes them to come up with even worse ideas to make everybody even madder.
This kind of censorship is causing a whole lot of problems right now.
In some ways, porn is more damaging, isn't it? For example, there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry.
I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.
> there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry
[citation needed]
I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation).
There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...
I'm not clear that any of those run contrary to what I said?
Regulation and enforcement thereof is obviously a necessary part of ensuring that porn producers are operating legally/safely, and if porn production were more widely legal/regulated then these fly-by-night trafficking operations wouldn't thrive
There's no evidence in actual psychological literature that porn is harmful to people beyond making some religious folks feel a little more shame than normal. Porn addiction isn't an actual psychological condition.
I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.
Tbh I lost track of what people thought "censorship" is, especially as a pejorative, many years ago. Not only is censorship good, but information is more free than it has been at any point in history. Just pirate the games ffs.
One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.
You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy.
Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die.
It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.
People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
Take a good look at the world around us, and note especially how the countries in which sexual expression and by extension porn are heavily censored also coincidentally have some of the most sexually repressive and hostile attitudes towards women and consensual intimacy between adults of any kind in real life. People being allowed to express sexuality in sometimes crude and commercialized ways is not what you should be pointing at if you want to mention a dangerous progression of society toward violent attitudes around sex.
There are many paths to a fallen society. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. The answer is always in the middle. I think we've gone pretty far with the proliferation of commercialized sex in the West, and they have gone pretty far with regards to repression in the East. AI is the first time as far as I can remember where just about everyone is considering the ethical and societal implications of it. We really didn't do that for porn, video games, and social media. We're late to the discussion, but a discussion about "how much sex exactly?" is always a discussion that needs to be had. I'd say the same for "how much money exactly?". How much comfort, how much wealth, how much power, how much, how much, how much?
Many things can sometimes be problems. Porn. Video games. Tacos. One time I made myself nauseous by dancing too much (low blood sugar probably). Let's ban dancing, yeah?
(Let's ban dancing, I wanna ban dancing with you, all night dancing (it's a reference to a music track))
> One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.
This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn.
> Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days.
This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.
> that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.... The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.
I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn.
So is the NoFap/incel movement.
There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories.
People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
Your characterization of hip hop shoots the messenger. It's the stories of an oppressed people, if you don't like the violence in their stories, blame their oppressor.
It's the same with porn and the Christian Right. If people feel incomplete and try to fill that gap with a porn habit, the porn is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Filling that gap with right wing propaganda doesn't address the problem, it just changes it into something that can be used for political advantage.
There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.
The real debate has nothing to do with porn. The only reason this started with porn, is because they knew they would get away with taking over the world while everybody is distracted by an unrelated debate.
The debate is weather or not credit card providers should ever be able to blackmail independent companies, for any reason they feel like.
Should the government be able to blackmail credit card companies? Do you really think the credit card companies care where you spend your money? All they want you to do is spend more. They are trying to get out ahead of your own fellow citizens (and their government) who agree with more "censorship" and, at least in this regard, more state control. Unless you have a solution for this strain of American politics focusing on credit card companies is, in this situation, missing the point.
>Should the government be able to blackmail credit card companies?
It's called regulations, not blackmail, and yest the government should, because it's accountable to its people, meanwhile CC companies are not. Everything all companies are allowed to to is regulated by the government. Companies only exist at the mercy of the government, otherwise angry mobs can break in and ransack the place.
> Do you really think the credit card companies care where you spend your money?
Obviously they do care, when you see their rulings on this matter they care very much(did you not read the articles before commenting?), otherwise they wouldn't be pushing censorship rules on sellers. Or more specific they care about activists complaining how CC companies let you spend your money.
> Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea
Yet, there's a lot of porn there too. A whole lot of voyeur porn too. As well as prostitution, which is also illegal.
Making something legal or illegal is just signaling. The real part is how it actually is implemented in practice. And as you imply, things are pretty complex. We really need to be careful about our own tendencies to want things to be simple. It always backfires...
Not being 100% effective isn't backfiring. No law is ever absolutely effective. But making something illegal objectively makes it more difficult to obtain, and is certainly effective at reducing access, even if it's not 100%.
In many cases, bans can have unintended side effects which might make the means of acquiring/distributing/producing "banned X" far worse (aka the cure is worse than the disease).
At least in the case of South Korea, all porn is treated equally illegally, so the country has a really high incidence of secret cameras peeping in places like women’s bathrooms, because that’s just as illegal as a scripted porn film.
You're the only one who asserted a percentage. So allow me to clarify, when I wrote that comment I had no belief that a law need be 100% effective for it to be a useful law. I also believe there's a lot of room between 100% effective and "backfiring". I don't believe this is a binary situation but there's a spectrum (that isn't one dimensional)
I hope with this added context that my previous comment will make much more sense and you can interpret it closer to what I intended.
I'll just add, I don't think most people work in those absolutes. So I'd be wary of jumping to the extreme interpretation. People might interpret you as being disingenuous and using the logical fallacy "logical extreme" or "reductio ad absurdum". But I'm pretty sure you're not doing that because then I'd be grossly misinterpreting you, right?
I misread your "It always backfires" comment as making something illegal always backfires, rather than the desire to make things simple always backfires (note that "always" implies 100%). So now I see all you're saying is "be careful", which is fine.
This is just how people speak. Sometimes qualifiers are critical, sometimes they are a bit of exaggeration. But always doesn't mean always because only a sith deals in absolutes.
My comment about some truth was to specifically about:
* It models unrealistic and possibly unhealthy notions about sexuality
* It can be exploitive of its subjects (yes, sometimes empowering too)
That's kind of it. I don't think it should be banned at all.
I believe that "free speech" is critical to a well functioning society, but we need to recognize that it can have negative impacts. A key example is the right-wing Hate Industrial Complex: decades of right wing propaganda have conditioned tens of millions of Americans to consider their fellow citizens as non human.
I don't have an answer for how to address this, but you can't fix a problem until you recognize the problem and that it needs fixing.
> if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Sounds great, where do I sign?
Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
You then have to ask, "In what way is it damaging?" Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation?
If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.
> Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation?
If we are to talk about exploitation, then capitalism itself is subject to be attacked and prohibited.
If we work for a living, we sell our bodies to someone else for a time (40h a week or more). Does it really matter if we work on a factory floor doing parts, sitting and coding at a desk, or having sex in front of a camera? Labor is labor.
Sure its the christian 'sex is bad' in various stripes (puritanical to catholic to baptist etc). But in reality, its just different labor.
Now, capitalism in exploitive in that you generate X value, and you get a small percentage of your labor's output. Some owner is who collects the surplus.
So if exploitation is the problem, then its time to start looking at worker cooperatives, unions, banning shows like Shark Tank, and all the capitalist propaganda.
But no, its just 'sex icky'. We won't actually look at the root of exploitation.
You're framing of "sex icky" is a common reductionist approach to remove all humanity from the topic and try and make it purely logical. But that's always been a ridiculous way to argue.
The human experience has never been pure reason. A picture of a naked person will have wildly different effects than a picture of a dog, even though you could technically say they're both "just pixels on a screen". Reductionism doesn't get an argument anywhere; it's too commonly an intellectually lazy defense of the vulgar.
Of course you prefer reductionist, because that fits your interest of doing nothing, rather than seeking a solution to the very real destructive consequences of the genre in question. That's what I mean by intellectually lazy.
Porn is way easier to define than obscenity, so I don't see that being a problem.
> one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.
> it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
I think this is critical insight and applies to a lot of topics. I think it is true for pretty much every heated topic.
The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person.
Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0]
> they are optimizing but under differing constraints
Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals.
In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.
IME it doesn't help to villainize the other side, it only escalates things. You're right that there are bad actors, but I don't think this is accurate for the majority of people. You need to differentiate the people leading a group from the people within a group. Leaders may be highly manipulative bad actors, but that doesn't mean that the people that they duped are.
It may not be good logic, or even self-consistent, but everyone is always using some logic. I'm saying "find it if you want to convince them." Very few people see themselves as evil, or more accurately intentionally choosing evil. And I say this as someone who was once a member of a religion that has its own state. You're not going to pull people out of that by acting like they're evil. They're trying very hard to be good, just misguided.
There's an saying that I believe was popularized during the Cold War. I think you should consider it.
The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders.
I agree with most of what you said, and it was well said.
However, I disagree in two ways.
Firstly, while villainizing them is unhelpful convincing them is utterly impossible when religion is involved. It doesn't matter if we learn to understand their perspective, especially as logic/reason often doesn't apply and they aren't being honest about their goals and motivations.
I think the best anyone can hope for in such cases is for all parties to agree that we all have belief structures, and that we don't get to force those beliefs on others via the law. IE - "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." It's the only rational basis for a society in which different belief systems coexist. The United States used to understand this, but we seem to have forgotten.
Secondly, I do agree that it might be easier to reason with folks the further you get from the top of the ladder. The "true believers" who fly airplanes into buildings or who want to outlaw eating candy because it might lead to smiling on a Sunday didn't start down that path last week.
The issue with the bottom up approach is that the folks on the bottom seldom have any real power, and for good reason. If pawns were allowed to move backwards they would kill their kings.
I was going to argue that you seem like a bit of a rare creature, but I suppose you would know better than I. I didn't bring it up because I didn't want it to sound like a personal attack or something.
Do YOU feel that it's common for folks to change their minds about such deeply held beliefs? I've met a few over the years that I know of. Maybe there are more, and I just don't realize it.
No, this is killing revenue streams for people. You should be under a company to earn money. The problem is, more stupid the general populace is, more stricter rules will be introduced, otherwise you cannot keep the herd together.
The other common (valid) argument is that it's easy for children to access this content because they're already using Steam and unless they have mature content filters enabled, it's already trivial to bypass age gates by lying.
That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.
In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.
Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.
To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.
> Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts?
Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.
They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules.
The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems.
I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.
The Puritanical origins of the US reverberate to this day. While coming for "freedom of religion" sounds like a noble origin story, the context was that they wanted the freedom to practice a much stricter, restrictive form of religion than that allowed by the Church of England.
I had to remind shocked Americans when they saw Australia's COVID response that, although many Australians are descended from prisoners, a fair number are also descendants of the jailers.
Weren't the Pilgrims, also known as Separatists, being jailed if they didn't attend Church of England services per the Act of Uniformity of 1559? And weren't they jailed without trial if they tried to have their own religious services in private homes?
One of the best porn web comics (which I recommend, though like all web comics it has its highs and lows) is Oglaf [1], and the artist drawing the sexy pictures is Trudy Cooper... a woman.
If somehow the puritanical mob banned stuff like that, I'd be genuinely sad.
"Protecting women" is an incoherent excuse for pressuring websites to pull romantic games that feature consensual, loving, respectful homosexual male-male relationships, with no women even present in the game.
The real motivations seemingly have nothing to do with protecting women, which appears to simply be a palatable facade for the true intention to suppress all depictions of sexuality, including the depictions that offer good-faith representation of historically marginalized groups.
there's a big push to classify fleshlights and dolls as rape because the extreme right won every battle there is to fight they need more battles. porn is next.
I'm not so sure you can point the finger at the USA for this.
I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.
I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.
In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.
The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.
A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.
A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."
We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.
During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.
One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.
The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."
But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies
exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.
And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.
While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.
All this makes me think of war on drugs and other similar failed attempts at regulation, and of the article "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". The stronger the zeal to prevent porn the more expensive it gets to do so, and the more they cause legit companies like yours to close, the more profitable it gets to do it illegally. Just cranking on the symptoms without looking at the cause often has the opposite effect to the one desired, not that the people pushing for this probably care.
I'd suggest that foreign investors dictating domestic policy is a huge problem. For a core institution like banking there ought to be a law forbidding them from discriminating against otherwise legal activities except in the case that a different law permits or requires them to do so. That would also absolve them of any PR concerns because "everyone has to; legally speaking we don't have any choice".
What aggravates me the most about stories like yours is that banks are effectively public utilities. They are regulated as such, are broadly considered too big to fail (especially in Canada - believe it or not at a domestic scale, their banks are far more important than any US bank is to the American economy) and thus receive an implicit tax payer underwriting, yet are able to act like this when you're not doing any illegal activities.
I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.
Thank you for your story. I like to try to imagine what conversations happened behind the scenes. The fact that the suddenly hauled you into the branch, and still decided that you were too "risky" (clearly a made-up excuse) says a lot. Whatever force is behind this is powerful and it's not even remotely explained by a coalition of angry activists.
If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)
And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.
Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?
And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to
1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and
2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?
While I'm not big on crypto. This is, in part, why Bitcoin exists and why it was created.
I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the right answer due to the 51% attack vulnerability. And a network of miners where everyone can join in principle sounds pretty yolo, but it seems the be the one of the few organizations that exist outside of government? At least, it does in principle, the fact that the whole crypto industry is a mix of scams and recreation of the actual finance industry isn't helping that case, but a part of it definitely still exists outside of it.
We need more digital systems that exist outside of governments. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but stuff like this is egregious.
I wonder what our view on all of this is in a 1000 years. People in the future probably look at us in disbelief with how we practiced our ethics.
Maybe one day crypto will get there, but in 2022 we couldn't pay bills, taxes or payroll with crypto. At the end of the day it still needs to be converted into legal tender in order to be useful, and you need a bank account for that to do anything in the offline world, like pay for utilities or employees.
Two things can be true at the same time, however. The US has a strong stance on freedom, which means that they'll allow most things even if they're against them. Specially when that thing generates income. But that doesn't mean they're not also a puritanical society. They just take more of a "shame you" approach than a "you're forbidden" one to force you not to do stuff.
I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.
It's in Article 210 of the Icelandic penal code and, from what I gather, this follows a pattern typically referred to as "The Nordic Model" where it is not illegal to consume pornography, but it is illegal to produce and/or distribute it.
The "Swedish Model" is about prostitution, specifically making it legal to sell sex but not to buy it.
There are ongoing debates about how this applies to Onlyfans etc, with one faction claiming all sex work is abuse even if you're doing it solo in the privacy of your own home, so payments to Onlyfans should be banned.
> even if you're doing it solo in the privacy of your own home
The frame the problem as being vulnerable to escalating customer demands if you make custom content. Like, "insert this object and take a photo, insert this larger object and take a photo, insert this uncomfortably large object and take a photo, insert this painfully large object and take a photo, insert this clearly damaging object and take a photo".
This sounds like a just so story. There were all sorts of groups who set up shop in America, and all contributed to its success and influenced the culture.
Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?
What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?
Dutch society in New York?
Poor Scots in Appalachia?
And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?
No this isn't just American. Most of the world is very anti-porn. The BRICS countries mostly outlaw porn. Even Nordic countries, which are very socially liberal, discourage it (at least production).
There's a tendency for social liberals to see their view as the only legitimate one. Sometimes they are right. But this is an area where there is lots of international push back from undeveloped, developing, and even many developed socially liberal countries.
When I finally got around to reading Fukuyama, I had an "aha" moment where I realized... oh, this is how liberal democracy thinks. They think they've perfected society and everyone agrees with them, except for a few weird superstitious cults.
Then I realized that it was all wrong, countries accept western liberal democracy only as long as the free aid keeps flowing. And the libdems were in for a rude awakening if they ever ran out of kibble.
The very strange thing I’ve found about liberal democracies is not just the amount of people who believe the entire world believes in the value of liberal democracies. It’ the amount of people who believe, for some strange reason, that other countries support the values of liberal democracies even more than liberal democracies themselves.
Hence comments about the U.S. being extremely puritanical, when anyone can look at laws throughout the world and see that the U.S. is more open on most of these issues than the vast majority of countries.
It’s a very strange form of self-loathing. I’ve discussed it with a lot of people from non-Western countries, and they find this behavior extremely confusing.
A lot of this goes back to Rousseau, a philosopher who sees civilization as the root of evil.
He thought of undeveloped places as filled with “noble savages” uncorrupted by the evils of modern society.
This is why many people believe that anti-gay sentiment only exists because of American or European influences.
While it’s true undeveloped counties often have very different sexual ethics, that does not mean humanity’s default is liberal individualism sanctioned by custom and community.
Several of the BRICS (& other "global south" / non-neoliberal / non-western) countries also imprison journalists and nonviolent political opposition groups, and some even have the death penalty for minor cannabis possession. "Everyone else does things this way" isn't a legitimate justification.
A justification of what, though? It isn't a cohesive argument on it's own but it is important perspective. If a significant fraction of societies have arrived at policies that contradict your worldview I think that ought to give you pause. (Note that I say that as someone who holds far more extreme views about legal freedom of expression than the vast majority of people out there.)
That's getting somewhat off topic though. In the context of this thread it's merely the observation that attributing this to "puritans" or "christianity" or "US history" is rather misguided. The US and western Europe are very much the outliers here.
I am expressing neither support nor opposition to any particular policy position in that comment, merely putting forth the general principle that any time you find yourself to be an outlier you should very carefully examine how that came to be. It's a natural extension of Chesterton's fence.
I think it also follows from such a principle that in general the relevant reasoning should be explicitly articulated when discussing the topic.
> It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.
Suppose that a thing is explicitly chosen by the majority of the world's population, or dictated by the majority of governments, or imposed by the majority of cultural norms. I am suggesting that dismissing it in favor of your own reasoning is fine, but that doing so lightly is arrogant and misguided.
What gives you the impression that I might be offering my critiques lightly or arrogantly, as opposed to only after arriving at them through extensive, careful, and deliberate thought?
Humans engaged in tribalistic groupthink committing moral atrocities is a tale as old as time.
It is never wise to accept a majority or status quo position reflexively without thoroughly interrogating the ideas held within. A great deal of majority positions are morally reprehensible and ethically indefensible, and that has always been the case throughout human history.
Human sacrifices of the innocent were not a "different culture", they were barbaric murders that were always wrong. They were also normative in much of the world for much of human history.
The values espoused (but not always upheld) by western societies that many of us take for granted today are the exception to the rules throughout human history - rules that promoted needless bloodshed, widespread suffering, and persecution of the innocent.
It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned. To assert otherwise isn't simply innocuously defending pluralism, it's defending atrocities.
All life is inherently valuable and I will not apologize for asserting that, no matter how many billions of people disagree for tribalistic, persecutory reasons.
> What gives you the impression that I might be offering my critiques lightly or arrogantly, as opposed to only after arriving at them through extensive, careful, and deliberate thought?
Perhaps the fact that you made a claim without bothering to explain this supposed "extensive, careful, and deliberate thought" of yours? Also the fact that your tone generally comes across as ideologically charged; in my experience zealots rarely engage in patient critical thinking.
Certainly I don't suggest that one should blindly favor the status quo when given the chance to think things through. However absent careful thought the status quo is the obvious default. When in Rome and all that. There is nearly always a reason that things are done the way they are done although often the particulars will be quite convoluted.
> It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned.
Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.
>Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.
No, that was not my intention. You are right to object here. I allowed myself to get worked up by inadvertently framing your more methodological perspective as a moral perspective, and your perception that I came on too aggressively in response to that is correct. I'm sincerely sorry. This wasn't an attempt to attack you or your character, but it did come out looking like that, and that was my fault. My bad on this one.
For what it's worth I myself am actually quite opposed to the status quo when it comes to freedom of expression. Most people, notably even most US nationals, seem to feel that the US permits too much. In contrast I favor compete abolishment of the obscenity carveouts.
However that isn't a free standing view on my part. I acknowledge that the conservatives raise a number of hard hitting points about corrosion of the social fabric, but observe that even jurisdictions with far stricter laws than the US still appear to suffer the same ills (in addition to those caused by the laws themselves).
My view is that this is due to modern technology having fundamentally changed the social dynamic. Continually eroding civil liberties in a doomed attempt to regain some imagined ideal of the past strikes me as nothing more than an obscene parallel to the war on drugs.
Given that we clearly recognize that certain activities are detrimental to society when flaunted in public surely we could apply the same principle to various forms of expression? It's not much of a leap - you'll already land yourself in trouble if you go around shouting your head off or intimidating people for example. Analogous to alcohol consumption, I'd much prefer a clear distinction between standards for public displays, secluded public business establishments, and private gatherings than the bizarre scenarios that the current obscenity laws inevitably give rise to.
People look at the "corrosion of the social fabric", and they point at the most inconsequential stuff. It's quite funny.
We live in a world where technology made everyone live in their own bubbles, only consume and reinforce what they already believe, create narrow identities with strict rules enforced by groupthink, and lose track of the things and people that we actually interact and have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Yet, people think this small stuff that has been around forever, that are tiny parts of our society or lives, that this stuff is the problem with everything today.
Not to whatabout but the US isn't free from punishing journalists.
See the Steven Donziger[1] case. It was just done more Americanly. Private corporation threw their full weight at a lawyer defending an indigenous population who had their water supply poisoned. Chevron hired a private prosecutor who had him locked up on house arrest for years.
Similar to this porn case, the censorship and suppression is coming from market interests rather than government, but they're nearly equally untouchable and even more difficult to hold accountable. You can't vote out the leadership of mastercard or chevron.
Steven Donziger isn’t a journalist. He was a lawyer who was suing Chevron.
I’ve been following the case closely. This is the first time anybody has claimed he’s a journalist, AFAIK.
Am I missing something?
Edit: according to Wikipedia he worked as a journalist for three years before attending law school. So I guess he’s an ex-journalist, and ex-lawyer for that matter.
But calling the persecution of journalists is false. Maybe persecution of environmental lawyers, but lawyers, unlike journalists, are heavily regulated, and face much higher liability for bad acts.
I used Steven as an example if private prosecution, where a private organization can take away your freedom outside of public prosecutors.
Steven did similar work to an investigative journalist at a high level, he brought attention to, and fought for a marginalized group. He did it through the court system rather than through publication. Despite doing it legally.
I don't see much of a difference. As recent times have shown, much of the legal system(and legal protections) depend on someone enforcing. Without that, there's little difference between the government boot and the corpo boot.
A couple of the groups that founded what would become US states were decent. Of course those decent groups got outcompeted by the authoritarian weirdos because live and let lives types and insular communities don't see the need to grab state power.
I don't think you have to be Puritanical or particularly religious to realize that some content is generally not good for people. I've seen this destroy lives, drive addiction and lead to other forms of destructive behavior.
Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
You don't have to agree that it should be banned, but you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom.
>Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.
Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.
It sounds more strategic than performative. Surely if they can set precedents against weaker opponents then they stand more chance against stronger opponents.
Though Steam is not weak. But small-time game devs probably don't care to fight unless they're making bank.
I'll take the hard stance on this. I don't see how Sex is anymore harmful, addicting, or dangerous as any other number of socialties. Including Alcohol, fast food, gambling, and simply getting to into any given hobby (be it video games or playing guitar).
A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.
Alcohol and gambling are commonly restricted if not outright banned in various localities though, and most people would consider those and fast food to be harmful. So you seem to be agreeing with GP that while you may not think it should be banned, you find it comparable to things that are widely recognized as "generally not good for people".
Porn is also typically restricted. Just as many jurisdictions permit neither public consumption nor intoxication, everywhere I've lived had laws against publicly displaying "obscene" content.
The issue with GGP is that in context it appears to be an argument in favor of increasing restrictions (ie in favor of the events that the article is talking about) despite disclaiming that "You don't have to agree that it should be banned". That's analogous to a loaded question. Expressing agreement with the literal wording of GGP seems to also carry an implication of agreement with some rather different things as well.
My read was that they were merely saying that it's not helpful to characterize desire for such restrictions as fundamentally coming from some religious angle. There are entirely secular reasons to consider restrictions even if you e.g. weigh personal autonomy as more important than those reasons and therefore believe there should not be restrictions.
It's perfectly fine to say "I think porn is generally unhealthy and would suggest people not partake, but I think they ought to be able if they'd like". It's also reasonable to say "I think things like porn, alcohol, cigarettes, violence, and/or gambling should be accessible to adults, but they should not be able to advertise in spaces where children are likely to visit (like an online video game store), and stores should check ID to purchase those things, and 'paying via advertising' should not act as a loophole for those ID checks." There's a wide range of reasonable positions to debate that are entirely shut down by basically implying that people are unreasonable to disagree.
>So you seem to be agreeing with GP that while you may not think it should be banned, you find it comparable to things that are widely recognized as "generally not good for people".
That's up for debate on what's "good for people". But I don't mind proper, formal laws from lawmakers restricting access of that's the will of that region. I will note that trying to restrict porn in the US has traditionally been difficult die to the first amendment.
My main point was: credit card is not a lawmaker. It should be as dumb a pipe as my ISP.
> you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom
I'd actually hypothesise that if you locked three sets of teenage boys in rooms, one with only porn games, one with only social media and one with only sitcoms, that the first group would likely emerge the healthiest of the three. I'm basing this on my bias towards activity and that nobody seems to have bothered with actually doing research on porn games, the organisation pushing for these bans included [1], instead proxying research on porn as a whole for this specific category.
Whatever you want. Substance abuse rates. Marriage or long-term partnership rates. Employment. Income. Wealth. Serum cortisol.
My assumption is someone actively participating in something, even something unhealthy, is going to maintain cognitive and executive function above someone simply observing. (To the degree these games may be destructive, I'd argue it's in its game mechanics.)
We have no evidence pornography causes negative outcomes across population. (Versus among a vulnerable subset.) We have lots of evidence for social media addiction causing broad psychological issues, particularly in children.
I'd have an easier time with this argument if it got equally applied to violence. It's ridiculous that exposure to sex is considered worse than to violence.
I'd feel more comfortable showing a 12 year old a violent movie than I would an adult movie.
Or maybe put another way, if my child was at a neighbors house and one of the parents watched an adult movie with my child I would have a huge issue. If they watched Terminator or something similar, I would have much less of an issue.
I think your analogy is a bit off. The "watched it with" really changes the dynamic. There are quite a few activities that I'd take issue with adult neighbors doing with someone else's child. That's an entirely different question from a child doing things on his own or with other children.
Not defending the ratings system here, but there is a big gap between M and R/X or whatever your country uses.
A better question would be if you would be more comfortable with your child being shown porn or snuff movies. For me the answer would be neither, in about an equal measure
I think parent comment is asking you to consider why you think young children watching violent movies is way less of a problem. E.g. "Terminator or similar" - why draw the line there?
Sure video games can be unhealthy. Maybe I'm weird but I would much rather prefer my son plays video games 8 hours a day than watches adult content 8 hours a day. Let's stop pretending like they're comparable.
> Maybe I'm weird but I would much rather prefer my son plays video games 8 hours a day than watches adult content 8 hours a day.
Isn't it the end result that matters? Presumably you'd like your son to become a functional adult. Neither of the scenarios you describe there sound like that to me (excepting perhaps "professional competitive gamer" but somehow I suspect most parents don't really approve of that outcome either).
I guess it comes down to time allocation. If you're spending "a lot" of time on it but not so much that it precludes conducting the rest of your life in a functional manner then why would spending the same amount of time on porn (or any other supposedly degenerate activity) be any different?
I don't really disagree with you, but to play devil's advocate - when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition in what you see as the best interest of everyone?
Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn? Rolling coal and other egregious pollution? Online gambling? Abortion? Fentanyl?
> when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition
Evidence. If you think something is harmful to society, you have a hypothesis. The next step is to test it. Not assume it's true and ban everything.
I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful. If I had to hazard a guess, and this is again just a hypothesis, I'd actually suspect that a teenager exposed to porn games is less likely to suffer mental-health issues than one on algorithmic social media or forming intimate connections with chatbots.
Thing is, with things like these, they only need one or a handful of cases. With everything, there is always a handful of cases - porn addicts, gambling addicts, revenge porn victims, trans women in women's spaces and sports, etc. The fundamentalists and right-wing media will hyperfocus and signal boost these statistically insignificant cases to push their own agenda.
For them, n=1 is enough evidence. For their moral compass or larger scale goals, n=1 is one too many.
There will always be some people - teenagers or otherwise - that develop mental health issues from e.g. porn games. But there's people developing mental health issues from Farmville or ChatGPT supposedly turning sentient and sharing the infinite Truth of the universe too. Somehow those aren't an issue.
It's not about preventing mental health issues. It's not about protecting women.
If cigarette was banned from the beginning, we would still see people getting mad without much evidence.
The truth is the evidence is coming half a century after when everyone got cancer.
Precautionary principle should always prevail.
That's why we just don't go full GMO, and you would still not wait for any proof that "it's harmless".
You also don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless.
Additionally, without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette).
TL;DR: You actually need a proof, but it's a proof that it's harmless and not the other way around.
But things like pesticides are being tested and approved first. With the knowledge they were able to get at the time, they were approved. It was only later, when long term and large scale usage of certain pesticides were shown to have a negative impact on the ecosystem that they looked at them again.
Of course, these things don't live in a vacuum; the manufacturers of e.g. pesticides have a vested financial interest in selling their product, because money. They pay for scientific studies in favor of their product, they schmooze (= bribe) with decision makers and politicians, they overwhelm the system, they take their product global and sell it to whoever is buying, etc.
Same with cigarettes or asbestos or lead paint; it's part "we didn't know" because it's long-term effects or the science wasn't there yet, but part "shut up and buy my product" too.
Anyway, proof that it's harmless is not easy to get in certain cases, not when the effects only show up long-term or when the science doesn't yet know how to test. Was science at a point where they could test for the presence and endocrine effects of microplastics in the human body?
This makes sense. If anybody at any point thinks that something might be bad, it should immediately and permanently be prohibited for everyone. We don’t need a mechanism to check this because people are never mistaken or misled, and there is no such thing as a bad actor.
Since the principle should always prevail, it applies to people as well. If anybody thinks that another person could do harm in the future, they should be allowed to kill them in order to protect society from harm.
A system where the only rule is “every person gets to make the rules for everyone else” isn’t the stupidest imaginable thing because
If the precautionary principle should always prevail, then yes, that's what's being said.
In this case, it's difficult to even disentangle what the status quo is. Pornography, this group's bogeyman, is millenia old. Computer games, decades. The combination is a bit novel, but it's also more precedented than these bans.
> I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful
Yeah. I see evidence they're demanded by the people who we're putatively protecting, however. And I see lots of evidence of other harmful things that aren't banned. Herego, why the fuck are we kneejerking on this?
There's probably a fundamental political question underlying a lot of these discussions: do you default to letting people do things or not?
My long-held belief is that there's a certain hubris to saying that you know best for everyone. So I default to letting people do things, since preventing them is exerting power over them. With that framing, you would need evidence that something is harmful if you're going to exert power over other people to prevent them from doing it.
I disagree, the precautionary principle (Chesterton's fence) is heavily overused, often as a bludgeon and for power maintenance.
This is sort of like Jordan Peterson's claim that something is true if it improves evolutionary fit - a claim that seems reasonable on the surface but is rotten nonsense inside.
>whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition in what you see as the best interest of everyone?
That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.
>Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?
My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.
simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)
That's your line, but others have other lines; violence in games was a big thing twenty years ago, and some pearl clutchers tried to have all violent video games banned.
Thing is though, if violent video games caused people to become violent, Columbine wouldn't have been a rare incident.
But it's a difficult one. People play video games but for most people it doesn't change their moral compass; it doesn't make them think ripping out people's spines is normal or acceptable. It desensitizes them to a point I suppose.
Does porn, porn games or simulated CSAM make people normalize objectification and violence towards people and children? I can't answer that, and I don't know if there's been any studies towards especially CSAM since it's such a taboo. N=1, but 20+ years of porn on occasion hasn't turned me into some rampant sex addict.
The problem with simulated CSAM is that there is a risk that the viewer develops a fetish for such repulsive practices. It has then destructive consequences for the viewer and, should he try to perform it, his victims.
Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.
This is the same "violence in video games" argument, no? I'm open to reading studies on the issue, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that simulated CSAM "converts" people who otherwise is not attracted to children.
I don’t know how you would study that specifically, but it seems like there’s a lot of evidence that sexual experiences can contribute to formation of fetishes. Iirc there was an experiment on mice or rats or something where they had them wear some sort of structure the first times they mated and then later on they uh, mated more strongly when wearing the thing than when not wearing it (and I think when not wearing it, produced less emissions than rats or mice that had never been made to wear the thing).
I mean, this seems to be a pattern people have seen in many cases?
I seem to recall something about people in the military developing scat fetishes after repeatedly masturbating in restrooms that smell of feces, due to a lack of other private places?
The phrase “fetish fuel” is a fairly standard phrase I think.
Generally, it’s pretty clear that some fetishes come from somewhere. Like, the “woman turns into a giant blueberry” one seems to pretty clearly trace back to someone’s experience with the scene in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.
And, like, if someone starts out looking at/for breast expansion porn, they’re probably going to be exposed to a far bit of lactation porn as well, and I think there’s a fair chance that they’ll start seeking that out as well? For example.
Why would we expect this pattern to not apply in the case of CP/CSAM?
Violence in video games is quite different from paraphilias. While they usually have an origin deep buried in the psyche, exposure to specific types of porn can act as a trigger and reinforcement to it.
I fail to see how. We have entire sections of our brain dedicated to aggression and adrenaline management. Knowing how to recognize a threat, fight, and flight is every bit as base as knowing how to breed.
End of page 3, the author does a litterature review and finds that current studies show that exposure to CSAM increases probability of offending for those with predispositions.
Thar seems to fit with my previous readings. "those woth predispositions". The equivalent of "alcoholics withdraw when exposed to alcohol". The paper cites other studies saying as much for general indidividuals:
>SEM) and psychological outcomes: sexual satisfaction, body satisfaction, sexist attitudes and mental well-being. Participants were 252 adults recruited from universities and online who were asked how often in the last three months they had intentionally looked at (1) pictures with clearly exposed genitals, (2) videos with clearly exposed genitals, (3) pictures in which people were having sex, (4) video clips in which people were having sex. They also included some of the items used by Hald (2006) but these were not specified. There results indicated no significant indirect or direct relationships between online SEM use and any of the psychosocial outcomes and appeared to have a negligible role in current sexual functioning and mental well-being. Similarly, Landripet et al. (20191) in a longitudinal study of 248 male adolescents found that a preference for violent/coercive pornography decreased over time and was unrelated to latent growth in pornography use. The authors noted limitations in this study, but still argued for the importance of sexual education and media literacy programs aimed at a more critical evaluation of sexual media content and its potential adverse outcomes.
Haven't read this yet, but I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that none of those "current studies" mentioned in the literature review were RCTs, because an RCT would entail deliberately exposing people with a predisposition towards paedophilia to CSAM, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would ever be allowed by an ethics board.
If that's the case, then all these studies were observational studies, which lack the ability to infer causality. They can at best hint at directions to pursue for studies that can infer causality.
As a concrete example of the way that observational studies can go wrong despite good intentions: It was believed for a long time that paedophiles have lower average IQs than the general population. This was based on the observation that a larger fraction than would be expected of those caught and sentenced for sexual crimes involving children were of low IQ. Of course, a better explanation of this observation is that paedophiles with higher IQs are better at covering their tracks and evading suspicion.
Read carefully: I'm only claiming absence of (genuine) evidence, not evidence of absence.
Until genuine evidence is available, either outcome seems plausible. It could be that consuming CSAM pushes people towards committing sex crimes, or it could be that it "magically" doesn't, the same way people playing violent video games are "magically" unaffected by doing so.
ETA: An example of the inability of porn to influence sexual behavior is the plight of gay Western men in the 1950s-1980s. During this time homosexuality was absolutely demonised across essentially all of Western society, so there was ample interest from gay men in "correcting" their "errant" desires (this is not to say that all gay men felt this way). At the same time, heterosexual porn was widespread and easily available, though admittedly to a lesser extent than it is today. Given these forces at play, if it were possible for a gay man to develop an interest in having sex with women merely by looking at heterosexual porn, it does seem like there would have been large numbers of gay men who successfully "converted" to straight men. But AFAIK it is disputed that any such genuine conversion has ever taken place.
The first is that you're banning free expression, and banning free expression is inherently harmful.
There's also the displacement theory - with the legal content being much more accessible and regulated to ensure minors aren't involved in production, it displaces illegal content that does harm minors.
I don't think the theory behind "free expression" covers things such as CSAM or incest porn. It's ok to say that content that aim to excite the viewer about minor abuse should be forbidden.
Murder is illegal, but games and stories about murder are protected free expression. None of the games in question involve actual people, let alone people being harmed, and so why wouldn't they be treated the same way?
I would imagine that it is probably easier to make someone find something sexually exciting than to make them no longer find a thing sexually exciting?
When a river had carved a canyon, it is hard to redirect it. That doesn’t mean the canyon was always there.
Why is the pornography served to each generation more violent then? It's one thing to be homosexual, it's another to be into the most extreme acts that some homosexuals perform. Do we really need porn that scenarizes incest?
It's kind of interesting that you're claiming a slippery slope argument, when the words we use to describe incest Oedipal and Electra complex come from wildly popular pre-CE fictional accounts of incest.
As for violence, that's because such acts on film were illegal. Pornography was tightly regulated before this era of free speech. Even now the UK, is constantly trying to maintain BDSM porn as criminal [1] and Australia has similar tight restrictions [2]. This is to say nothing of the countries where pornography is completely banned: China, North Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iceland, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Malta, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen.
So if the question is why do you see more of Y in XXX, it's because it is now allowed so content is created to satisfy needs that were already there.
The assumption they're making is "interactive incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior".
In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.
How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?
If somebody things he knows better, he shouldn't be allowed to push his views on others from his position of power. All public policies should be subject to public scrutiny.
Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives. For his view to be even considered, he should be required to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that whatever he is against is actually harmful. And after that, only after that, should the voting whether this finding should influence public policy begin.
People should be allowed to harm themselves when they are informed about the consequences. Similarly, society should be allowed to harm itself because not everything has to be a race to the bottom of productivity and strength.
Do abortions lower the birth rate and are more populous societies stronger? Even _if_ the answers are yes to both, I don't see why any society should optimize this metric to the extreme. And theological arguments quickly fall apart in the first step of proving harm.
> Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives.
The pragmatics of activism prove contrary to this ideal. The reality is that this is a failed argument and it will continue to fail regardless of how often it's repeated. I hate to say it, but the only way to counter is to win at the activism game rather than complain about the rules.
