I’m gonna go in hard with a controversial opinion here: saying things like “what the fuck do I pay you for” to your employees is toxic and unprofessional, and the moment my boss would raise their voice to like that is the moment I’d start looking for a new job.
Pretty sure the man was hired to drive the point home specifically for less moderation, not more, so him presenting that opinion goes in direct opposition to the wishes of the client he represents.
Doesn’t make it less toxic or unprofessional mind you, but I’d probably have told my counsel to go fuck themselves too if they presented a point that went against my exact wishes
Hey, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this or not, but… there’s pornography on Steam.
I haven’t actually. But now I understand why Steam asks for my birthday over and over. It’s surprising that people don’t complain about that more. All the new age verification laws have drawn vociferous ire, but Steam has been doing it for years and remains beloved.
Steam hasn’t faced backlash because it doesn’t make you upload your ID like the laws are
Why yes, I am turning 127 next January. Gaming is what keeps me fresh and about my wits
So you’re saying it’s a one dimensional age check which doesn’t invade your privacy because you can just lie to it completely?
That’s a valid point. I just want to clarify that’s what you meant.
All Steam has to do is let you buy credits that you can then spend on games. It’s slightly shadier but breaks the direct payment link.
Steam gift cards.
But it would be better if they do it where I can specify the exact amount of money to the cent and do it directly from their store. That way it is just normal purchases with extra steps.
With Gabe’s absurd amount of middleman tax money obtained by running the defacto PC games store monopoly, the solution is oddly simple: Just start a bank and become a payment processor.
Payment processing is only one part of their troubles. The other is lawsuits.
A “de-facto” monopoly is not a monopoly. Competitors basically refused to innovate their stores beyond the MVP despite users pointing out the missing features. Epic pissed away a lot of money to buy traffic and then never did anything to keep it.
I would be alright with this. Gabe could make a fiscal platform that lets everyone escape MasterVisa’s grip, only charging 1% or thereabouts on every transaction, with barely any moderation. That would let Valve to benefit from other storefronts like GOG, JAST, and DLSite, while also freeing Steam from content restrictions, plus giving freedom to buyers to just get what they want. It is win-win for everyone who isn’t MasterVisa or Collective Shout.
Plus, Gabe could establish stronger ties with Europe and Asia, which is good if the US balkanizes in the coming decades. It protects from de-dollarization, since Steam would be able to easily allow Americans to use foreign currencies that become more competitive.
The article calling their moderation hands-off stuck out to me because you can’t really call Steam’s approach hands off by any means, they’ve banned some Japanese VNs before and most VN discovery guides will encourage you to use other marketplaces to avoid possible censorship, because it happens.
What kind of stuff, specifically, do they censor?
Examples given in the article are:
Historically, Valve’s policy has only banned games that are “illegal or straight-up trolling,” but that has opened the people running Steam to an endless series of subjective value judgements. For years, sporadic reports emerged of developers making anime-style smut getting ghosted by Valve – presumably for the genre’s association with high school settings and underage characters. Similarly, Steam took direct action to pull a cheap, trashy visual novel called Rape Day from the platform in 2019.
Fuck that article BTW, pretending Steam is in the wrong and the quack would have “saved them some headaches”.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I figured they meant by “censorship”.
If Valve doesn’t want to sell you loli visual novels, then that’s their prerogative. Can’t say that I blame them.
Free speech for the maker of loli porn but not for the platform that has regular porn or lgbtq.
Lesbian porn and trans porn are the two biggest categories in porn.
Both of those categories are lgbtq.
Therefore, lgbtq is the most “regular” porn.
how do we create a system for digital payments without introducing centralized control (and therefore censorship)?
watches as lemmy tries their best to say anything except crypto
Yeah, because crypto is not that. The problems with it as a payment system are numerous and make it unusable. It’s barely better than lugging suitcases full of twenties as a payment system for doing crimes, but only barely. The only thing it’s really good for is scamming people and gambling
What problems? And crypto gets associated with crime because the currency is harder to control, which is precisely the point. Governments love being able to control their payments systems, just like they love to define what a “crime” is.
There are enough crypto currencies made specifically with payment processing as their primary goal. But sure let’s just ignore good tech cus “crypto bros bad”
BS, Monero is the best currency for making untraceable payments full stop. People buy drugs with it but buying drugs shouldn’t be a crime. We need private currency’s that governments don’t control like that. It may not be great in every way but it’s the beat that exists and is certainly used for more than gambling and scamming people.
