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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 09 2018, @05:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-it dept.

You might say we're all living inside a ruinous waking nightmare that spawned from the dream of Web 2.0.

Don't get me wrong: It was a beautiful dream.

Web 2.0. We are all of us producers. With our blogs and our comments and our tweets and our YouTube channels we will democratise content and the algorithms -- those glorious algorithms -- will aid in the process. We will upvote and favourite and like and the wheat will be separated from the chaff.

Magic.

I think we can all agree that Web 2.0 didn't quite work as advertised.

It gave us Minecraft. It gave us Wikipedia, collaborative spaces, online tools. But it also gave us Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Gamergate, incels, toxic communities, Logan Paul wandering into a suicide forest. It gave us Twitter bullying, Kelly Marie Tran harassment campaigns on Instagram.

It gave us terrible, opportunistic video games about school shootings.

Wednesday, after yanking Active Shooter, a video game where you play as a high school shooter, from its Steam store, Valve made an announcement. In a blog titled "Who gets to be on the Steam Store" Valve discussed the steps it's taking to prevent a video game like Active Shooter from making it to the Steam store in the future.

Its solution is about as Web 2.0 as it gets.

"[W]e've decided," wrote Valve, "that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."

"Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see."

In 2018, at this current moment, it seems like a decision out of time. An old-fashioned solution to a problem that literally every single platform on the internet is currently trying to solve. We live in a world where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are in the process of trying to actively take responsibility for the content produced and posted on their platforms.

Meanwhile, Valve is busy trying to abdicate that responsibility.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:31PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:31PM (#690880)

    So SN should stop banning spammers because SN is censoring them? Is SN restricting the spammers' free speech?

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:45PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:45PM (#690891)

    No, spam is a variant of crap flooding and a technical issue. Likewise with moderation - wearing ear plugs when someone has a habit of screaming in your ear is not censoring them.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:03PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:03PM (#690897)

      You're not just building up a personalized algorithm based on some, say, we of trust made of like minds; rather, you're actively cultivating the reality for someone else, including for those who might disagree with your assessment.

      That is, you're going around, trying to stick ear plugs in other people's ears!

      Your analogy doesn't hold up, and so you are naturally drawing wrong conclusions.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @10:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @10:18PM (#690942)

        Your analogy doesn't hold up, and so you are naturally drawing wrong conclusions.

        Moderation is communal and everyone has the choice to browse at -1 therefore the analogy holds. Recall the reluctance with which comments were deleted from the green site back in the day. [slashdot.org]

      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday June 10 2018, @01:13AM

        by Arik (4543) on Sunday June 10 2018, @01:13AM (#690995) Journal
        "That is, you're going around, trying to stick ear plugs in other people's ears!"

        If that's what they're trying to do they're horribly ineffective at it.

        No, I think it's more like they've setup a system where people can share recommendations on brands of earplugs. Or not. As they wish.

        First thing I did after making an account was set that threshold down as low as she goes... precisely because I'm not much interested in others recommendations re: earplugs.
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:00PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:00PM (#690896)

    SN doesn't remove spam posts, and it isn't even effective at banning them anyway. That's about as free speech friendly as you can get.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:09PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:09PM (#690901)

      And thank goodness!

      Most of the posts marked "Spam" are nothing of the sort; most of the posts marked "Troll" are nothing of the sort.

      Here's the thing, though: If you mark down enough posts from one IP, that IP gets banned from posting here. That is a kind of censorship, then; but, it's just so badly implemented (like everything on this website) that it's ineffective. Soylent News is right for the wrong reasons; it's freedom isn't based on principle, but rather on ineptitude.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @08:15PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @08:15PM (#690920)

        > it's freedom isn't based on principle, but rather on ineptitude.

        Give it a rest. Everything around here is based on limited resources. Very limited resources and volunteer labor.

        Personally, I believe that the volunteer labor here is top notch! Thanks to all the volunteers!!

  • (Score: 2) by chromas on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:17PM

    by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:17PM (#690904) Journal

    I'm pretty sure that was sarcasm.