Are you, personally, harmed by someone having an abortion?
Are you, personally, harmed by someone watching porn?
Maybe it makes society as a whole weaker compared to other societies but that doesn't mean your society actually loses anything. Countries have nuclear weapons and multi-national defense pacts now. Just because China has several times the population of the US and could win a conventional war, doesn't mean it's gonna invade.
We don't live in tribes of a few hundred people who are constantly on the brink of starvation and/or genocide anymore. But many people are still governed by instincts from that environment.
The dangerous thing is that there are some busybodies who will believe they are harmed by such things, and so you have to take the argument a step further and precisely define harm to confirm that they have no case. It would be easier if people had a common definition of "if it doesn't involve you then it's not your business".
And the difficult thing about that is that externalities do exist for some things. Pollution affects everyone, for instance, and those externalities need to be accounted for. It's not a trivial definitional problem to distinguish valid externalities from spurious/invalid claims, unfortunately.
Both points are true. I chose these examples in response because they are relatively simple, clear cut examples of "not your business", yet people still try to dictate other people's lives around them.
These people are on one end of the authoritarian spectrum. The other are anarchists, usually ancaps in places I frequent, and they are just as wrong because they are ignoring how people in the real world will actually behave. Negative externalities are precisely the thing that they ignore, minimize, or try to redirect your attention by linking you to a 2 hour video which is supposed to address it but doesn't.
Well, at least they do generally get out of other people's lives though. But it's a system which doesn't work and when it fails, leads to the rise of authoritarians. I wish people were able to understand that policy is a multi-dimensional spectrum and extremes on any one axis are unlikely to lead to stability.
The issues you are talking about are not "society-wide" issues requiring compliance of others.
A better example would be to consider that pre-op transgender people, namely MtF, can share the same spaces that were reserved to biological women. For instance in sport. If I'm a woman and now I have to compete with a biological man in MMA because society chose that it's the new normal, yes, I'm going to suffer from it.
If society decides that it's fair to feed Tiktok to toddlers who end up having their neurons fried, I'm going to suffer from it as well when they grew up as they won't be able to do their job well. If society decides that it's fair to allow CSAM everywhere, I guess that a few children are going to suffer as it becomes mainstream.
I agree with the trans example because 1) it's a great example of one individual being allowed to do something that directly harms another individual; 2) it's fairly easy to prove that someone who grew up with male bone and muscle structure does not suddenly get the female structure because of a reassignment surgery or hormones. I am all for letting people do what they want with their bodies but their freedom stops at interacting with other people's bodies.
I cannot agree with the toddlers example: 1) it's possible it does some damage but as I said, to even consider it, we need proof; 2) even if they are bad at life, it doesn't automatically harm another individual - don't hire incompetents and they won't harm your business. They might harm society in general but society does not IMO have any right to force people to optimize for society's goals. The balance might change if this was true and happened on such a scale that society measurably declined but then I am still of the opinion that we should have mechanisms how a group of people should be able to get together separate themselves from others. We have no right to force the Amish to start using modern tech, even if a few more able bodies would probably be beneficial on some scale. Similarly, if the majority feed TikTok to their toddlers and a minority does not, they should be able and allowed to form their own society with its own rules, as long as everyone participates willingly.
The problem with this kind of pure hedonistic thinking is that it negates that societies exist because of cooperation of individuals and not just as an aggregate of humans.
According to your thinking, no one can "force" medical faculties to say that now anyone can buy a surgical doctor degree for 10$, that said if you have to get urgent surgery you'll pay for the consequences as the "doctor" who'll operate won't be qualified.
This is why we need basic rules, norms and constraints that allows us to reach a better optimum than the free-for-all that you recommend. It's also a question of personal values: I value more living in a CSAM-free society, than one where pedos can watch it freely. Amishes value being in a highly religious and low-tech society than giving birth without pain or having air conditioning.
I agree that leaving the society should be possible (emigration, for instance, as the Amishes did). But each society has its local optimum, so you'll have to choose with different constraints. You can for instance go to Russia where it's legal to own and watch CSAM, but with other constraints.
> According to your thinking, no one can "force" medical faculties to say that now anyone can buy a surgical doctor degree for 10$, that said if you have to get urgent surgery you'll pay for the consequences as the "doctor" who'll operate won't be qualified.
I have trouble parsing that sentence, did you mean "prevent" instead of "force"?
If yes, then it doesn't follow from my thinking at all. Lying is an offensive action by which the liar gains an advantage at someone else's expense. There are expectations of minimum quality standards for doctors, both informal (people's expectations) and formal (state exams / certification). Somebody claiming to be a doctor without fulfilling these expectations is clearly directly harming other people (whether actual harm is done - even if he somehow through sheer luck managed to perform one surgery successfully, the expected outcome is still harm and expected outcome should absolutely factor into his punishment).
> This is why we need basic rules, norms and constraints
I never said we didn't. I said we only need them when other people are harmed provably and directly; not when somebody thinks he "knows better".
Side stepping local country government, and applying pressure to payment processors to enforce your own rules globally should not be able to happen.
Even a government should not be able to dictate what other countries do.
IMO, in addition to, the shaky belief that rape games promote rape in real life to the audience, etc., maybe there is the belief attacking the creators like, "there is a person/group of people we know profit off the fictional depictions of rape/see concept of rape itself as good for cash flow. Because these people went through all the trouble and effort creating, publishing this work focused on rape in gratuitous detail - so its significantly more likely they hold beliefs outside the safe norms society upholds, than someone whose only conception of rape is 'its horrible' and doesn't need to think about implementation, writing graphic scenes, going out of their way to create and market 'a rape simulator', and so on. As punishment for perception of being immoral people their income source needs to be shut down."
When the Steam removals came up on HN, several people linked the list of games pulled. It looked more like they were targeting incest games (which is a genre I didn’t know existed) rather than the generic “porn games” that keeps showing up in headlines. There could be more developments or a different story for Itch.io, but last time this story was circulating it appeared that journalists were avoiding talking about specifics because people were much more sensitive about removing “porn games” in general whereas as “incest games” is a different story.
Those games are legal, also in some USA states you canmary your cousin so why the fuck don\t this puritans do not go for incest inreal life first then handle virtual stuff.
>One of the example games that was banned was “daddy twins incest BDSM” and similar titles.
Next you will ban games where you are killing people instead of focusing on real killers?
I would prefer we have laws for what is legal and not let religious extremists decide what music we are allowed to listen, what type of books and games should we play, I guess there is no evidence they can bring to ban this content so they push their FUD around.
So please either make it illegal or stop focusing on virtual crimes, maybe focus on real crimes or use those money religious people have on helping real people.
If you think (insert thing here) is genuinely evil, you might be inclined to rid the world of it. It may even make you seem like a better person (to god, to others in the same camp) because you are "cleansing" or "healing" the world through those efforts. It's self righteous
I agree with you, but I think we need to be a bit more careful about that argument.
The problem is actually the slippery slope happened earlier, with advertisers. The slippery slope was advertisers not wanting to advertise on porn sites and adult content. It is the same thing we see with the creation of Algospeak and self-censorship. As the article points out, it is also very hard to accurately classify this information. I mean even on YouTube the other day I got a video in my shorts feed that was flagged for sensitive topic. The video? About a veteran who was wearing a shirt that said "Do not give in to the war within. End veteran suicide." Here's the vid, it still has the content warning[0]. What about this video is sensitive? That it mentions the word "suicide?" (Twice?) There's not even options in the settings and YouTube definitely knows I'm in my 30's.... How do I even say "this was improperly flagged?" We're just letting algorithms shape our culture in a way we clearly don't want. We wouldn't have Algospeak if we wanted it... Sure, covert speech has formed in the past but mostly under duress and the current form allows for a much more rapid iteration and I really don't think that's good for society. It comes with the best intentions, but I guess we all know the old clique, right? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. As much as it sucks to admit, a lot of "evil" is created by "good" people trying to do "good" things (quotes to let you define good and evil however you want)
The reason I point out the argument is we can modify "Don't like porn? Don't buy it." can be modified to "Don't like porn? Don't advertise on those sites."
But I think payment systems should have a different regulation. Similar to internet, common carrier. I'm actually surprised this isn't already a rule (it has to be, right?). As long as it is legal, they should be compelled to perform the transaction. Anything else seems like it is actually holding your money ransomed.
I'll admit I'm biased and I think payments should be private and we should try to make the system so that digital transactions are as similar to cash transactions as possible, but I'm not convinced either party is in favor of that, nor the banks themselves which would like to make money on that information.
Anger and outrage are our most viral emotions. Given ad-driven social media rewards attention, it also--by proxy--rewards those go generate anger and outrage. This is a market signal and entrepreneurial incentive as potent as any.
As a result, you get collections of fuckwits like this one [1] finding the 2% of the internet who will give them money to get upset about an imaginary problem, a problem so imaginary that nobody is on the other side of the issue because the entire issue was made up for clicks.
Presumably, the belief of Collective Shout is that there is a causal link between acting out incest, rape, and sexual violence in games and acting on those behaviors in real life.
The issue is not with Collective Shout, who are rightly free to argue whatever they want. The issue is with payment processor - who fall all over themselves and invoke all sorts of random claims, to use their extreme power to ban content.
We have seen time and time again that a lot of such reprehensible behaviour comes from a puritanical stance on sex. So it's likely that they already act out those behaviours in real life.
They just want to hide behind "those games made me do it" when they eventually get caught.
Making sure I get this straight. You're saying that if you shared that believe, you would go out in search of evidence to prove it? I hate to break the news, but if we read the literature published by members of Collective Shout, they have in fact done this. The evidence they have supports their claims. Let's be clear, the evidence they have is independent of the veracity of the claims, but they have done with you suggested. However, it had the effect of confirming their beliefs.
I hate to ask the question again, but if you believed the same thing and felt like you empirically proved it, how would you behave?
> if we read the literature published by members of Collective Shout, they have in fact done this
Granted, I've skimmed, but I'm genuinely not seeing it [1].
The closest is this study [2], which counted how many times thirty-eight women "who self-identified as having experienced unwanted or non-consensual sexual experiences in relationships" and were "recruited via social media," when "given the opportunity to reflect on their experiences of [intimate partner sexual violence], with prompting to speculate about their partner’s motivations or any underlying causes for the violence" mentioned pornography. That's...that's not a study.
You kind of missed the point. It doesn't matter if what they did is or isn't real science. They believe it is, and so as far as they are concerned, it's proven.
So then what? Since they really believe what they said, how can you blame them for their actions?
You might argue that since they are wrong, their beliefs should be changed. Well sure, maybe they should.
You could commission a study to confirm that, then try to persaude people. Perhaps form a collective to persuade others of that belief. Oh wait....
You asked a question about what I would do if I had a belief that somebody was harming society.
Historically, my observation is that some of the most evil things ever perpetrated by humans were done in the name of trying to make society better. So I'm pretty hesitant to enforce my views on other people or even attempt to. If they were acting in good faith, this would be sort of like a Black Lives Matter type of approach that is trying to raise public awareness around an issue. But they're not acting in good faith in trying to get society to see their point of view. Instead, they are trying to go after the fulcrums of society and enforce their view using backroom deals. It's a transparent power play, and it's not in good faith: real good faith actors look at both sides of the issue, both the values and the harm, and they try to develop a balanced response. This is not what's happening here.
Sorry no. No amount of "market power" should compel you to engage in behavior you find immoral.
Also "credit card companies" are not a monopoly for any reasonable definition of monopoly. There are four major ones. That's like saying Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Tesla are a monopoly.
> ”I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.“
Perhaps we could develop some form of secure digital currency that is not reliant on central authorities such as banks, payment processors, or governments?
That was a great theory, but in practice it became an asset/investment; nobody pays with BTC because its value is too volatile.
One would expect stablecoins to be more popular but I haven't seen them as valid payment options anywhere except crypto exchanges. That's just me though.
That is underway, with adult content providers (for example) now generally accepting payment methods that do not rely on credit card companies. All the way to accepting Home Depot gift cards that can be bought for cash.
The issue is that for now, and for a long time ahead, all these content providers feel that most of their clients would prefer to use a credit card. So they need all of their content to be acceptable to these people. Which comes with lots and lots of lowest common denominator rules. Even if some people do not use credit cards.
I guess you can also ask "don't like gambling, don't gamble".
It goes even further.
What was wrong with those people poisoning Socrates? For what? Don't like what he says, do not listen to him.
You know how in higher dimensional space everything is almost orthogonal? I think people are like that, some like porn, some are afraid of it, some want to be impregnated by aliens, some hate aliens.
Through good intentions democracy can be just as tyrannical as any tyrant; a pinch of incompetence and good intentions and it can not be stopped.
When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.
I think it comes down to how much society is an entity in its own right vs just a collection of individuals. Proportionaly, saving society may be worth restricting the absolute freedom of individuals to some degree.
> What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?
Porn is just the thin end of the wedge (as was "violence in video games" a generation ago) - porn is something society considers as distasteful, so politicians are less likely to go on record as supporting porn. Once the porn bans go into effect, they'll move onto the next target in the conservative playbook: gay marriage, birth control/abortion access, etc.
Let's assume there is a payment processor where anything goes, the company utilizing it would still be punished by the other payment processors.
I don't think Visa/Mastercard would care that you only sell the things they don't want through other payment processors, they still would threaten to cut you off entirely for having the content they don't like
>No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
Obviously the government should make selling certain things illegal. And I think that many of the games sold their, should be made illegal.
What should not happen is payment processors being the ones who decide what is okay to sell. If selling something is legal, payment processors should be forced to make that transaction.
>I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
I do not. I do not want legal financial transactions being dependent on the whims of how "brave" some company is.
Well you know Superman shouldn’t fight against genocidal maniacs and instead should fight for them. Then we wouldn’t have to ban him and infect we can all celebrate him.
I agree with your sentiment, but declaring that a company shouldn't be free to decide who they can and can't do business with isn't the solution to this problem and I am no friend of the business world.
It seems fine now when it's something you don't like but what happens when it's a situation that isn't so agreeable? like being legally oblidged to do business with South Africa during apartheid or working with a chocolate company that (allegedly) used child slave labor to farm it's cocoa??
don't like porn? run a for-pay pornsite, bleeding revenue from the other porn sites, which you will spend fighting porn; also, you'll have better targeted customer lists. extremely effective altruism.
But not because I think people who don’t like nazi content should simply not buy nazi content. It’s because I don’t trust the government to ban any kind of political speech.
Do you trust the government to determine what is and isn't political speech?
The left has been talking for years about how what would we have classified 20 as political speech 20 years ago is not really political speech but hate speech, and inciting people to violence.
> Do you trust the government to determine what is and isn't political speech?
Even in the U.S., which is highly protective of speech, we've had carve outs for obscenity, etc., that have been fairly workable. It's hard to take a rule directed at banning porn and apply it to political speech.
He is a lawyer in the US and most lawyers in the US oppose the banning of Nazi content, which is why Nazi content is not and has never been unlawful in the US.
The explanation is simple: they don't want easy revenue streams for people. You want to earn some side income, go F yourself. If you look around, and want to earn a few dollars, what can you do? Literally nothing. And this keeps continuing.
What is meant by uncensored though? Did it have for example the complete unfiltered human knowledge, or was its dataset filtered to exclude e.g. 4chan?
sorry, I looked again and I think it was either llama-2-7b or llama-2-13b from TheBloke on huggingface. It is very old and my vm no longer runs it (I must have installed too much conflicting software since). I used ggerganov llama and ggml ggerganov llama, and when I run ./main ... it now coredumps.
They’re being forced to remove games that are essentially anime CSAM. Payment processors shouldn’t need to be stepping up, but these platforms don’t bother to curate or moderate content so their hands are being forced.
You know. I used to be all about what you're going for. But I realized that porn to a certain extent is like cocaine. It's possibly one of the drivers for world wide declining population. Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing. There's growing science about this too.
I don't like the conservative angle which is to be "proper" or it's against god, but from the scientific side this stuff is bad.
Now I also agree that censorship is bad too and on a moral level this stuff doesn't harm anyone morally.
I'm still a staunch 90s liberal, but over time I'm starting to realize that there's an evolutionary reason why conservative values exist. Humans weren't designed to live in a world of only fans where every girl who's slightly hot can gain so much power over hundreds of men. Like there are 4th - 10th order effects here that go past morality.
I mentioned the population problem right, that's just one example. We have no idea wtf is causing it. But we do know that the population issue correlates with so many changes in society, and it's a big freaking deal.
Another thing is rising womens power. I'm all for it. It's moral and right to give women equal rights and equal power, but humanity has never encountered such a scenario. It's always the men that lead the hunt and the family and they were the bread winners for millions of years. Were humans evolved to support such changes? Like if we satisfy every moral imperative in our primitive brains and build a utopia but human biology was never meant for utopia is it right?
That's the problem. The population is declining. We don't know why. But we do know everything is different.
So I know I got off on a huge tangent here. But i feel porn is one of these things. It's right to keep it open and free, but it's causing unexpected side effects. Most of us were not meant to deal with that level of extreme hedonism.
I don't know if porn really affects population growth. There are so many other factors that do that to a much greater extent, such as: 1) gender equality and women working, 2) education, 3) contraception, 4) lower child mortality, 5) the fact that 200 years ago kids were an asset (free labor on the farm and support in old age) but today they're just a huge expense, 6) the fact that even a few decades ago child care consumed much less time as kids could be left to play outside, but today you have to supervise them 24/7 at least until they're 12. Etc etc. people don't have kids for a long list of reasons, none of which has to do with men watching so much porn they can't have sex even once.
But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing? There's 8 billion of us, isn't that enough? Housing prices are through the roof and most young people can't even hope to be able to afford a house. Human population has doubled about 4 times in the last 100 years. If it doubles yet again there's going to be 16 billion of us. Do you think the world and humanity can sustain infinite exponential growth? I don't think so. The only reasons to want population growth is because the pension system is a Ponzi scheme, but that's a completely different problem.
I also find it interesting that on one hand the argument against porn is, "porn is bad because it encourages X behavior in real life", but then another is "porn is bad because it discourages sex in real life".
>But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing?
The issue is bigger then that. It's weird though. First for context, when population grows, that growth is compounding usually. There's an acceleration.
Now that the population is in freefall, the freefall is also compounding. Like there are structural impacts that will effect most of the asian countries (where this problem will hit first) that will effect them economically.
> Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing.
As one of the “dudes satisfying themselves”, I’d happily “do the real thing” if that was an option. This is like complaining that people play spaceship simulator games instead of going out to drive an actual spaceship.
it is a good thing. Ironically hard effort leads to happiness. A life spent scaling mountains is happier then a life spent on the couch.
It's just where you are right now, the happiness part is not apparent. It's because it's a long term thing.
If porn or computers or TV or junk food didn't exist, you'd have nothing better to do then for mind numbing self improvement. Miserable, but in the long term you end up building something that makes you happier and more fulfilled. You build up resistance to the short term pain. And eventually depending on your case, the pain disappears completely. You start to enjoy scaling the mountain.
With sex specifically, the results are inversely proportional to the effort. Putting a lot of time into seducing a woman is seen as desperate and creepy. The men who are getting laid the most just walk into a bar and women throw themselves at them.
Population is declining for some societies but not others.
The older I get the more I start to believe that industrialization and pervasive technological adoption have come with a cost to humanity that maybe we don’t want to bear.
I think it's declining across the board. Some societies just haven't caught up to the decline yet. This is why immigration will never solve the problem either.
It's not just porn, it's depictions of rape, from what I’ve read. So I don’t know if it’s really good for people to consume that kind of content. Real-life safe sex involves consent, which is obviously not the objective of this game. I believe this type of material can be genuinely harmful to our brains.
Even though I’m against using payment processing restrictions, I do believe we need laws to prohibit this kind of content. There’s data suggesting that it impacts real people's behavior during sex and shapes harmful social expectations.
Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content. People all are about free speech when it comes to censorship in media, but not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
I’m sure that there are dating sims that are just fine, but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff . Some of them even enter the morally grey areas imo.
>Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content.
several Otome and BL content was hit by this as well. I don't think this is about protecting the women and children.
>not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
It's not 2005 anymore. Show me any modern AAA game still doing this.
in terms of porn... well, yes. Your reward is sexual gratification with your chosen mate in any given game. Porn is inherently objectifying. I don't think you're seen enough of the porn market if you think porn is focused onobjectifying women, though.
>but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff .
We're on Hacker News. I really hope we had enough background growing up to not wish for "weird" to be illegal.
Well yes, one could argue that if games like GTA don’t turn people into criminals than these games are also harmless. Imo it’s a bit different in this case, as a more natural instinct (sexuality) is affected.
Sure, games can be beneficial for living out fantasies, but how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content? The bottom line of my point is that I think this type of content is too easily available nowadays, and especially too much of it.
>Imo it’s a bit different in this case, as a more natural instinct (sexuality) is affected.
I personally don't see the difference. Violence is a primal instinct and studies on video games and violence only concluded short term increases in aggression. Why would a similar conclusion with yet another primal instinct not conclude with short term increased arousal? I don't see arousal as inherently dangerous.
>how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content?
Do you feel that people just find "sexist content" from some algorithm, or that already sexist people seek out content to conform to their views? I have my criticisms of Steam, but I am glad they are one of the few bastions left that aren't driven by "engagment boosting" algorithms. Just a simple tag system recommending other content with similar tags and good ratings.
I agree with the undertone that we need better sex education. Those early years where we don't sell content to 10 year olds should be used to talk about the dangers before sending them off. Too bad such groups also go for an all-abstinence approach.
If you start down this road, policing which media people have access to based on your own totally subjective moral standards and interpretations, you will end up with pervasive censorship that severely stunts cultural development. Because who is "you", anyway? The answer is, of course, whichever monstrous nutjob chooses to devote a huge chunk of their time and money to seizing the levers of power so that they can impose their monstrous nutjobbery on everyone else.
Seriously, outside of special, clearly delineated cases with indisputable negative externalities (especially on the production side), when has [effectively] banning certain [types of] media been a net good? Seems to me that all it's good for is political repression and fueling moral panics.
In my book objectification means presenting women as walking sexual organs, bodies of flesh that one needs to conquer, nothing more. Many of pornographic content nowadays do this. Sexuality is not a problem, sexism is.
How would you make porn that isn't "objectifying"? Would you add an hour of prologue showing actors going to work, hanging out with friends, having hobbies etc, to show they are aren't just "sex objects"? I don't know if such porn would be very popular, leave alone cost-effective to produce.
Also, I don't see how women in porn are any more objectified than men. In the porn that I've seen, men are 100% objectified and portrayed as only good for "one thing".
I mean your last point is fine, the problem is when the Overton window of what "normal male sexuality" is shifts towards violating other people's boundaries, or diminishing them as people beyond how it affects men's arousal.
Where would books like Twilight or 50 shades of grey rank on this "weirdness" scale? Sexism? Those two books had orders of magnitude more of an impact on society, where is the outrage?
I suspect that a lot of people who object to this censorship, would be perfectly fine with a game being pulled because say it glorified owning slaves, or if gameplay was explicitly anti-homosexual. Then they would see the harms, employ their empathy, and support the censorship. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of the people who are outraged about this article.
Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.
There's a lot of dishonesty relating to this. This really isn't about Puritanism, unless you're redefining Puritanism to mean having any morality at all.
Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games? [this is the only addition that I wasn't aware of from previous investigations, but I still don't think it's valid to call it a "slippery slope" yet]
A lot of customers don't want to be shown such games in the first place (keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice).
We can argue about whether "it's better to sell pedos fake content rather than real content" etc. (keep in mind that some of these things are actually illegal in many countries even when no real people are involved), but if so we should be explicit that that is our argument, and not falsely claiming this is some attack on sex in general. (Also keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions.)
The same group driving this has attempted to get games like Detroit: Become Human banned because they include even the basic concept of mistreatment against women as part of the dramatic narrative. Not glorifying it, just having it exist, even when explicitly framed as a negative thing the narrative explores the consequences of.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
Games that are pedophilia is very different form games that appeal to potential pedophiles. The first one is not only not allowed on Steam but outright illegal overall. Steam doesn't even want you using adult models in their games for this very reason; they don't want to need to verify ages.
For the latter: I guess so? It's really hard to determine what triggers someone to commit crime. I don't think any but the most blatant cases are as simple as "play video game with teenagers in it -> I want to have sex with a real teenager". This is why it's better to focus on who's victmized instead of who may or may not be influenced.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
there are 1000 games released on steam every month. A game's existence isn't a compelling factor to buy it.
With that in mind for all subsequent answers: yes, I dont mind games with rape being sold. I will not buy it, but if they find a market: so be it.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Sure. Maybe this is a hot take, but I never had a stronger attraction to my mom because I watched porn of someone else banging their "stepmother". I'm into it because it's other people doing forbidden acts (or toeing the line with the "step" aspects), not because I'm interested in doing the forbidden act myself. This goes all the way back to Romeo and Juliet; people are engaged by romance fighting against societal norms.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games?
GTA has been a thing for some 30 years now. I think this boat has set sail. But yes.
>keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice
okay. So how about we fix that instead of just banning content we don't like. Steam is already too strong for my liking, but they very much can enforce a system where an account is suspended for too many clearly bad tags.
>keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions
Itch has a donation system on all game pages. So that's not quite the case here. Also, pressurign payment processors will endanger the entire store, even if every NSFW game is free.
I don't want to compel any stores to sell anything, but I do want to compel monopoly/duopoly money processors to process money for legitimate transactions for legal goods.
And the list of games targeted and affected here is really expansive.
I didn't mention "porn", and there's a reason I included domestic violence simulations in list of specific things they're targeting; when phrased like that it sounds like a reasonable category to ban. I haven't played that specific game but it certainly sounds close enough that it could be caught even if not intended (and maybe it is intended - even if I trust what people say on the internet and the game is well-meaning, that doesn't mean it is actually healthy or sane).
If it really is an example of a rare false positive, a manual fix for that one specific game is a reasonable thing to seek, without giving the pedos their heyday like most of the comments here suggest.
You might disagree with me and others here and even want censorship for games. But don't you think it's should be regulated by your local government for your specific country or by whatever regulator there is where you live?
Do you really think Visa and MasterCard should be making decisions what is acceptable for like everyone?
Otherwise any random weirdos from UK or Australia will censor what are you allowed to watch or play in the US.
And China can also put pretty good pressure on payment processors too. They'll certainly want many games gone since they are worse than pedos for CCP.
The problem with slippery slopes is that the world is made of them. You can't leave the slippery slope, at BEST you can choose which slope you're sliding down.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
IMO the difference is whether the “slope” is emotional or physical.
Exhibit A - emotional: the government has outlawed violent crime and wants to outlaw intimidation. Argument “once they outlaw intimidation, next they’ll outlaw regular insults, next they’ll outlaw criticism”. This is a bad slippery slope argument because (I’m assuming) intimidation should be outlawed. Insults and criticism should not, but are not. If the government votes in evil-gov or you encounter evil-cop, it’s as easy for them to harass you for insults and criticism, as it would be had intimidation never been outlawed.
Exhibit B - physical: the government wants to give every citizen a brain implant that can be remotely activated to stun them. This would significantly prevent crime. However, it would also be a terrible idea, because now if you get evil-gov or evil-cop, it’s significantly easier for them to remotely stun you for non-crime.
The key is that in Exhibit A, evil-gov and evil-cop face equal resistance for punishing insults and criticism regardless of whether intimidation is outlawed, because either way, people understand that intimidation should be outlawed and insults and criticism should not. More generally, moving the Overton Window to contain a “good” thing doesn’t make it contain a “bad” thing, at least not enough so that the “good” thing isn’t worth it. But in Exhibit B, evil-gov and evil-cop face ineffective resistance for stunning people for insults and criticism, because people allowed good-gov and good-cop to give them stun implants for punishing crime; whereas if evil-gov or evil-cop stepped up and said “alright, we’re going to give everyone stun implants to punish insults and criticism”, they would face effective resistance.
—-
Put into perspective: Visa and Mastercard using their Monopoly to effectively prevent payment for depictions of incest and rape, assuming you think that is OK, is Exhibit A. However, Visa and Mastercard having a monopoly in the first place is Exhibit B. My argument is “we should break the Visa and Mastercard monopoly (or popularize crypto) to prevent them from restricting LGBTQ and firearms etc. in the future” (this argument still applies if they’re restricting some of that now). A counter-argument is “this will allow incest depictions, hate speech, and moreover actual drug and sex trafficking*, etc.” and my counter is “those things are bad, but are they bad enough to leave us vulnerable to power shifts restricting good content in the future?” I support free speech with a similar argument**.
It’s an argument that relies on the uncertain future, but nonetheless the change here clearly and significantly decreases the probability of a bad future, because bad-gov or bad-cop must acquire power then revert the monopoly breakup; whereas the emotional example can’t even rely on the future, because if bad-gov or bad-cop acquire enough power to cause the bad thing, they would’ve just as likely acquired enough power had we not avoided causing the good thing.
* Also note these things are already exchanged with real money, and breaking up the Visa/Mastercard monopoly won’t make them legal nor stop law enforcement from tracking and prosecuting them. The more general argument is that it’s better for society to make it hard for law enforcement to prosecute crime then give them the resources to do so, but also make it hard for them to prosecute non-crime; then make it easy for law-enforcement to prosecute crime so they need less resources, but also make it easy for them to prosecute non-crime. The justification is that we spend extra resources and let some crimes avoid prosecution, in exchange for decreased risk of non-crime prosecution now and in the future.
** and that speech is mild enough, sans confidential information etc., that it shouldn't be blocked simply to content whoever says it. But even confidential information doesn't warrant e.g. a universal backdoor and filter that could be stolen and exploited by a bad actor.
The slippery slope is the one the payment processors have been sliding down for a while. Steam and itch dont want to pull these games. They dont have a choice.
From what I understand it was more that they found a sympathetic ear in the management suite at Mastercard and Visa. They've been wanting to do this for some time but needed political cover.
Ideological alignment with the party in control of the US executive, legislative, and judicial branches gives groups like these quite a bit of leverage.
My guess is none, and that they are only used as a front for this. It really doesn't add up that a "grassroots org" from Australia that doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page can pressure Mastercard / Visa to pressure Steam to remove games. Makes zero sense.
The very idea of a store front for software needs to die. It’s a single strangle point that serves only to concentrate power and create a legal or regulatory target.
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
I'm curious, what do you imagine as the better alternative?
I guess every publisher could just sell direct to customers on their own website, but that wouldn't address this issue at all (it would make it even easier for payment processors to abuse their duopoly), while also severely damaging the discoverability of games.
And, considering that companies can already do this if they want but still choose to sell via a platform, I'm guessing there are several benefits beyond discoverability that I'm not thinking of.
Well we have a couple of problems on the table at the moment. Stop Killing Games is a good exemplar of one so I won't go there. But the other is "what happens if Steam goes evil?". Remember Google's old motto?
The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service. The distribution of it can remain wherever and you can go via a side channel if you want. But being tied to a platform is utterly wrong.
If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere. With Stream as the distributor, you can't. It's a single point of failure.
>The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service.
I agree, but that could still be done even when using a centralized distribution platform. I would say those are two separate issues. I think (not positive) that's the whole premise of GOG, isn't it?
>If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere.
Not really, though. If the payment processor stops doing business with your company, your shit out of luck. Instead of pressuring steam or whoever, they just pressure you directly. The single (well, double) point of failure always chains up to the payment processors.
How exactly does an independent developer have more choice or power against credit card processors alone? That's not how it works. Mega platforms have more power and still get pushed around. Indies are completely beholden to the whims of the payment platforms unless they opt out and accept crypto instead. Mega platforms could also accept crypto for controversial or all content too.
I guess the GP's plan is a scatter approach. 1 indie has no power, but if for every banned indie you have 10 more setting up payment, it becomes financially untenable to go after them all. Compared to, say, making one or two calls to Gabe. Turning it from a game of corruption to one of whack-a-mole.
The fact that we can let a duopoly of payment processors dictate the morals of our societies based on the morals of a few militant cluster B "concerned moms" is very very scary.
How do porn sites accept money then? Steam should just make a separate company for adult games and use the same payment methods as porn sites.
Also this reminds me of Apple that for example demanded Telegram to block adult channels (including non-porn channels where authors blog about their sex life) from AppStore's Telegram version.
Also if cryptocurrency were more popular and widespread, then banks would have less leverage to do this.
In discussions about this topic, in almost every place I see them, lots of people (against this censorship) are going "I don't play this kind of games" or "I don't personally care about tentacle fetish" (or whatever).
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
I think the main point is showing solidarity, even for content that does not directly benefit them. There's nothing wrong with sex and nudity, but everyone will have different personal lines in their day to day life.
>must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not?
I don't think war or violence is most people's thing to begin with.
Guns, that's definitely a thorny issue. Especially in the US. I'm personalyl fine with much stricter gun control
>we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
indeed. It's not the first wave, it won't be the last. Gotta do the same thing either way and push back.
To be honest, the "other content" seems to be an excuse.
I don't buy the "multiple countries' cultures" excuse because this seems to be spearheaded by conservative groups from the Christian anglosphere, the same culture that produces these same games to begin with; and also: other cultures forbid depictions of explicit violence, alcohol, women without their heads covered or publicly disagreeing with their husbands, etc. I don't see a push to ban games which depict alcohol consumption or independent women, do you?
Let's call a spade a spade, and recognize this for what it is.
Also: there's absolutely nothing wrong with erotica in games. Just place it behind the same safety checks as violent games. If those don't work, then they also don't work for violent games, in which case: shall we ban all games with violence?
That's because people recognise that their self-control with regard to violence is solid, they know where the line is and won't have an urge to cross it, but with sex the story is different. Making this type of content mainstream will start a wildfire in our society. I believe this is the main reason why all religions are strict about sex, while at the same time very lax about violence (holy wars, the image of warrior, etc.)
Prostitution was legal and regulated by the catholic church as necessary and understandable evil for centuries, until 15th century. Even Thomas Aquinas (huge stickler) agreed. And why wouldn't it be? It was what common sense would tell you. Learned christians would understand sexual sins are far from the worst ones.
Also additional context, before the 12th century priests were allowed to marry and have children. It was taken away, to consolidate the church's property.
They want to fix the online hack that allows people to create their own sub culture and become financially independent with it
It is only just about controlling people, has nothing to do with porn
Otherwise they'd go after Valve for empowering and facilitating the biggest legal (disguised) online gambling market to minors (counter strike case gambling, steam cards and the whole marketplace)
Again, this is all about controlling individuals, they do not care about anything else, you can drink 1000L of Vodka a week, they won't care about your insignificant life
They have an agenda (digital wallet/ID), they'll do what ever it takes to make it happen
Just closed my dev acct (only had an old 2015 puzzle game I made, 2 sales, no huge deal personally), but decided to put my 4.57 where my mouth is (no payout, waaaaaaah, cuz 5 dollar minimum). And told them exactly why I am doing so.
Money talks, and it's one of the few ways I have to show my opposition. I hope others will do the same. It's sad, because itch is kinda one of the last few places for "indie" as a thing with the vibe of indies, at least (I mean they aren't Steam or the other big publishers). I'm surprised Epic didn't buy them out yet just like they did with Bandcamp. Probably next on the block.
I think you’re in your right to close your account, but itch has a public history[1] of generally being in agreement with you. Leafo talked about feeling a responsibility to host the unique and diverse content the platform holds. [2] This is further exemplified by deindexing/demonetizing adult content rather than swiftly deleting everything in a crass, cover-your-ass, manner.
It strikes me that they had a gun held to their head by a mobster. If itch didn’t comply, they’d lose all their revenue, and we’d lose the website in its entirety, which is much more than just smut.
Pushing back against the payment processors, rather than itch under duress, would have made money talk in the right direction. The difficulty in doing so is reflected in the discussion here.
It's not a slippery slope, they're targeting non-porn games literally right now. Detroit Become Human, a very well reviewed cinematic/adventure game especially among non-gamers was one of their targets.
Detroit: Become Human has abuse as significant element to its story. It came under attack from the "National Association of People Abused in Childhood" when it came out, and also from Collective Shout.
They might want to take a look in mirror and see what institutions have been involved in many such abuse cases in the past. Hint, it's not video game companies.
That was part of it, as well as the idea of an RPG that represents skills as essentially "shadow work". Very much helped me on my mental health journey!
My pro-fascist brother-in-law with massive social anxiety hated it for some reason..
The theme is about androids being abused by society, so I suppose answering that question gives insight into your views on what may happen decades from now in this pursuit of General AI.
Yeah that's exactly the kind of framing that I am against. "caught in the dragnet" implies that there was some kind of mistake. Surely they didn't mean to argue for banning these ones, they just want to target 'porn' games. Nevermind that this started as just targeting 'extreme porn', we'll continue to say that the critics criticizing them for doing the thing that they are doing right now as arguing slippery slope.
Same slope, also slippery: this thing is not limited to opinions of moral minorities, because payment processors are a weak point for government pressure. We already started: pressuring CBS to fire Colbert for political speech, pressuring Columbia to curb anti-genocide speech, etc etc. So wait until this same route -- pressuring visa/mc -- is used on any product or creator that's not doubleplus good newspeaking.
The government doesn't need to touch you to ruin you, if they can yank your payments.
For your kids, you can set up a child account where you can block content they can see, adult content included.
Actually, it works for basic accounts as well, you can filter out adult content and don't have this kind of problem :)
There are a lot of people mentioning crypto as a possible solution to this, and a lot of people responding that crypto is a ponzi scheme, and they're not interested. But congress recently passed stablecoin legislation that could possibly fix this problem. Recipients would have a straightforward way of receiving money, and they wouldn't need to gamble on the price of bitcoin. Most people would probably still use a third part payment processor to handle the rough edges of managing money on the blockchain. But if any of them try to pull something like this it would be incredibly easy spin up a new processor and migrate accounts.
