SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:49PM (2 children)
Now let's rename slavery as "actively take responsibility for the behavior and living conditions of workers" while at it
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @07:09PM (1 child)
Leftists had to come up with a different label for censorship, because they want to stamp out speech they disagree with, but they're supposed to still be the 60's era hippie radicals fighting for free speech against 'the man', or something like that. So as usual, they come up with a different label for what they're doing, since everything is okay when they do it.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday June 10 2018, @03:34AM
Don't yo just wish you could ban all leftist speech?