Fortunately in the US I trust that their First Amendment has some teeth. If that were happening in most other countries, I’d be seriously worried that this senator might succeed with his evil plans.
Another thing, the first amendment doesn’t protect against violent or criminal speech, like terrorist threats/advocacy, threats towards individuals (bodily harm, sexual assault, murder, etc.) things which there is no shortage of anyway on Steam and they have every right to force the platform to moderate this, on the count of it being against the law.
Public space would be a place like a national park or the sidewalk. These forums are owned and operated by a private company, they’re private spaces and can be moderated however the company sees fit. Same thing for Twitter or Facebook or Lemmy.
A senator has the right to tell them that they need to do a better job at moderating their platform if there’s reasons to believe they’re letting people threaten violence or incite criminal activity.
Alright that’s still a weird ruling to someone outside America though because something like a shopping mall or a parking lot are public spaces here too as well as anything that is openly visible on the internet. Which makes a lot of sense.
@Kecessa speaks unclearly when saying “public space”—the term they are thinking of is usually “public forum.” source
The rules around what constitutes a true public forum and what the public forum doctrine even means are fuzzy, but in all cases the term refers to a space owned or created by the government.
Thus, a shopping mall, parking lot, or internet forum, being owned by a private company, is not a public forum and can’t really be defended on the basis of the public forum doctrine.
See the US section, the use of the term “public space” in this conversation is acceptable as the term “public” is used in opposition to privately owned and not public in the sense that it’s open to the public like a mall is.
.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space
The government cannot usually limit one’s speech beyond what is reasonable in a public space, which is considered to be a public forum (that is, screaming epithets at passers-by can be stopped; proselytizing one’s religion probably cannot).
Think of it like your house. You can ask people to leave if they say something you find offensive. That is not infringing on their free speech.
If the owner of a shopping mall wants to ban the word banana, they can ask anyone who says it to leave. That is also not infringing on their free speech. That’s because shopping malls are not owned and operated by the government.
I think you’re misunderstanding the use of the term “public” here.
A mall is a public space in the sense that people can go, but it’s not a public space in the sense that it’s not operated by the government, it’s a private space.
I’m using the term public space in the governmental sense, not in the publically accessible sense. If you use that definition of public I’m pretty sure even in your country you can get censored and kicked out of a mall and moved off its surrounding property (the parking around it), because it’s privately owned. Once on the sidewalk you’re on public property though so you can do whatever you want as long as it respects the law.
Also, talking about Europe as a whole is wrong since different countries can still have different rules on the subject.
A shopping mall is absolutely not a public space, and if youre shouting slurs into a megaphone, or even just harassing random shoppers with your crazy beliefs, you are definitely going to be dragged out by security. And or/have the cops come to remobe you. I hope you understand how badly you just disproved your own point.
I don’t get how kids can be unsafe because of other kids being dumbasses. I guarantee the majority of the hate symbolism and speech on Steam’s forums, is from people under the age of 18. Kids are fucking little shits. Especially when they have no supervision, like on the Steam forums.
Teenage nazis when not moderated or taught otherwise will grow up to be adult Nazis, and have the very real possibility of spreading their hate to others when not moderated. It may seem trivial like something to hand-wave away, but many of these people complaining about woke games will grow up to be hateful republicans like the ones currently trying to take our rights away. It’s not a laughing matter.
Steam forums and groups have become a place to organize far right raiding groups that have harassing people and bullying women and minorities or straight up nazism glorification as their sole objective and Steam just does not care.
Of course they don’t, companies only care when Pepsi Co and P&G take away their ad revenue for serving extremist content and catering to extremists. Valve has no ad revenue and is the only real PC game store on the block, so no one can make them “care” the way YouTube and Twitch, and other platforms are made to “care”.
ADL says steam was unsafe after stating that pepe the frog is an extremist symbol to more than double the number of cases found.
Remove the meme, and take into consideration the number of users, 0.1% of users have used some form of extreme symbol or statement. That is a lower ratio of extremism than what Lemmy has.
This is a reach for control and surveillance. Nothing else.
No wonder you hate the ADL, they advocate for the rights of minority people you regularly undermine and attack. They’re working against you, especially because more protections means people won’t take your comments seriously and instead call you what you are, a troll, and you’ll also end up getting banned from more and more places.