All stablecoins (at least popular ones) has the same underlying problem -- it's regulated and controlling entity can freeze any funds because it wants so
Yeah, but so can PayPal and Visa and Mastercard. The issue here is that payments is essentially a duopoly. Itch doesn't have any alternatives because they're locked into traditional payment rails. Stablecoins at least let someone else decide "Hey, you know what, I'm going to create a coin that can be used as payment for porn games." And executing on that is fairly straightforward.
When can we start banning christianity from different platforms? It's not an issue of separation of church and state as these are private companies. The blood on the hands of the church is well documented, not to mention the Catholic Church molesting so many children. Why can't we go after them as well?
I know people here love to hate it, and it's a very very controversial topic, but this here, is a good use case for Bitcoin [1]
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
It's not in this case. The payment processors were going to drop all support to these platforms if they didn't remove these games. Bitcoin could allow them to keep operating, but at the cost that now all users who want any games at all have to use Bitcoin. Mainstream platforms accepting Bitcoin as an option is fine and great, but few if any are going to want to only accept Bitcoin.
> Mainstream platforms accepting Bitcoin as an option is fine and great, but few if any are going to want to only accept Bitcoin.
For all of the talk (hype) about how crypto has the potential to avoid the exact type of meddling and manipulation and pressuring we’re seeing now, it surprises me that no equivalents to PayPal have really popped up - that best that can be done is apparently something along the lines of what Linux was on the desktop a decade or two ago. Basically, before Valve and others picked up the slack and worked on things your average person actually cares about - notably, gaming and simple(r) to use desktop environments and software stores.
Where’s the flagship platform for payments that’s built on crypto but lets you ignore the technical details, that’s trivial to implement as a merchant and is a download away on app stores? If there are a few of those, why would anyone bother with these puritan payment processors?
Isn't that what Monero is trying to do? Why can't I pay with Monero at the grocery store? Presumably because some gatekeeper that's in between me and the business has to decide whether it makes financial sense _to them_ whether to add Monero to the exclusive list of supported payment methods.
There are many actually, some extremely simple to use. The problem is that payers also need to use crypto and many people don't know how, but are instead used to paying with credit cards.
Using cryptocurrency would give them leverage in a future negotiation. The goal would not be to replace payments entirely with cryptocurrencies (they are pretty inefficient), but to reduce the monopolistic power of conventional payment processors and strike a better deal.
I would argue it's worth investing infrastructure into it, for the same reason that valve has invested infrastructure into linux to gain leverage over microsoft. Without leverage, negotiations get ugly: see the Epic vs Apple saga.
If Steam dropped Visa and Mastercard and successfully got most of their customers to use a Bitcoin payment processor instead, wouldn't these organizations just pressure that processor? I don't see how it would be any different. If the problem you're trying to solve is that private payment processors can deny service to anyone they don't like, the underlying technology the processor uses is irrelevant.
Bitcoin won't require a payment processor, but companies wanting to effectively handle Bitcoin will want a payment processor or else they will have to become one themselves.
Even companies working in large amounts of cash end up hiring companies to handle the cash logistics and all the other complications in dealing with it.
You want to handle refunds, fraud, money laundering, chargebacks... That stuff is really hard, and if it's not your main line of business, you really don't want to do it. And if you don't have a payment processor do it, and you don't do it yourself, criminals will scam your customers and use your platform to commit fraud and launder money and you will get in hot water with the law.
Bitcoin can be used as currency for occasional transactions between individuals. But you don't want your business to depend on it. It doesn't scale, not due to technological reasons, but because of legal issues and customer experience expectation.
There's still a lot of work in managing the custody of all that cryptocurrency safely and securely from a business perspective.
It's the same thing as a company needing a building for their factory. They decide they don't want to pay rent anymore, they're going to control their own properties they own themselves now. But the business of managing the property now falls to the business to do. So even when companies own their own properties they often end up hiring a property management company to deal the the day to day operations of running a commercial property. Because in the end they don't want to have to worry about their janitorial contracts, handling elevator certifications, landscaping contracts, maintenance techs, etc. They want to focus on producing widgets.
Same thing with hosting a digital storefront. Sure one could spend all the time managing servers on your own offices and ensure good uptime and security and what not, or you can just sign up for Shopify or others and they'll manage it all for you. If managing servers and software stacks and digital security isn't your main business competency, why get into it?
Most companies won't want to deal the logistics of handling crypto. So they'll often outsource that work, because I'm the end they want to focus on selling widgets not handling payments. For the same kinds of reasons why they'll hire a company to do cash logistics.
Do you need to hire payment processor to accept crypto? No. But in the end you will need to do that work though.
I'm not the reason why people choose these big centralized services. I'm not that powerful. They choose them because they see value in the services they offer. Not everyone wants to be their own bank.
>Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.
I agree with this point but I don't agree with the premise. I don't really care about the censorship of porn, but it is a slippery slope to censorship in general. If you give them an inch they will take a mile.
I think there is sometimes a business justification of putting your foot in the ground, even if the short term consequences are harsh.
Third-parties take care of this bureaucracy for you. Check out the Phoenix wallet, for example.
(Unaffiliated, I hold some pocket money on there not to run a Lightning node myself)
The on-chain transaction is just to "fund" a channel between two parties. These two parties can then make unlimited trasnfers between each other instantaneously for free. These nodes are organised in a network and can relay payment from other nodes as well. It's a bit like the Internet. You don't need to peer with everybody, you just need a path from A to B.
If you and I have a channel funded with 100 sat, we can move these around as many times as we wish, even on behalf of others, but if you need to transfer more than you have on your side, you need to fund the channel with another on-chain transaction. That's where the Phoenix 1% fee comes from, as they deal with this exact problem for you, so you don't have to worry about it.
In the case of Phoenix, you have semi-custody - i.e. control over your coin, and it can't be taken from you. There are other non-custodial wallets (Wallet of Satoshi) which are like an exchange - so they can rug pull you anytime just as Paypal can.
The fact that the majority of validators caved to sanctions from us means bitcoin is not gonna cut it esp if uncle sam gets involved. Pro crypto folks want to stay on the up and up due to trying to change the negative view of it.
I personally worked in the crypto payment processing space and we had to say no to many very well known porn companies for this reason.
* anything using proof-of-work is still gonna be a hard sell
* good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD without ever having to give a shit about the constantly-fluctuating value of BTC
* fun times ahead when you get big enough for the government to notice you and start requiring you to comply with all kinds of arcane regulations
3. Government prohibition and restriction of our rights is a terrible problem and it's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. It's a necessary fight if only to keep government power in check, unless one really believes the State is always right and always has our best interest in mind. I don't.
>good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD
I think it works out fine with fixed/float exchanges. These are exchanges that let you agree on a fixed exchange rate for a small (<=%1 fee) or trade at a floating exchange rate. The fee covers the price risk
Also - like... I absolutely hate cryptocurrency, but if this is what it comes to, then make that a payment option, and leave up the "bad naughty legal stuff" for us consenting adults to decide (but I know, it won't be legal for long as these reactionaries keep pummeling away at free speech while using the rhetoric of 'Free Speech' to gain further control of communication systems).
This is somewhat tangential: people are debating a lot whether porn has negative effects, but has anyone thought about or studied positive effects? I personally think it's more likely for porn to have positive effects and that it's preferable to sexual deprivation. Horny and sexually deprived people tend to sometimes do awful things like sexual harassment or even rape, but if they have access to porn, they're much less likely to do those things.
You just described the problem. You want men to be pacified through their screen rather than engaging with real women.
You aren't the only one who seems to think this way though, we have more things than ever to pacify men and even increase estrogen and decrease testosterone probably because some believe that men are inherently dangerous.
Based on https://blog.osum.com/steam-market-share/ (no idea how accurate) Steam holds 75% market share. One could make an argument that it may be a gatekeeper to the market and should be more closely regulated for commercial and free speech reasons.
For those who think this is about just banning adult content, think again.
What's actually happening is any content disliked by certain billionaires is being flagged by payment providers under their influence.
Some examples, like this one are for porn but the same approach could be used for anything even remotely controversial.
Anyway, maybe Witcher 3 could be next. Great game, but it happens to have some sex scenes, so....
With graphics being so realistic now I’ve always wanted a “AAA” porn game. Why don’t we have one yet? It can’t be lack of demand. Hell build a light RPG around it and it will sell in the millions.
imo nothing wrong with a platform deciding what content it wants to host.
But there’s also nothing wrong with allowing this type of content. Who wants to help me build an uncensored game distribution platform? We could call it Steamy.
The mistake is thinking about payment processors as a "platform". They're not. They're critical infrastructure operating in an environment with low competition, and them denying service — beyond what is illegal within a certain jurisdiction — is more a kin to your electricity company denying service because they don't like that you use their electricity to power a device to watch porn. I think everyone would agree that to be crazy.
The solution to those who would like to play porn games is not relying on developers to make them or Steam to host them but using an LLM to build them for you, and your SSD to host them.
Porn games on Steam and itch are tacky af but they don’t push them on me and I sort of just ignore them. That being said they should probably sell them on different website.
Itch has been "that different website" for pretty much all its existence. If itch isn't safe, I don't know who is. Epic doesn't really allow any of that, and GOG is still pretty picky on any submission.
DLSite is another good site but that was hit last year by this.
Because filters do not work well at all and because these platforms want to make parents feel like it is ok for kids to be on them. Imagine if youtube had an “onlyfans” creator filter. That would never work.
The reality is you are not the only customer or market. While you may find it to work well enough for you, myself along with many others do not.
They absolutely work. I'm a parent, my kid plays games. I have yet to have any concerning close calls with NSFW content. People who make adult games (by and large) don't want kids to play their games.
If the platform doesn't want kids to see them, and the creators don't want kids to see them, it's pretty easy for kids to not see them.
If creators, platforms, and users all say, I would prefer to not see the content, it's pretty easy to make that happen.
I'm assuming this is driven by stakeholders in the legacy porn business prompted to anticompetitive action by generative AI tools seriously threatening their monopoly on sexual content for the first time. There has always been a huge barrier to entry into porn for non-seedy, non-abusive, and mentally stable people. Art-based content like games are both much easier to create without a human trafficking network and are usually far more wholesome than the prevalent legacy porn tropes, which often center around incest, coercion, chauvinistic infidelity or miscegenation, and other disgusting themes. I am hoping there are people archiving this content for future sociological study.
The bitter truth is that the tech world's libertarian allergy to collective action is exactly why stuff like this keeps happening.
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
>If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine.
Okay. If you have any wisdom or ideas, I'd love to hear them. But as is, this comment is about as effective as mine on fighting Visa/Mastercard. "Just come together and yell at Steam!"
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm ignorant of it. The big issue of the internet is that we are all scattered very wide and that makes it harder to collect ourselvves under one goal. And as of now, I'm a laid off tech worker (who doesn't live in SF) who has no real capital to contribute to such a cause. I feel powerless.
That's what I was essentially asking. I'd want to start with small actions that feel realistic. I know it's not gonna just pop up overnight, so more reason to break it down.
If none of us know, then the next alternative is "can we point to any existing organizations to throw support at"? Or at the very least, an adjacent organization who can tell us steps to take?
Set up a Discord. Market it to attract a handful of early adopters. Run a book club using Organizing for Social Change[1] or Beautiful Trouble[2]. Along the way, you build shared language and alignment. People start to get a feel for tactics: collective letter campaigns, pressure targeting, framing, etc.
By the time you wrap the first book, you’ll have a core group with a working vocabulary and some trust. You’ll know how to set up a continuous recruitment and onboarding loop. You’ll be ready for a second round of action. For example, something sharper, louder, more public-facing. From there, it's just iteration after iteration.
The most important seed is a vision holder, someone whose primary job is building solid relationships and gradually offloading the core functions: facilitation, comms, outreach, tech, and education. Don't worry. You don't need money and you don’t need credentials. You need consistency above all, social fluency, emotional and logistical endurance, and a bit of luck.
Trust me when I say it's not easy, but the overhead is basically zero. The only real cost is showing up (again and again and again).
>The only real cost is showing up (again and again and again).
If people could show up once on thr right day, we woildnt be in such a situation. Persistence is key, but I think we can both recognize how flaky modern society is.
These are good steps, but this is definitely something that should have started in 2019/2020, not 2025. I just hope it's not too late.
The libertarian solution has been to use cryptocurrency for payments. The problem is that only libertarians want to use cryptocurrency, and most people don't care.
Modern neuroscience provides enough evidence to argue older generations “synced” early on to ideals of the past. They memorized some modern syntax and semantics but still align as individuals with puritanical social and tyrannical political practices of old. Not entirely their fault, it’s biology.
Not something the next generations have to tolerate however. Physics is clearly ageist.
I have always found it odd that whenever pornography comes up the degree to which people defend it in all forms. It is uncomfortably telling but also completely misses why this is happening.
Itch.io is heavily saturated with anime porn games along with steam to the point I find both difficult to navigate even with nsfw filters turned on. Turning those filters off and it is pretty egregious the volume of it all let alone subject matter. I dont care about porn but the platforms have done a piss poor job for the majority of people who are not looking for porn games but find games like cyberpunk totally acceptable. How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?
This is happening because it was too easy for someone to pull up the home page on said platforms and point to several incest porn games. Using payment processors is not a solution i favor but people cannot find that experience acceptable.
On a personal note, i dont want to live in a society that deems it acceptable to have a “no incest” filter for games. That is line for me and not for religion but because I find incest disgusting.
I like my game platforms how I like my streaming platforms. One for explicitly porn, and another for explicitly not porn. GoT on netflix while spicy is not porn. The issue is mixing porn with not porn. I shouldnt have to go click a bunch of special porn tags to not see that shit on the home page. I like anime games but cant seem to keep them without the hentai. Poor experience.
The fact the default is porn games in your home page IS the issue. It gives all this ammunition for xyz group to do whatever.
The politics of payment processors being the bad guys is nonsense. They have to bow down to too many governments to play ball so will always take the politically expedient option. Almost all bitcoin validators bowed down to us sanctions banning wallet addresses for example. That cat has been out of the bag for years.
That is not true. Very often i find porn games not filtered out so does my partner. Which is once again, why having distinct store fronts would have solved this. No system is perfect in tag this tag that so it is better to be explicit with it so things do not leak. This is what happens when you mix it. The xyz groups get ammunition.
Can you imagine if youtube launched an onlyfans like filter to allow nsfw content?
Are you absolutely sure you and your partner not changed default content filtering preferances on Steam?
Because Steam literally have settings in "Home > Account -> Store preferences -> Mature Content Preferences" with following options:
> Some Nudity or Sexual Content. Games or content that contain some nudity or sexual themes, but not as the primary focus.
This is where basically 99.9% of your normal games belong even if they have sex in them.
> Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content. Games or content that primarily feature nudity or sexual themes. By ticking this box you affirm that you are at least eighteen years old.
This is where all the sex VN slop belong.
> Adult Only Sexual Content. Games or content that are sexually explicit or graphic and are intended for adults only. By ticking this box you affirm that you are at least eighteen years old.
And this is porn.
I'm absolutely sure that "Adult Only Sexual Content" is disabled by default and pretty sure "Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content" disabled too.
All the real hentai trash is on DLsite anyway. These people probably have no idea, and even if they did, they're powerless to change Japan. They'd definitely give up after encountering Kanji.
...sweet summer child
visa is hitting DLSite hard
https://cs.dlsite.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500002888202-What-p...
actually it seems all the major western credit card players have already blocked them. i remember seeing pay with crypto so i guess thats what you need to use in the west
Another framing of this: Mastercard / Visa, and by extension whomever had them to do the crackdown, are now powerless to change DLSite.
Googling for news, it seems like the story between DLSite and M/V is a push and pull. Many articles turn up that say they have an agreement, then a disagreement, then an agreement again, then a suspension, then they bring it back again etc.
My point here is that their relationship with M/V seems to have failed to actually change them, so, the point "they're powerless to change Japan" stands.
I see the assault, but the results are very different from what we can see with Steam and itch.io - I think maybe because of how much M/V matter in the West vs. Japan. Whereas these western companies gave in to pressure, the same pressure in Japan didn't work, the stores just seemed to restrict the card usage, and call it a day.
I wish other payment processors spread in the West. With a much more even distribution of power, they could not abuse it like this (and others could not use them to abuse it like this).
No shit, people just use a different credit card, instead of the site pulling a game or shuttering, because these groups have no power beyond pestering Visa.
Not that anyone saying "sweet summer child" ever had anything smart to say.
"i remember seeing pay with crypto so i guess thats what you need to use in the west"
In other words you know nothing and couldn't be bothered to look it up before posting.
More caving to the ultra-religious pearl grippers who just have nothing better to do than tell others how to live.
All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
You answered your own question - if you go after shows with the popularity of game of thrones or games with the popularity of grand theft auto you will fail.
It's not just mature content... there have been efforts to reduce the ability to legally purchase firearms as well as suppression of prominent social media figures. Not just the CC companies, but even the larger payment processors like Stripe/Paypal etc. are all doing it for different categories.
There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.
> There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.
I used to work for a fintech. As new employee I had coffee with a colleague who explained KYC, AML, and other compliance topics to me. They mentioned that marijuana businesses can't bank their money due to these considerations as it would make banks knowing accomplices to the federal crime of trafficking a controlled substance. This threat is material because cannabis, unlike adult content, is actually illegal, so I don't think it's a substantially similar example to what's mentioned in this thread.
The group bills themselves as feminist, but aligns with the religious right in most of their policies. They’re directly at odds with many things feminists have fought for.
I agree completely that they align with the religious right in this aspect, but you can't pretend that sex-negativity isn't a huge school of thought in feminism. Vague calls to "stop the sexualization of women in media (aimed at hetrosexual men)" have been a huge part of the casual feminist suite of views for at least a decade.
There exist sex-negative feminists, but it is wrong to describe that as a feminist position.
For the better part of a decade feminists have been wildly anti-objectification, not anti-sex. It's an important distinction.
For example, most modern feminists are pro sex-work, but only under conditions that guarantee safety, autonomy, and health care for the sex workers. That's very different from how most sex work is done today. So a modern feminist might say that we should be doing more to protect the sex workers who are held in bondage by a pimp, and forced to walk the streets while simultaneously arguing in favor of well regulated, protected brothels or private sex work.
You can't really say that, there are many variations; for example, the women advocating for prohibition of alcohol way back in the day were feminists. Socially, their views would be more aligned with this Australian organization.
But that'd be damning: these views (banning alcohol) of some of the early feminist movements are hopelessly outdated. Alignment with them would make Collective Shout conservative... and aligned with today's religious right, as I'm arguing all along.
It's interesting that you equate opposition to sexualization of women in media with sex negativity. One does not necessarily imply the other. You can be sex positive and believe that media sexualizes women to a problematic degree.
Can you give me an example of this? As far as I understand it sex positivity doesn't seem to be concerned with "media sexualizing women" in and of itself. Consequently I'm not sure what "media [that] sexualizes women to a problematic degree" is or would even look like.
It has to do with agency, primarily. Is the character in the media given the agency and depth necessary to support their sexual appetites? Or are they treated like an object by the camera, a 2 dimensional cutout whose purpose is only to be an object.
Compare, for example, Sex and the City, where 4 women were regularly engaged in a variety of sexual encounters and say, background dancers in a music video or advert that exist to appeal as objects to a male audience.
I've definitely seen people say it's about agency, though exactly what they mean by that and why they think that matters tends to vary. That said, I suspect your response is in line with the person I was originally responding to.
In a different context I might be more sympathetic to this specific formulation of the concept since it's not always clear how much agency the background dancers in a music video or advert have. However, on the original topic of video games, the notion of "character agency" is rather pernicious.
In Kotor 2, there's a character called "The Handmaiden", who will join your party if the player character is a male. She talks at great length about her situation and the decisions the player should make. She's depicted as a chaste, virginal religious character. But one of the very first things you can do with her when she joins your party is spar with her. And she strips into black lingerie to do so. Then she stays in black lingerie on your ship while you go and do other stuff.
She's clearly there as an object for the audience to drool over. It's given a very surface level justification ("we always spar with only our bodies"), but that justification is provided the instant before the player sees her in her undies. (Which, it's important to note, aren't like modest undergarments one might expect from a religious figure like this, but are specifically sexy underwear.)
Compare this to another Star Wars game, Jedi: Fallen Order, where the Night Sister Mirrin can becomes romantically involved with the player character. She has a well developed culture, and is given space to articulate her personality, choices, and opinions in a cogent way. She can be a romantic interest without being an object. She is as complex as all the other characters, and we don't see her positioned in sexy lingerie suddenly out of the blue.
I can come up with other examples if those aren't illustrative.
No, that's fine, since I think it's not only the case that these are sufficient, but that I simply wasn't explicit enough in my rejection.
What I'm disputing is any application of objectification theory to media analysis wherein there are no actual agents involved. Neither The Handmaiden nor Night Sister Mirrin ever possessed any agency, nor were they deprived of it. There is simply no moral valence in how one treats or regards them.
The demand here is that they be treated as if they possessed agency. I see no reason or obligation to do so.
You're not wrong. I read a couple days ago that this group receives funding from evangelical organizations to do stunts like this. I don't know if the intention is to false flag feminists as responsible, but it sure seems like it.
Just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s representative of feminism at large. It doesn’t mean it’s not a conservative think tank hiding behind a veil of feminism.
These days there seems to be a fair bit of sex-inconsistent feminism.
With something like OnlyFans, where there's money to be made, the 'sex work is real work!' slogan comes out. And there's a reluctance to criticise big porn sites even after claims of links to sex trafficking etc.
But at the same time, scantily-clad videogame characters designed to appeal to the male gaze are deemed unacceptable/objectifying/regressive. And 'sex robots' are seen as a horrifying prospect.
There's a range of views from a range of people, that's no surprise. That said, the common perception of men who pay for sex work (especially OF) is extremely negative, they are marks who deserve it. Meanwhile there is no such perception of men who pay for traditional media.
Is it? The religious conservative organizations I've seen are also wringing their hands over other media as well such as smut or that shitty netflix show, while this one appears to be ambivalent to supportive.
Let me see: they seem to receive funding from evangelical organizations; the founder speaks/writes at Christian venues and is pro-life, anti-gay/trans; they are targeting games because that's what they happen to focus on right now. They've also campaigned against Rap music and artists in the past. They managed to get articles critical of them pulled from VICE, etc. Their modus operandi is typical of religious conservatives.
Being Christian does not mean one is not feminist. This person seems to advocate for a multitude of things including ones that are historically feminist (of at least one commonly accepted variety of feminism). Those advocations make it reasonable to call her a feminist.
I didn't mean that one cannot be a Christian and a feminist.
I meant that this person chooses Christian venues to voice her opinions, and shares with them non-feminist values such as being "pro life", etc.
Hers is not a feminist organization, and Collective Shout is perceived by some as a right-wing group seeking to also ban LGTB+ depictions in videogames (which is not standard feminist agenda). Like another commenter mentioned, Collective Shout receives funding from evangelical organizations. And really, you have to ask yourself: since when exactly payment processors paid any attention to what genuine feminist organizations had to say about anything?
At some point you cannot ignore the evidence anymore. At best you can point the non-empty intersection of conservative Christian groups and some sex-negative feminists who both seek to ban pornography, but this doesn't make them the same thing.
TL;DR this is a variation of "will somebody think of the children!?" pearl-clutching, and everyone should know by now it doesn't lead to anything good.
It seems to me that people are waking up to the fact that tolerance seems to be a suckers game. The only way to maintain the social capital you have is to go on offense because at least recently it seems like the people screaming for tolerance don't actually have any once they become culturally ascendant. Though maybe it was always thus.
I find the overall discussion on this topic interesting, but it feels like we could emphasise a bit more how this is related with the transition of discourse from freedom to righteousness. In this context, arguing the fairness of being free is just an admission that freedom is now a secondary line of argumentation. As an outsider to the US, it also seems a bit ironic to my uninformed eyes that a heavily liberal part of the society effectively and efficiently co opted the fairness, equality, morality vector to drive an agenda of less liberalism in the interest of winning against non liberal movements.
On July 29 2022, Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California held that Brown Rudnick had adequately alleged facts in the Fleites v. MindGeek case that Visa engaged in a criminal conspiracy with MindGeek to monetize child pornography. Judge Carney also granted the plaintiff discovery that will reveal the relationships between the hundreds of allegedly sham organizations and the secret owners behind this alleged criminal trafficking internet platform.
Because it's slightly/majority embarrassing. The groups backing this ban will find the worst of the worst thing, and paint you as a massive supporter. And their militant zealots will endanger your life if you become significant enough.
It takes a certain kind of person to stand up for pornography. And most are not that kind of person.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
and yet people still refuse to understand the utility of bitcoin/lightning protocol in relation to situations like this (or cutting donations to Greenpeace or Wikileaks)
Crypto uses more power than Generative AI with fewer users. A much easier solution is to use the law to classify the payment processors as common carriers.
It's unfortunate because there really isn't anything anyone can do except wait for regulation or try raising awareness/usage of crypto payments or cash by mail
Porn sites use smaller special purpose payment processors that have higher fees. It makes sense for porn sites because they only sell sexual content. If Valve and itch used those same payment processors, they'd be paying the higher premiums on all transactions, including those for nonsexual content (i.e. that vast majority of their transactions). It just doesn't make sense for them from a financial perspective.
In many countries, the sale of alcohol is restricted because the majority agrees that it is harmful to society. The same should be done with pornographic content. However, we are only beginning to learn how to efficiently limit it. Things like this will happen, but it will improve over time. Overall, I see positive progress here.
I don’t understand people who defend porn access. Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs. We regulate gambling, paid access to porn is worse. Furthermore it is fraught with misogyny and exploitation and objectification of women. Would you defend ISIS games on Steam promoting Taliban-style patriarchy? Porn is worse.
> Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs.
This comparison alone soundly defeats your argument. Prohibition of hard drugs has been a spectacular failure, directly resulting in increased rates of death, disease, and crime, and elevating drug cartels to enormous international influence.
The danger of porn as an addictive substance - which is very real as you point out - is a great argument against its prohibition.
They are targeting incest/rape games. I wouldn't call that 'LGBTQ' like some people seem to imply. If Itch and Steam don't want to police their store fronts _before_ the law gets involved, then I am not surprised that other businesses such as payment providers will choose not to work with them.
Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.
This is my entire point: Valve and Itch do not police their store fronts (Itch actually does, it won't allow any games it thinks are 'hatred' but other content is OK) and now the payment processors think the risk is too great.
I think one solution for Valve/Itch to continue with the 'no policing policy' is for governments to step in and say all video games needed classification like films do.
I think a few of these video games that are sold would be found to breaking some law if anyone cared to test it.
Have you heard of a television show called "Game of Thrones". It featured live actors, real humans with human bodies, acting out representations of incest and rape. And positive representations at that. It was a worldwide phenomenon and hundreds of millions of people probably watched it. It's still available to buy and sell GoT and related merchandise and payment providers don't bat an eye.
Video games don't even involve actual human bodies like GoT does. It's crazy that "Collective Shout" thinks this is worth invoking violence and violating peoples volition for. Certainly not consistent with all other aspects of entertainment in society. Makes me think there are probably other fame, power and money motivations behind their behavior. But it doesn't explain people agreeing with them. That's the weirdest part of this.
"It was a worldwide phenomenon and hundreds of millions of people probably watched it." - this is what explains why GOT is not the one getting taken down. Collective Shout is picking battles it can win.
I think what that tells you is that there are still limits to what collective shout is able to do, hence why GTA is still for sale but the fringe porn games aren't
Pornography is the canary in the coalmine of protected speech. When you give a group the ability to censor content on the basis of "obscenity", then that group and other groups can use this to label other subjects they don't like as obscene. LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this, as it is often made the case that being gay or trans is only about sex. You don't have to consume pornography yourself in order to benefit from a society that allows it.
> LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this,
Exactly, the Heritage Foundation doesn't define porn the same way a reasonable person might. From Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".
I don't think LBGTQ+ are too harmed by the removal of "Sex adventures Incest Family" or "Interactive Sex Mother Son Incest BDSM" or "Reincarnation adventure going to rape all NPCS VR" front he steam store. I don't think too many LGBTQ like to include rapists or incest adventures into their group. I could be wrong though.
I agree with you in that most LGBTQ+ folks don't like being grouped in with incest-promoting games, but that's exactly what MasterCard and Visa are doing by forcing platforms to indiscriminately remove adult content.
It should be up to individual platforms to moderate this content on a case by case basis, not the payment processors.
It doesn’t matter how much entirely non-porn queer content there is. The folks behind the payment processor pressure campaigns view Heartstopper and Pride Puppy! as just as immoral and depraved as the stuff you mentioned.
Strictly speaking this isn't a conventional free speech issue since the government isn't involved here, just private businesses.
That said, there's a de facto duopoly on payment processing that gives these companies near government-level power to dictate terms. Realistic alternatives don't exist and would be insanely hard to start.
That's already happening though. There's a bunch of quid pro quo for speech curtailment in the media right now. Hell, just this week Colbert lost his spot to appease the administration for the Paramount + Skydance merger. Even if it's not direct to the little guys and it's just quid-pro-quo, it's just them being smart enough to make it seem more palatable. It's the same thing.
> Since when has protected speech required being valuable?
For this specific topic in the US, it's necessary. The third prong of the Miller Test is "Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
The three-pronged Miller test is for examining if something is obscene, which is a considerably narrower criteria than whether or not a given piece of free speech is worthy of protection. Speech does not need to be 'valuable' to be worthy of protection, it needs to have a specific lack of value as determined by the Miller test to not be protected. Big difference.
>My free speech red line is criticism of govt and leaders.
Doesn't sound like you support free speech at all then if this is your red line. Criticism of politicians is needed to keep them in line. Being about to criticize the US government is true freedom.
Weirdly, Amazon sells TONS of porn and NSFW content, and yet doesn't lose their Visa/Mastercard processing.
Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.
Isn't this American culture? You can watch soft porn as long as you can claim it is not porn? The Spartacus Series comes to mind. Gore and Porn. But sure, it is "history"
A lot of the moralizing pressure groups are also against sexual content on TV (at least historically they have been).
One of the slippery slopes here would be that initially they go after smaller players and then work their way up. Would they ultimately go after Amazon or Warner Bros? It’s not totally clear to me that they wouldn’t.
I said this on the other thread, it's obvious they don't yet have the clout to go after big titles like GoT or GTA yet, and it would be a losing strategy for them to do so. Hence why they are going after battles they can win first.
They already suceeded in getting GTA5 banned in a bunch of stores.
Yeah, but not yet from Steam. Anyway the point is, people keep bringing up "why don't they go after GTA and GOT instead of fringe eroge" so, yeah, one - they have but it was a partial success at best - they aren't ready or able to make that leap YET.
There's plenty of hard core material on Amazon as well, fwiw.
Someone who watches Game of Thrones as pornography is a paraphiliac.
It's art. Not porn!
This is absolutely a wedge to censor LGBTQ+ content. If you can separately argue that adult content should be blocked and LGBTQ+ themes are for adults, then you can block queer content online en masse.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
Yes, I think this is 100% the take we should come away with.
I don't have strong feelings around wether steam or itch sell adult content, but its the fact that a duopoly and using their power to exert political influence.
The group responsible also want to ban Detroit: Become Human, for context.
That game advocates staunchly for civil rights and the autonomy of women, children, and other minorities. The Holocaust allegory is so on the nose you can't even call it veiled. It says domestic abuse is unforgivably, undeniably wrong.
They don't even care about marginalized groups or even women themselves. Any piece of content that gives them the heeby jeebies, any media that has conflict: banned. Doesn't matter if it even supports their purported agenda.
This is why it is so tiring to see everyone reduce what is happening here to “they're trying to ban [specific thing I care about]!” rather than take the objective facts of the situation in total.
Is there any indication or reason why they would want to block LGBTQ+ content? Haven't both companies been very vocal supporters of LGBTQ+ in the past?
It's like those game companies, that support lgbt and donate to gay mental health foundations, but will block you when you mention some gay words in chat, because they are child friendly. I always found the hypocrisy funny. Then their auto-translate feature will routinely consistently swap pronouns to opposite.
Companies are not moral entities. They will go whichever way the wind blows. Right now it's more profitable and avoid being singled out by the current US admin to not vocally support LGBT. We saw this during pride month this year where most major companies either pulled their support or were not vocal at all. We've seen plenty of companies drop "DEI" policies to curry favor with the admin as well.
If a group this small can get Visa/Mastercard to hand out ultimatums, then it's not that far of a jump for the same group or another who is against LGBT to recontextualize LGBT as something sexual or something targeting children. We've already seen this rhetoric from the current admin.
It's crazy to me that people can simultaneously understand that censorship is bad and still think we can allow for exceptions for things like "obscenity/pornography" or "hate speech"
Free expression means that objectionable things will be said, even published. There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence that can put people in immediate danger, but stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category, and giving finance the ability to censor in this way is not signficantly better than governments doing so
I suppose I think what you've said - not specifically regarding itch, but I'm on board with some kinds of curbs on speech like hate speech.
I don't think it's a complex position though, I think free speech is good. But I think other things like people's ability to leave lives free from abuse is good as well.
Sometimes free speech can be in conflict with something else that's good. You don't have to agree on the specific, but I think it's at least a coherent non-crazy position.
While at the same time allowing for blowing up people to pieces on regular movies, because that is alright, no big problem.
> There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence
You seem to have chosen three hairy exceptions, why not four or five?
> stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category
Those categories?
Or are you saying that doxxing, slander and "incitement" to violence are three things that can put people into immediate danger, so the single category is "things that can put people in immediate danger"?
Are arguments that doxxing and slander are things that can put people into immediate danger any stronger than the arguments that pornography/obscenity and hate speech put people into immediate danger?
In fact, doxxing is usually extremely legal. The thing that should obviously be illegal is legal.
On the other hand, hate speech can aggravate criminal charges and obscenity is still actually illegal (while pornography isn't necessarily considered obscene any more.)
I guarantee you have a counterpart who thinks it's obvious to everyone that hate speech and pornography cause real harm, where doxxing and slander are journalism and incitement to violence is activism or self-defense.
This isn't censorship. This is VISA/MC saying "you can't pay for porn with our service" or more broadly, "you can't pay for things that we don't want to be associated with" which is their right.
They have a govt-supported duopoly in the States, which is generally speaking why some folks believe they lack the right to refuse service in this case.
Exactly. Your rights of association should be carefully weighted against the government-granted cartel you have been granted.
>This is VISA/MC saying "you can't pay for porn with our service" or more broadly, "you can't pay for things that we don't want to be associated with" which is their right.
FALSE, they are not blocking customers buying adult games using their system, they are focing the stores to remove the adult content unless they will block all customers that would buy very christian products too.
Would make sense if you were telling the truth and VISA would refuse your money if you are not a religious extremist but the reality is they they force their duopoly to remove LEGAL products from market places.
Imo, using this argument in this context not just strains the credibility, it makes argument itself sound like fake excuse. VISA/MC would not be associated with porn at all if they did not pressured on steam to remove the games. That is simply not true and non existent threat. It is censorship, plain and simple in its true original meaning.
I do not think VISA/MC do care about freedom of speech or anything of the sort. Nor they ever claimed to do so. But we do not have to twist ourselves into pretzels to pretend this is not censorship just because censorship is ugly word.
The good old "we don't serve gays" argument.
The baker case I think was about the cake, thus having to produce "reprehensible" art. Editorial work (steam selecting what games to promote) is Sth I strongly think is their right to choose. But having a transaction run through your network? That's on the other side of the spectrum, way closer to the "no gay customer" situation. If they'd at least pretend it's because of, idk, higher card fraud rates...
They're in panic mode and nuke all mode because one payment facilitator in Europe under investigation.
Why not ditch them and use crypto?
What about FedNow? They would be bound by 1st amendment.
I think hate speech is a separate case from porn, honestly. Porn is not ideal but it's not ideal as letting people mount hate against minorities, which imho is unacceptable
More importantly people thought they could vote republican and ignore their rabid religious governing. Particularly people like peter theil
What are the principles governing the exceptions you listed (slander, doxxing, incitement)?
1. Direct, obvious harm beyond "my feelings were upset."
2. Actually, this isn't illegal in a lot of places.
3. Direct, obvious harm beyond "my feelings were upset."
Should we ever consider broad societal harm, or just focus on individual harm? It's to me just short sighted to only consider the later.
Do you actually believe that the issue with porn is that it "upsets people's feelings"?
Mostly the principle that direct, tangible, and irreparable harm is being done by the speech. I called these "hairy" exactly because they are less clear-cut than most cases. The line between satire or speculation and slander, for example, can be kind of notoriously hard to draw, many "doxxing" incidents mostly involve finding already-public information, and incitement to violence is pretty difficult to demonstrate in a satisfying way
The reason I bring up these examples is that they are what I consider the edge cases of freedom of expression. There are genuinely difficult tradeoffs between values, but allowing stuff that bothers some people to be published is not one of them
This actually took longer than I thought. It is really weird that for all my adult content I have to go to a dedicated adult store, yet for games I can find them on Steam and gog where kids shop for games.
You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?
Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
While being removed from general stores, porn has become very visible on big gaming platforms which majority of customers don’t associate with porn. Backlash is inevitable.
I think we can expect a bigger push against porn in general as pendulum swings back on the other side.
Bookstores sell kids books and adult material just fine. The adult stuff might be behind the counter or in a certain area, same as stores like Steam where you have to actively seek it out.
Also grocery stores sell alcohol, and I'm personally more fine with children getting access to porn than to liquor.
Depends what country you're in. In most of Canada grocery stores do not sell liquor.
But at any rate, they're going to ask for ID when you buy it. Children can't access it.
It’s a lot easier to ID-gate food based on whether it contains some amount of a substance (alcohol) than it is to ID-gate media.
For extremely explicit stuff, sure, the adults-only line might be clear for a lot of folks. But other stuff is not as clear cut: if media describes sex at all, is it adult? Even Supreme Court justices have trouble defining in this area.
…and all of that is ignoring the elephants in the room: whether or not explicit media even should be restricted for non-adults, the fact that there are highly variable and localized levels of people’s preparedness for adult media (even more variable and subjective than developmental cutoffs for alcohol sale), and the abundant historical evidence that attempts to draw an acceptability/adults-only line in subjective areas like this are inevitably extended to provide cover for political agendas (e.g. homophobia).