I was gonna say, you can tell who’s just a cryptobro vs who actually cares about fiscal freedom based on that. If anyone suggests you use bitcoin, they probablyyyyy aren’t someone to listen to. Zcash and Monero are the only two I’d ever trust as of now.
Honestly, its a massive shame that a technology as good as crypto was completely usurped by groups just looking to profit. They chant “This is true freedom of finance!” while only caring how much USD it’s worth. Like dawg, that’s why nobody takes crypto seriously.
Dunno why zcash has taken off so much, I believe it’s not private by default, but you have to manually enable that feature.
Monero is 100% opaque always
to add why that is bad: it makes those who enable privacy to stand out. those users who do thatbwill face arbitrary restrictions, but also it is easier to doxx the person behind a transaction if there are not a lot of other transactions with privacy enabled
In Europe we now slowly get wero.
This will replace hopefully PayPal, visa and mastercard
it will not replace visa and mastercard if they won’t give a card, but only an app that refuses to work on your phone but also has access to way too many things on it
I admit currently WERO has issues and it should not be baked into each banking app.
But still it will be better than to rely on the grace of American companies
But still it will be better than to rely on the grace of American companies
but that’s still the end result if they are forcing apple or googlified android phones
As someone who has lives in the Netherlands, were iDeal (the less international predecessor of wero) has been available for years - yes it replaces it, so much.
And it feels easier and safer at the same time, when my banking app on the phone can just scan the QR code on the website and deal with that.
Every time I DO use paypal now, usually a foreign webshop, I get a little nervous if my account still works, because it’s been a year or so again.
We could lobby our governments to regulate the payment processors. Their job is to facilitate transactions, not dictate what they are. Governments could easily regulate them such that they may not do that.
Governments are centralized control. Just take a look at the current US administration, and the economic sanctions they pushed left and right. You trust them to keep their hands off transactions happening within their own country?
This is so naive it hurts, though. As if there weren’t literally thousands of years’ worth of tales of corruption and failed regulation to learn from.
I, too, desperately want to believe that democracy can still work despite capitalists having captured it. But I dunno…
Nobody has yet solved the “who watches the watchers?” problem. Because of that, I believe every system of government is doomed to fall to corruption and capture given time.
I know that there are a lot of mechanisms that can be put in place to mitigate that problem, such as adversarial branches and divisions of authority, but I haven’t seen one yet that does anything more than prolong things and delay what seems to be the inevitable. Until something big changes, the pendulum seems destined to keep swinging back and forth.
In the meantime, I haven’t seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion, like making the government a party to the transaction by way of regulating the process, though that’s admittedly far from fool-proof, either.
I’m just trying to lay out the available options at our disposal now as I understand them.
As I see it, the development of anti-capture systems aren’t about actually preventing capture. Rather, they are to delay the inevitable and to make it so that when a “reset” happens, the good parts of a civilization aren’t too damaged when replacement happens.
Ideally, the next civilization(s) to arise from the ashes should inherit the best bits of whatever came before.
In the meantime, I haven’t seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion
This is just decentralization. This is literally what I alluded to in my root comment. Crypto solves these problems
That’s just centralization with extra steps. Crypto is easily manipulated by whales and frequently is. At least with governments, I know the names and faces of the people robbing me.
manipulated by whales? are you talking about 51% attacks? censorship? Can you link some concrete examples of major crypto coins getting manipulated? I think there was a potential 51% attack on Monero but IIRC nothing actually happened.
So it’s all Political Entropy, huh?
So it would seem! Entropy always wins.
Karl Quackenbush
Is Valve’s lawyer a cartoon duck? That sounds like the name of a cartoon duck.
Or a duck-themed pornstar.
Just big duck beak pussy lips surrounded by untamed bush. Quackenbush, just like it says on the label (labial?).
Maybe Quackenbush’s approach could’ve saved Valve some headaches along the way.
Oh so their suggestion is that Valve should have bowed to conservative censorship even earlier? What a waste of an article
I imagine gaben hiring a lawyer to be creative and clever to outsmart the puritan censorship control of valve and steam. Then the lawyer taking time to think about it, giving up, and coming at gaben with that as legal advice, resulting in gaben being furious that the lawyer failed and passed that failure as default to what the opposition is trying to strongarm you to do as official advice.
Mastercard+visa: suck my cock and lick my over-ripe anus
Gaben: hey fuck you
Gaben: hires lawyer to try to not have to do that
Gaben: lawyer, I’m not doing that. What are my options?
