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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @08:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @08:53PM (#690930)

    No corporation has censorship ability.

    On what do you base that argument? Are you saying that no definition of the term "censorship" exists that could apply to corporations? If so, you are flat-out incorrect, as I demonstrated previously. Really, just search around for "corporate censorship" to see that the term has been used this way for quite a while. Are you next going to argue against the indisputable fact that language changes over time, and that more definitions can be added to existing words?

    NOT IN MY HOUSE is not censorship. Its merely private property rights.

    False dichotomy. It can be both.

    Why do you insist on denying others such control of private property?

    Why do you insist on making straw man arguments? I mentioned several times that they are allowed to censor.

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