I would not agree on this one. Both is detrimental on children’s health.
One is more likely to directly cause a child's death than the other.
I‘m not arguing against that, but I'd like to point out that „death“ as a baseline is a pretty krass statement. Just my two cents.
I don't think it's a bad idea to say the thing that can (and does) kill children is the worse thing.
Video rental stores, when those were still a thing, were the same way. They'd have a room in the back with a curtain to section it off.
First, it's highly concerning that some companies have gained immense power through monopolization, a point also made by former FTC Chair Lina Khan. Separately, in physical stores, there's an incentive to comply with laws because police would intervene if pornography were sold alongside regular goods. However, online, there's hardly any punishment for distributing pornography. This has led to a proliferation of people trying to sell porn on mainstream platforms to maximize profits and gain attention. Online, pornography is consumed far too casually. While it doesn't need to be completely eliminated, I believe there needs to be a clearer separation. Also, it seems many of those currently criticizing Visa/Mastercard are Trump supporters, and I'm curious about the FTC's stance on mergers and acquisitions between large corporations.
I don't think any of that really has anything to do with my comment. I was commenting on the cultural normality of a business dealing in both adult and family friendly content simultaneously.
Dedicated porn sites are also being forced by the card companies to pull down porn. Also Steam/itch aren't where this started, they're in the third wave of companies getting held hostage over this. Digital tip jars and direct-payment creator services were hit weeks ago.
But the problem isn't porn. That's the low hanging fruit for a massive power grab The problem is that card companies can/will/did blackmail multiple companies into changing, and in some small cases shut-down their entire businesses.
In a post-cash world, this is completely unacceptable, and a blatant power grab. If the payment processors are allowed to set this precedent, then there will be nothing to stop these for-profit companies from blocking anybody, anywhere from buying anything - for any or no reason.
People are blaming a specific protest group. Personally I believe they are being scapegoated. And honestly if a tiny group from a tiny economy are so easily able to control international macroeconomics, then the root cause is still that the card services are vulnerable to such an attack.
The only appropriate response is swift and severe regulation of these critically necessary card and banking services, up to and including the dissolution of both Visa and MasterCard - and in the US strict caps on card fees, as well as an amendment to the Constitution ensure that our right to own property permanently includes the right to buy property.
Are the payment providers going to weaponize their de facto control over all purchases to target guns next? Churches? Birth control? Inner-City hospitals? Which apps or social music companies do you think they'll allow to live, or die? Will they blackmail the Internet service providers? Political parties? Entire countries? Which side of which wars do you think Visa will force us to support? Is a company called "MasterCard" for or against letting people with your skin color buy food? You don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody should have to know.
It doesn't matter where you land politically, the point is that these companies cannot be allowed to wield this kind of control. Our society really does depend on it. ...Because we can't go back to cash anymore, and they very much know it.
> But the problem isn't porn. That's the low hanging fruit for a massive power grab
I mostly agree with this. There are legitimate issues with even the biggest and most respected porn sites being very lax with taking down underage and nonconsensual content. The card companies AFAICT aren't being pressured to reform because of this kind of content, but more the LGBT content which is harming nobody.
Maybe this will end the crypto winter.
I do like bringing up the potential for dissolution. I would add just the general ways in which they profit off distorting the economy for massive private gains, often to the ruin of many individuals.
Credit has become ubiquitous, in a manner that belies its supposed purpose, at least as was originally practiced before consumers were offered and employed credit for absolutely everything.
Then again, governments and "regulated" entities are also capable of blackmail. I'm not sure these private companies would ever have an incentive to care about what you spend their money on unless governments gave them a reason to - which is why this is happening. At the end of the day you run into the same perpetual problem - you want x, some mob wants y. Good luck.
It's not the same as an online store. There is a way for people to know kids are in a place they shouldn't be or to deny them access to adult content in real life. In Steam, there isn't
Adult content on steam is marked as such very clearly.
Under Community Content Preferences, you'll see an option for Mature Content and Adult-Only Sexual Content.
You'll also be preventing from accessing mature content depending on the filters in your account settings, and in the Family Management section of steam, for Family Shared Libraries.
Next you’ll tell us that all facebook users are over the age of 16 just like marky mark promises us.
It's not clear to me what kind of age controls Steam has, but I suspect that they require certain forms of payment before accessing the "super adult" portion.
(For instance you cannot see the "super adult" store pages at all if you are not logged in.)
So what? A kid can still go get adult content without anyone else knowing or seeing. Most parents aren't able to set the family settings on Steam or even know their kid knows what Steam is.
If kids are on steam they're also on... ya know... the internet.
It's not complicated to realise that this achieves none of the stated objectives
Yes that's my point. The Internet does not have the kind of separation or age-checking that real life has, and maybe that hasn't been good for kids or adults
Steam isn't internet, you have to buy things there, which is a strong authentication than requires all your personal data (KYC).
I've been using Steam as an adult for the last two decades. I have hundreds of games in my library. I've never seen one porn title recommended to me or while browsing the site.
Steam also has extensive parental controls: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49...
They popped up for me a few times without any prompting. It was weird.
The lack of an opt-out filter was an issue that Collective Shout supposedly campaigned for that went through Steam Labs and was them implemented for everyone circa 2020.
I feel like I saw this for the first time a year or two ago, and I had to toggle it on since it was off by default
> You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store.
I'd be more interested in questioning these than why porn is available on Steam. I mean, Disney is essentially an anti-porn product, so I get that, but Netflix is a perfectly reasonable platform for porn. I don't see any reason adult toys can't be sold in Walmart or whatever.
> Backlash is inevitable.
I don't know. This doesn't seem like a grassroots movement.
Walmart does sell them. Next to pharmacy.
And that’s a good thing. There are too many stories of unsafe insertion of household objects ending up in the ER.
Lol I don't think that the reason for that is lack of vibrators in nearest walmart
Same. Some Targets.
> You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store
In the US at least the classier vibrators have been starting to be sold first at shops like Sharper Image, and now, indeed, grocery stores. The packaging of course would not raise any questions from kids, and they are sold in the same aisles as condoms and lubricant. "Sexual health" is the umbrella term which feels like it is in play.
There is also a thriving wink-and-nod category of “personal massager” tools which are sold in many department stores in the US. They’re usually not in supermarkets, but I get the impression that’s mostly due to supermarkets not having many electronics/appliances in general, not because supermarkets are more family-friendly than, say, Target.
Your own examples show the slippery slope this is. Walmart, Netflix, and Disney all DO carry content that some people want banned†. No matter what you're talking about, someone is going to take offense and want the content removed entirely.
Collective Shout, the group behind this latest censorship push, also wanted Detroit Become Human to be banned because the story depicted someone abusing a child. If we're banning that, why not ban memoirs of child abuse survivors or "James and the Giant Peach"?
You suggest it would be easy for Steam and Itch to run alternative storefronts. Given that they removed content that was offensive to their payment processors, they'd need to engage with high-risk payment processors to power these new store fronts. To say nothing of the technical work involved, those high-risk payment processors certainly charge more for their services. That'd raise the already high 30% that Valve takes on most transaction.
Additionally, if a games journalism website also has relationships with payment processors, are they allowed to review adult games even if those reviews don't include pictures? Or are they going to be equally punished for giving adult content a positive rating?
This all limits the options available of responsible adult consumers and costs creators of LEGAL content revenue.
===
†Here's a longer look at your examples:
Define adult toys. I assume you mean dildos. Walmart doesn't sell those in physical stores, but they do sell them online. Additionally they, like most other stores, do sell lube, condoms, and vibrating rings in their brick and mortar store. Every clothing store that sells underwear sells something many would describe as lingerie. Target has an entire lineup of "after dark" board games stocked right next to Candyland.
"After Netflix published a marketing poster showing the [11 year old girls] twerking in revealing cheerleading outfits without any context, an online petition calling for the cancellation of the US release received more than 140 thousand signatures."
'According to a source close to the production, Pixar’s next feature film, “Lightyear” does feature a significant female character, Hawthorne, who is in a meaningful relationship with another woman. While the fact of that relationship was never in question at the studio, a kiss between the characters had been cut from the film. Following the uproar surrounding the Pixar employees’ statement and Disney CEO Bob Chapek‘s handling of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, however, the kiss was reinstated into the movie last week.'
I'm not sure is "very visible", there is some streisand-effect going on with this issue. I've been a subscriber to steam since...the beginning. Signed up for Steam to play half life 2 at its launch. And I didn't know there were porn games on steam until this issue with mastercard/visa came up in the last week.
Grocery stores absolutely sell sex toys now. Wal-Mart carries them as well.
I'm no prude, but it's really weird to me.
I was in Belgrade aiport duty-free a few days ago and there was a Lelo stand in amongst the usual cosmetics. "Fly in Pleasure", definitely got a laugh out of me.
Personally I think this is a good thing.
I'm curious how do you define "prude". My definition of it would be to be highly sensitive to sexual things, which is basically why you'd be weirded at seeing them in a daily place, for better or worse.
On their presence in the first place, I'd say if a shop is going to sell condoms and lubricant, also holding basic sex tools isn't a big stretch.
Why? Those same stores have sold lube, condoms, and Trojan's vibrators since the 90's. Walmart has sold lingerie since they existed.
They've also sold personal massagers that were used as (and sometimes quietly designed as) sex toys for many years, too.
Why? Why is it weird that large box stores like Walmart and target that literally sell everything, also sells vibrators?
Seems like you are a bit of prude :) No shame there, you are fully entitled to your opinion in democracy
CVS and Walgreens in the USA sell adult toys.
Bookstores have adult book with images and kids books.
Walmart also sells some adult toys, lubricant, and condoms. They also sell magazines with nudity.
ESPN did The Body Issue magazine in stores for a decade [1]
If a kid has access to steam, do they not have access to the internet? If you are parental blocking the internet, then why not steam?
[1]: https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/27400369/the-bo...
Wouldn't some parents use Steam's offline mode for this exact reason ?
(But of course this means no access to the "problematic materials" either.)
>You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?
Why not? One shouldn't confuse games with real life.
Back in my day, we went to the blockbuster, and you had to muster up the courage to walk back into the adults only section!
Don Don Donki in Asia sell sex toys, the section is just behind a curtain.
You can walk into any bookstore and buy a bible, which has plenty of disgusting content in it.
Absird comparison the bible is clearly not pornographic
Ahem:
https://ffrf.org/other-2/x-rated/
>Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
Because the payment processing is unreliable and prohibitively expensive. For all the whining about "moral pearl clutching", the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs. Visa and Mastercard couldn't care less about the ethical issues, it's simply a risk calculation for their business.
Even if that’s true (and it gets repeated as a very general statement without general data to back it up, so I’m not sure), then why couldn’t payment processors either a) charge retailers in high-risk segments a higher transaction fee, b) charge merchants penalty fees if the number of chargebacks from their transactions exceeds some threshold, or c) compete with each other to serve higher-risk markets?
The answer is, I think, monopoly environments: they contain poor incentive structures for competitive differentiation, and encourage extreme risk aversion by the monopolists. Add to that the “it’s not really about chargebacks, it’s a culture war” agenda (which isn’t just lobbying pressure on payment processors; plenty of the calls are coming from inside the house there), and the outcome of de facto censorship is likely.
>Even if that’s true (and it gets repeated as a very general statement without general data to back it up, so I’m not sure), then why couldn’t payment processors either a) charge retailers in high-risk segments a higher transaction fee, b) charge merchants penalty fees if the number of chargebacks from their transactions exceeds some threshold, or c) compete with each other to serve higher-risk markets?
They do all of the above. There are obviously an endless number of niche payment providers who serve the segments. And they are... expensive and unreliable. Not suitable to a huge business like Valve that derives the majority of their revenue from mainstream products.
> the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs
This gets repeated, but it's not the real reason. If it were, Visa/MasterCard would be fine with a store like Steam offering those games as e.g. crypto-only purchases.
Found an explanation: the reputational risk they're talking about is 2022 pornhub case. Most likely some saudi dude didn't like it and threatened to pull. That's why they don't talk about it: because it's literal sharia exported around the world.
Wouldn't surprise me, gotta follow the money.
That's the clause in the agreement they use to justify the increase in rates, but it's unclear it's actually "risky" when it's a large company like Valve.
>That's the clause in the agreement they use to justify the increase in rates, but it's unclear it's actually "risky" when it's a large company like Valve.
The risk is not from Valve; disputes pass through to the processor. This is the same problem dating sites, gambling, etc. all deal with. Any sufficiently large adult oriented business becomes a de-facto payment processor, where their entire core business function is in managing this risk, not whatever they actually do for the end user. It's either that, or charge the exorbitant fees that come with using a niche provider who takes on that risk.
Steam has been selling these games for years without ever saying there was a problem with this. So has itch.
>Steam has been selling these games for years without ever saying there was a problem with this. So has itch.
Until now, when they did.
So why did this happen now as opposed to 5-10 years ago? What changed?
Actually they don’t, visa heavily restricts those business and the amount of chargebacks they are allowed to have, other industries have much higher rates of chargeback.
It is alarming for credit card companies to take on a politically censorious role that supersedes legal activity. This really kicked off in 2021 when MasterCard started imposing restrictive rules on sex sites like OnlyFans. The ACLU has a campaign against it: https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercards-new-p...
I strongly disagree about this being a recent thing, this has been happening for decades at this point.
2015 article that starts "For nearly a decade, PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa/MasterCard, and now Square, have systematically denied or closed accounts of small businesses, artists and independent contractors whose business happens to be about sex."
https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-02-paypal-square-and-big-ba...
From 2017 .. (Fetlife, a fetish Platform)
Last Tuesday we got a notice that one of our merchant accounts was shutting us down. One of the card companies contacted them directly and told the bank to stop processing for us. The bank asked for more information, but the only thing they could get from the card company was that part of it had to do with "blood, needles, and vampirism."
https://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9
https://mascherari.press/financial-censorship-when-banks-dec...
Yeah, it's a problem because there aren't really realistic alternatives, and starting an alternative payment processor would be impractically difficult.
Feels like we really need something like India's UPI that doesn't have a central company imposing beyond-the-law level rules.
OnlyFans did manage to figure it out though. Maybe this is an opportunity for them to start a gaming division.
The thing they figured out was "people can fight back and the credit cards will back down". Onlyfans is a lot of people's income, so they will naturally fight harder than a consumer market like games to keep the lights on.
They found another processor, CCBill. That's what they figured out.
Or a credit card processor.
Even before that, after Charlottesville, these payment processors were banning far-right wing people such as Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes. Same thing, really. Pressure from outside groups.
Its too bad that the old school anti-trust provisions against restraint of trade are no longer of interest to enforcers. This isn't a case where visa/mc are against a specific game/publisher transactions is where they are saying we will stop processing payments for your entire platform because of a few games we object to. And its worse because the pmt processors aren't really specific about their objections in public at least.
I read from a fairly reputable source that money laundering is a huge problem in online sex industry.
Which makes sense - you have buyers and sellers who insist on anonymity, services that leave no trace once rendered, buyers and sellers lying to family and friends about what they're doing, etc.
There's often no "normal" amount of consumption, for example, some sellers receive million dollar tips.
Money laundering is a massive problem, and it enables some really terrible things.
I suspect the fact that American banks are so anti-porn comes from the fact that the American financial sector has such strong anti-money laundering regs (as opposed to, say, the American real estate sector, or the UK financial sector).
One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws. Not many porn platforms could function that way.
If it was about potential for money laundering, they'd have gone after the Steam item marketplace way before random adult games. Valve has had to take action against it in the past: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-block-counter-strike-... , but AFAIK it's hard to actually solve.
Not so much the potential for money laundering, as actual money laundering. Is there actual money laundering going on in Steam's item marketplace?
Yes, at least back in 2019, from the link:
> However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable.
Many users still suspect it happens, although it's hard to prove.
I've worked specifically on payment connected to porn. Money laundering is a fact, but this being the motivation for banks to pull away is not.
There have been several scandals related to payment processing and money laundering, and some of them connected to companies that do a lot of business with porn. Usually, you will see banks breaking away when those scandals break to the public.
However, banks do not break away just because they don't like the transactions they're seeing. What they actually do is to enforce stricter rules by financially penalizing those who make them lose money. Your transactions are getting canceled a lot (by having to be flagged/undone/paid back etc.)? You'll have to pay higher fees, and if it keeps happening, you will lose your license.
You know when they do often break immediately, however? When there are campaigns by special interests groups, usually connected to conservative groups, to paint companies as having illegal content, even when they don't have this problem any more than any social media platform. In those cases, they don't wait for any tribunal.
Don't kid yourself. Has nothing to do with laundering. Payment processors want more transaction volume. The only time they start doing this is if they get legal pressure.
The initial regulation also didn't suppress content, it just made you have to go through age verification, which everyone knows doesn't work.
That doesn't explain why Visa/Mastercard have gone after written erotica (gumroad, patreon, etc), Japanese manga/doujinshi distributors (DLsite), and video games.
I assume they just decided that the whole industry, even if run legitimately in some cases, has too high of a legal risk and hence don't decide on a case-by-case basis. With how often NSFW content gets reuploaded and the source becoming unclear, they probably see the biggest risk with undetected child porn on regular porn sites. If you are involved with that as a payment processor that's obviously a huge problem.
That's just crazy talk. Doujinshi isn't kitbash collages of free 4chan images. Or is that expectation of readers? If so it makes sense that those things don't come from anywhere Western.
It's not that any more. Or at least not just that :
Visa Japan’s CEO says disabling card payment for legal adult content is “necessary to protect the brand” :
https://automaton-media.com/en/news/visa-japans-ceo-says-dis...
(And from what I have understood, there's very little or perhaps even no shame in Japan about these things, so that applies even less there.)
>One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws
You’d think so, but nope. Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I ended up subscribing to someone who’s catfishing. All their pics on OnlyFans and other socials were just stolen from random Instagram models. I reported it to OF, but got no response.
Whatever verification system OF has, it’s bypassable. It doesn’t matter much when it’s just regular subscribers - nobody really cares about consumer rights in the adult content space. That’s why so many creators can get away with pretending they’re the ones replying to messages. But I’m betting there’s going to be a CSEM scandal linked to this in the next few years.
KYC doesn't mandate genuine art.
Don't we have something like net neutrality but for money transfers?
And besides, why do payment processors even know/care what their customers use their money for as long as it's legal?
If you want to ban porn, fine, but do it through the law, and don't let every company make their own laws. Especially if they are a quasi monopoly (have power).
Regulate Visa and MasterCard and the rest. As utility services, they should not have the ability to ban or deny service to any payment that is not clearly illegal. Or we should create a public alternative with private transactions.
I'm afraid regulators are happy with the current situation when they can make a phone call and Visa/MC will block whatever people in government don't like (e. g. porn), in exchange state allows Visa/MC to rake up fees.
It feels they should be a neutral payment system. They're implementing global policy otherwise due the monopoly they have, that's something that should handled at government/state level.
There is no "the rest". All the payment processors or aggregators ultimately talk to Visa or MasterCard. Even if there are alternative payment methods that include direct transfer etc. they still might get kicked off if they don't follow their rules.
> a public alternative with private transactions
This is exactly why governments should step in and regulate Visa and MasterCard, to prevent them from banning porn or other adult services.
If this kind of banning goes too far, there will come a point when even Joe Blow and his dog start using cryptocurrency. And once (truly private and anonymous) cryptocurrency becomes widely circulated, people will no longer need to exchange it back into fiat currency. Joe might start paying other people directly with crypto and eventually, perhaps even his rent, utilities, groceries...?
And then what? How will governments collect tax revenue?
>A public alternative with private transactions
Anyone heard of Monero? Kind of their whole purpose... I know, I know, crypto bad, but when censorship comes for [insert your thing/country here], it kind of becomes obvious why people talked about crypto before btc was six digits. Anyone who knows how tech works and also any history about how authoritarian states work should probably see why crypto got so big in the first place, long before [insert scam that makes otherwise sensible people disregard an entire class of technology here].
Yes I have and I've used it, a website required that rather than BTC and attempting to use tumblers. So far as I know it's private. Transaction fees were low.
I've tried a couple times looking up address/wallet history and of course nothing comes up and every time I have that "oh yeah" moment.
I heard somewhere that they still found people who used Monero. I am not sure how, but apparently the Government has the tech to do so... allegedly. It might have been at the cash out stage or the process before that.
This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentially criminal content needs to be reviewed.
These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly, they're targeting payment processors.
I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
If we don't get a section 230 for payment processors we're looking at serious consequences for 1A because everything will be a civil suit away from getting blacklisted. Economist reported that adult performers are having trouble keeping bank accounts open -- as soon as a bank or payment processor finds out it's porn-related it gets nuked. Now that this is established practice, what's going to happen when Visa/MC gets sued for handling payments to do with disagreeable political speech? Our right to freedom of speech is currently only as strong as what Visa/MC are willing to defend in court, or you'd better be willing to live without any access to the banking system -- even if you're a gazillionaire who doesn't have to work, you've got to keep your money somewhere (and satisfy KYC).
Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
This is not the administration to ask for that.
Why not? Payment processors have done it to guns just as much as they've done it to porn, both under the Obama administration.
I think they would be far more likely to support a gun exception than a general “no moralizing” rule.
They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible.
Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well.
But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media.
I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing.
That’s why.
Because one of the goals of project 2025 is to make porn illegal.
Bonus: it also aims to eliminate sex ed.So they want to not have women abort children, but also not have them aware of how their bodies and sex works. Surely not a formula for a dysfunctional future generation.
It’s not a contradiction at all, they want women to get knocked up as early as possible because (the thought is) that makes them easier to control. That’s what all this “tradwife” propaganda is about.
That they really want is to eliminate any sort of ground truth so that whoever holds the power can resolve related issues by fiat. Less policy, more kissing the ring and such.
This way, abusers can disagree about what constitutes abuse in private, but can form a bloc in public, unifying around the common ground that the boss's whims should be respected in matters where the bandying about of facts is taboo. Might makes right, etc.
>registered sex offenders
Does that term still have any meaning?
Most of the people I've seen advocating for this kind of pressure, for the purpose of suppressing this sort of content in video games, would describe themselves as very much the opposite of "conservative". But perhaps it's for the better that they are recognized as such. Because it really is a conservative instinct, no matter what American party politics might currently be dictating.
You don't need to compete with Steam or Itch for games that they can't sell, you're in your own market.
And as soon as people find out you exist, they get the payment processors to shut you down too as part of their crusade.
Now what?
If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
The suggestion is new start businesses that do not need credit card processors.
We’re back to chicken and egg.
If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again.
Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again.
If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble.
And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking.
You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
> If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point.
Yes but no. Currently the issue is that these two payment systems - both credit/debit card networks - (1) have the power to decide with impunity, because they have critical mass. And (2) have visibility into who each vendor is and what they are selling. If there is one case of abusing market dominance, this is it - and for all we frequently hear, this is REALLY not all that common. (And it's "funny" that we hear a lot about Apple's app store - but not about their anti-adult content rules!)
For example, right now a bank would have a VERY hard time preventing you from paying for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT with crypto. That bank would have no visibility into who you are paying with that crypto. There are other crypto intermediaries but they are "diffuse". Nobody in there has both visibility and power.
For example, right now some vendors accept gift cards as payment. Buy a Home Depot gift card in cash at your local store and use it to pay for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT. Obviously this is not a very efficient payment infrastructure but it exists.
But yes of course, imposing to credit card networks to be content-blind would be helpful and soooo much more efficient.
The big credit/debit networks can easily justify killing buying crypto.
Terrorism, money laundering, illegal things like drugs, whatever.
If it’s hard enough to get crypto, then it doesn’t matter if it’s technically an option.
You could make it possible to buy this stuff with Fruity Pebbles box tops. They’d have no visibility into that either. And roughly no one would do it.
They just have to make this stuff hard enough. And that’s currently very easy.
Some people kinda already live in an alternative financial system where only a part of their salary is in money.
What you need for running a site that people might not like: 1. Your own servers 2. Your own network 3. Your own CDN 4. Your own payment processor
Step 4 gets you thrown in jail for violating AML.
being discoverable on the existing markets is extremely valuable.
It's hard for the big companies which want to stay big - and so feel that they can't live without credit cards. But indeed that's not an issue for newcomers.
The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
>These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly
Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.
> I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.
If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
The impression I get is allowing them to be purchased at all is grounds for the payment processor to suspend their account. So this solution is a no-go.
Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
FWIW https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
Like I said, that smell like anti-competitive behavior. It basically means the payment processor denies competitors a business opportunity for cases they don't want to service.
Just get people to mail you cash. Sounds stupid, but that’s how I built my first ecommerce business in the 90’s, and it was a pretty normal way to pay for stuff online. Cash, money order, bank cheque, whatever.
> Just get people to mail you cash.
> (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Wow, not crypto, but GP fucking nailed it.
You can't realistically target anyone outside the US with this.
It worked for Amazon.com in 1995!
> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
> That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
It shows you the effort that some people will go to be able to buy things if they also don't have good alternatives.
But if we're talking about a hypothetical Steam competitor, then Steam still exists and takes credit cards.
You can’t realistically target anyone inside the US with it either. USPS is allowed to seize cash in packages if it believes it’s being used for illegal purposes.
We are discussing legal purchases though, not illegal ones.
At least I hope that USPS is forbidden from not (eventually) delivering legal packages ?
Back in the days we used to mail cash in an envelope all the way to Britain just for some RuneScape membership time.
You can't even realistically target people inside the US with this. How many people are gonna mail cash to buy digital games? Gimme a fucking break.
Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.
they're targeting payment processors
They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
> Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks.
This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.
But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
Those problems are artificially created by regulation. There is nothing inherent to these topics that makes servicing them physically impossible.
Charge backs, etc... can be effectively solved by appropriately pricing in such risks (or not offering those services at all).
This isn't a payment processor issue, it's a political choice.
Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
> if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!
And it proves that it's not about these games having high risks of fraud and chargebacks.
Most of the games that have been deindexed on itch.io and some of the ones that were banned/removed were free or Pay-What-You-Want/Donation-Ware (some even via Patreon or SubscribeStar rather than itch.io's own payment processing).
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
> Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits
That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.
"Citizen's United" wasn't _wrong_ about money being a type of speech, that shouldn't be censored. Only wrong about who the first amendment is for.
>Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough. Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.
F2P games are very different in design from regular games(and far worse imo)
You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.
There's quite a few F2P games requiring high spec machines, Throne & Liberty for example.
Even if you manage to sidestep the issues with payment processors mentioned elsewhere, you don’t end up as a “popular platform that just happens to take a principled stance and also hosts some controversial material.”
Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.
Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
One thing that might be a possibility for attracting developers of non-banned games is focusing on having lower fees than Steam's 30% or Epic's 12%, but Itch.io already does that (you can choose the split from 0 to 100%).
>Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
when you start talking about a business for serving “the few”, you’ve already removed the incentive for most entrepreneurs (unless those “few” are the extremely wealthy and you can charge them exorbitantly).
I've watched hikaru on kick and the only offensive thing about his stream is how he repeats himself. I don't really like how he says the same thing over and over. Chat, it's kinda starting to bother me how he repeats himself. Yeah I'm starting to think he repeats himself a bit too much for my taste.
After the third sentence, I was like, what's wrong with this guy? After the fourth, I was like, Oh. Lol.
I guess from the down votes I'm getting that people don't have the full context here and won't seek it out on their own - something I should have foreseen.
I'm speaking of Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best chess players in the world. He is also a streamer on kick, and actually talks in the way I demonstrated. It's not an exaggeration, he actually repeats the same thought ~5 times in the regular.
He is the only kick streamer I know, so that's what I think of when I hear kick.
The major problem is the payment processors though. Unless you defeat that duopoly or only accept cash how do you stop this exact situation?
There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.
There's the Fair Access to Banking Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401), currently stuck in committee, which would make it illegal for various financial services, including payment processors, to deny service for mere reputational reasons.
I wrongly assumed this was a D bill, and would die in committee. Turns out it's actually an R bill, with exclusively R sponsors, and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.
Though almost all of the sponsors are from almost 6 months ago, so it might die in committee anyway.
The text is on there and is very straightforward. As far as I can tell it's a basically good bill.
I agree that the text sounds good. I'm worried about the consequences I might not think of. What legal services are the Ds and Rs thinking of that currently have trouble with payment processors, and which are causing a lot of Rs to sponsor and no Ds? Because I'm sure it's not porn and video games.
Operation Choke Point is referenced by the proposed bill...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
> Operation Choke Point was an initiative of the United States Department of Justice beginning in 2013 which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies that, while operating legally, were said to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
There's a whole list on the Wikipedia article of the kinds of legal businesses that were targeted by this. Some of them make sense, but others look like very serious 1A and 2A violations.
Historically, payment processors were usually against republicans, which is why you see them acting in support of this.
Debanking is a form of social deplatforming that (for now) mostly targets right-wing causes. That's not at all to assert that the bill is wrong or that censorship is right—I'm just clarifying why it's Republicans on the side against censorship, in this context, when in other contexts the roles are flipped.
You can read the bill's author (Kevin Cramer) discussing that bill and his motives for writing it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250715113010/https://fedsoc.or... ("Debanking: The Newest Threat to Free Speech and Religious Liberty?) (2024)
> [Senator Kevin Cramer] "...I've heard that one from some pretty big bank presidents - but they get a lot of noise in their left ear and you have activist investors and whatnot that are saying, hey, you know what? We don't like coal. We don't like oil, we don't like natural gas. We don't like private prisons, or we don't like ammunition shops or gun manufacturers or whatever the case might be, the entire category or industry and says, "Well, so we're not going to bank them. We're going to debank them. We're not going to bank them. You're disqualified from getting money from us.”, and they're starving these industries out. And all this really is, in my view, you guys is this is a political agenda where they're utilizing the leverage of the financial services sector to accomplish policy goals that they can't accomplish any other way."
> and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.
Had to look into it a bit.
From looking at the text of the bill, it looks like the sponsor did not like Operation Choke Point [0], which was specifically targeting banks that did business with Payday Lenders, Ponzi Schemes, and other shady vendors.
This also included pornography, but I'm willing to bet that's not what Sen. Cramer was upset about. More likely, he's simply serving the interest of his donors.
He also might have extremist "small business" constituents that are perhaps selling racist/sexist/homophobic merch, and they don't like being told that their bank/credit card processors are refusing to process payments on that swag.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
That's disingenuous. There were plenty of legit business types included also. Directly from your link:
> Turns out it's actually an R bill, with exclusively R sponsors, and now I'm wondering what awful shit is hiding in it.
It seems to me like if you thought something was good and then switched to thinking it was bad based just on who proposed it, you need to stop being prejudiced. Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.
Being a member of a political party is cosigning their platform, and based on a consistent 60+ years pattern of behavior they do not deserve any benefit of the doubt. It's not prejudice if it's based on observation. It's entirely reasonable to wonder what ghoulish motives they might have for an idea I initially thought sounded good.
> Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.
Ideas? Sure. Bills? No.
So much of how a piece of legislation affects society has to do with the agendas of the people behind it (no matter what it says in text) and the means by which the executive implements it (often hand-in-glove with the agendas of the legislation’s originators).
https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/understanding-the-cascade-of-...
Yeah and it isn't just you accepting cash. Let's say you decide to go with cash (or, more realistically, manual bank transfers) and even get some host like 1984 that'd go to the court for you, but what stops Visa/MC to go directly at your host and tell them to either drop your site or they'll drop them?
In theory, if you went "full crypto", there's probably options like Filecoin and web3 domains (I'm not in that space enough to know what the current versions of these are) that could make something "uncensorable" by Visa/MC, but it also would limit its reach heavily.
Is it not possible to jawbone them into favoring free speech?
If they are easy to sway in one direction, why not the other? Simply do what Collective Shout did, but in the opposite direction?
Cryptocurrency is the only way I see this working.
Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain.
The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally. That’s worth the investment than that pipe dream of a global, frictionless cryptocurrency.
>Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain.
But you're doing this with credit cards already? Different amounts, but still supporting everyone in a chain. If you want to "buy" something without supporting intermediates, then barter is the only way to go. Everything else requires common trust, and common trust comes with operating cost.
> Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it.
That's not true, at least not in general. Polygon (and USDT/USDC on Polygon) fees are near zero, Ethereum is lately very cheap, and even Bitcoin fees are no longer outrageous. EDIT: ...and Bitcoin Lightning is cheap.
A lot of p0rn payment processing is done in crypto for exactly the censorship reasons. If you can't use the payment processor, who cares what their fees are? (not saying they are cheaper or more expensive than crypto - I don't know)
This has mostly been solved. Bitcoin's lightning network, ethereum layer 2 networks, etc all have sub-cent fees.
Not sure about Ethereum's equivalent, but 'Lightning' just reintroduces the problem of having one person act like a payment processor.
Not sure I follow.
A node in the Lightning network (to simplify a lot) become the payment processor that would be targeted.
(But it's kind of spurious- in practice, Coinbase, Block, etc. would be targeted far before someone running a Lightning node would be. The larger point is that very few people would interact with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as a peer in the network.)
V or MC perhaps?
Even still I have put money into my bank then put it into cryptocurrency. My customers just want to use their bank, not a pseudocurrency. My customers aren’t trying to escape the payment processor. They can just pirate the game.
> The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally.
Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.
What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.
Isn’t regulation even less likely though than a split? You yourself acknowledge the times and the current admin is heavy anti-regulation.
Perhaps. You're right that it's currently unlikely, but I still argue that it would be easier to legislate than split up. It's not like the financial industry doesn't already have an insane amount of rules and regulations at both the state and federal level preventing them from being too nefarious. Having a rule that states "You're not allowed to cut off vendor foo just because they sell bar" doesn't seem that much of a stretch, especially if you look at credit as basically another form of legal tender.
It already works; it's how people in China purchase adult content online, which is illegal there. Usually with USDT (which is also illegal there).
They actually bother purchasing it? They don't simply pirate it rampantly to around access problems?
Adding a broken, inefficient system to a problem just makes 2 problems.
So, you don't see it working at all.
The spirit of Visa/Mastercard isn't wrong. If a platform is doing something illegal they will break ties or give them a chance to course correct. When Pornhub was exposed for hosting lots of revenge porn and illegal porn Visa/Mastercard pulled back, Pornhub cleaned house and put up new stronger barriers to prevent that kind of material being uploaded. But instead of doing business again they said "just kidding" and did not come back.
In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong.
Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.
How would you feel about a US Central Bank Digital Currency?
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
It is already here, it is called Bitcoin (with Lightning possibly). And this is not fantasy, the exact same story happened to Pornhub in 2018 - in which they got banned from Visa/MC and purged 60% of their content. They are banned to this day, and now accept Bitcoin/Crypto Payments as well as SEPA transfers in the EU.
CSAM means material of actual kids, meaning actual victims from the real world have been harmed/abused. Weird video games on the porn side, are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed.
When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic?
None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal.
BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored.
So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt?
Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!
> When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore?
I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.
IANAL, but I understand there are varying definitions of CSAM which is also why I said “and other potentially criminal content”. I’m also not equating CSAM to the actual reasons people are using financial censorship, I’m highlighting a challenge of a censorship resistant platform.
I think OP is saying someone should make a platform that hasn't lost marbles and would allow this content, but you would still want to block CSAM and that is not easy to do.
Itch hasn't lost its marbles, they're forced to remove this content by payment processors. They're critical infrastructure, they shouldn't be allowed to arbitrate on behalf of an entire society. We need laws to require them to carry payments for any legal transaction. Paying for porn games is legal.
Nobody said anything about itch, this is about the whole payment system. You are agreeing with both of us but writing it as argument.
But the lack of reading comprehension on this site is making me lose my marbles.
My apologies, my anger is at the payment processors, not at you/not meant to be combative.
All good, I'm angry at the same.
I think the implication with saying "a company that hasn't lost its marbles" is that Itch and Steam have lost their marbles. You can argue that Steam should have pushed back, but Itch definitely lacks the leverage to refuse here.
U.S. law says otherwise:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A
> (c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
> all legal to the T
You might want to check that because it's not so cut and dried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
> are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed
I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with.
If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting.
Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.
> If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies.
Sounds news to me. Do you have any origin for this?
Seems like a good place to repost my comment from earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726
> I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.
> So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.
> Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.
Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits.
What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.
create a good censorship resistant payment network (stripe replacement) and these platforms would probably just be your customers?
Oh be realistic. Hosting smut isn't exactly respectable at this day and age. Your choice for sponsors dwindles to illegal gambling sites and shady dating sites who scrape monthly fees from lonely men. Maybe an MLM scheme if you are lucky.
Looking at this US administration, I don't think "respectable" is much of a metric these days.
And yes, you need a lot of private capital to pull this off.
I think that the decentralized mechanisms used for censorship resistance would also make it difficult to monetize
> Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
Remember how the homicide rate exploded after violent video games became popular?
They know this logic doesn't make sense. People are unfortunately happy to lie about it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
They insisted rock and roll, jazz, and dancing they didn't like were going to harm women too. Somehow that didn't seem to happen either.
Don't forget the D&D satanic panic! I also remember my local Baptist youth group burning Harry Potter books back when they came out. These people are unreasonable, they don't care about logic. They care about imposing their views and morals on those around them.
They have a religion whose identity is in being oppressed in a world where they are the de facto ruler.
No, no, no. You're both wrong. It was heavy metal.
RIP Ozzy.
>Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?
Worth pointing out that their definition of "right to object" is evidentially identical to "right to censor".
Well, that's not precise. They are simply objecting. Others are listening to them. I have a right to tell you to go eat a pile of dung[0], for instance. Should you then go eat the dung, it is not that I exercised my right to make you eat dung.
They are simply participating in the once-maligned "cancel culture" which was protected as "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". These kinds of escape hatches always have these results because one's enemies find a way to use them as well.
0: Just for the sake of argument. I'm not actually insulting you.
I am absolutely against the concept of "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" in the same way I am against Soviet "freedom of speech but not freedom after speech".
That makes no sense. Frequently the "consequences" of speech is other speech. Are you going to try to argue that the original speech should be privileged over the response?
