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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) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 09 2018, @09:50PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 09 2018, @09:50PM (#690938)

    >extremely niche (high amount of dislikes/thumbs down) might struggle.

    Things that attract a lot of attention, positive or negative, benefit from that attention.

    The tragically hip will seek out the most hated content just to see what pushes other people's buttons. Like browsing "controversial" on Reddit.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday June 09 2018, @10:42PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday June 09 2018, @10:42PM (#690950) Journal

    Only if they have that option to look for 1:1 likes/dislikes, which is how Reddit's "controversial" works. Or sort by most dislikes or highest dislike ratio to find content that is disliked for reasons other than quality (mixed in with genuinely bad content). Does Steam have these?

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 09 2018, @11:52PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 09 2018, @11:52PM (#690967)

      Dunno, I haven't opened my Steam client in years.

      I do wish they'd get KSP running smoothly on modest hardware, though - it looks like a fun waste of time.

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