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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 09 2018, @09:45PM (4 children)
Candy crush is pretty clearly on the "all clear" side of objectionable content.
Active shooter is pretty far on the other side, getting close to celebrity-deepfake-incestuous-kiddie-torture-snuff-porn and other things that are illegal and/or unacceptable in most of the world.
So, that leaves Valve (and everyone else) in the position of occasionally stepping up to the plate and saying "no, this one went too far."
The Apple store would seem to take that action too often, often appearing to play favorites for commercial or arbitrary rather than moral reasons.
With global audiences, this kind of thing really calls for local censor boards - if you live in a country that cares, then they should care enough to step up and say what is and isn't acceptable in that country (like the EU is doing for privacy). Somewhere around Web 5.3, we should evolve to local and personal filtering: not just translation of content to the local languages, but some kind of compliance matrix which allows a general content pool to be served up globally with local laws and customs respected. Further, even when jurisdictions aren't involved, there are groups of like-minded individuals who would restrict violent, sexual, profane and other emotionally strong imagery from themselves and/or their children. Content to be labeled by human and/or robot curators for filtering, unlabeled content to be included or excluded at the option of the content receiver...
Or, the whole world could just grow up and start accepting child porn the way that Japan used to before the internet, and everything else along with it, because patterns of light on a screen can't really harm anyone (exceptions for epilepsy triggers, etc.) Care to guess which one is more likely to happen first?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Captival on Saturday June 09 2018, @10:28PM (1 child)
Except the thing is: murdering prostitutes, killing thousands of people, torture, rape, death - all OK when Grand Theft Auto or Disney owned movie studios do it. Those products make hundreds of millions of dollars so they're fine. It's only when people who giant corporations don't like want to have a voice that the censor-nazis come out to attack.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 09 2018, @11:49PM
The Disney owned studios dance their multitude of angels on the head of a pin ever so carefully... They have stretched and stretched the definition of fantasy violence to a point where it is acceptable because it is "sufficiently distinguishable from real life that no reasonable person could possibly confuse it with reality" - well, except for the fact that it looks exactly like real life, just with some impossibly super-powered character that the audience so strongly identifies with out of envy that they feel like they are personally backflip roundhouse kicking the ugly mean bad guys heads clean off themselves in 3D IMAX with 30,000 watts of surround sound and now vibrating chairs to boot.
Yeah, irrational double standards backed up by industry lobbyists feeding the public far more socially negative imagery than the amateur commentaries on recent news ever would. The logical extension is that someday you'll have to be an "accredited news source" to comment on any story that involves violence or politically incorrect themes. Pravda, if the USSR had thrived.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday June 10 2018, @12:47AM (1 child)
If Candy Crush Saga is on the safe end of the objectionability spectrum, a game like Columns would probably place similarly. That is, unless its developer made it Columbine-themed for a bad pun. Likewise for a Concentration game (turn over two cards and keep them if their emblems match), unless some sort of camping is involved.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @01:01AM
The whole thing gets absurd, right up to the point that a nipple-shield shown during a half-time song and dance sequence is a huge scandal, but Saving Private Ryan is critically acclaimed (and Saving Ryan's Privates raises less controversy than Janet Jackson's costume stunt.)
A lot is about venue, audience, etc. but it all falls apart when you attempt to find any even-handed logic to any of it.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end