I do not give a shit about people responding to speech with speech. I am arguing that responding to speech by using your authority over the speaker to hurt them, or by lobbying an authority to do so is something different than speech. Did you see the context for this thread? This is the rhetorical question I responded to: "Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?". I hold that they absolutely do have a right to object to such speech, any speech in fact, but "objecting" is not the same as lobbying Visa/Mastercard to ban speech they believe "promotes and normalizes violence against us".
>>"objecting" is not the same as lobbying Visa/Mastercard to ban speech they believe "promotes and normalizes violence against us"
Why not? Like, I'm a full on anarchist, but how do you create any sort of functioning society without out people being able to say "we as a group don't like that shit and are going to do things to stop it from happening"? Like if burger king comes out and says "We sell dogs here now" am i not allowed to say "fuck this, I'm allergic to dogs but I loved whoppers, I'm going to picket outside BK until the king fixes this travesty of hamburgers?"
Again, I'm an anarchist so I have weird views on a lot of topics, but isn't this a problem that "the capital class wants to continue to have profit go up and to the right on their charts, they're cowardly and uncreative so they fear anything that destabilizes this movement on their charts, and large networks of people are the only thing that can utilize this fear to cause them to change their behaviors"?
If the shit that you don't like is people talking and that causes your society to stop functioning, your society should not exist.
> lobbying an authority to do so is something different than speech
Really? How is it different, specifically?
If you're a guest in my house and you say something racist and I ask you to leave...
Or you're a customer in my restaurant...
Or you work for the company I'm a ceo of...
Which one of those freedoms should I be disallowed from using?
(The actual issue here is that mastercard/visa are effectively a duopoly with no competition. The only reasonable way to have a monopoly provider of a vital service is to make it part of a democratic government)
>Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?
If men don't, then neither should women, who are murdered at 1/10th the rate men are.
Murder is not the only violent crime. Please don't construct such obviously poor strawmen. Both men and women suffer similar rates of violence, albeit typically different violence.
Trans people suffer a wildly higher rate of violent crime than either cis gender.
> Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?
I mean this sounds reasonable until you also consider that shows like Game of Thrones would then also be banned, and probably plenty of popular books.
Hell, you could use the same reasoning to target most video games, since most video games use some level of violence.
Related. Others?
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (189 comments)
Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (51 comments)
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (306 comments)
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)
The decision to provide or not some services or products should be free from considering downstream use.
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
Why do you people always presume they know what is best for other people?
Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes! As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
Some people actually care for the whole, or for the wholesomeness of a specific subset. This includes (on the face) most people who participate in public life. Which is a lot of people!
>Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes!
Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?
>As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
There is a good difference between something being generally available to access (and getting promoted even), and being technically available to some. There is material worthy of being suppressed, hate speech and calls for violence being some of them. Did this censorship stop anybody to access Mein Kampf or other such vile stuff? Not really, but it helps a lot that these are not in the front and center.
EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point
I'm not a downvoter, but I have a few minutes to kill, so sure, I'll bite.
> Why do you then tell others how to live their lives?
In all reasonably-free societies, the default stance is "Mind your damn business, and everyone else will mind theirs.". Deviations from that default veer into "telling other people how to live their lives" territory. Sometimes it's right and proper to actively interfere in the lives of others. It is occasionally even extremely important to do this. But -the majority of the time- the folks doing this are nothing more than busybodies sticking their noses in other people's business.
You might think that US-based businesses should not be permitted to accept payments tendered by the two major credit and debit card processors for the sale of more-extreme pornographic content. I think it's none of those processors' business what legal goods consenting adults purchase using their systems.
Given Visa and MasterCard's enormous size, I think it's absolutely essential that they not be permitted to refuse any legal purchase for any reason other than credible suspicion of fraud. You may feel differently. You're totally entitled to that opinion.
I definitely agree on the payment processor situation. In my opinion, businesses should also be free to refuse business for whatever reason, but, with the very important caveat that when they so large that to be considered a utility, they can't refuse legal business, like in this case Mastercard and Visa. There is not exactly an alternative to them.
The point I'm more interested in here is the "Why do you people always presume they know what is best for other people?". To which my answer is that many people make it their job to care about what people are exposed to. Often it's rooted in extensive experience and literature. I don't think it's a good notion to outright disregard everyone who seems to have a better idea on how people should live. Among other things, not everyone needs to make the same mistakes over and over again, like falling into an addiction, just because "they can't tell me to not fall into this addiction".
And yeah, there will be a lot of busybodies as well. When there's power, there will be abuse as well.
> "Why do you people always presume they know what is best for other people?"
Well. Let's examine the context of the conversation. You replied to the statement "Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes!" with "Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?"
Most folks have a healthy relationship with porn, and a reasonably-healthy relationship with sex in general. Given that the US is a reasonably-free society, its default stance is "Mind your damn business, and everyone else will mind theirs.". You rejected the call to avert your eyes from something that is moderately offensive. This indicates that -when it comes to porn- you're not content to mind your own business while people quietly go about their own. This means that you are the busybody poking his nose in other people's business.
Thanks for clarifying. I now see where the disapproval comes from.
> Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?
Huh? Wait? Are you suggesting that by telling people to leave me alone I am infringing on their freedom to haggle me?!
What a disingenuous and hypocritical way to twist this around! Just wow.
(I did not downvote.)
No, it's not about their freedom to haggle you, it's about their duty to haggle you. And by implying a correct way to live, you also do actually impose that on others, even though on the face, it looks like you are granting personal freedom. Similar to how not voting is also a participation in the political system, how people can lie by omission, or how not making a decision ends up being a decision itself.
People in a community can't leave each other to their own devices, because that's simply not how people and communities work. What do you think about tradition, and laws?
What I would like to know is why is it any business of VESA or any other payment processor, what I am buying with my own money. vESA has no business knowing what game I’m specifically buying. They just have to give money to Steam in my behalf and that’s it.
What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
> Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that.
The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society".
I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
> No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.
> The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society"
That's their framing, it's not what they actually do.
If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand.
They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does.
In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.
If a special interest group is acting in bad faith, then it is still incorrect and confusing to frame it as "they just don't like that thing". We should just be saying they are acting in bad faith, weaponizing arguments, etc. Why they are against something also is explainable, so ideally we could also state their real motivations (they are racist, fascist, reactionary, etc.)
It's a description, not a claim. If a group tries to ban a thing, it obviously follows that they don't like the thing in some sense. Referring to them as "trying to ban stuff they don't like" describes their behavior, it's not a claim about what their motivations are or aren't.
The root cause looks more like financial oligopolies abuse Steam, because it's easier for them.
Ganging up to enforce your political will is only bad when it's "the woke mob" but totally cool when it's my mob.
And idiots eat that shit up thinking fighting the woke mind virus is the real censorship, jumping straight into the arms of moralistic fascists like this.
I wish I knew how we failed. (I am "woke" but I disagree with mob tactics, and think it's done more harm than good, and there are a lot of disingenuous abusers of said ideology to boost their personal cred, chasing online clout over any substance. And plenty of the right-wingers will notice this, and "fight it" but fail to notice the same thing in their own side; because to them it's not about a principle it's about "punishing the bad guys" who don't like what I like).
"Cancel culture is bad akshully unless I'm the one cancelling you (c.f. bud light, etc...)"
> It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things;
In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.
If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.
> that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.
Thank baby jebus that this sort of thing never happens. Can you imagine if our government were to, for instance, threaten to deport our own citizens, publicly, for disagreeing with the government. That would be a fucking shit show! Thank you, first amendment!
It's pretty wild that people think that porn is more damaging to society than censorship.
I think the issue would be more that people don't accept this is censorship - the surface level here looks like companies negotiating who they will and won't do business with which is actually encouraged. If companies have a moral objection to something then they don't have to be involved. In theory stopping a flow of money takes a lot more than some crazy from Australia getting upset.
The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation.
[0] Magic The Gathering Online eXchange
and those companies aren't heavily regulated.
In Europe they regulated exchange fees down to something like 0.3%. They just said the fees shall be low and lo, they were low.
They could also easily regulate that credit card networks can't block obscene content.
Some people think porn is worse than censorship. Some of those people even feel that censorship is good, not damaging at all, and should be mandatory. I’m not one of those, though it does seem like there’s a possibility that some of the things we’re doing a lot of in society today, like porn and also social media and AI, are changing society in ways we don’t understand yet and don’t have control over. I don’t think it’s wrong to have fears about that.
Anyway, some people wouldn’t even call it censorship if private businesses disagree and decide not to do business, for any reason, even if it’s public pressure. Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? If not, why not? Be really careful with your answer, because taking away their freedom to choose is a type of censorship, and possibly a worse one because it would be a public/government censorship and not a private transaction censorship. Steam and Itch.io do still have the right to ship all these games, they’re choosing not to. They also still have the right to use other payment processors, and/or create their own.
I’d be willing to bet the payment processors in question would rather not be forced to cut off business, and do not care whether people pay for porn. They are simply trying to avoid public backlash and avoid being blacklisted by a large number of people who happen to believe porn is damaging.
> Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process?
We shouldn't have private payment processors. Access to the economy should not itself be a product that you have to buy and then worry about whether you own it or it owns you.
What’s the alternative? How do you propose to fix it?
Notionally, opening new banks and/or buying an existing one that lacks current customers is feasible. Presumably once you do that, you could easily plug into FedWire/FedACH/FedNow, which would allow you to process electronic payments on behalf of whomever you choose to bank, as long as you comply with all the KYC/AML and other finance regs. You might not be able to process visa and mastercard, but virtually any of your customers' customers presumably still have financial accounts that are enabled on Fed rails, which will not be as likely to discriminate. Requiring end-customers to initiate payment (push) as opposed to doing pull, would also reduce transaction reversal risk.
I don't really the ultimate purpose of the position taken by either side here, but it does seem to me that there's a path by which both can coexist, even if difficult.
I don't think blockchains are the way forward, but the crypto people had one thing right: The incentive towards providing storage/compute/connectivity for transaction settlement should be built into the protocol, not provided by some corruptible institution. The idea that coins would be mined by the people providing the compute has unacceptable consequences, but it did solve the problem that it set out to solve. So we need something like that, but with fewer problematic side effects.
If I were to take a stab such a protocol, it would live on a web of trust that kept track of interpersonal debts. So if Alice owes Bob, and Bob owes Charlie, then Charlie can "pay" Alice by instructing Bob to cancel both of those debts. In this case Bob is the clearinghouse. Some network connectivity is needed (Alice, Bob, and Charlie all on the same network) but it still works if the internet partitions. We incentivize Bob to keep his device available for this by creating a new debt when the transaction settles: this time it's one where Alice and Charlie owe Bob for having been the transaction processor.
If Bob didn't want to act in this capacity, he wouldn't have trusted Alice and Charlie to begin with. Charlie would then need to find a different path to Alice if he wanted to use the network to pay her. (Presumably they don't trust each other directly, otherwise they'd be creating new debts instead of cancelling transitive ones). In this scenario I suppose Bob would be acting as "censor" but his capacity to do so is not greater than any other user of the network.
For Charlie to be fully denied the ability to pay Alice, one of them would have to be behaving so badly that everyone refuses to trust them. That's a desirable outcome, if we must have something like censorship, it should not depend on the feeling of some guy who owns a bank but is otherwise unconnected with the parties of the transaction. It should be decided by the people who are near to Alice and Bob on the trust graph and therefore have to deal with the real world consequences of Alice and Bob's behavior. If they want to collectively prevent those two from doing business, that's their right since it's their community that that business is happening in.
One imagines this featuring in cases where some rich foreigner wants to set up mining operations that would poison the drinking water. The locals can collectively prevent that foreign money from buying local groceries, thereby limiting the ability of the foreign actor to harm them.
So that's my harebrained idea. But I'm not making up fictions and asking people to treat them like money. The people involved with USD are. If they want us to continue participating in their harebrained idea, they should recognize that giving us a system with problematic properties represents a risk that they might lose their privileged position. My point is just that it's on them, the designers of the system, to figure it out how to make it all work--we need only accept or reject it.
The Circles white paper is something like this. (I heard the Circles project went off the rails, but the original white paper is still there)
Yeah, circles was the inspiration. I decided to deviate from the Circles design because I want partition tolerance--and you can't do token-issuance-on-a-schedule in a partition tolerant way (no way to agree about what time it is).
Sure you can, if you can resynchronize the time whenever partitions reconnect.
Some clock drift might even be ignorable. I say it's 5:00 and I have 100 tokens, you say it's 4:55 and I only have 99. Doesn't matter, I'm only spending 5 tokens anyway.
But how do you decide, when they come back together, which side was right?
I'll confess to sort of making this up as I go along, so I don't have any sources to cite here, but when I sit down and think about it I come to the conclusion that partition tolerance means that when you come across a disagreement of this kind, you can't just let the more powerful partition win (We already have that, both in banking and in blockchains. Snore.)
Consensus has to come from the circumstances of the transaction. What's the intersection of the people I trust with the people you trust? Are there transitive trust pathways between us? Calculate the consensus value based on those pathways. It comes not from whether one of us is backed by a bigger bully, but rather because we've both personally chosen to trust the people that we have, and we've provided incentives for them to continue to be trustworthy.
They may both be damaging, but currently we have a lot more porn than censorship, so it looks like it's causing more damage. If we flip to having a lot more censorship we'll feel that damage more clearly. Or we won't, depending how successful the censorship is.
> we have a lot more porn than censorship
How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.
> it looks like it's causing more damage
what damage is it causing?
I can say that I think my past use of pornography has harmed me. I haven’t used it in over 2 years, but I still on a daily basis observe the effects it had on me. Others might argue that it is only because of my views that the effects are “harmful”, but I think they are wrong.
Can you clarify how it “harmed” you? You didn’t quite answer that question.
I’m against censorship, well, except for stuff that would already be illegal.
But as to the potential harm, I recommend “Homemade” by Sebadoh.
Example verse: “There’s still pictures in my mind. I’ve been addicted all this time. It taught me everything I know. Tell me girl, did it leave me cold?”
We don’t need to ban porn. We need better sex ed, ideally starting at home.
https://xkcd.com/598/
(Except, remove the last panel)
It sounds like you're saying porn either "gave" you a fetish, or uncovered a latent fetish you didn't know you had (and /or preferred not to know about). If that's an accurate read, can I ask what harm it causes you to have a fetish? Provided it doesn't harm anyone else, what's wrong with liking what you like?
I don’t buy the “revealed a latent fetish” explanation. I don’t think people are born with a fetish baked into their soul.
Like, the people with the “blueberry expansion” one, you really think they were born with that? No, of course not, that would be dumb.
I think the main reason people put forth the “latent fetish” explanation is in order to argue that pornography is harmless.
As for why it harms me?
The purpose of sexuality is for relations with one’s spouse. On average, I expect it to be counterproductive in that regards. Most women wouldn’t find it appealing, and looking for specifically women who would find the idea appealing would substantially restrict the pool to search among. Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible?
And, generally, lust promotes lust.
> I don’t buy the “revealed a latent fetish” explanation. I don’t think people are born with a fetish baked into their soul.
There’s a 3rd explanation: fetishes aren’t inborn, but they’re not instilled by porn either. Instead, they develop through a complex interaction of psychological, developmental, neurological, and cultural factors.
One theory is that, if a person repeatedly experiences sexual arousal in the presence of a specific object or situation (even coincidentally), the brain may begin to link that stimulus with arousal (classical conditioning). Or if the experience isn’t repeated but it is intense, it can become imprinted as erotically significant. In both cases, the fetish can be considered “latent” in the sense that it existed prior to one’s encounter with porn related to that fetish. Porn simply revealed what was already there (and showed the viewer there are others out there like them, too!).
So-called “normal” sexual behavior is just the median of millions of data points. There is not one person who fits that median in all respects. Even if you can’t find a partner who finds your specific fetish “appealing”, there are plenty of women out there who won’t specifically judge you for it either. Failing that, just enjoy the fetish in your own mind and don’t divulge it to your partner. You’re entitled to an inner life, after all.
Just as we have a biological imperative to procreate, we also have one to eat. But I’d disqualify any potential partner who thought less of me for liking tacos. Again, as long as one’s fetish doesn’t harm others, why should sex be any different?
To add: I had never heard of the "blueberry expansion" fetish before. But that sounds like it fits the above explanation. Five bucks says people with this fetish had a childhood experience where their parents sat them in front of a TV, put on "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", and went to make love in the next room. The kid probably figured out what was going on around the same time Violet Beauregarde turned into a blueberry.
There's probably a greater-than-zero number of people who had that experience, and there are probably similar fetishes around chocolate rivers, pneumatic tubes, and little orange people.
I've heard of expansion fetish before; my immediate hypothesis was that it's about mental wiring normally related to pregnancy (the same way foot fetishes are hypothesized to be related to wiring meant for your genitals). I've never heard of someone specifically wanting to be a giant blueberry but it's not hard to guess that once the general pattern of a fetish exists, specific details could be impressed by various conditioning processes.
I can't think of an analogous reaso someone might like chocolate rivers or pneumatic tubes. There probably are people out there who really like little orange people but by a totally different mechanism.
I think it is mostly consumed by men wanting to watch a woman turn into a giant blueberry, not women wanting to turn into a giant blueberry? But I’m not sure, haven’t talked to anyone who was into it.
== I think the main reason people put forth the “latent fetish” explanation is in order to argue that pornography is harmless.==
I think the main reason people blame their fetishes on porn is in order to avoid confronting their inner compulsions.
== Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible? ==
I’m not sure, but it’s probably something you should unpack with a therapist. Blaming porn is the easy way out. Exploring why you are personally drawn to it is the hard work.
> The purpose of sexuality is for relations with one’s spouse.
Says who?
If that was true, everybody who watches porn would have anal fetish, because anal in porn is regular, but instead anal fetish has geographic distribution.
Sex is an older institution for marriage. Or are there all these lizard weddings I've never seen. "Sexually reproducing animals, plants, fungi and protists "
Man, I can't wait to get invited to the next fungus wedding, seeing a little penis shaped mushroom with a little tophat, and the brides dress, why it must be a literal carpet on the forest floor so long and stretchy.
LOL this doesn't harm you int he slightest.
You should like, read a(actually man, from diverse positions, and not just your little right-wing fundie) psychology book and get out of your bible-thumping bubble.
> The purpose of sexuality is for relations with one’s spouse
That's not actually true.
That doctrine has been used to guilt-trip people and control their lives for many hundreds of years - but it isn't true. People are complex. We're not self-replicating machines whose sole purpose is to breed.
Where did I imply that our purpose was to breed? I don’t believe that. I didn’t even say that the relations were specifically to be reproductive.
Why do you believe the parts you believe but not the other parts?
I would say all knowledge have that effect on us. Kinda the inherent drawback of it. Lessens enjoyments somewhat.
Good for you. IME porn is very standardized and can't be arsed to include my fetishes.
What were the effects?
for me it really hurts life satisfaction. my porn tastes are basic. i like beautiful women in their 20s. when i was in my 20s that seemed fine, but i got older and my tastes did not change. coincidentally, my wife also got older.
she is awesome, and very responsive in the bedroom, but she is no longer a beautiful woman in her 20s. if i've been watching porn in the last month or so, my satisfaction with our sex is much lower. if i haven't, i'm happy.
there is also a lot of stuff that seems default in porn, like choking or anal. when i watch porn, i want those things. when i do not watch porn, i don't. my wife does not enjoy those things, but will do them if i ask. but they honestly do not make the sex any better for me.
you will say, "well don't watch porn then." but it isn't easy to not watch it. it has a powerful draw. i enjoy watching it in the moment. and it is always just a few taps away on the phone. it takes willpower not to watch it. if all the tube sites were banned, my life would be better.
the damage to me is small. i do not have an addictive personality. i do have a lot of willpower. other people might not be as lucky.
> it takes willpower not to watch it. if all the tube sites were banned, my life would be better.
Now imagine if this was done for different proclivities: alcoholics, speadfreaks, over-eaters, game-addicts. Do you want the government limiting those activities for everyone because a minority lacks self-control?
regulating drugs, highly processed foods, and addictive games sounds good to me. they all exploit vulnerabilities in the human brain. if your product triggers a dump of dopamine, it is suspect.
What thing do humans do that's not an exploit? Isn't HN also a dopamine exploit? Would you ban it?
In other words how do you distinguish between a dopamine exploit and just dopamine?
> regulating drugs, highly processed foods, and addictive games sounds good to me.
"Regulating" and banning/limiting intake are 2 different things. What's the limit of sucrose you can buy/consume?
It raises your dopamine tolerance - part of why people tend to get into more and more crazy types of porn to get the same fix (see randy in south park :) ).
Also, since your dopamine tolerance is higher, you enjoy real life less, which is bad mkay
Yeah, but that's also true for video games, board games, social media (HN included), and yummy food. Pretty much everything anyone ever enjoys, actually. The difference is that some of them (like, I'm assuming, board games) are associated with other outcomes you want (real life socialization)
I am writing this from the tail end of a 4-day techno music festival. I haven't taken any mind-altering substances, but I've enjoyed dancing to the music. Should it be banned?
I'm not of the opinion it should be banned. Demonize it, yes. Also I think the repeated daily dopamine spikes, which are also much higher with porn, is much worse. It also probably has an adverse affect on young men that would normally better themselves to find a women.
I don't think there's a good way to compare the amounts of these things. I think the best you could do is ask how many bits would be flipped/added/removed had the thing not existed/happened.
Porn might involve large media files which gives it an up-front advantage re: "more", but it doesn't create shockwaves the way censorship does. Remove a porn video and the world stays largely unchanged. Undo an act of censorship and, well, maybe the world stays unchanged, or maybe everything is different.
I would say we are already pretty severely censored. We no longer have social tools to vet misinformation. We can't publicly insult dumb people and their wrong ideas to their faces. There are people -professional trolls- who, while they should not be deplatformed, should have their ideas publicly scrutinized and yes, humiliated. But we can't do that, because it's cyber bullying, or whatever.
Irl, if a crazy person gets on a soapbox and starts shouting at everybody, then people can shout back. Online, anybody who flamebaits is protected by the platforms and can censor the responses. They delete opposing comments, shadowban users, harsh language usually gets automatically deleted by the platform - and all that shouting-down is actually just counted as "engagement" which algorithmically boosts and spreads the bad idea further. The argument just directly profits the person with the bad idea, and incentivizes them to come up with even worse ideas to make everybody even madder.
This kind of censorship is causing a whole lot of problems right now.
You can’t have a free market without censorship. It’s one or the other.
Maybe that's true of intellectual property, but are you claiming something more general?
In some ways, porn is more damaging, isn't it? For example, there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry.
I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.
> there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry
[citation needed]
I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation).
There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...
Here you go:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/pornhub-sex-traffickin...
https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-re...
https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/breaking/npos-more-...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/girlsdoporn-owner-micha...
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-porn-20160613...
I'm not clear that any of those run contrary to what I said?
Regulation and enforcement thereof is obviously a necessary part of ensuring that porn producers are operating legally/safely, and if porn production were more widely legal/regulated then these fly-by-night trafficking operations wouldn't thrive
There's no evidence in actual psychological literature that porn is harmful to people beyond making some religious folks feel a little more shame than normal. Porn addiction isn't an actual psychological condition.
I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.
Or guns. Or payday loans. Or credit card debt. Or credit score. Etc.
Tbh I lost track of what people thought "censorship" is, especially as a pejorative, many years ago. Not only is censorship good, but information is more free than it has been at any point in history. Just pirate the games ffs.
One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.
You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy.
Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die.
It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.
People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
Take a good look at the world around us, and note especially how the countries in which sexual expression and by extension porn are heavily censored also coincidentally have some of the most sexually repressive and hostile attitudes towards women and consensual intimacy between adults of any kind in real life. People being allowed to express sexuality in sometimes crude and commercialized ways is not what you should be pointing at if you want to mention a dangerous progression of society toward violent attitudes around sex.
There are many paths to a fallen society. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. The answer is always in the middle. I think we've gone pretty far with the proliferation of commercialized sex in the West, and they have gone pretty far with regards to repression in the East. AI is the first time as far as I can remember where just about everyone is considering the ethical and societal implications of it. We really didn't do that for porn, video games, and social media. We're late to the discussion, but a discussion about "how much sex exactly?" is always a discussion that needs to be had. I'd say the same for "how much money exactly?". How much comfort, how much wealth, how much power, how much, how much, how much?
In the original days of TheRedPill one of the first things recommended was to drop porn IIRC (also workout and get paid more)
The manosphere is probably a very large umbrella of all kinds of views only united by one common trait - being a man.
Although you're not wrong that society is hyper sexualised and dating has become increasingly transactional
Recommending one drops porn indicates porn a problem for one.
Many things can sometimes be problems. Porn. Video games. Tacos. One time I made myself nauseous by dancing too much (low blood sugar probably). Let's ban dancing, yeah?
(Let's ban dancing, I wanna ban dancing with you, all night dancing (it's a reference to a music track))
I was with you until the last two paragraphs.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.
> One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.
This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn.
> Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days.
This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.
> that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.... The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.
I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn.
So is the NoFap/incel movement.
There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories.
People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
Your characterization of hip hop shoots the messenger. It's the stories of an oppressed people, if you don't like the violence in their stories, blame their oppressor.
It's the same with porn and the Christian Right. If people feel incomplete and try to fill that gap with a porn habit, the porn is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Filling that gap with right wing propaganda doesn't address the problem, it just changes it into something that can be used for political advantage.
You're missing the root causes here.
> the claim is "this is damaging to society"
There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.
The real debate is which is worse to society, its existence or attempting to ban it.
Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea and if anything they have some of the worst gender toxicity.
The real debate has nothing to do with porn. The only reason this started with porn, is because they knew they would get away with taking over the world while everybody is distracted by an unrelated debate.
The debate is weather or not credit card providers should ever be able to blackmail independent companies, for any reason they feel like.
I say no.
Should the government be able to blackmail credit card companies? Do you really think the credit card companies care where you spend your money? All they want you to do is spend more. They are trying to get out ahead of your own fellow citizens (and their government) who agree with more "censorship" and, at least in this regard, more state control. Unless you have a solution for this strain of American politics focusing on credit card companies is, in this situation, missing the point.
>Should the government be able to blackmail credit card companies?
It's called regulations, not blackmail, and yest the government should, because it's accountable to its people, meanwhile CC companies are not. Everything all companies are allowed to to is regulated by the government. Companies only exist at the mercy of the government, otherwise angry mobs can break in and ransack the place.
> Do you really think the credit card companies care where you spend your money?
Obviously they do care, when you see their rulings on this matter they care very much(did you not read the articles before commenting?), otherwise they wouldn't be pushing censorship rules on sellers. Or more specific they care about activists complaining how CC companies let you spend your money.
Making something legal or illegal is just signaling. The real part is how it actually is implemented in practice. And as you imply, things are pretty complex. We really need to be careful about our own tendencies to want things to be simple. It always backfires...
Not being 100% effective isn't backfiring. No law is ever absolutely effective. But making something illegal objectively makes it more difficult to obtain, and is certainly effective at reducing access, even if it's not 100%.
In many cases, bans can have unintended side effects which might make the means of acquiring/distributing/producing "banned X" far worse (aka the cure is worse than the disease).
At least in the case of South Korea, all porn is treated equally illegally, so the country has a really high incidence of secret cameras peeping in places like women’s bathrooms, because that’s just as illegal as a scripted porn film.
You're the only one who asserted a percentage. So allow me to clarify, when I wrote that comment I had no belief that a law need be 100% effective for it to be a useful law. I also believe there's a lot of room between 100% effective and "backfiring". I don't believe this is a binary situation but there's a spectrum (that isn't one dimensional)
I hope with this added context that my previous comment will make much more sense and you can interpret it closer to what I intended.
I'll just add, I don't think most people work in those absolutes. So I'd be wary of jumping to the extreme interpretation. People might interpret you as being disingenuous and using the logical fallacy "logical extreme" or "reductio ad absurdum". But I'm pretty sure you're not doing that because then I'd be grossly misinterpreting you, right?
I misread your "It always backfires" comment as making something illegal always backfires, rather than the desire to make things simple always backfires (note that "always" implies 100%). So now I see all you're saying is "be careful", which is fine.
This is just how people speak. Sometimes qualifiers are critical, sometimes they are a bit of exaggeration. But always doesn't mean always because only a sith deals in absolutes.
My comment about some truth was to specifically about:
That's kind of it. I don't think it should be banned at all.I believe that "free speech" is critical to a well functioning society, but we need to recognize that it can have negative impacts. A key example is the right-wing Hate Industrial Complex: decades of right wing propaganda have conditioned tens of millions of Americans to consider their fellow citizens as non human.
I don't have an answer for how to address this, but you can't fix a problem until you recognize the problem and that it needs fixing.
> if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Sounds great, where do I sign?
Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
I would rather we ban censors from positions of power.
You then have to ask, "In what way is it damaging?" Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation?
If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.
> Some porn is exploitative, but also so are other things. Why is the attack being made upon porn and not exploitation?
If we are to talk about exploitation, then capitalism itself is subject to be attacked and prohibited.
If we work for a living, we sell our bodies to someone else for a time (40h a week or more). Does it really matter if we work on a factory floor doing parts, sitting and coding at a desk, or having sex in front of a camera? Labor is labor.
Sure its the christian 'sex is bad' in various stripes (puritanical to catholic to baptist etc). But in reality, its just different labor.
Now, capitalism in exploitive in that you generate X value, and you get a small percentage of your labor's output. Some owner is who collects the surplus.
So if exploitation is the problem, then its time to start looking at worker cooperatives, unions, banning shows like Shark Tank, and all the capitalist propaganda.
But no, its just 'sex icky'. We won't actually look at the root of exploitation.
You're framing of "sex icky" is a common reductionist approach to remove all humanity from the topic and try and make it purely logical. But that's always been a ridiculous way to argue.
The human experience has never been pure reason. A picture of a naked person will have wildly different effects than a picture of a dog, even though you could technically say they're both "just pixels on a screen". Reductionism doesn't get an argument anywhere; it's too commonly an intellectually lazy defense of the vulgar.
Remember, that the SCOTUS judgement of what obscenity is defined as, is "I'll know it when I see it".
I prefer reductionist rather than the current standard of 'whatever 9 fucks think of it'.
Of course you prefer reductionist, because that fits your interest of doing nothing, rather than seeking a solution to the very real destructive consequences of the genre in question. That's what I mean by intellectually lazy.
Porn is way easier to define than obscenity, so I don't see that being a problem.
> one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.
This is the exact claim of "hate speech" as well.
Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.
Except having virtual sex and threatening to kill/hurt someone in real life are two different things.
The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person.
Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...
> they are optimizing but under differing constraints
Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals.
In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.
IME it doesn't help to villainize the other side, it only escalates things. You're right that there are bad actors, but I don't think this is accurate for the majority of people. You need to differentiate the people leading a group from the people within a group. Leaders may be highly manipulative bad actors, but that doesn't mean that the people that they duped are.
It may not be good logic, or even self-consistent, but everyone is always using some logic. I'm saying "find it if you want to convince them." Very few people see themselves as evil, or more accurately intentionally choosing evil. And I say this as someone who was once a member of a religion that has its own state. You're not going to pull people out of that by acting like they're evil. They're trying very hard to be good, just misguided.
There's an saying that I believe was popularized during the Cold War. I think you should consider it.
I agree with most of what you said, and it was well said.
However, I disagree in two ways.
Firstly, while villainizing them is unhelpful convincing them is utterly impossible when religion is involved. It doesn't matter if we learn to understand their perspective, especially as logic/reason often doesn't apply and they aren't being honest about their goals and motivations.
I think the best anyone can hope for in such cases is for all parties to agree that we all have belief structures, and that we don't get to force those beliefs on others via the law. IE - "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." It's the only rational basis for a society in which different belief systems coexist. The United States used to understand this, but we seem to have forgotten.
Secondly, I do agree that it might be easier to reason with folks the further you get from the top of the ladder. The "true believers" who fly airplanes into buildings or who want to outlaw eating candy because it might lead to smiling on a Sunday didn't start down that path last week.
The issue with the bottom up approach is that the folks on the bottom seldom have any real power, and for good reason. If pawns were allowed to move backwards they would kill their kings.
I was going to argue that you seem like a bit of a rare creature, but I suppose you would know better than I. I didn't bring it up because I didn't want it to sound like a personal attack or something.
Do YOU feel that it's common for folks to change their minds about such deeply held beliefs? I've met a few over the years that I know of. Maybe there are more, and I just don't realize it.
No, this is killing revenue streams for people. You should be under a company to earn money. The problem is, more stupid the general populace is, more stricter rules will be introduced, otherwise you cannot keep the herd together.
The other common (valid) argument is that it's easy for children to access this content because they're already using Steam and unless they have mature content filters enabled, it's already trivial to bypass age gates by lying.
That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.
Even if thats their claim, I doubt it has evidence. What if its actually beneficial to society?
We regulate speech based on its damage to society? Well, sounds like a certain canidae TV network ought to be regulated out of existence.
Not to mention Facebook and YouTube.
yeah but that network benefits the rich and powerful people who orchestrate our society
They are talking about games, right? Somebody drew/built all of them, unlike porn.
> and I think they should be banned from doing so
In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.
Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.
To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.
> Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts?
Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.
They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules.
The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems.
I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.
> yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.
There is actually a bipartisan bill proposing precisely that: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987
> yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business
I like that idea. The USA actually used to trust bust :|
The Puritanical origins of the US reverberate to this day. While coming for "freedom of religion" sounds like a noble origin story, the context was that they wanted the freedom to practice a much stricter, restrictive form of religion than that allowed by the Church of England.
The Collective Shout group pushing for the censorship is Australian, not American.
Most people are unaware of Australia's long history of censorship which continues to this day.
Australia was a prison colony, after all.
I had to remind shocked Americans when they saw Australia's COVID response that, although many Australians are descended from prisoners, a fair number are also descendants of the jailers.
Weren't the Pilgrims, also known as Separatists, being jailed if they didn't attend Church of England services per the Act of Uniformity of 1559? And weren't they jailed without trial if they tried to have their own religious services in private homes?
Shh don’t bring facts in here.
Collective Shout, which organized this, claims to be an Australian feminist organization. (Admittedly, this may be an act.)
The irony is that many if not most of the porn ARTISTS I have know or known of are women, in a subculture that skews male *heavily*.
And video games are just art.
So, women, drawing and writing stuff they like, being banned and losing an income stream.
I don’t think drawing or writing porn is exploitative at all.
One of the best porn web comics (which I recommend, though like all web comics it has its highs and lows) is Oglaf [1], and the artist drawing the sexy pictures is Trudy Cooper... a woman.
If somehow the puritanical mob banned stuff like that, I'd be genuinely sad.
[1] https://www.oglaf.com
"Protecting women" is an incoherent excuse for pressuring websites to pull romantic games that feature consensual, loving, respectful homosexual male-male relationships, with no women even present in the game.
The real motivations seemingly have nothing to do with protecting women, which appears to simply be a palatable facade for the true intention to suppress all depictions of sexuality, including the depictions that offer good-faith representation of historically marginalized groups.
Ironically, isn’t most MfM smut written by and for women?
yep
wait what?
Gay male porn is the second most watched genre of porn among women: https://www.garrettschlichte.com/female-gaze/2019/10/22/the-...
> laims to be an Australian feminist organization
I'm genuinely curious to see how this plays out in the American partisan landscape.
there's a big push to classify fleshlights and dolls as rape because the extreme right won every battle there is to fight they need more battles. porn is next.
They are however influenced by the American discourse soup of lies and talking points, in the same way that the NZ mosque shooter was.
Conservatives around the world talk to each other.
Also Murdoch's conservative media empire has had a strong influence in both Australia and the US
I'm not so sure you can point the finger at the USA for this.
I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.
I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.
In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.
The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.
A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.
A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."
We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.
During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.
One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.
The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."
But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.
And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.
While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.
All this makes me think of war on drugs and other similar failed attempts at regulation, and of the article "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". The stronger the zeal to prevent porn the more expensive it gets to do so, and the more they cause legit companies like yours to close, the more profitable it gets to do it illegally. Just cranking on the symptoms without looking at the cause often has the opposite effect to the one desired, not that the people pushing for this probably care.
Yep, similar to how banning Juul led to the proliferation of foreign-made vapes[0]
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/fda-vapes-vaping-elf-bar-juul-80b...
I'd suggest that foreign investors dictating domestic policy is a huge problem. For a core institution like banking there ought to be a law forbidding them from discriminating against otherwise legal activities except in the case that a different law permits or requires them to do so. That would also absolve them of any PR concerns because "everyone has to; legally speaking we don't have any choice".
What aggravates me the most about stories like yours is that banks are effectively public utilities. They are regulated as such, are broadly considered too big to fail (especially in Canada - believe it or not at a domestic scale, their banks are far more important than any US bank is to the American economy) and thus receive an implicit tax payer underwriting, yet are able to act like this when you're not doing any illegal activities.
I understand the risk tolerance aspect from a bank, they wouldn't want to give a massive loan to a property developer or oil driller going under water. But when it comes to basic deposit services where nobody is asking them to risk their own money, they should be forced to allow any customer who isn't breaking any laws, such as in your case.
Thank you for your story. I like to try to imagine what conversations happened behind the scenes. The fact that the suddenly hauled you into the branch, and still decided that you were too "risky" (clearly a made-up excuse) says a lot. Whatever force is behind this is powerful and it's not even remotely explained by a coalition of angry activists.
> we fell outside of their "risk appetite."
If you take that statement at face value (not sure if you should), it's fascinating to think that your business was able to operate for two decades with what I assume are the standard problems people in the porn industry face (e.g. chargebacks from customers unwilling to admit they subscribed in their SO's presence and so pretending it was a scam, etc.)
And yet seemingly none of the bank's risk heuristics based on actual transaction profiling ever went off.
Wouldn't that mean that, in practice, being in the porn industry isn't as high-risk as banks / payment processors think it is?