Lawyer: huh, i am a potato and therefore have no real thought. i hereby legally suggest you suck their cock and lick their over-ripe anus. That’ll be $3,000,000. Thanks.
Gaben: what the fuck do i pay you for if that’s your opinion?
Most corporate lawyers are there to steer you way around any danger. I used to think they would help me understand exactly where the legal boundaries are, but I’ve been disappointed time and again that they won’t play it even close to the line. To be fair to them, laws are written in language and always have room for interpretation so if you work in an industry where you’re doing novel things, they can’t always say exactly what will get you in trouble.
A lawyer that will lean in and go in hot on issues where it’s well known that you’re operating over the line… yeah that’s a very “wartime consigliere” kind of thing which I imagine few corporate lawyers are able to pivot to at the drop of a hat. Sorry, Tom.
John Oliver had a take on lawyers recently that was pretty good. He said that most lawyers are, as you say, essentially, to keep you from being sued. But he wanted lawyers to make sure that when he is sued, that he will win.
The lawyer is question is Karl Quackenbush, who has worked with Valve for decades now. He’s the one who helped them settle their lawsuit with Sierra over Counterstrike in internet cafes
This is suspiciously like what working with AI is like
I’ve sat in on support calls where the human on the other side paused before answering and then sent responses that were clearly pasted from AI.
“I don’t want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.” — J.P. Morgan
Gabe Newell cursing at a lawyer is exactly what I needed to read to start the day. What a wonderful human! 🥰
Visa and Mastercard, suck it! You do NOT get to decide how I spend MY money. Got it?
Tag as adult and move on.
Wasn’t there an issue with credit card processors threatening them?
Payment processors/banks should not be the arbiters of ethics. If a thing is legal, they should be REQUIRED to handle it, or lose their ability to conduct business nationwide.
They should but Americans (where processors are based) will use them as a tool when needed. Also their government could make phony allegations and they would have to enforce them. We need more processors world wide! I hope that EU does it right this time.
Valve could probably just start their own bank at this point.
Steam Bank? Steam Vault? Oh Steam Treasury! Steam Financial Alliance, i would immediately dump the parasites i have now.
PayValve, if Gabe wanted to be on the nose and take the piss out of Paypal.
Steam Tank is right there
Just call it Condensation.
Valve Liquidity
Aperture Finance
That does sound like a payment processor!
Financial censorship is a useful tool for people who want stuff censored.
It’s their most effective tool at this point.
I’d say it’s their most effective direct tool.
But if you count indirect tools, I think the propaganda out there is more effective. There are school districts where somebody on the school board encountered a bit of propaganda, and then before you know it, the school district is choosing on its own to censor their own libraries of things like LGBTQ+ materials.
I always figured they could just charge the card for a “gift card” for that amount… Which then immediately gets used for the “adult themed” game. Or at least allow the games to be sold on the store only with gift cards.
No can do. Governments will ask them for age verification. Valve will instead swiftly remove anything with kinky dialogue and move on. True story by the way. Happened in Germany and no, it had nothing to do with protecting customers on Steam’s side because the age verification process authorities asked for protects your identity. Valve simply didn’t want to deal with it. To be fair it was a bullshit demand anyway but Sony didn’t seem to have any problems implementing it so this is a Valve thing.
Newell ripped into general counsel Karl Quackenbush when the lawyer advocated for more hands-on moderation on Steam. “What the f— do I pay you for if that’s your opinion?” Newell reportedly interjected.
Presumably he pays the legal professional for their legal opinion. Doesn’t mean he has to listen, but usually you should listen to your lawyers.
True but there’s very liitle context here. It could have made more sense in the conversation if it was meant like “I pay you to fight for our position, not roll over to threats.”
If a position is legally untenable it’s a lawyer’s job to say so, though. We really don’t have enough context here.
Sometimes a lawyer has nothing to fight with. The law and constitution are sometimes clear and any judge will disbar a lawyer who tries to waste the courts time on this issue (this never happens because lawyers won’t risk it when things are that obvious - and usually it isn’t). If you don’t like it pay a lobbiest not a lawyer.
Not any longer with federalist society partisan activist judges appointed throughout the country.
The law and constitution are sometimes clear and any judge will disbar a lawyer who tries to waste the courts time on this issue
I’ve heard about this once in my lifetime, and it made the news because it was so usual…
So not “any” judge, rather one specific one.
I’d put my savings in The Steam Vault
