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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @03:06PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @03:06PM (#691105)

    WTF?
    We're blaming web 2.0 for this crap? Why?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @04:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @04:24PM (#691125)

    Muh soggy knees!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:55PM (#691155)

    'blaming' web 2.0 is a way to deflect blame from themselves and their failures. They assumed that they were smart. Then since they were smart they then assumed they could fix everything. Then they assumed that their ideas were 100% better than everyone else. They did not react well to 'hey the emperor is naked' and are now going on to blame everything on everyone else except for their failed polices which they continue to push on us. Then try to gaslight us and make us double and triple check "yep he is buck naked". Even then they will not let it go. Because 'they are smart and you are stupid ipso facto that man has a beautiful set of cloths on'. The other facet of this is 'find the stupidest thing a politician says and mock them forever for it'. Which is just other 'smart' people trying to manipulate the conversation.

    It is a form of cognitive bias where you are smart in one area and then assume that your smarts correlate to other areas. Take me for example. If you want someone to crack out a program or fix your computer in some way I probably can manage that and do a decent job at it. May take a little longer than you thought but it will be done correctly and work pretty good. Want me to build you a house? I have some ideas (because I have a bit of training in it), but in no way do you want me building you a house. You want to find a decent architect and a building firm. I am at least cognizant enough that i can sometimes see it. But I too can be blinded by my bias and fall into the trap all the time.

    Apparently the most deadly enemy for someone who is kinda smart? The words "I do not know". Once you free yourself from the shackles that you know everything you can begin to realize you have a hell of a lot to learn.

    http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/06/the-smart-are-more-biased-to-think-they-are-less-biased.html [overcomingbias.com]

    So blaming web 2.0 for this sort of thing? Not surprising. They like to blame people and ideas for their own failures. In this case they thought they had control of 2.0 and only their ideas were worth hearing. Well they gave everyone a podium to shout whatever idea they came up with. Not all of those ideas will perfectly fit yours. So therefore web 2.0 is a failure because it let OTHER people come up with ideas.