And would this not then suggest a gap in the market, for an (ideally vertically-integrated) bank + payment processor + card issuer + KYC provider, who is willing to
1. evaluate risk on a customer-by-customer basis (through e.g. continuous dynamic network analysis of transaction flow, with txs annotated with their KYC info) rather than by actuarial categorization; and
2. avoid seeking any investment (at any remove) by parties who would insist they avoid these types of customers?
The risk they're talking about is risk of government interest in them, which is never cheap when you run a business.
While I'm not big on crypto. This is, in part, why Bitcoin exists and why it was created.
I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the right answer due to the 51% attack vulnerability. And a network of miners where everyone can join in principle sounds pretty yolo, but it seems the be the one of the few organizations that exist outside of government? At least, it does in principle, the fact that the whole crypto industry is a mix of scams and recreation of the actual finance industry isn't helping that case, but a part of it definitely still exists outside of it.
We need more digital systems that exist outside of governments. I'm not sure if it's feasible, but stuff like this is egregious.
I wonder what our view on all of this is in a 1000 years. People in the future probably look at us in disbelief with how we practiced our ethics.
Maybe one day crypto will get there, but in 2022 we couldn't pay bills, taxes or payroll with crypto. At the end of the day it still needs to be converted into legal tender in order to be useful, and you need a bank account for that to do anything in the offline world, like pay for utilities or employees.
Two things can be true at the same time, however. The US has a strong stance on freedom, which means that they'll allow most things even if they're against them. Specially when that thing generates income. But that doesn't mean they're not also a puritanical society. They just take more of a "shame you" approach than a "you're forbidden" one to force you not to do stuff.
I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.
I'm amazed that producing porn in Iceland can lead to gaol. Can you expand upon that further?
It's in Article 210 of the Icelandic penal code and, from what I gather, this follows a pattern typically referred to as "The Nordic Model" where it is not illegal to consume pornography, but it is illegal to produce and/or distribute it.
Here is an article from the Reykjavik Grapevine that deep dives on it better than I could: https://grapevine.is/mag/2021/05/07/ask-an-expert-why-is-por...
And for a broader overview, see "Pornography laws by region" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
The "Swedish Model" is about prostitution, specifically making it legal to sell sex but not to buy it.
There are ongoing debates about how this applies to Onlyfans etc, with one faction claiming all sex work is abuse even if you're doing it solo in the privacy of your own home, so payments to Onlyfans should be banned.
> even if you're doing it solo in the privacy of your own home
The frame the problem as being vulnerable to escalating customer demands if you make custom content. Like, "insert this object and take a photo, insert this larger object and take a photo, insert this uncomfortably large object and take a photo, insert this painfully large object and take a photo, insert this clearly damaging object and take a photo".
This sounds like a just so story. There were all sorts of groups who set up shop in America, and all contributed to its success and influenced the culture.
Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?
What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?
Dutch society in New York?
Poor Scots in Appalachia?
And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?
This is the result of campaigning by an Australian group
are you saying the puritans were the taliban equivalent of christianity.
& want to bring back laws that sex would only be used to 'recreate' not recreation.
Well not equivalent, they taught their women to read after all.
But let's be real here, they were a bunch of jerks. There's a reason it took no time flat for Rhode Island to exist.
Yes that’s exactly what they were and are today
No this isn't just American. Most of the world is very anti-porn. The BRICS countries mostly outlaw porn. Even Nordic countries, which are very socially liberal, discourage it (at least production).
There's a tendency for social liberals to see their view as the only legitimate one. Sometimes they are right. But this is an area where there is lots of international push back from undeveloped, developing, and even many developed socially liberal countries.
When I finally got around to reading Fukuyama, I had an "aha" moment where I realized... oh, this is how liberal democracy thinks. They think they've perfected society and everyone agrees with them, except for a few weird superstitious cults.
Then I realized that it was all wrong, countries accept western liberal democracy only as long as the free aid keeps flowing. And the libdems were in for a rude awakening if they ever ran out of kibble.
The very strange thing I’ve found about liberal democracies is not just the amount of people who believe the entire world believes in the value of liberal democracies. It’ the amount of people who believe, for some strange reason, that other countries support the values of liberal democracies even more than liberal democracies themselves.
Hence comments about the U.S. being extremely puritanical, when anyone can look at laws throughout the world and see that the U.S. is more open on most of these issues than the vast majority of countries.
It’s a very strange form of self-loathing. I’ve discussed it with a lot of people from non-Western countries, and they find this behavior extremely confusing.
A lot of this goes back to Rousseau, a philosopher who sees civilization as the root of evil.
He thought of undeveloped places as filled with “noble savages” uncorrupted by the evils of modern society.
This is why many people believe that anti-gay sentiment only exists because of American or European influences.
While it’s true undeveloped counties often have very different sexual ethics, that does not mean humanity’s default is liberal individualism sanctioned by custom and community.
In England such laws were lobbied by NCH (7000 staff), so it's not necessarily opinion of people, especially in places like Brazil.
Several of the BRICS (& other "global south" / non-neoliberal / non-western) countries also imprison journalists and nonviolent political opposition groups, and some even have the death penalty for minor cannabis possession. "Everyone else does things this way" isn't a legitimate justification.
A justification of what, though? It isn't a cohesive argument on it's own but it is important perspective. If a significant fraction of societies have arrived at policies that contradict your worldview I think that ought to give you pause. (Note that I say that as someone who holds far more extreme views about legal freedom of expression than the vast majority of people out there.)
That's getting somewhat off topic though. In the context of this thread it's merely the observation that attributing this to "puritans" or "christianity" or "US history" is rather misguided. The US and western Europe are very much the outliers here.
Are you defending the morality of authoritarian states imprisoning journalists and nonviolent political opposition groups?
It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.
To be clear, I'm not accusing you of promoting these practices, just asking you to clarify your position.
I am expressing neither support nor opposition to any particular policy position in that comment, merely putting forth the general principle that any time you find yourself to be an outlier you should very carefully examine how that came to be. It's a natural extension of Chesterton's fence.
I think it also follows from such a principle that in general the relevant reasoning should be explicitly articulated when discussing the topic.
> It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.
Suppose that a thing is explicitly chosen by the majority of the world's population, or dictated by the majority of governments, or imposed by the majority of cultural norms. I am suggesting that dismissing it in favor of your own reasoning is fine, but that doing so lightly is arrogant and misguided.
What gives you the impression that I might be offering my critiques lightly or arrogantly, as opposed to only after arriving at them through extensive, careful, and deliberate thought?
Humans engaged in tribalistic groupthink committing moral atrocities is a tale as old as time.
It is never wise to accept a majority or status quo position reflexively without thoroughly interrogating the ideas held within. A great deal of majority positions are morally reprehensible and ethically indefensible, and that has always been the case throughout human history.
Human sacrifices of the innocent were not a "different culture", they were barbaric murders that were always wrong. They were also normative in much of the world for much of human history.
The values espoused (but not always upheld) by western societies that many of us take for granted today are the exception to the rules throughout human history - rules that promoted needless bloodshed, widespread suffering, and persecution of the innocent.
It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned. To assert otherwise isn't simply innocuously defending pluralism, it's defending atrocities.
All life is inherently valuable and I will not apologize for asserting that, no matter how many billions of people disagree for tribalistic, persecutory reasons.
> What gives you the impression that I might be offering my critiques lightly or arrogantly, as opposed to only after arriving at them through extensive, careful, and deliberate thought?
Perhaps the fact that you made a claim without bothering to explain this supposed "extensive, careful, and deliberate thought" of yours? Also the fact that your tone generally comes across as ideologically charged; in my experience zealots rarely engage in patient critical thinking.
Certainly I don't suggest that one should blindly favor the status quo when given the chance to think things through. However absent careful thought the status quo is the obvious default. When in Rome and all that. There is nearly always a reason that things are done the way they are done although often the particulars will be quite convoluted.
> It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned.
Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.
>Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.
No, that was not my intention. You are right to object here. I allowed myself to get worked up by inadvertently framing your more methodological perspective as a moral perspective, and your perception that I came on too aggressively in response to that is correct. I'm sincerely sorry. This wasn't an attempt to attack you or your character, but it did come out looking like that, and that was my fault. My bad on this one.
For what it's worth I myself am actually quite opposed to the status quo when it comes to freedom of expression. Most people, notably even most US nationals, seem to feel that the US permits too much. In contrast I favor compete abolishment of the obscenity carveouts.
However that isn't a free standing view on my part. I acknowledge that the conservatives raise a number of hard hitting points about corrosion of the social fabric, but observe that even jurisdictions with far stricter laws than the US still appear to suffer the same ills (in addition to those caused by the laws themselves).
My view is that this is due to modern technology having fundamentally changed the social dynamic. Continually eroding civil liberties in a doomed attempt to regain some imagined ideal of the past strikes me as nothing more than an obscene parallel to the war on drugs.
Given that we clearly recognize that certain activities are detrimental to society when flaunted in public surely we could apply the same principle to various forms of expression? It's not much of a leap - you'll already land yourself in trouble if you go around shouting your head off or intimidating people for example. Analogous to alcohol consumption, I'd much prefer a clear distinction between standards for public displays, secluded public business establishments, and private gatherings than the bizarre scenarios that the current obscenity laws inevitably give rise to.
People look at the "corrosion of the social fabric", and they point at the most inconsequential stuff. It's quite funny.
We live in a world where technology made everyone live in their own bubbles, only consume and reinforce what they already believe, create narrow identities with strict rules enforced by groupthink, and lose track of the things and people that we actually interact and have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Yet, people think this small stuff that has been around forever, that are tiny parts of our society or lives, that this stuff is the problem with everything today.
Not to whatabout but the US isn't free from punishing journalists.
See the Steven Donziger[1] case. It was just done more Americanly. Private corporation threw their full weight at a lawyer defending an indigenous population who had their water supply poisoned. Chevron hired a private prosecutor who had him locked up on house arrest for years.
Similar to this porn case, the censorship and suppression is coming from market interests rather than government, but they're nearly equally untouchable and even more difficult to hold accountable. You can't vote out the leadership of mastercard or chevron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
Steven Donziger isn’t a journalist. He was a lawyer who was suing Chevron.
I’ve been following the case closely. This is the first time anybody has claimed he’s a journalist, AFAIK.
Am I missing something?
Edit: according to Wikipedia he worked as a journalist for three years before attending law school. So I guess he’s an ex-journalist, and ex-lawyer for that matter.
But calling the persecution of journalists is false. Maybe persecution of environmental lawyers, but lawyers, unlike journalists, are heavily regulated, and face much higher liability for bad acts.
> threw their full weight at a lawyer
I used Steven as an example if private prosecution, where a private organization can take away your freedom outside of public prosecutors.
Steven did similar work to an investigative journalist at a high level, he brought attention to, and fought for a marginalized group. He did it through the court system rather than through publication. Despite doing it legally.
I don't see much of a difference. As recent times have shown, much of the legal system(and legal protections) depend on someone enforcing. Without that, there's little difference between the government boot and the corpo boot.
The actors in this are Australian, by the way.
the group behind this, collective shout are Aussies
The groups behind are two US companies. Some random group of weirdos from Australia are just a good excuse, at best.
The Puritanical origins of the US
Like slavery, smallpox, and tipping, Puritanism was Europe's gift to the new world.
Also penicillin, trains, and the Haber-Bosch process.
Quakers also came to the US early on to practice a peaceful an anarchistic form of Christianity.
Exactly. The Puritans didn't leave England because the church there was too intolerant. They left because it wasn't intolerant enough.
You do know that porn is legal to produce and view in the US and the US produces a LOT of porn? This hardly seems puritanical.
A couple of the groups that founded what would become US states were decent. Of course those decent groups got outcompeted by the authoritarian weirdos because live and let lives types and insular communities don't see the need to grab state power.
I don't think you have to be Puritanical or particularly religious to realize that some content is generally not good for people. I've seen this destroy lives, drive addiction and lead to other forms of destructive behavior.
Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
You don't have to agree that it should be banned, but you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom.
>Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies, because that would actually benefit society and not too many people would mourn their loss.
Why are they instead going after a dozen random horny video games nobody heard of? Oh that's right, because those random game devs don't have the power to fight back in court, unlike Meta/X, so it's an easy win for them to collect brownie points, for performative nonsense.
It sounds more strategic than performative. Surely if they can set precedents against weaker opponents then they stand more chance against stronger opponents.
Though Steam is not weak. But small-time game devs probably don't care to fight unless they're making bank.
Those companies have been alive for a long time. Where's the proof they're going after them?
So then why aren't those activists going after Instagram, TicTok, X/Twitter, etc. you know, the OG spyware, brain rot and anxiety inducing companies
What makes you think they aren't? Because it hasn't been discussed in the HN bubble?
>What makes you think they aren't? Because it hasn't been discussed in the HN bubble?
Maybe post some proof that they are if you wanna make this argument.
I'll take the hard stance on this. I don't see how Sex is anymore harmful, addicting, or dangerous as any other number of socialties. Including Alcohol, fast food, gambling, and simply getting to into any given hobby (be it video games or playing guitar).
A habit I've noticed is that a person vulnerable to being addicted to X is more prone to fall back on Y, Z, etc. even when X is fixed. So I only see "this hurts certain people" as a scapegoat. Stairs probably hurt more people in any given day than many activities, we don't base law purely on harm and potential harm.
Alcohol and gambling are commonly restricted if not outright banned in various localities though, and most people would consider those and fast food to be harmful. So you seem to be agreeing with GP that while you may not think it should be banned, you find it comparable to things that are widely recognized as "generally not good for people".
Porn is also typically restricted. Just as many jurisdictions permit neither public consumption nor intoxication, everywhere I've lived had laws against publicly displaying "obscene" content.
The issue with GGP is that in context it appears to be an argument in favor of increasing restrictions (ie in favor of the events that the article is talking about) despite disclaiming that "You don't have to agree that it should be banned". That's analogous to a loaded question. Expressing agreement with the literal wording of GGP seems to also carry an implication of agreement with some rather different things as well.
My read was that they were merely saying that it's not helpful to characterize desire for such restrictions as fundamentally coming from some religious angle. There are entirely secular reasons to consider restrictions even if you e.g. weigh personal autonomy as more important than those reasons and therefore believe there should not be restrictions.
It's perfectly fine to say "I think porn is generally unhealthy and would suggest people not partake, but I think they ought to be able if they'd like". It's also reasonable to say "I think things like porn, alcohol, cigarettes, violence, and/or gambling should be accessible to adults, but they should not be able to advertise in spaces where children are likely to visit (like an online video game store), and stores should check ID to purchase those things, and 'paying via advertising' should not act as a loophole for those ID checks." There's a wide range of reasonable positions to debate that are entirely shut down by basically implying that people are unreasonable to disagree.
>So you seem to be agreeing with GP that while you may not think it should be banned, you find it comparable to things that are widely recognized as "generally not good for people".
That's up for debate on what's "good for people". But I don't mind proper, formal laws from lawmakers restricting access of that's the will of that region. I will note that trying to restrict porn in the US has traditionally been difficult die to the first amendment.
My main point was: credit card is not a lawmaker. It should be as dumb a pipe as my ISP.
> you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom
I'd actually hypothesise that if you locked three sets of teenage boys in rooms, one with only porn games, one with only social media and one with only sitcoms, that the first group would likely emerge the healthiest of the three. I'm basing this on my bias towards activity and that nobody seems to have bothered with actually doing research on porn games, the organisation pushing for these bans included [1], instead proxying research on porn as a whole for this specific category.
[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/research
What do you consider "healhty", though? It's a very broad term that doesn't actually mean much on its own.
> What do you consider "healhty", though?
Whatever you want. Substance abuse rates. Marriage or long-term partnership rates. Employment. Income. Wealth. Serum cortisol.
My assumption is someone actively participating in something, even something unhealthy, is going to maintain cognitive and executive function above someone simply observing. (To the degree these games may be destructive, I'd argue it's in its game mechanics.)
We have no evidence pornography causes negative outcomes across population. (Versus among a vulnerable subset.) We have lots of evidence for social media addiction causing broad psychological issues, particularly in children.
I'd have an easier time with this argument if it got equally applied to violence. It's ridiculous that exposure to sex is considered worse than to violence.
I'd feel more comfortable showing a 12 year old a violent movie than I would an adult movie.
Or maybe put another way, if my child was at a neighbors house and one of the parents watched an adult movie with my child I would have a huge issue. If they watched Terminator or something similar, I would have much less of an issue.
They're not even close to the same thing.
I think your analogy is a bit off. The "watched it with" really changes the dynamic. There are quite a few activities that I'd take issue with adult neighbors doing with someone else's child. That's an entirely different question from a child doing things on his own or with other children.
Not defending the ratings system here, but there is a big gap between M and R/X or whatever your country uses.
A better question would be if you would be more comfortable with your child being shown porn or snuff movies. For me the answer would be neither, in about an equal measure
They're different things, yep.
I think parent comment is asking you to consider why you think young children watching violent movies is way less of a problem. E.g. "Terminator or similar" - why draw the line there?
And I've seen video games cause people to destroy their lives.
What else should we arbitrarily ban based on this criteria? It doesn't seem to hold up to much scrutiny.
I'm not saying we should ban anything.
Sure video games can be unhealthy. Maybe I'm weird but I would much rather prefer my son plays video games 8 hours a day than watches adult content 8 hours a day. Let's stop pretending like they're comparable.
Is it the public’s job to police what your son does or is it your job?
> I'm not saying we should ban anything.
That's the context of this entire discussion though, that these things are being banned…
> Maybe I'm weird but I would much rather prefer my son plays video games 8 hours a day than watches adult content 8 hours a day.
Isn't it the end result that matters? Presumably you'd like your son to become a functional adult. Neither of the scenarios you describe there sound like that to me (excepting perhaps "professional competitive gamer" but somehow I suspect most parents don't really approve of that outcome either).
I don't see how playing a lot of video games prevents being a functional adult.
It's no worse than reading a lot of books or watching a lot of TV shows, activities that are not disparaged as much.
I guess it comes down to time allocation. If you're spending "a lot" of time on it but not so much that it precludes conducting the rest of your life in a functional manner then why would spending the same amount of time on porn (or any other supposedly degenerate activity) be any different?
Not sure if you are talking about religion or porn games..
IMHO the creation of organized religion has led to far more injustice in the world than a stray nipple (outside of Helen of Troy).
I really hope you don't like alcohol or any kind of spice because historically those are coming next
I don't really disagree with you, but to play devil's advocate - when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition in what you see as the best interest of everyone?
Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn? Rolling coal and other egregious pollution? Online gambling? Abortion? Fentanyl?
> when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition
Evidence. If you think something is harmful to society, you have a hypothesis. The next step is to test it. Not assume it's true and ban everything.
I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful. If I had to hazard a guess, and this is again just a hypothesis, I'd actually suspect that a teenager exposed to porn games is less likely to suffer mental-health issues than one on algorithmic social media or forming intimate connections with chatbots.
Thing is, with things like these, they only need one or a handful of cases. With everything, there is always a handful of cases - porn addicts, gambling addicts, revenge porn victims, trans women in women's spaces and sports, etc. The fundamentalists and right-wing media will hyperfocus and signal boost these statistically insignificant cases to push their own agenda.
For them, n=1 is enough evidence. For their moral compass or larger scale goals, n=1 is one too many.
There will always be some people - teenagers or otherwise - that develop mental health issues from e.g. porn games. But there's people developing mental health issues from Farmville or ChatGPT supposedly turning sentient and sharing the infinite Truth of the universe too. Somehow those aren't an issue.
It's not about preventing mental health issues. It's not about protecting women.
This is not the correct way.
If cigarette was banned from the beginning, we would still see people getting mad without much evidence.
The truth is the evidence is coming half a century after when everyone got cancer.
Precautionary principle should always prevail.
That's why we just don't go full GMO, and you would still not wait for any proof that "it's harmless".
You also don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless.
Additionally, without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette).
TL;DR: You actually need a proof, but it's a proof that it's harmless and not the other way around.
But things like pesticides are being tested and approved first. With the knowledge they were able to get at the time, they were approved. It was only later, when long term and large scale usage of certain pesticides were shown to have a negative impact on the ecosystem that they looked at them again.
Of course, these things don't live in a vacuum; the manufacturers of e.g. pesticides have a vested financial interest in selling their product, because money. They pay for scientific studies in favor of their product, they schmooze (= bribe) with decision makers and politicians, they overwhelm the system, they take their product global and sell it to whoever is buying, etc.
Same with cigarettes or asbestos or lead paint; it's part "we didn't know" because it's long-term effects or the science wasn't there yet, but part "shut up and buy my product" too.
Anyway, proof that it's harmless is not easy to get in certain cases, not when the effects only show up long-term or when the science doesn't yet know how to test. Was science at a point where they could test for the presence and endocrine effects of microplastics in the human body?
> Precautionary principle should always prevail.
This makes sense. If anybody at any point thinks that something might be bad, it should immediately and permanently be prohibited for everyone. We don’t need a mechanism to check this because people are never mistaken or misled, and there is no such thing as a bad actor.
Since the principle should always prevail, it applies to people as well. If anybody thinks that another person could do harm in the future, they should be allowed to kill them in order to protect society from harm.
A system where the only rule is “every person gets to make the rules for everyone else” isn’t the stupidest imaginable thing because
> the evidence is coming half a century after when everyone got cancer
Yes. Then the evidence was suppressed for decades more. We have no analogy here.
> Precautionary principle should always prevail
Why? Why assume the status quo is perfect? Also, what part of pornography isn't embedded into the human status quo?
> don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless
There is no such thing as "full proof."
> without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette)
Now do vaccines, antibiotics, filtered water, the agricultural revolution and every other life-saving invention.
> Why? Why assume the status quo is perfect? Also, what part of pornography isn't embedded into the human status quo?
No one said that. But you should fool yourself saying that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Here is your own quote:
> I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful.
> No one said that
If the precautionary principle should always prevail, then yes, that's what's being said.
In this case, it's difficult to even disentangle what the status quo is. Pornography, this group's bogeyman, is millenia old. Computer games, decades. The combination is a bit novel, but it's also more precedented than these bans.
> I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful
Yeah. I see evidence they're demanded by the people who we're putatively protecting, however. And I see lots of evidence of other harmful things that aren't banned. Herego, why the fuck are we kneejerking on this?
There's probably a fundamental political question underlying a lot of these discussions: do you default to letting people do things or not?
My long-held belief is that there's a certain hubris to saying that you know best for everyone. So I default to letting people do things, since preventing them is exerting power over them. With that framing, you would need evidence that something is harmful if you're going to exert power over other people to prevent them from doing it.
I disagree, the precautionary principle (Chesterton's fence) is heavily overused, often as a bludgeon and for power maintenance.
This is sort of like Jordan Peterson's claim that something is true if it improves evolutionary fit - a claim that seems reasonable on the surface but is rotten nonsense inside.
>whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition in what you see as the best interest of everyone?
That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.
>Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?
My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.
simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)
That's your line, but others have other lines; violence in games was a big thing twenty years ago, and some pearl clutchers tried to have all violent video games banned.
Thing is though, if violent video games caused people to become violent, Columbine wouldn't have been a rare incident.
But it's a difficult one. People play video games but for most people it doesn't change their moral compass; it doesn't make them think ripping out people's spines is normal or acceptable. It desensitizes them to a point I suppose.
Does porn, porn games or simulated CSAM make people normalize objectification and violence towards people and children? I can't answer that, and I don't know if there's been any studies towards especially CSAM since it's such a taboo. N=1, but 20+ years of porn on occasion hasn't turned me into some rampant sex addict.
The problem with simulated CSAM is that there is a risk that the viewer develops a fetish for such repulsive practices. It has then destructive consequences for the viewer and, should he try to perform it, his victims.
Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.
This is the same "violence in video games" argument, no? I'm open to reading studies on the issue, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that simulated CSAM "converts" people who otherwise is not attracted to children.
I don’t know how you would study that specifically, but it seems like there’s a lot of evidence that sexual experiences can contribute to formation of fetishes. Iirc there was an experiment on mice or rats or something where they had them wear some sort of structure the first times they mated and then later on they uh, mated more strongly when wearing the thing than when not wearing it (and I think when not wearing it, produced less emissions than rats or mice that had never been made to wear the thing).
I mean, this seems to be a pattern people have seen in many cases?
I seem to recall something about people in the military developing scat fetishes after repeatedly masturbating in restrooms that smell of feces, due to a lack of other private places?
The phrase “fetish fuel” is a fairly standard phrase I think.
Generally, it’s pretty clear that some fetishes come from somewhere. Like, the “woman turns into a giant blueberry” one seems to pretty clearly trace back to someone’s experience with the scene in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.
And, like, if someone starts out looking at/for breast expansion porn, they’re probably going to be exposed to a far bit of lactation porn as well, and I think there’s a fair chance that they’ll start seeking that out as well? For example.
Why would we expect this pattern to not apply in the case of CP/CSAM?
Violence in video games is quite different from paraphilias. While they usually have an origin deep buried in the psyche, exposure to specific types of porn can act as a trigger and reinforcement to it.
I fail to see how. We have entire sections of our brain dedicated to aggression and adrenaline management. Knowing how to recognize a threat, fight, and flight is every bit as base as knowing how to breed.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11757-020-00607-y
End of page 3, the author does a litterature review and finds that current studies show that exposure to CSAM increases probability of offending for those with predispositions.
Thar seems to fit with my previous readings. "those woth predispositions". The equivalent of "alcoholics withdraw when exposed to alcohol". The paper cites other studies saying as much for general indidividuals:
>SEM) and psychological outcomes: sexual satisfaction, body satisfaction, sexist attitudes and mental well-being. Participants were 252 adults recruited from universities and online who were asked how often in the last three months they had intentionally looked at (1) pictures with clearly exposed genitals, (2) videos with clearly exposed genitals, (3) pictures in which people were having sex, (4) video clips in which people were having sex. They also included some of the items used by Hald (2006) but these were not specified. There results indicated no significant indirect or direct relationships between online SEM use and any of the psychosocial outcomes and appeared to have a negligible role in current sexual functioning and mental well-being. Similarly, Landripet et al. (20191) in a longitudinal study of 248 male adolescents found that a preference for violent/coercive pornography decreased over time and was unrelated to latent growth in pornography use. The authors noted limitations in this study, but still argued for the importance of sexual education and media literacy programs aimed at a more critical evaluation of sexual media content and its potential adverse outcomes.
Haven't read this yet, but I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that none of those "current studies" mentioned in the literature review were RCTs, because an RCT would entail deliberately exposing people with a predisposition towards paedophilia to CSAM, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would ever be allowed by an ethics board.
If that's the case, then all these studies were observational studies, which lack the ability to infer causality. They can at best hint at directions to pursue for studies that can infer causality.
As a concrete example of the way that observational studies can go wrong despite good intentions: It was believed for a long time that paedophiles have lower average IQs than the general population. This was based on the observation that a larger fraction than would be expected of those caught and sentenced for sexual crimes involving children were of low IQ. Of course, a better explanation of this observation is that paedophiles with higher IQs are better at covering their tracks and evading suspicion.
There are many publications studying how porn exposure shapes sexuality and our vision of the human body, especially in the young age, but not only.
By your logic, CSAM consumers would be "magically" unaffected by viewing this porn subcategory.
How convienient.
Read carefully: I'm only claiming absence of (genuine) evidence, not evidence of absence.
Until genuine evidence is available, either outcome seems plausible. It could be that consuming CSAM pushes people towards committing sex crimes, or it could be that it "magically" doesn't, the same way people playing violent video games are "magically" unaffected by doing so.
ETA: An example of the inability of porn to influence sexual behavior is the plight of gay Western men in the 1950s-1980s. During this time homosexuality was absolutely demonised across essentially all of Western society, so there was ample interest from gay men in "correcting" their "errant" desires (this is not to say that all gay men felt this way). At the same time, heterosexual porn was widespread and easily available, though admittedly to a lesser extent than it is today. Given these forces at play, if it were possible for a gay man to develop an interest in having sex with women merely by looking at heterosexual porn, it does seem like there would have been large numbers of gay men who successfully "converted" to straight men. But AFAIK it is disputed that any such genuine conversion has ever taken place.
Two arguments I can think of:
The first is that you're banning free expression, and banning free expression is inherently harmful.
There's also the displacement theory - with the legal content being much more accessible and regulated to ensure minors aren't involved in production, it displaces illegal content that does harm minors.
I don't think the theory behind "free expression" covers things such as CSAM or incest porn. It's ok to say that content that aim to excite the viewer about minor abuse should be forbidden.
Murder is illegal, but games and stories about murder are protected free expression. None of the games in question involve actual people, let alone people being harmed, and so why wouldn't they be treated the same way?
Gay conversion therapy, which has an entire society backing it, failed consistently despite trying pairing it with torture and social ostracism.
This seems to suggest that broad sexual preferences are remarkably stable.
I would imagine that it is probably easier to make someone find something sexually exciting than to make them no longer find a thing sexually exciting?
When a river had carved a canyon, it is hard to redirect it. That doesn’t mean the canyon was always there.
By that logic, one would think that gay people would at least also be heterosexual because they're drowning in an ocean of heterosexual material.
Why is the pornography served to each generation more violent then? It's one thing to be homosexual, it's another to be into the most extreme acts that some homosexuals perform. Do we really need porn that scenarizes incest?
It's kind of interesting that you're claiming a slippery slope argument, when the words we use to describe incest Oedipal and Electra complex come from wildly popular pre-CE fictional accounts of incest.
As for violence, that's because such acts on film were illegal. Pornography was tightly regulated before this era of free speech. Even now the UK, is constantly trying to maintain BDSM porn as criminal [1] and Australia has similar tight restrictions [2]. This is to say nothing of the countries where pornography is completely banned: China, North Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iceland, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Malta, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen.
So if the question is why do you see more of Y in XXX, it's because it is now allowed so content is created to satisfy needs that were already there.
[1] https://reason.com/2014/12/02/uk-bans-fetish-porn/ [2] https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornography-...
The assumption they're making is "interactive incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior".
In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.
How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?
If somebody things he knows better, he shouldn't be allowed to push his views on others from his position of power. All public policies should be subject to public scrutiny.
Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives. For his view to be even considered, he should be required to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that whatever he is against is actually harmful. And after that, only after that, should the voting whether this finding should influence public policy begin.
People should be allowed to harm themselves when they are informed about the consequences. Similarly, society should be allowed to harm itself because not everything has to be a race to the bottom of productivity and strength.
Do abortions lower the birth rate and are more populous societies stronger? Even _if_ the answers are yes to both, I don't see why any society should optimize this metric to the extreme. And theological arguments quickly fall apart in the first step of proving harm.
> Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives.
The pragmatics of activism prove contrary to this ideal. The reality is that this is a failed argument and it will continue to fail regardless of how often it's repeated. I hate to say it, but the only way to counter is to win at the activism game rather than complain about the rules.
Nothing failed. People always did things they had no right to, as long as they were allowed to do them.
Your propositions are contradictory. If "society" decides to harm itself, and I'm part of it, I'll have to suffer from the choices taken by others.
Are you, personally, harmed by someone having an abortion?
Are you, personally, harmed by someone watching porn?
Maybe it makes society as a whole weaker compared to other societies but that doesn't mean your society actually loses anything. Countries have nuclear weapons and multi-national defense pacts now. Just because China has several times the population of the US and could win a conventional war, doesn't mean it's gonna invade.
We don't live in tribes of a few hundred people who are constantly on the brink of starvation and/or genocide anymore. But many people are still governed by instincts from that environment.
The dangerous thing is that there are some busybodies who will believe they are harmed by such things, and so you have to take the argument a step further and precisely define harm to confirm that they have no case. It would be easier if people had a common definition of "if it doesn't involve you then it's not your business".
And the difficult thing about that is that externalities do exist for some things. Pollution affects everyone, for instance, and those externalities need to be accounted for. It's not a trivial definitional problem to distinguish valid externalities from spurious/invalid claims, unfortunately.
Both points are true. I chose these examples in response because they are relatively simple, clear cut examples of "not your business", yet people still try to dictate other people's lives around them.
These people are on one end of the authoritarian spectrum. The other are anarchists, usually ancaps in places I frequent, and they are just as wrong because they are ignoring how people in the real world will actually behave. Negative externalities are precisely the thing that they ignore, minimize, or try to redirect your attention by linking you to a 2 hour video which is supposed to address it but doesn't.
Well, at least they do generally get out of other people's lives though. But it's a system which doesn't work and when it fails, leads to the rise of authoritarians. I wish people were able to understand that policy is a multi-dimensional spectrum and extremes on any one axis are unlikely to lead to stability.
The issues you are talking about are not "society-wide" issues requiring compliance of others.
A better example would be to consider that pre-op transgender people, namely MtF, can share the same spaces that were reserved to biological women. For instance in sport. If I'm a woman and now I have to compete with a biological man in MMA because society chose that it's the new normal, yes, I'm going to suffer from it.
If society decides that it's fair to feed Tiktok to toddlers who end up having their neurons fried, I'm going to suffer from it as well when they grew up as they won't be able to do their job well. If society decides that it's fair to allow CSAM everywhere, I guess that a few children are going to suffer as it becomes mainstream.
We don't live in a vacuum.
I agree with the trans example because 1) it's a great example of one individual being allowed to do something that directly harms another individual; 2) it's fairly easy to prove that someone who grew up with male bone and muscle structure does not suddenly get the female structure because of a reassignment surgery or hormones. I am all for letting people do what they want with their bodies but their freedom stops at interacting with other people's bodies.
I cannot agree with the toddlers example: 1) it's possible it does some damage but as I said, to even consider it, we need proof; 2) even if they are bad at life, it doesn't automatically harm another individual - don't hire incompetents and they won't harm your business. They might harm society in general but society does not IMO have any right to force people to optimize for society's goals. The balance might change if this was true and happened on such a scale that society measurably declined but then I am still of the opinion that we should have mechanisms how a group of people should be able to get together separate themselves from others. We have no right to force the Amish to start using modern tech, even if a few more able bodies would probably be beneficial on some scale. Similarly, if the majority feed TikTok to their toddlers and a minority does not, they should be able and allowed to form their own society with its own rules, as long as everyone participates willingly.
The problem with this kind of pure hedonistic thinking is that it negates that societies exist because of cooperation of individuals and not just as an aggregate of humans.
According to your thinking, no one can "force" medical faculties to say that now anyone can buy a surgical doctor degree for 10$, that said if you have to get urgent surgery you'll pay for the consequences as the "doctor" who'll operate won't be qualified.
This is why we need basic rules, norms and constraints that allows us to reach a better optimum than the free-for-all that you recommend. It's also a question of personal values: I value more living in a CSAM-free society, than one where pedos can watch it freely. Amishes value being in a highly religious and low-tech society than giving birth without pain or having air conditioning.
I agree that leaving the society should be possible (emigration, for instance, as the Amishes did). But each society has its local optimum, so you'll have to choose with different constraints. You can for instance go to Russia where it's legal to own and watch CSAM, but with other constraints.
> According to your thinking, no one can "force" medical faculties to say that now anyone can buy a surgical doctor degree for 10$, that said if you have to get urgent surgery you'll pay for the consequences as the "doctor" who'll operate won't be qualified.
I have trouble parsing that sentence, did you mean "prevent" instead of "force"?
If yes, then it doesn't follow from my thinking at all. Lying is an offensive action by which the liar gains an advantage at someone else's expense. There are expectations of minimum quality standards for doctors, both informal (people's expectations) and formal (state exams / certification). Somebody claiming to be a doctor without fulfilling these expectations is clearly directly harming other people (whether actual harm is done - even if he somehow through sheer luck managed to perform one surgery successfully, the expected outcome is still harm and expected outcome should absolutely factor into his punishment).
> This is why we need basic rules, norms and constraints
I never said we didn't. I said we only need them when other people are harmed provably and directly; not when somebody thinks he "knows better".
It's not what, it's how is the problem.
Side stepping local country government, and applying pressure to payment processors to enforce your own rules globally should not be able to happen. Even a government should not be able to dictate what other countries do.
The advocate group who do this believe they are exercising the will of God and do not need to mess with things like laws
Governments should educate people instead of outright banning things.
And in the case of addiction like drugs or gambling, instead of stigmatizing the victims, they should be there to support them.
Let people make their own decisions, not the government.
It all depends on how much power a company has, and so how easy it is to find alternatives.
Laws.
IMO, in addition to, the shaky belief that rape games promote rape in real life to the audience, etc., maybe there is the belief attacking the creators like, "there is a person/group of people we know profit off the fictional depictions of rape/see concept of rape itself as good for cash flow. Because these people went through all the trouble and effort creating, publishing this work focused on rape in gratuitous detail - so its significantly more likely they hold beliefs outside the safe norms society upholds, than someone whose only conception of rape is 'its horrible' and doesn't need to think about implementation, writing graphic scenes, going out of their way to create and market 'a rape simulator', and so on. As punishment for perception of being immoral people their income source needs to be shut down."
When the Steam removals came up on HN, several people linked the list of games pulled. It looked more like they were targeting incest games (which is a genre I didn’t know existed) rather than the generic “porn games” that keeps showing up in headlines. There could be more developments or a different story for Itch.io, but last time this story was circulating it appeared that journalists were avoiding talking about specifics because people were much more sensitive about removing “porn games” in general whereas as “incest games” is a different story.
Those games are legal, also in some USA states you canmary your cousin so why the fuck don\t this puritans do not go for incest inreal life first then handle virtual stuff.
One of the example games that was banned was “daddy twins incest BDSM” and similar titles.
>One of the example games that was banned was “daddy twins incest BDSM” and similar titles.
Next you will ban games where you are killing people instead of focusing on real killers? I would prefer we have laws for what is legal and not let religious extremists decide what music we are allowed to listen, what type of books and games should we play, I guess there is no evidence they can bring to ban this content so they push their FUD around.
So please either make it illegal or stop focusing on virtual crimes, maybe focus on real crimes or use those money religious people have on helping real people.
So what? Why does that make any difference?
If you think (insert thing here) is genuinely evil, you might be inclined to rid the world of it. It may even make you seem like a better person (to god, to others in the same camp) because you are "cleansing" or "healing" the world through those efforts. It's self righteous
I agree with you, but I think we need to be a bit more careful about that argument.
The problem is actually the slippery slope happened earlier, with advertisers. The slippery slope was advertisers not wanting to advertise on porn sites and adult content. It is the same thing we see with the creation of Algospeak and self-censorship. As the article points out, it is also very hard to accurately classify this information. I mean even on YouTube the other day I got a video in my shorts feed that was flagged for sensitive topic. The video? About a veteran who was wearing a shirt that said "Do not give in to the war within. End veteran suicide." Here's the vid, it still has the content warning[0]. What about this video is sensitive? That it mentions the word "suicide?" (Twice?) There's not even options in the settings and YouTube definitely knows I'm in my 30's.... How do I even say "this was improperly flagged?" We're just letting algorithms shape our culture in a way we clearly don't want. We wouldn't have Algospeak if we wanted it... Sure, covert speech has formed in the past but mostly under duress and the current form allows for a much more rapid iteration and I really don't think that's good for society. It comes with the best intentions, but I guess we all know the old clique, right? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. As much as it sucks to admit, a lot of "evil" is created by "good" people trying to do "good" things (quotes to let you define good and evil however you want)
The reason I point out the argument is we can modify "Don't like porn? Don't buy it." can be modified to "Don't like porn? Don't advertise on those sites."
But I think payment systems should have a different regulation. Similar to internet, common carrier. I'm actually surprised this isn't already a rule (it has to be, right?). As long as it is legal, they should be compelled to perform the transaction. Anything else seems like it is actually holding your money ransomed.
I'll admit I'm biased and I think payments should be private and we should try to make the system so that digital transactions are as similar to cash transactions as possible, but I'm not convinced either party is in favor of that, nor the banks themselves which would like to make money on that information.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x6WzOx01Tws
That is what happens, if we give public functions to private companies. Noboy say you have to use Mastercard.
Anger and outrage are our most viral emotions. Given ad-driven social media rewards attention, it also--by proxy--rewards those go generate anger and outrage. This is a market signal and entrepreneurial incentive as potent as any.
As a result, you get collections of fuckwits like this one [1] finding the 2% of the internet who will give them money to get upset about an imaginary problem, a problem so imaginary that nobody is on the other side of the issue because the entire issue was made up for clicks.
[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/our_team
Presumably, the belief of Collective Shout is that there is a causal link between acting out incest, rape, and sexual violence in games and acting on those behaviors in real life.
What would you do if you harbored that belief?
The issue is not with Collective Shout, who are rightly free to argue whatever they want. The issue is with payment processor - who fall all over themselves and invoke all sorts of random claims, to use their extreme power to ban content.
They're Australian. So no.. not really. There's no freedom of speech in Australia.
Why they don't go after alcohol? I am not an expert, but I guess most such crimes happen due to alcohol usage.
We have seen time and time again that a lot of such reprehensible behaviour comes from a puritanical stance on sex. So it's likely that they already act out those behaviours in real life.
They just want to hide behind "those games made me do it" when they eventually get caught.
Empirically prove it.
Making sure I get this straight. You're saying that if you shared that believe, you would go out in search of evidence to prove it? I hate to break the news, but if we read the literature published by members of Collective Shout, they have in fact done this. The evidence they have supports their claims. Let's be clear, the evidence they have is independent of the veracity of the claims, but they have done with you suggested. However, it had the effect of confirming their beliefs.
I hate to ask the question again, but if you believed the same thing and felt like you empirically proved it, how would you behave?
> if we read the literature published by members of Collective Shout, they have in fact done this
Granted, I've skimmed, but I'm genuinely not seeing it [1].
The closest is this study [2], which counted how many times thirty-eight women "who self-identified as having experienced unwanted or non-consensual sexual experiences in relationships" and were "recruited via social media," when "given the opportunity to reflect on their experiences of [intimate partner sexual violence], with prompting to speculate about their partner’s motivations or any underlying causes for the violence" mentioned pornography. That's...that's not a study.
[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/research
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10778012209713...
You kind of missed the point. It doesn't matter if what they did is or isn't real science. They believe it is, and so as far as they are concerned, it's proven.
So then what? Since they really believe what they said, how can you blame them for their actions?
You might argue that since they are wrong, their beliefs should be changed. Well sure, maybe they should.
You could commission a study to confirm that, then try to persaude people. Perhaps form a collective to persuade others of that belief. Oh wait....
> they have in fact done this. The evidence they have supports their claims
>> It doesn't matter if what they did is or isn't real science. They believe it is, and so as far as they are concerned, it's proven
There is a massive gap between someone having done something and their (wrongly) believing they've done it.
You asked a question about what I would do if I had a belief that somebody was harming society.
Historically, my observation is that some of the most evil things ever perpetrated by humans were done in the name of trying to make society better. So I'm pretty hesitant to enforce my views on other people or even attempt to. If they were acting in good faith, this would be sort of like a Black Lives Matter type of approach that is trying to raise public awareness around an issue. But they're not acting in good faith in trying to get society to see their point of view. Instead, they are trying to go after the fulcrums of society and enforce their view using backroom deals. It's a transparent power play, and it's not in good faith: real good faith actors look at both sides of the issue, both the values and the harm, and they try to develop a balanced response. This is not what's happening here.
You say that, but history shows that people are much more likely to move based on what _feels_ true to them.
In the game of politics we split one group away from another and get them to fight. This achieves several effects.
Similarly, if you don't like something, you shouldn't have to sell it. Or host it. Or process payments for it.
> you shouldn't have to sell it [etc]
Until you abuse your market power. See Apple store vs adult content, see credit card companies vs an endless list of obsessions.
Sorry no. No amount of "market power" should compel you to engage in behavior you find immoral.
Also "credit card companies" are not a monopoly for any reasonable definition of monopoly. There are four major ones. That's like saying Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Tesla are a monopoly.
And if you do, your monopoly gets broken apart.
> ”I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.“
Perhaps we could develop some form of secure digital currency that is not reliant on central authorities such as banks, payment processors, or governments?
That was a great theory, but in practice it became an asset/investment; nobody pays with BTC because its value is too volatile.
One would expect stablecoins to be more popular but I haven't seen them as valid payment options anywhere except crypto exchanges. That's just me though.
That is underway, with adult content providers (for example) now generally accepting payment methods that do not rely on credit card companies. All the way to accepting Home Depot gift cards that can be bought for cash.
The issue is that for now, and for a long time ahead, all these content providers feel that most of their clients would prefer to use a credit card. So they need all of their content to be acceptable to these people. Which comes with lots and lots of lowest common denominator rules. Even if some people do not use credit cards.
I guess you can also ask "don't like gambling, don't gamble".
It goes even further.
What was wrong with those people poisoning Socrates? For what? Don't like what he says, do not listen to him.
You know how in higher dimensional space everything is almost orthogonal? I think people are like that, some like porn, some are afraid of it, some want to be impregnated by aliens, some hate aliens.
Through good intentions democracy can be just as tyrannical as any tyrant; a pinch of incompetence and good intentions and it can not be stopped.
When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.
> When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.
Who gave anyone the right to judge who needs or needs not to be saved? What if people don’t want to be saved?
I think it comes down to how much society is an entity in its own right vs just a collection of individuals. Proportionaly, saving society may be worth restricting the absolute freedom of individuals to some degree.
> What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?
Porn is just the thin end of the wedge (as was "violence in video games" a generation ago) - porn is something society considers as distasteful, so politicians are less likely to go on record as supporting porn. Once the porn bans go into effect, they'll move onto the next target in the conservative playbook: gay marriage, birth control/abortion access, etc.
Would this really help though.
Let's assume there is a payment processor where anything goes, the company utilizing it would still be punished by the other payment processors.
I don't think Visa/Mastercard would care that you only sell the things they don't want through other payment processors, they still would threaten to cut you off entirely for having the content they don't like
>No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
Obviously the government should make selling certain things illegal. And I think that many of the games sold their, should be made illegal.
What should not happen is payment processors being the ones who decide what is okay to sell. If selling something is legal, payment processors should be forced to make that transaction.
>I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
I do not. I do not want legal financial transactions being dependent on the whims of how "brave" some company is.
Don't like porn? Don't sell it in your store, simple as that.
Next is a Superman videogame being blocked because it goes against the 'policies/interests' of a country that manages to lobby a lot here.
You seem to be sarcastic but there's plenty of countries that have stringent laws on what games are and aren't allowed.
Well you know Superman shouldn’t fight against genocidal maniacs and instead should fight for them. Then we wouldn’t have to ban him and infect we can all celebrate him.
I agree with your sentiment, but declaring that a company shouldn't be free to decide who they can and can't do business with isn't the solution to this problem and I am no friend of the business world.
It seems fine now when it's something you don't like but what happens when it's a situation that isn't so agreeable? like being legally oblidged to do business with South Africa during apartheid or working with a chocolate company that (allegedly) used child slave labor to farm it's cocoa??
A payment processor should be treated like a utility. They just let the money flow and skim profit off the top without caring who's at either end.
I wish we didn't have payment processors. But if wishes were fishes there would be no room for water.
>Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that.
don't like porn? run a for-pay pornsite, bleeding revenue from the other porn sites, which you will spend fighting porn; also, you'll have better targeted customer lists. extremely effective altruism.
These are private companies and you better believe they have a say in what they make available on their own platform.
They do not have to host your game that they don’t like and that doesn’t make it censorship.
What if said game is a realistic CP simulation?
> Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that
Except we live in a society and what goes into it affects all of us. Why does Germany ban Nazi content? Why do governments have minimum wages?
I believe you oppose the banning of Nazi content?
But not because I think people who don’t like nazi content should simply not buy nazi content. It’s because I don’t trust the government to ban any kind of political speech.
Why do you trust the government to ban non-political speech?
I don’t, I just don’t think non-political speech is as important.
One of the big problems here is that once you start letting the government ban a class of speech, you’re also implicitly letting them classify speech.
Their definition of what is or isn’t protected political speech is going to be warped by their capability to ban non-political speech.
Do you trust the government to determine what is and isn't political speech?
The left has been talking for years about how what would we have classified 20 as political speech 20 years ago is not really political speech but hate speech, and inciting people to violence.
> Do you trust the government to determine what is and isn't political speech?
Even in the U.S., which is highly protective of speech, we've had carve outs for obscenity, etc., that have been fairly workable. It's hard to take a rule directed at banning porn and apply it to political speech.
He is a lawyer in the US and most lawyers in the US oppose the banning of Nazi content, which is why Nazi content is not and has never been unlawful in the US.
The explanation is simple: they don't want easy revenue streams for people. You want to earn some side income, go F yourself. If you look around, and want to earn a few dollars, what can you do? Literally nothing. And this keeps continuing.
I remember checking out llama when it first came out. (meta's published LLM model)
"what is the best sex position?"
[blah, blah, ... non-answer]
"How do you get a sex change?"
[long detailed answer]
Well, those are somewhat different types of questions. One is subjective opinion, and the other is a bit more factual/straightforward.
I'm also not entirely sure what this has to do with the comment you're replying to.
any sex questions led to non answers.
the point was that content is blocked almost by default nowadays
But the LLM gave you a detailed answer on another sex question. I'm a bit confused why that example was used.
Intercourse vs sexuality. Not the same thing.
So the comparison was useless then?
Not entirely; the one question was sex and interpersonal relationships, the other was medical / scientific.
So the comparison was indeed of two unlike things, but trying to be displayed as such.
the first version of llama was uncensored, so this story is not factual
It was llama-7b
that was uncensored
What is meant by uncensored though? Did it have for example the complete unfiltered human knowledge, or was its dataset filtered to exclude e.g. 4chan?
It was uncensored enough to a point where I can confidently say that the parent's story is not true.
sorry, I looked again and I think it was either llama-2-7b or llama-2-13b from TheBloke on huggingface. It is very old and my vm no longer runs it (I must have installed too much conflicting software since). I used ggerganov llama and ggml ggerganov llama, and when I run ./main ... it now coredumps.
no worries!
> Don’t like porn? Don’t buy it.
Ok.
Don’t like porn? Don’t sell it.
“CENSORSHIP! PURITAN NAZIS!”
They’re being forced to remove games that are essentially anime CSAM. Payment processors shouldn’t need to be stepping up, but these platforms don’t bother to curate or moderate content so their hands are being forced.
Not only that, but also furry content has been targeted in the past in other websites.
You know. I used to be all about what you're going for. But I realized that porn to a certain extent is like cocaine. It's possibly one of the drivers for world wide declining population. Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing. There's growing science about this too.
I don't like the conservative angle which is to be "proper" or it's against god, but from the scientific side this stuff is bad.
Now I also agree that censorship is bad too and on a moral level this stuff doesn't harm anyone morally.
I'm still a staunch 90s liberal, but over time I'm starting to realize that there's an evolutionary reason why conservative values exist. Humans weren't designed to live in a world of only fans where every girl who's slightly hot can gain so much power over hundreds of men. Like there are 4th - 10th order effects here that go past morality.
I mentioned the population problem right, that's just one example. We have no idea wtf is causing it. But we do know that the population issue correlates with so many changes in society, and it's a big freaking deal.
Another thing is rising womens power. I'm all for it. It's moral and right to give women equal rights and equal power, but humanity has never encountered such a scenario. It's always the men that lead the hunt and the family and they were the bread winners for millions of years. Were humans evolved to support such changes? Like if we satisfy every moral imperative in our primitive brains and build a utopia but human biology was never meant for utopia is it right?
That's the problem. The population is declining. We don't know why. But we do know everything is different.
So I know I got off on a huge tangent here. But i feel porn is one of these things. It's right to keep it open and free, but it's causing unexpected side effects. Most of us were not meant to deal with that level of extreme hedonism.
I don't know if porn really affects population growth. There are so many other factors that do that to a much greater extent, such as: 1) gender equality and women working, 2) education, 3) contraception, 4) lower child mortality, 5) the fact that 200 years ago kids were an asset (free labor on the farm and support in old age) but today they're just a huge expense, 6) the fact that even a few decades ago child care consumed much less time as kids could be left to play outside, but today you have to supervise them 24/7 at least until they're 12. Etc etc. people don't have kids for a long list of reasons, none of which has to do with men watching so much porn they can't have sex even once.
But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing? There's 8 billion of us, isn't that enough? Housing prices are through the roof and most young people can't even hope to be able to afford a house. Human population has doubled about 4 times in the last 100 years. If it doubles yet again there's going to be 16 billion of us. Do you think the world and humanity can sustain infinite exponential growth? I don't think so. The only reasons to want population growth is because the pension system is a Ponzi scheme, but that's a completely different problem.
I also find it interesting that on one hand the argument against porn is, "porn is bad because it encourages X behavior in real life", but then another is "porn is bad because it discourages sex in real life".
>But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing?
The issue is bigger then that. It's weird though. First for context, when population grows, that growth is compounding usually. There's an acceleration.
Now that the population is in freefall, the freefall is also compounding. Like there are structural impacts that will effect most of the asian countries (where this problem will hit first) that will effect them economically.
>It's possibly one of the drivers for world wide declining population.
Porn is illegal in South Korea, yet it's the country with the lowest fertility rate. If anything, this suggests a reverse of the correlation.
> Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing.
As one of the “dudes satisfying themselves”, I’d happily “do the real thing” if that was an option. This is like complaining that people play spaceship simulator games instead of going out to drive an actual spaceship.
Think about it this way. If porn didn’t exist your will power to do the real thing would balloon. You would scale mountains to get it.
Like your sex drive would amp up to the point where you would spend the effort to ride the space ship.
> You would scale mountains to get it.
You say that as if it was a good thing.
it is a good thing. Ironically hard effort leads to happiness. A life spent scaling mountains is happier then a life spent on the couch.
It's just where you are right now, the happiness part is not apparent. It's because it's a long term thing.
If porn or computers or TV or junk food didn't exist, you'd have nothing better to do then for mind numbing self improvement. Miserable, but in the long term you end up building something that makes you happier and more fulfilled. You build up resistance to the short term pain. And eventually depending on your case, the pain disappears completely. You start to enjoy scaling the mountain.
With sex specifically, the results are inversely proportional to the effort. Putting a lot of time into seducing a woman is seen as desperate and creepy. The men who are getting laid the most just walk into a bar and women throw themselves at them.
They get rejected too. They become numb to that pain. Eventually they get laid.
Part of the pain is getting seen as desperate and creepy. The goal is to become numb to this. To not care.
Population is declining for some societies but not others.
The older I get the more I start to believe that industrialization and pervasive technological adoption have come with a cost to humanity that maybe we don’t want to bear.
I think it's declining across the board. Some societies just haven't caught up to the decline yet. This is why immigration will never solve the problem either.
It's not just porn, it's depictions of rape, from what I’ve read. So I don’t know if it’s really good for people to consume that kind of content. Real-life safe sex involves consent, which is obviously not the objective of this game. I believe this type of material can be genuinely harmful to our brains.
Even though I’m against using payment processing restrictions, I do believe we need laws to prohibit this kind of content. There’s data suggesting that it impacts real people's behavior during sex and shapes harmful social expectations.
Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content. People all are about free speech when it comes to censorship in media, but not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
I’m sure that there are dating sims that are just fine, but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff . Some of them even enter the morally grey areas imo.
>Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content.
several Otome and BL content was hit by this as well. I don't think this is about protecting the women and children.
>not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
It's not 2005 anymore. Show me any modern AAA game still doing this.
in terms of porn... well, yes. Your reward is sexual gratification with your chosen mate in any given game. Porn is inherently objectifying. I don't think you're seen enough of the porn market if you think porn is focused onobjectifying women, though.
>but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff .
We're on Hacker News. I really hope we had enough background growing up to not wish for "weird" to be illegal.
Oh no, weird stuff in games? Or even... morally grey actions in games? How awful!
Child rape is morally grey now?
Not my words. Look upthread.
Well yes, one could argue that if games like GTA don’t turn people into criminals than these games are also harmless. Imo it’s a bit different in this case, as a more natural instinct (sexuality) is affected.
Sure, games can be beneficial for living out fantasies, but how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content? The bottom line of my point is that I think this type of content is too easily available nowadays, and especially too much of it.
>Imo it’s a bit different in this case, as a more natural instinct (sexuality) is affected.
I personally don't see the difference. Violence is a primal instinct and studies on video games and violence only concluded short term increases in aggression. Why would a similar conclusion with yet another primal instinct not conclude with short term increased arousal? I don't see arousal as inherently dangerous.
>how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content?
Do you feel that people just find "sexist content" from some algorithm, or that already sexist people seek out content to conform to their views? I have my criticisms of Steam, but I am glad they are one of the few bastions left that aren't driven by "engagment boosting" algorithms. Just a simple tag system recommending other content with similar tags and good ratings.
I agree with the undertone that we need better sex education. Those early years where we don't sell content to 10 year olds should be used to talk about the dangers before sending them off. Too bad such groups also go for an all-abstinence approach.
If you start down this road, policing which media people have access to based on your own totally subjective moral standards and interpretations, you will end up with pervasive censorship that severely stunts cultural development. Because who is "you", anyway? The answer is, of course, whichever monstrous nutjob chooses to devote a huge chunk of their time and money to seizing the levers of power so that they can impose their monstrous nutjobbery on everyone else.
Seriously, outside of special, clearly delineated cases with indisputable negative externalities (especially on the production side), when has [effectively] banning certain [types of] media been a net good? Seems to me that all it's good for is political repression and fueling moral panics.
"Objectification" is just a clinical and negative way to describe normal male sexuality. ie, that physically beautiful women are sexually attractive.
In my book objectification means presenting women as walking sexual organs, bodies of flesh that one needs to conquer, nothing more. Many of pornographic content nowadays do this. Sexuality is not a problem, sexism is.
How would you make porn that isn't "objectifying"? Would you add an hour of prologue showing actors going to work, hanging out with friends, having hobbies etc, to show they are aren't just "sex objects"? I don't know if such porn would be very popular, leave alone cost-effective to produce.
Also, I don't see how women in porn are any more objectified than men. In the porn that I've seen, men are 100% objectified and portrayed as only good for "one thing".
I mean your last point is fine, the problem is when the Overton window of what "normal male sexuality" is shifts towards violating other people's boundaries, or diminishing them as people beyond how it affects men's arousal.
Where would books like Twilight or 50 shades of grey rank on this "weirdness" scale? Sexism? Those two books had orders of magnitude more of an impact on society, where is the outrage?
I suspect that a lot of people who object to this censorship, would be perfectly fine with a game being pulled because say it glorified owning slaves, or if gameplay was explicitly anti-homosexual. Then they would see the harms, employ their empathy, and support the censorship. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of the people who are outraged about this article.
Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.
There's a lot of dishonesty relating to this. This really isn't about Puritanism, unless you're redefining Puritanism to mean having any morality at all.
Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games? [this is the only addition that I wasn't aware of from previous investigations, but I still don't think it's valid to call it a "slippery slope" yet]
A lot of customers don't want to be shown such games in the first place (keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice).
We can argue about whether "it's better to sell pedos fake content rather than real content" etc. (keep in mind that some of these things are actually illegal in many countries even when no real people are involved), but if so we should be explicit that that is our argument, and not falsely claiming this is some attack on sex in general. (Also keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions.)
The same group driving this has attempted to get games like Detroit: Become Human banned because they include even the basic concept of mistreatment against women as part of the dramatic narrative. Not glorifying it, just having it exist, even when explicitly framed as a negative thing the narrative explores the consequences of.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
Games that are pedophilia is very different form games that appeal to potential pedophiles. The first one is not only not allowed on Steam but outright illegal overall. Steam doesn't even want you using adult models in their games for this very reason; they don't want to need to verify ages.
For the latter: I guess so? It's really hard to determine what triggers someone to commit crime. I don't think any but the most blatant cases are as simple as "play video game with teenagers in it -> I want to have sex with a real teenager". This is why it's better to focus on who's victmized instead of who may or may not be influenced.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
there are 1000 games released on steam every month. A game's existence isn't a compelling factor to buy it.
With that in mind for all subsequent answers: yes, I dont mind games with rape being sold. I will not buy it, but if they find a market: so be it.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Sure. Maybe this is a hot take, but I never had a stronger attraction to my mom because I watched porn of someone else banging their "stepmother". I'm into it because it's other people doing forbidden acts (or toeing the line with the "step" aspects), not because I'm interested in doing the forbidden act myself. This goes all the way back to Romeo and Juliet; people are engaged by romance fighting against societal norms.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games?
GTA has been a thing for some 30 years now. I think this boat has set sail. But yes.
>keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice
okay. So how about we fix that instead of just banning content we don't like. Steam is already too strong for my liking, but they very much can enforce a system where an account is suspended for too many clearly bad tags.
>keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions
Itch has a donation system on all game pages. So that's not quite the case here. Also, pressurign payment processors will endanger the entire store, even if every NSFW game is free.
I don't want to compel any stores to sell anything, but I do want to compel monopoly/duopoly money processors to process money for legitimate transactions for legal goods.
And the list of games targeted and affected here is really expansive.
> Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
> Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
> Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
So ban the things you believe are the problem instead of blanket banning everything.
Are they actually banning "everything" though? From what I can see, that's entirely clickbait fraud.
The group behind this censorship attack is not just against porn games. It's also attacked games like Detroit: Become Human.
So they want to censor far more than just porn.
I didn't mention "porn", and there's a reason I included domestic violence simulations in list of specific things they're targeting; when phrased like that it sounds like a reasonable category to ban. I haven't played that specific game but it certainly sounds close enough that it could be caught even if not intended (and maybe it is intended - even if I trust what people say on the internet and the game is well-meaning, that doesn't mean it is actually healthy or sane).
If it really is an example of a rare false positive, a manual fix for that one specific game is a reasonable thing to seek, without giving the pedos their heyday like most of the comments here suggest.
You might disagree with me and others here and even want censorship for games. But don't you think it's should be regulated by your local government for your specific country or by whatever regulator there is where you live?
Do you really think Visa and MasterCard should be making decisions what is acceptable for like everyone?
Otherwise any random weirdos from UK or Australia will censor what are you allowed to watch or play in the US.
And China can also put pretty good pressure on payment processors too. They'll certainly want many games gone since they are worse than pedos for CCP.
The problem with slippery slopes is that the world is made of them. You can't leave the slippery slope, at BEST you can choose which slope you're sliding down.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
See also decrim.
I completely agree. One could frame not banning these games as another slippery slope - which I'm sure they do.
I think many of these slippery slopes are defined in hindsight. What all of these represent are simply struggles for power.
IMO the difference is whether the “slope” is emotional or physical.
Exhibit A - emotional: the government has outlawed violent crime and wants to outlaw intimidation. Argument “once they outlaw intimidation, next they’ll outlaw regular insults, next they’ll outlaw criticism”. This is a bad slippery slope argument because (I’m assuming) intimidation should be outlawed. Insults and criticism should not, but are not. If the government votes in evil-gov or you encounter evil-cop, it’s as easy for them to harass you for insults and criticism, as it would be had intimidation never been outlawed.
Exhibit B - physical: the government wants to give every citizen a brain implant that can be remotely activated to stun them. This would significantly prevent crime. However, it would also be a terrible idea, because now if you get evil-gov or evil-cop, it’s significantly easier for them to remotely stun you for non-crime.
The key is that in Exhibit A, evil-gov and evil-cop face equal resistance for punishing insults and criticism regardless of whether intimidation is outlawed, because either way, people understand that intimidation should be outlawed and insults and criticism should not. More generally, moving the Overton Window to contain a “good” thing doesn’t make it contain a “bad” thing, at least not enough so that the “good” thing isn’t worth it. But in Exhibit B, evil-gov and evil-cop face ineffective resistance for stunning people for insults and criticism, because people allowed good-gov and good-cop to give them stun implants for punishing crime; whereas if evil-gov or evil-cop stepped up and said “alright, we’re going to give everyone stun implants to punish insults and criticism”, they would face effective resistance.
—-
Put into perspective: Visa and Mastercard using their Monopoly to effectively prevent payment for depictions of incest and rape, assuming you think that is OK, is Exhibit A. However, Visa and Mastercard having a monopoly in the first place is Exhibit B. My argument is “we should break the Visa and Mastercard monopoly (or popularize crypto) to prevent them from restricting LGBTQ and firearms etc. in the future” (this argument still applies if they’re restricting some of that now). A counter-argument is “this will allow incest depictions, hate speech, and moreover actual drug and sex trafficking*, etc.” and my counter is “those things are bad, but are they bad enough to leave us vulnerable to power shifts restricting good content in the future?” I support free speech with a similar argument**.
It’s an argument that relies on the uncertain future, but nonetheless the change here clearly and significantly decreases the probability of a bad future, because bad-gov or bad-cop must acquire power then revert the monopoly breakup; whereas the emotional example can’t even rely on the future, because if bad-gov or bad-cop acquire enough power to cause the bad thing, they would’ve just as likely acquired enough power had we not avoided causing the good thing.
* Also note these things are already exchanged with real money, and breaking up the Visa/Mastercard monopoly won’t make them legal nor stop law enforcement from tracking and prosecuting them. The more general argument is that it’s better for society to make it hard for law enforcement to prosecute crime then give them the resources to do so, but also make it hard for them to prosecute non-crime; then make it easy for law-enforcement to prosecute crime so they need less resources, but also make it easy for them to prosecute non-crime. The justification is that we spend extra resources and let some crimes avoid prosecution, in exchange for decreased risk of non-crime prosecution now and in the future.
** and that speech is mild enough, sans confidential information etc., that it shouldn't be blocked simply to content whoever says it. But even confidential information doesn't warrant e.g. a universal backdoor and filter that could be stolen and exploited by a bad actor.
hello from Russia, which was disconnected from the rest of the world by our overloads Visa and Mastercard
There's a whole buisness model of russians paying to a company in Kazahstan so that they buy a steam game and gift it to a russian user
In Russia many of those games would be illegal: LGBT is illegal, propaganda against having children is illegal, etc.
Although it's been tried before, we should all follow this bill, the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act which will criminalize lewd sexual material.
In the current atmosphere, it might just pass.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...
The slippery slope is the one the payment processors have been sliding down for a while. Steam and itch dont want to pull these games. They dont have a choice.
I recently got a notification from Flickr: You must now have the paid account (around $8 per month) to view 18+ content. I wonder if it's related.
What sort of leverage can a group like this realistically have on Visa and Mastercard? Can they really make a dent in their top line?
From what I understand it was more that they found a sympathetic ear in the management suite at Mastercard and Visa. They've been wanting to do this for some time but needed political cover.
Weaponized complaints to legal departments asking to enforce existing Terms & Conditions of Visa and Mastercard. It's a "squeaky wheel" problem.
Ideological alignment with the party in control of the US executive, legislative, and judicial branches gives groups like these quite a bit of leverage.
My guess is none, and that they are only used as a front for this. It really doesn't add up that a "grassroots org" from Australia that doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page can pressure Mastercard / Visa to pressure Steam to remove games. Makes zero sense.
EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point
The very idea of a store front for software needs to die. It’s a single strangle point that serves only to concentrate power and create a legal or regulatory target.
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
I'm curious, what do you imagine as the better alternative?
I guess every publisher could just sell direct to customers on their own website, but that wouldn't address this issue at all (it would make it even easier for payment processors to abuse their duopoly), while also severely damaging the discoverability of games.
And, considering that companies can already do this if they want but still choose to sell via a platform, I'm guessing there are several benefits beyond discoverability that I'm not thinking of.
Well we have a couple of problems on the table at the moment. Stop Killing Games is a good exemplar of one so I won't go there. But the other is "what happens if Steam goes evil?". Remember Google's old motto?
The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service. The distribution of it can remain wherever and you can go via a side channel if you want. But being tied to a platform is utterly wrong.
If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere. With Stream as the distributor, you can't. It's a single point of failure.
>The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service.
I agree, but that could still be done even when using a centralized distribution platform. I would say those are two separate issues. I think (not positive) that's the whole premise of GOG, isn't it?
>If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere.
Not really, though. If the payment processor stops doing business with your company, your shit out of luck. Instead of pressuring steam or whoever, they just pressure you directly. The single (well, double) point of failure always chains up to the payment processors.
How exactly does an independent developer have more choice or power against credit card processors alone? That's not how it works. Mega platforms have more power and still get pushed around. Indies are completely beholden to the whims of the payment platforms unless they opt out and accept crypto instead. Mega platforms could also accept crypto for controversial or all content too.
I guess the GP's plan is a scatter approach. 1 indie has no power, but if for every banned indie you have 10 more setting up payment, it becomes financially untenable to go after them all. Compared to, say, making one or two calls to Gabe. Turning it from a game of corruption to one of whack-a-mole.
Everyone is free to build their own website to market and distribute their games.
It's not the store, it's the cc companies.
The fact that we can let a duopoly of payment processors dictate the morals of our societies based on the morals of a few militant cluster B "concerned moms" is very very scary.
[dupe] Discussions:
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406
How do porn sites accept money then? Steam should just make a separate company for adult games and use the same payment methods as porn sites.
Also this reminds me of Apple that for example demanded Telegram to block adult channels (including non-porn channels where authors blog about their sex life) from AppStore's Telegram version.
Also if cryptocurrency were more popular and widespread, then banks would have less leverage to do this.
In discussions about this topic, in almost every place I see them, lots of people (against this censorship) are going "I don't play this kind of games" or "I don't personally care about tentacle fetish" (or whatever).
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
Nothing is wrong with it.
People are just accustomed to being insulted for willingly associating themselves with it, on the basis of imputed perversion, bad taste etc.
I think the main point is showing solidarity, even for content that does not directly benefit them. There's nothing wrong with sex and nudity, but everyone will have different personal lines in their day to day life.
>must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not?
I don't think war or violence is most people's thing to begin with.
Guns, that's definitely a thorny issue. Especially in the US. I'm personalyl fine with much stricter gun control
>we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
indeed. It's not the first wave, it won't be the last. Gotta do the same thing either way and push back.
It isnt sex and nudity in games but the other “content” people gloss over that is bundle in.
The other context is that global companies must cater to multiple countries cultures which conflict so they take the path of least resistance.
To be honest, the "other content" seems to be an excuse.
I don't buy the "multiple countries' cultures" excuse because this seems to be spearheaded by conservative groups from the Christian anglosphere, the same culture that produces these same games to begin with; and also: other cultures forbid depictions of explicit violence, alcohol, women without their heads covered or publicly disagreeing with their husbands, etc. I don't see a push to ban games which depict alcohol consumption or independent women, do you?
Let's call a spade a spade, and recognize this for what it is.
Also: there's absolutely nothing wrong with erotica in games. Just place it behind the same safety checks as violent games. If those don't work, then they also don't work for violent games, in which case: shall we ban all games with violence?
That's because people recognise that their self-control with regard to violence is solid, they know where the line is and won't have an urge to cross it, but with sex the story is different. Making this type of content mainstream will start a wildfire in our society. I believe this is the main reason why all religions are strict about sex, while at the same time very lax about violence (holy wars, the image of warrior, etc.)
after how many decades of freely available pornography will you accept this is just not based in reality?
Prostitution was legal and regulated by the catholic church as necessary and understandable evil for centuries, until 15th century. Even Thomas Aquinas (huge stickler) agreed. And why wouldn't it be? It was what common sense would tell you. Learned christians would understand sexual sins are far from the worst ones.
Also additional context, before the 12th century priests were allowed to marry and have children. It was taken away, to consolidate the church's property.
They want to fix the online hack that allows people to create their own sub culture and become financially independent with it
It is only just about controlling people, has nothing to do with porn
Otherwise they'd go after Valve for empowering and facilitating the biggest legal (disguised) online gambling market to minors (counter strike case gambling, steam cards and the whole marketplace)
Again, this is all about controlling individuals, they do not care about anything else, you can drink 1000L of Vodka a week, they won't care about your insignificant life
They have an agenda (digital wallet/ID), they'll do what ever it takes to make it happen
Just closed my dev acct (only had an old 2015 puzzle game I made, 2 sales, no huge deal personally), but decided to put my 4.57 where my mouth is (no payout, waaaaaaah, cuz 5 dollar minimum). And told them exactly why I am doing so.
Money talks, and it's one of the few ways I have to show my opposition. I hope others will do the same. It's sad, because itch is kinda one of the last few places for "indie" as a thing with the vibe of indies, at least (I mean they aren't Steam or the other big publishers). I'm surprised Epic didn't buy them out yet just like they did with Bandcamp. Probably next on the block.
I think you’re in your right to close your account, but itch has a public history[1] of generally being in agreement with you. Leafo talked about feeling a responsibility to host the unique and diverse content the platform holds. [2] This is further exemplified by deindexing/demonetizing adult content rather than swiftly deleting everything in a crass, cover-your-ass, manner.
It strikes me that they had a gun held to their head by a mobster. If itch didn’t comply, they’d lose all their revenue, and we’d lose the website in its entirety, which is much more than just smut.
Pushing back against the payment processors, rather than itch under duress, would have made money talk in the right direction. The difficulty in doing so is reflected in the discussion here.
[1] https://x.com/itchio/status/1478123227394150400 [2] https://youtu.be/9v4ppSSpb0I
It's not a slippery slope, they're targeting non-porn games literally right now. Detroit Become Human, a very well reviewed cinematic/adventure game especially among non-gamers was one of their targets.
From the subhed: "Even games that have nothing to do with sex or abuse have been caught in the dragnet."
Detroit: Become Human has abuse as significant element to its story. It came under attack from the "National Association of People Abused in Childhood" when it came out, and also from Collective Shout.
Should we only tell stories about good people respecting their fellows and living happy, wholesome, conflict-free lives?
By their own logic that association should disband, as their existence could remind people of their traumatic childhood experiences.
They might want to take a look in mirror and see what institutions have been involved in many such abuse cases in the past. Hint, it's not video game companies.
This amuses me, as my wife deals with trauma from childhood abuse, and she absolutely loved that game.
Much like some people with drug addictions love Disco Elysium, specifically because of the authenticity it has regarding substance abuse.
That was part of it, as well as the idea of an RPG that represents skills as essentially "shadow work". Very much helped me on my mental health journey!
My pro-fascist brother-in-law with massive social anxiety hated it for some reason..
It was such a masterpiece right up there with The Last Of Us.
The theme is about androids being abused by society, so I suppose answering that question gives insight into your views on what may happen decades from now in this pursuit of General AI.
Yeah that's exactly the kind of framing that I am against. "caught in the dragnet" implies that there was some kind of mistake. Surely they didn't mean to argue for banning these ones, they just want to target 'porn' games. Nevermind that this started as just targeting 'extreme porn', we'll continue to say that the critics criticizing them for doing the thing that they are doing right now as arguing slippery slope.
Same slope, also slippery: this thing is not limited to opinions of moral minorities, because payment processors are a weak point for government pressure. We already started: pressuring CBS to fire Colbert for political speech, pressuring Columbia to curb anti-genocide speech, etc etc. So wait until this same route -- pressuring visa/mc -- is used on any product or creator that's not doubleplus good newspeaking.
The government doesn't need to touch you to ruin you, if they can yank your payments.
For your kids, you can set up a child account where you can block content they can see, adult content included. Actually, it works for basic accounts as well, you can filter out adult content and don't have this kind of problem :)
There are a lot of people mentioning crypto as a possible solution to this, and a lot of people responding that crypto is a ponzi scheme, and they're not interested. But congress recently passed stablecoin legislation that could possibly fix this problem. Recipients would have a straightforward way of receiving money, and they wouldn't need to gamble on the price of bitcoin. Most people would probably still use a third part payment processor to handle the rough edges of managing money on the blockchain. But if any of them try to pull something like this it would be incredibly easy spin up a new processor and migrate accounts.
All stablecoins (at least popular ones) has the same underlying problem -- it's regulated and controlling entity can freeze any funds because it wants so
Yeah, but so can PayPal and Visa and Mastercard. The issue here is that payments is essentially a duopoly. Itch doesn't have any alternatives because they're locked into traditional payment rails. Stablecoins at least let someone else decide "Hey, you know what, I'm going to create a coin that can be used as payment for porn games." And executing on that is fairly straightforward.
I don’t know man , the porn games getting more and more weird is the slippery slope
When can we start banning christianity from different platforms? It's not an issue of separation of church and state as these are private companies. The blood on the hands of the church is well documented, not to mention the Catholic Church molesting so many children. Why can't we go after them as well?
I know people here love to hate it, and it's a very very controversial topic, but this here, is a good use case for Bitcoin [1]
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
It's not in this case. The payment processors were going to drop all support to these platforms if they didn't remove these games. Bitcoin could allow them to keep operating, but at the cost that now all users who want any games at all have to use Bitcoin. Mainstream platforms accepting Bitcoin as an option is fine and great, but few if any are going to want to only accept Bitcoin.
> Mainstream platforms accepting Bitcoin as an option is fine and great, but few if any are going to want to only accept Bitcoin.
For all of the talk (hype) about how crypto has the potential to avoid the exact type of meddling and manipulation and pressuring we’re seeing now, it surprises me that no equivalents to PayPal have really popped up - that best that can be done is apparently something along the lines of what Linux was on the desktop a decade or two ago. Basically, before Valve and others picked up the slack and worked on things your average person actually cares about - notably, gaming and simple(r) to use desktop environments and software stores.
Where’s the flagship platform for payments that’s built on crypto but lets you ignore the technical details, that’s trivial to implement as a merchant and is a download away on app stores? If there are a few of those, why would anyone bother with these puritan payment processors?
Isn't that what Monero is trying to do? Why can't I pay with Monero at the grocery store? Presumably because some gatekeeper that's in between me and the business has to decide whether it makes financial sense _to them_ whether to add Monero to the exclusive list of supported payment methods.
There are many actually, some extremely simple to use. The problem is that payers also need to use crypto and many people don't know how, but are instead used to paying with credit cards.
Using cryptocurrency would give them leverage in a future negotiation. The goal would not be to replace payments entirely with cryptocurrencies (they are pretty inefficient), but to reduce the monopolistic power of conventional payment processors and strike a better deal.
I would argue it's worth investing infrastructure into it, for the same reason that valve has invested infrastructure into linux to gain leverage over microsoft. Without leverage, negotiations get ugly: see the Epic vs Apple saga.
If Steam dropped Visa and Mastercard and successfully got most of their customers to use a Bitcoin payment processor instead, wouldn't these organizations just pressure that processor? I don't see how it would be any different. If the problem you're trying to solve is that private payment processors can deny service to anyone they don't like, the underlying technology the processor uses is irrelevant.
Bitcoin does not require any payment processor. That's its whole point: censorship-resistant, permissionless, p2p payment system.
Bitcoin won't require a payment processor, but companies wanting to effectively handle Bitcoin will want a payment processor or else they will have to become one themselves.
Even companies working in large amounts of cash end up hiring companies to handle the cash logistics and all the other complications in dealing with it.
I am not sure why any middle man is needed to "effectively" handle Bitcoin.
It is a very liquid asset - easy to move and easy to sell.
You want to handle refunds, fraud, money laundering, chargebacks... That stuff is really hard, and if it's not your main line of business, you really don't want to do it. And if you don't have a payment processor do it, and you don't do it yourself, criminals will scam your customers and use your platform to commit fraud and launder money and you will get in hot water with the law.
Bitcoin can be used as currency for occasional transactions between individuals. But you don't want your business to depend on it. It doesn't scale, not due to technological reasons, but because of legal issues and customer experience expectation.
Sure - you can (and probably should) outsource your non-core business like accounting, accounts receivables etc. but it is not payment processing.
Bitcoin adoption is a chicken and egg problem. But my guess is that censoring porn creates a very big incentive for people to start using it.
[flagged]
There's still a lot of work in managing the custody of all that cryptocurrency safely and securely from a business perspective.
It's the same thing as a company needing a building for their factory. They decide they don't want to pay rent anymore, they're going to control their own properties they own themselves now. But the business of managing the property now falls to the business to do. So even when companies own their own properties they often end up hiring a property management company to deal the the day to day operations of running a commercial property. Because in the end they don't want to have to worry about their janitorial contracts, handling elevator certifications, landscaping contracts, maintenance techs, etc. They want to focus on producing widgets.
Same thing with hosting a digital storefront. Sure one could spend all the time managing servers on your own offices and ensure good uptime and security and what not, or you can just sign up for Shopify or others and they'll manage it all for you. If managing servers and software stacks and digital security isn't your main business competency, why get into it?
Most companies won't want to deal the logistics of handling crypto. So they'll often outsource that work, because I'm the end they want to focus on selling widgets not handling payments. For the same kinds of reasons why they'll hire a company to do cash logistics.
Do you need to hire payment processor to accept crypto? No. But in the end you will need to do that work though.
I'm not the reason why people choose these big centralized services. I'm not that powerful. They choose them because they see value in the services they offer. Not everyone wants to be their own bank.
Well I think the advantage is that the cryptocurrency payment processors are interchangeable. But your point mostly stands
Bitcoin existing is not going to make Itch.io not want to accept payments via Visa.
Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.
>Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.
I agree with this point but I don't agree with the premise. I don't really care about the censorship of porn, but it is a slippery slope to censorship in general. If you give them an inch they will take a mile.
I think there is sometimes a business justification of putting your foot in the ground, even if the short term consequences are harsh.
I’m not making a value judgement here. Just looking at it from the point of view of a business.
> Porn is a tiny market.
I'm not sure I agree. In the context of gaming, perhaps, but most of the Internet traffic is basically pornography.
When I say market here I mean something people pay for, where producers can convince people to spend money.
I’m quite sure there is not a lot of people paying for porn. The money people are making surely comes from ads and data hoarding.
Don’t you have to create a distinct payment channel (on-chain transaction) for every person you pay over Lightning? Or am I misunderstanding things?
Third-parties take care of this bureaucracy for you. Check out the Phoenix wallet, for example.
(Unaffiliated, I hold some pocket money on there not to run a Lightning node myself)
The on-chain transaction is just to "fund" a channel between two parties. These two parties can then make unlimited trasnfers between each other instantaneously for free. These nodes are organised in a network and can relay payment from other nodes as well. It's a bit like the Internet. You don't need to peer with everybody, you just need a path from A to B.
If you and I have a channel funded with 100 sat, we can move these around as many times as we wish, even on behalf of others, but if you need to transfer more than you have on your side, you need to fund the channel with another on-chain transaction. That's where the Phoenix 1% fee comes from, as they deal with this exact problem for you, so you don't have to worry about it.
>Third-parties take care of this bureaucracy for you. Check out the Phoenix wallet, for example.
Sort of defeats the purpose then, doesn't it? Why not just make lightning payments directly from your bitcoin exchange?
In the case of Phoenix, you have semi-custody - i.e. control over your coin, and it can't be taken from you. There are other non-custodial wallets (Wallet of Satoshi) which are like an exchange - so they can rug pull you anytime just as Paypal can.
Ah, I see
No. You can route through other people on the network, so you just need a path to the person through others.
The fact that the majority of validators caved to sanctions from us means bitcoin is not gonna cut it esp if uncle sam gets involved. Pro crypto folks want to stay on the up and up due to trying to change the negative view of it.
I personally worked in the crypto payment processing space and we had to say no to many very well known porn companies for this reason.
Random thoughts:
* anything using proof-of-work is still gonna be a hard sell * good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD without ever having to give a shit about the constantly-fluctuating value of BTC * fun times ahead when you get big enough for the government to notice you and start requiring you to comply with all kinds of arcane regulations
1. Proof-of-work is a feature.
2. Just do the conversion at the time of sale.
3. Government prohibition and restriction of our rights is a terrible problem and it's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. It's a necessary fight if only to keep government power in check, unless one really believes the State is always right and always has our best interest in mind. I don't.
The colossal amount of energy burnt by proof-of-work is one of the reasons people who are not cryptobros loathe crypto.
>good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD
I think it works out fine with fixed/float exchanges. These are exchanges that let you agree on a fixed exchange rate for a small (<=%1 fee) or trade at a floating exchange rate. The fee covers the price risk
Also - like... I absolutely hate cryptocurrency, but if this is what it comes to, then make that a payment option, and leave up the "bad naughty legal stuff" for us consenting adults to decide (but I know, it won't be legal for long as these reactionaries keep pummeling away at free speech while using the rhetoric of 'Free Speech' to gain further control of communication systems).
This is somewhat tangential: people are debating a lot whether porn has negative effects, but has anyone thought about or studied positive effects? I personally think it's more likely for porn to have positive effects and that it's preferable to sexual deprivation. Horny and sexually deprived people tend to sometimes do awful things like sexual harassment or even rape, but if they have access to porn, they're much less likely to do those things.
You just described the problem. You want men to be pacified through their screen rather than engaging with real women.
You aren't the only one who seems to think this way though, we have more things than ever to pacify men and even increase estrogen and decrease testosterone probably because some believe that men are inherently dangerous.
Based on https://blog.osum.com/steam-market-share/ (no idea how accurate) Steam holds 75% market share. One could make an argument that it may be a gatekeeper to the market and should be more closely regulated for commercial and free speech reasons.
For those who think this is about just banning adult content, think again. What's actually happening is any content disliked by certain billionaires is being flagged by payment providers under their influence.
Some examples, like this one are for porn but the same approach could be used for anything even remotely controversial.
Anyway, maybe Witcher 3 could be next. Great game, but it happens to have some sex scenes, so....
where are mid-00s Anonymous when you need them
https://archive.is/enjt7
So, wait, Apple is bad, is abusing a monopoly etc., if Apple disallows certain things on their platform
But Visa & Mastercard can get away with it for decades with abandon?? Dictating EVERYTHING in EVERY economy and on EVERY store?!
With graphics being so realistic now I’ve always wanted a “AAA” porn game. Why don’t we have one yet? It can’t be lack of demand. Hell build a light RPG around it and it will sell in the millions.
imo nothing wrong with a platform deciding what content it wants to host.
But there’s also nothing wrong with allowing this type of content. Who wants to help me build an uncensored game distribution platform? We could call it Steamy.
Yes, but it's not the platform really making the decision in this case. It's their payment processor
The mistake is thinking about payment processors as a "platform". They're not. They're critical infrastructure operating in an environment with low competition, and them denying service — beyond what is illegal within a certain jurisdiction — is more a kin to your electricity company denying service because they don't like that you use their electricity to power a device to watch porn. I think everyone would agree that to be crazy.
Incest rape simulators, zoophilia, lolicon?
I think this stuff has no place on 'normal' store fronts like Steam and Itch. It should be on an 18+ only store front at the very least.
The movie rental stores, back when they existed, used to have a room behind a curtain that adults could access.
And they wouldn't be selling zoophilia/lolicon/incest pornography.
The solution to those who would like to play porn games is not relying on developers to make them or Steam to host them but using an LLM to build them for you, and your SSD to host them.
Here's the list of removed games. It's worth a look.
https://bannedgames.netlify.app/
Porn games on Steam and itch are tacky af but they don’t push them on me and I sort of just ignore them. That being said they should probably sell them on different website.
Itch has been "that different website" for pretty much all its existence. If itch isn't safe, I don't know who is. Epic doesn't really allow any of that, and GOG is still pretty picky on any submission.
DLSite is another good site but that was hit last year by this.
> That being said they should probably sell them on different website.
Why? (Genuinely)
Why are filters not sufficient? If I enjoy adult games and non-adult games, why should I have to manage two storefronts?
Because filters do not work well at all and because these platforms want to make parents feel like it is ok for kids to be on them. Imagine if youtube had an “onlyfans” creator filter. That would never work.
The reality is you are not the only customer or market. While you may find it to work well enough for you, myself along with many others do not.
They absolutely work. I'm a parent, my kid plays games. I have yet to have any concerning close calls with NSFW content. People who make adult games (by and large) don't want kids to play their games.
If the platform doesn't want kids to see them, and the creators don't want kids to see them, it's pretty easy for kids to not see them.
If creators, platforms, and users all say, I would prefer to not see the content, it's pretty easy to make that happen.
I'm assuming this is driven by stakeholders in the legacy porn business prompted to anticompetitive action by generative AI tools seriously threatening their monopoly on sexual content for the first time. There has always been a huge barrier to entry into porn for non-seedy, non-abusive, and mentally stable people. Art-based content like games are both much easier to create without a human trafficking network and are usually far more wholesome than the prevalent legacy porn tropes, which often center around incest, coercion, chauvinistic infidelity or miscegenation, and other disgusting themes. I am hoping there are people archiving this content for future sociological study.
The bitter truth is that the tech world's libertarian allergy to collective action is exactly why stuff like this keeps happening.
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
Protesting only works when the media is on your side. I doubt the media would take your side on this one.
>If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine.
Okay. If you have any wisdom or ideas, I'd love to hear them. But as is, this comment is about as effective as mine on fighting Visa/Mastercard. "Just come together and yell at Steam!"
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm ignorant of it. The big issue of the internet is that we are all scattered very wide and that makes it harder to collect ourselvves under one goal. And as of now, I'm a laid off tech worker (who doesn't live in SF) who has no real capital to contribute to such a cause. I feel powerless.
I don't want to sound patronizing, but how would you break the task of forming an activist group down into manageable chunks?
That's what I was essentially asking. I'd want to start with small actions that feel realistic. I know it's not gonna just pop up overnight, so more reason to break it down.
If none of us know, then the next alternative is "can we point to any existing organizations to throw support at"? Or at the very least, an adjacent organization who can tell us steps to take?
It's something anyone can teach themselves.
The basic sequence is simple:
Set up a Discord. Market it to attract a handful of early adopters. Run a book club using Organizing for Social Change[1] or Beautiful Trouble[2]. Along the way, you build shared language and alignment. People start to get a feel for tactics: collective letter campaigns, pressure targeting, framing, etc.
By the time you wrap the first book, you’ll have a core group with a working vocabulary and some trust. You’ll know how to set up a continuous recruitment and onboarding loop. You’ll be ready for a second round of action. For example, something sharper, louder, more public-facing. From there, it's just iteration after iteration.
The most important seed is a vision holder, someone whose primary job is building solid relationships and gradually offloading the core functions: facilitation, comms, outreach, tech, and education. Don't worry. You don't need money and you don’t need credentials. You need consistency above all, social fluency, emotional and logistical endurance, and a bit of luck.
Trust me when I say it's not easy, but the overhead is basically zero. The only real cost is showing up (again and again and again).
1. https://www.amazon.com/Organizing-Social-Change-Bobo-Kendall...
2. https://orbooks.mybigcommerce.com/beautiful-trouble-paperbac...
>The only real cost is showing up (again and again and again).
If people could show up once on thr right day, we woildnt be in such a situation. Persistence is key, but I think we can both recognize how flaky modern society is.
These are good steps, but this is definitely something that should have started in 2019/2020, not 2025. I just hope it's not too late.
The libertarian solution has been to use cryptocurrency for payments. The problem is that only libertarians want to use cryptocurrency, and most people don't care.
This is one (of many) reasons why moving away from cash is bad.
We shouldn't be privatising money.
EU introduced their own solution, but I still don't see it
Same as it ever was…
https://americansongwriter.com/remember-the-filthy-fifteen-4...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Modern neuroscience provides enough evidence to argue older generations “synced” early on to ideals of the past. They memorized some modern syntax and semantics but still align as individuals with puritanical social and tyrannical political practices of old. Not entirely their fault, it’s biology.
Not something the next generations have to tolerate however. Physics is clearly ageist.
I have always found it odd that whenever pornography comes up the degree to which people defend it in all forms. It is uncomfortably telling but also completely misses why this is happening.
Itch.io is heavily saturated with anime porn games along with steam to the point I find both difficult to navigate even with nsfw filters turned on. Turning those filters off and it is pretty egregious the volume of it all let alone subject matter. I dont care about porn but the platforms have done a piss poor job for the majority of people who are not looking for porn games but find games like cyberpunk totally acceptable. How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?
This is happening because it was too easy for someone to pull up the home page on said platforms and point to several incest porn games. Using payment processors is not a solution i favor but people cannot find that experience acceptable.
On a personal note, i dont want to live in a society that deems it acceptable to have a “no incest” filter for games. That is line for me and not for religion but because I find incest disgusting.
> How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?
There are filter by tags too. Works pretty well to filter out like all anime or hentai games.
I like my game platforms how I like my streaming platforms. One for explicitly porn, and another for explicitly not porn. GoT on netflix while spicy is not porn. The issue is mixing porn with not porn. I shouldnt have to go click a bunch of special porn tags to not see that shit on the home page. I like anime games but cant seem to keep them without the hentai. Poor experience.
The fact the default is porn games in your home page IS the issue. It gives all this ammunition for xyz group to do whatever.
The politics of payment processors being the bad guys is nonsense. They have to bow down to too many governments to play ball so will always take the politically expedient option. Almost all bitcoin validators bowed down to us sanctions banning wallet addresses for example. That cat has been out of the bag for years.
Porn games are never ever visible by default on Steam. They were always opt-in.
And no, Steam don't mess them up with Cyberpunk.
That is not true. Very often i find porn games not filtered out so does my partner. Which is once again, why having distinct store fronts would have solved this. No system is perfect in tag this tag that so it is better to be explicit with it so things do not leak. This is what happens when you mix it. The xyz groups get ammunition.
Can you imagine if youtube launched an onlyfans like filter to allow nsfw content?
Are you absolutely sure you and your partner not changed default content filtering preferances on Steam?
Because Steam literally have settings in "Home > Account -> Store preferences -> Mature Content Preferences" with following options:
> Some Nudity or Sexual Content. Games or content that contain some nudity or sexual themes, but not as the primary focus.
This is where basically 99.9% of your normal games belong even if they have sex in them.
> Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content. Games or content that primarily feature nudity or sexual themes. By ticking this box you affirm that you are at least eighteen years old.
This is where all the sex VN slop belong.
> Adult Only Sexual Content. Games or content that are sexually explicit or graphic and are intended for adults only. By ticking this box you affirm that you are at least eighteen years old.
And this is porn.
I'm absolutely sure that "Adult Only Sexual Content" is disabled by default and pretty sure "Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content" disabled too.
Few questions I think we need to address at some point.
Why is there so much demand for these games?
Why do we think government intervention is the solution in this domain but not others?
Why is there so much demand for these games???
To the point where the only way to stop people from playing them is making them illegal.
Is anyone else worried about this??? I am!
All the real hentai trash is on DLsite anyway. These people probably have no idea, and even if they did, they're powerless to change Japan. They'd definitely give up after encountering Kanji.
...sweet summer child visa is hitting DLSite hard https://cs.dlsite.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500002888202-What-p... actually it seems all the major western credit card players have already blocked them. i remember seeing pay with crypto so i guess thats what you need to use in the west
Another framing of this: Mastercard / Visa, and by extension whomever had them to do the crackdown, are now powerless to change DLSite.
Googling for news, it seems like the story between DLSite and M/V is a push and pull. Many articles turn up that say they have an agreement, then a disagreement, then an agreement again, then a suspension, then they bring it back again etc.
My point here is that their relationship with M/V seems to have failed to actually change them, so, the point "they're powerless to change Japan" stands.
It's not just dlsite, Visa is on killing spree in Japan https://automaton-media.com/en/news/access-to-adult-pc-games... - see links to other cases
As for objectification of women: https://automaton-media.com/en/news/credit-card-restrictions...
I see the assault, but the results are very different from what we can see with Steam and itch.io - I think maybe because of how much M/V matter in the West vs. Japan. Whereas these western companies gave in to pressure, the same pressure in Japan didn't work, the stores just seemed to restrict the card usage, and call it a day.
I wish other payment processors spread in the West. With a much more even distribution of power, they could not abuse it like this (and others could not use them to abuse it like this).
No shit, people just use a different credit card, instead of the site pulling a game or shuttering, because these groups have no power beyond pestering Visa.
Not that anyone saying "sweet summer child" ever had anything smart to say.
"i remember seeing pay with crypto so i guess thats what you need to use in the west"
In other words you know nothing and couldn't be bothered to look it up before posting.
More caving to the ultra-religious pearl grippers who just have nothing better to do than tell others how to live.
All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
No problems with violent imagery in TV and cinema either. In fact some of the most popular shows and movies are full of it.
Not that I agree with censoring that (I don’t), but the double standard is puzzling.
You answered your own question - if you go after shows with the popularity of game of thrones or games with the popularity of grand theft auto you will fail.
They have picked their battle.
It's not just mature content... there have been efforts to reduce the ability to legally purchase firearms as well as suppression of prominent social media figures. Not just the CC companies, but even the larger payment processors like Stripe/Paypal etc. are all doing it for different categories.
There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.
> There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.
I used to work for a fintech. As new employee I had coffee with a colleague who explained KYC, AML, and other compliance topics to me. They mentioned that marijuana businesses can't bank their money due to these considerations as it would make banks knowing accomplices to the federal crime of trafficking a controlled substance. This threat is material because cannabis, unlike adult content, is actually illegal, so I don't think it's a substantially similar example to what's mentioned in this thread.
I understand that cannabis is slightly different, but my other examples aren't.
This is being pushed by an Australian Feminist organization, not the American Religious Right.
The group bills themselves as feminist, but aligns with the religious right in most of their policies. They’re directly at odds with many things feminists have fought for.
I agree completely that they align with the religious right in this aspect, but you can't pretend that sex-negativity isn't a huge school of thought in feminism. Vague calls to "stop the sexualization of women in media (aimed at hetrosexual men)" have been a huge part of the casual feminist suite of views for at least a decade.
There exist sex-negative feminists, but it is wrong to describe that as a feminist position.
For the better part of a decade feminists have been wildly anti-objectification, not anti-sex. It's an important distinction.
For example, most modern feminists are pro sex-work, but only under conditions that guarantee safety, autonomy, and health care for the sex workers. That's very different from how most sex work is done today. So a modern feminist might say that we should be doing more to protect the sex workers who are held in bondage by a pimp, and forced to walk the streets while simultaneously arguing in favor of well regulated, protected brothels or private sex work.
But the specific organization we're discussing is not feminist, they only disguise themselves as such.
No true feminist...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
The "no true Scotsman" dismissal doesn't work when it's actually not a Scotsman.
Or, as in this case, it's not a feminist organization.
You can't really say that, there are many variations; for example, the women advocating for prohibition of alcohol way back in the day were feminists. Socially, their views would be more aligned with this Australian organization.
But that'd be damning: these views (banning alcohol) of some of the early feminist movements are hopelessly outdated. Alignment with them would make Collective Shout conservative... and aligned with today's religious right, as I'm arguing all along.
It's interesting that you equate opposition to sexualization of women in media with sex negativity. One does not necessarily imply the other. You can be sex positive and believe that media sexualizes women to a problematic degree.
Can you give me an example of this? As far as I understand it sex positivity doesn't seem to be concerned with "media sexualizing women" in and of itself. Consequently I'm not sure what "media [that] sexualizes women to a problematic degree" is or would even look like.
It has to do with agency, primarily. Is the character in the media given the agency and depth necessary to support their sexual appetites? Or are they treated like an object by the camera, a 2 dimensional cutout whose purpose is only to be an object.
Compare, for example, Sex and the City, where 4 women were regularly engaged in a variety of sexual encounters and say, background dancers in a music video or advert that exist to appeal as objects to a male audience.
I've definitely seen people say it's about agency, though exactly what they mean by that and why they think that matters tends to vary. That said, I suspect your response is in line with the person I was originally responding to.
In a different context I might be more sympathetic to this specific formulation of the concept since it's not always clear how much agency the background dancers in a music video or advert have. However, on the original topic of video games, the notion of "character agency" is rather pernicious.
In a videogame, I can think of some examples.
In Kotor 2, there's a character called "The Handmaiden", who will join your party if the player character is a male. She talks at great length about her situation and the decisions the player should make. She's depicted as a chaste, virginal religious character. But one of the very first things you can do with her when she joins your party is spar with her. And she strips into black lingerie to do so. Then she stays in black lingerie on your ship while you go and do other stuff.
She's clearly there as an object for the audience to drool over. It's given a very surface level justification ("we always spar with only our bodies"), but that justification is provided the instant before the player sees her in her undies. (Which, it's important to note, aren't like modest undergarments one might expect from a religious figure like this, but are specifically sexy underwear.)
Compare this to another Star Wars game, Jedi: Fallen Order, where the Night Sister Mirrin can becomes romantically involved with the player character. She has a well developed culture, and is given space to articulate her personality, choices, and opinions in a cogent way. She can be a romantic interest without being an object. She is as complex as all the other characters, and we don't see her positioned in sexy lingerie suddenly out of the blue.
I can come up with other examples if those aren't illustrative.
No, that's fine, since I think it's not only the case that these are sufficient, but that I simply wasn't explicit enough in my rejection.
What I'm disputing is any application of objectification theory to media analysis wherein there are no actual agents involved. Neither The Handmaiden nor Night Sister Mirrin ever possessed any agency, nor were they deprived of it. There is simply no moral valence in how one treats or regards them.
The demand here is that they be treated as if they possessed agency. I see no reason or obligation to do so.
There's a reason I wrote "casual feminist suite of views" because while they two are very closely linked they are indeed separate.
It's unfathomable that an Australian Feminist organization wields this much power in the U.S. and globally. It seems more likely that this is a front.
The processors had this bias for decades. Some calls that already conform to what they want to do needs less nudging than proper consumer rights.
You're not wrong. I read a couple days ago that this group receives funding from evangelical organizations to do stunts like this. I don't know if the intention is to false flag feminists as responsible, but it sure seems like it.
I believe they get funding from evangelical orgs though
and you have to assume MasterCard is willing and cooperating here to some extent
I see Mormon(LDS) churches occasionally mentioned on these topics. The Australian cult angle had only surfaced during the last week or so.
You may want to take a look at how feminist that organization actually is.
There is a huge sex-negative feminist school of thought, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I never declared it doesn’t exist?
Let me respond with your attacking-style:
Just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s representative of feminism at large. It doesn’t mean it’s not a conservative think tank hiding behind a veil of feminism.
These days there seems to be a fair bit of sex-inconsistent feminism.
With something like OnlyFans, where there's money to be made, the 'sex work is real work!' slogan comes out. And there's a reluctance to criticise big porn sites even after claims of links to sex trafficking etc.
But at the same time, scantily-clad videogame characters designed to appeal to the male gaze are deemed unacceptable/objectifying/regressive. And 'sex robots' are seen as a horrifying prospect.
There's a range of views from a range of people, that's no surprise. That said, the common perception of men who pay for sex work (especially OF) is extremely negative, they are marks who deserve it. Meanwhile there is no such perception of men who pay for traditional media.
> There is a huge sex-negative feminist school of thought, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The specific organization we're discussing is not feminist. It's religious conservative, using some of the trappings of feminism.
Is it? The religious conservative organizations I've seen are also wringing their hands over other media as well such as smut or that shitty netflix show, while this one appears to be ambivalent to supportive.
> Is it?
Yes, it is.
Let me see: they seem to receive funding from evangelical organizations; the founder speaks/writes at Christian venues and is pro-life, anti-gay/trans; they are targeting games because that's what they happen to focus on right now. They've also campaigned against Rap music and artists in the past. They managed to get articles critical of them pulled from VICE, etc. Their modus operandi is typical of religious conservatives.
> This is being pushed by an Australian Feminist organization, not the American Religious Right.
The founder is Christian and writes and speaks in Christian venues and publications.
She's not a "feminist" by any reasonable and modern definition of the word.
Being Christian does not mean one is not feminist. This person seems to advocate for a multitude of things including ones that are historically feminist (of at least one commonly accepted variety of feminism). Those advocations make it reasonable to call her a feminist.
I didn't mean that one cannot be a Christian and a feminist.
I meant that this person chooses Christian venues to voice her opinions, and shares with them non-feminist values such as being "pro life", etc.
Hers is not a feminist organization, and Collective Shout is perceived by some as a right-wing group seeking to also ban LGTB+ depictions in videogames (which is not standard feminist agenda). Like another commenter mentioned, Collective Shout receives funding from evangelical organizations. And really, you have to ask yourself: since when exactly payment processors paid any attention to what genuine feminist organizations had to say about anything?
At some point you cannot ignore the evidence anymore. At best you can point the non-empty intersection of conservative Christian groups and some sex-negative feminists who both seek to ban pornography, but this doesn't make them the same thing.
TL;DR this is a variation of "will somebody think of the children!?" pearl-clutching, and everyone should know by now it doesn't lead to anything good.
It seems to me that people are waking up to the fact that tolerance seems to be a suckers game. The only way to maintain the social capital you have is to go on offense because at least recently it seems like the people screaming for tolerance don't actually have any once they become culturally ascendant. Though maybe it was always thus.
I find the overall discussion on this topic interesting, but it feels like we could emphasise a bit more how this is related with the transition of discourse from freedom to righteousness. In this context, arguing the fairness of being free is just an admission that freedom is now a secondary line of argumentation. As an outsider to the US, it also seems a bit ironic to my uninformed eyes that a heavily liberal part of the society effectively and efficiently co opted the fairness, equality, morality vector to drive an agenda of less liberalism in the interest of winning against non liberal movements.
payment processors shouldn't even be a thing; it should between the store and the customer. period.
I don't particularly like bitcoin, but isn't that one route for them?
We need cash payment as a service
On July 29 2022, Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California held that Brown Rudnick had adequately alleged facts in the Fleites v. MindGeek case that Visa engaged in a criminal conspiracy with MindGeek to monetize child pornography. Judge Carney also granted the plaintiff discovery that will reveal the relationships between the hundreds of allegedly sham organizations and the secret owners behind this alleged criminal trafficking internet platform.
what's so bad about human sexuality that it always needs to be censored?
I see what you did there
Why isn't there another counter group putting pressure on them to not pull this kind of thing?
Because it's slightly/majority embarrassing. The groups backing this ban will find the worst of the worst thing, and paint you as a massive supporter. And their militant zealots will endanger your life if you become significant enough.
It takes a certain kind of person to stand up for pornography. And most are not that kind of person.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
You can defend porn while not defending incest.
Keep all the porn that is great. But there has to be a line somewhere and even the most accepting countries have a line.
Often the groups defending porn are defending the most egregious stuff which makes it hard for people to support.
The anti-capitalist left is disorganized and under-funded a priori.
Part of the left sees porn as abuse, so at a minimum they do not care about porn or may even support banning porn.
The Trump admin wants to ban porn outright so this is just an appetizer.
and yet people still refuse to understand the utility of bitcoin/lightning protocol in relation to situations like this (or cutting donations to Greenpeace or Wikileaks)
Crypto uses more power than Generative AI with fewer users. A much easier solution is to use the law to classify the payment processors as common carriers.
Bitcoin is not useful for buying steam games, steam ended up that particular experiment due to it ... not being useful.
It's unfortunate because there really isn't anything anyone can do except wait for regulation or try raising awareness/usage of crypto payments or cash by mail
how do all these other adult sites get away with charging premium subscriptions?
Porn sites use smaller special purpose payment processors that have higher fees. It makes sense for porn sites because they only sell sexual content. If Valve and itch used those same payment processors, they'd be paying the higher premiums on all transactions, including those for nonsexual content (i.e. that vast majority of their transactions). It just doesn't make sense for them from a financial perspective.
In many countries, the sale of alcohol is restricted because the majority agrees that it is harmful to society. The same should be done with pornographic content. However, we are only beginning to learn how to efficiently limit it. Things like this will happen, but it will improve over time. Overall, I see positive progress here.
That's to stop children from accessing it while this stops anyone from doing so. The two aren't equivalent.
I'm not sure I understand you. For example in Norway, alcohol is forbidden for everyone at specific times (https://www.thenorwegianstandard.com/article/alcohol-in-norw...). Which "stops anyone from doing so".
I don’t understand people who defend porn access. Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs. We regulate gambling, paid access to porn is worse. Furthermore it is fraught with misogyny and exploitation and objectification of women. Would you defend ISIS games on Steam promoting Taliban-style patriarchy? Porn is worse.
> Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs.
This comparison alone soundly defeats your argument. Prohibition of hard drugs has been a spectacular failure, directly resulting in increased rates of death, disease, and crime, and elevating drug cartels to enormous international influence.
The danger of porn as an addictive substance - which is very real as you point out - is a great argument against its prohibition.
They are targeting incest/rape games. I wouldn't call that 'LGBTQ' like some people seem to imply. If Itch and Steam don't want to police their store fronts _before_ the law gets involved, then I am not surprised that other businesses such as payment providers will choose not to work with them.
Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.
> _before_ the law gets involved
There's no law (as of now). If there was a law, Valve would happily de-list these things. For example, a recent custom map for Mount and Blade that was banned in South Korea: https://automaton-media.com/en/news/valve-cooperates-in-bann...
This is my entire point: Valve and Itch do not police their store fronts (Itch actually does, it won't allow any games it thinks are 'hatred' but other content is OK) and now the payment processors think the risk is too great.
I think one solution for Valve/Itch to continue with the 'no policing policy' is for governments to step in and say all video games needed classification like films do.
I think a few of these video games that are sold would be found to breaking some law if anyone cared to test it.
Steam's storefront is actually policed somewhat, their rules are simply not the same as the ones you want them to have.
> governments to step in and say all video games needed classification like films do.
Valve and (I believe) Itch are both US companies. In the US, films are not required to get a rating anymore.
Have you heard of a television show called "Game of Thrones". It featured live actors, real humans with human bodies, acting out representations of incest and rape. And positive representations at that. It was a worldwide phenomenon and hundreds of millions of people probably watched it. It's still available to buy and sell GoT and related merchandise and payment providers don't bat an eye.
Video games don't even involve actual human bodies like GoT does. It's crazy that "Collective Shout" thinks this is worth invoking violence and violating peoples volition for. Certainly not consistent with all other aspects of entertainment in society. Makes me think there are probably other fame, power and money motivations behind their behavior. But it doesn't explain people agreeing with them. That's the weirdest part of this.
"It was a worldwide phenomenon and hundreds of millions of people probably watched it." - this is what explains why GOT is not the one getting taken down. Collective Shout is picking battles it can win.
Collective Shout also actively targets games like Detroit: Become Human that are hardly 'incest/rape games'.
And that game is still available. Hardly evidence that payment providers are targeting all 'NSFW' or adult games.
I think what that tells you is that there are still limits to what collective shout is able to do, hence why GTA is still for sale but the fringe porn games aren't
I think I missed the part where Valve or these games were in violation of any laws.
MasterCard/VISA clearly think the risk is there.
The problem is that they are opting to ban all games labeled “NSFW”, not just rape/incest games.
Itch is only doing this in the short term as they don't have enough time to go through all of the NSFW games on their platform.
And 4chan is only introducing the Captcha until the spam stops
Porn is a massive cash cow for itch, they are very incentivised to get the NSFW stuff up again asap
They should consider banning sale of the Bible and Game of Thrones from Amazon as well
My free speech red line is criticism of govt and leaders. Ban all the porn games ya want, I don't think they're very valuable.
When did pornography become protected speech?
Pornography is the canary in the coalmine of protected speech. When you give a group the ability to censor content on the basis of "obscenity", then that group and other groups can use this to label other subjects they don't like as obscene. LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this, as it is often made the case that being gay or trans is only about sex. You don't have to consume pornography yourself in order to benefit from a society that allows it.
> LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this,
Exactly, the Heritage Foundation doesn't define porn the same way a reasonable person might. From Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".
Yeah it's easy to see that Heritage would just ban Celeste, or any allegory about LGBT existence.
I don't think LBGTQ+ are too harmed by the removal of "Sex adventures Incest Family" or "Interactive Sex Mother Son Incest BDSM" or "Reincarnation adventure going to rape all NPCS VR" front he steam store. I don't think too many LGBTQ like to include rapists or incest adventures into their group. I could be wrong though.
I agree with you in that most LGBTQ+ folks don't like being grouped in with incest-promoting games, but that's exactly what MasterCard and Visa are doing by forcing platforms to indiscriminately remove adult content.
It should be up to individual platforms to moderate this content on a case by case basis, not the payment processors.
It doesn’t matter how much entirely non-porn queer content there is. The folks behind the payment processor pressure campaigns view Heartstopper and Pride Puppy! as just as immoral and depraved as the stuff you mentioned.
>When did pornography become protected speech?
A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, 1966 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=101895573599950...)
Miller v. California, 1973 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=287180442152313...)
Jenkins v. Georgia, 1974 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=106399862265120...)
-- https://reason.com/2019/10/04/pornography-is-protected-by-th...
> Ban all the porn games ya want, I don't think they're very valuable.
Ban all the games, I don't think videogames are very valuable.
Ban all TV shows, I don't think TV shows are very valuable.
Ban all televised sports, I think sports are very boring and not very valuable.
In fact, ban all the things I don't particularly find valuable.
Strictly speaking this isn't a conventional free speech issue since the government isn't involved here, just private businesses.
That said, there's a de facto duopoly on payment processing that gives these companies near government-level power to dictate terms. Realistic alternatives don't exist and would be insanely hard to start.
That's already happening though. There's a bunch of quid pro quo for speech curtailment in the media right now. Hell, just this week Colbert lost his spot to appease the administration for the Paramount + Skydance merger. Even if it's not direct to the little guys and it's just quid-pro-quo, it's just them being smart enough to make it seem more palatable. It's the same thing.
Since when has protected speech required being valuable? And who made you the pronouncer of said value?
> Since when has protected speech required being valuable?
For this specific topic in the US, it's necessary. The third prong of the Miller Test is "Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
The three-pronged Miller test is for examining if something is obscene, which is a considerably narrower criteria than whether or not a given piece of free speech is worthy of protection. Speech does not need to be 'valuable' to be worthy of protection, it needs to have a specific lack of value as determined by the Miller test to not be protected. Big difference.
In what world is artistic expression not free speech? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean its not protected.
>My free speech red line is criticism of govt and leaders.
Doesn't sound like you support free speech at all then if this is your red line. Criticism of politicians is needed to keep them in line. Being about to criticize the US government is true freedom.
Text is fairly comparable with speech, so it's be reasonable to argue that a pornographic novel is 'speech'.
Not so sure about 4K video footage, though. Or videogames. That's more a 'freedom of art' issue.