@Ategon@erlingur@snowe Just so we’re clear, this person is on your instance, using your platform to spew hate towards minority people on the Fediverse. Just want to make sure you’re aware of this.
Yes that is me, and no I am not a transphobe. The ghazi mods banned me because I said that someone losing a visa for something they said is fucked up. I didn’t even know who the person was who lost the visa or what they had done. I have never made any transphobic statements whatsoever, and you can dive deeper through the modlog to find evidence of that because it would show.
Also, I don’t appreciate you trying to cancel me just because I don’t agree with your post. We’re adults here.
Thinly veiled transphobia is still transphobia, and even if you never said anything transphobic, your modlog shows a clear history of atrocious behavior such as downplaying death threats, engagement/promotion of bigoted ideology and just overall hostility and incivility in general. Things most server owners don’t want on their servers.
Also, I don’t appreciate you trying to cancel me just because I don’t agree with your post. We’re adults here.
No one’s canceling you sweetie, servers have rules, and when you break them or are an ass people won’t want you to be there. You’ve already been banned from quite a few of them, and the fact is a lot of your behavior indeed does go against PD’s CoC. These admins deserve to know since they likely won’t see the reports, and removals unless they’re investigating you personally.
I haven’t downplayed death threats. It was a conversation where someome falsely alleged that someone else had received death threats, which had no evidence, and the person in question never even claimed they had received any.
The rest is just me calling out misinformation about black myth wukong (the sexism allegations that turned out to be mistranslations) and about the harassment campaing against Sweet Baby Inc, bias in gaming journalism, etc.
I’ve never taken a specific political stance in any of their conversations. I just am against misinformation and censorship and call them out when they happen.
The reason I’m against what your post is about, is because ADL were extremely dishonest in their findings, and I think they’re biased or politically motivated to implement restrictions that require users to give up more private information about themselves, or not be allowed free speech.
And no, I didn’t break any rules either. Every ban I’ve faced have all been completely unjustified, which is why I’ve blocked most of the communities I’ve been banned on. It’s like being banned from hexbear and you saying that makes me deserve to get my account removed. The little information you get out of that modlog only shows the mods being biased.
And you would know about biased mods, seeing as you yourself have been banned and then called out after making a thread about it. It isn’t all black and white. I’m not interested in who was right in that post, you or the mod, but you get my point.
I made that exact statement in another thread on Lemmy before his video was even out, and it is the most obvious thing to point out so I doubt I was the first to do so either. And the way you phrase it makes it sound like you disagree with the argument. Do you consider pepe to be a dog whistle for racism? Because I think not even a small percentage of conspiracy theorists seriously do that. Or maybe you just want to argue with someone?
I already know the story of Pepe and the attempt at portraying it as a hate speech symbol. Almost everyone made fun of them when they first made that statement.
And the thing about Pepe is that he is a meme template. That means he can be used in any ideological statement, greentext story, copy-pasta or anything. It is very apparent that the ADL do not understand internet culture, and that’s why no one took their statement about pepe seriously. They have no idea what they’re talking about.
Pepe wasn’t initially a racist meme, but was misappropriated by alt-righ groups. The author tried to fight it, but the damages were done. So the addition to the statistic by ADL is valid, but to be taken with the context it is in.
Right wing and not understanding second degree, name a more iconic duo
Edit: Lemmy users and not understanding who people are talking about, name a more iconic duo! I’m talking about the right wing Steam users commenting on the patch notes.
I’m talking about the users commenting on Helldivers patch notes. Just like with Starship Troopers, people on the right see Helldivers as inspiring when the real message behind the media is anti fascism.
Try to follow the conversation, that should have been very clear considering the comment I was replying to.
I really like that there was a whole thing about building a super-weapon where players had to complete quests or whatever to contribute to its development. Then enough players compete the quest and the weapon was completed, and it turned out to be an orbital bombardment that killed enemies and players indiscriminately.
A lot of players were pissed but it’s so aggressively in-character I can’t imagine how they didn’t see it coming.
Those hours were safely recalled from your memory by the government Bureau of Memetics to protect your peace of mind. Thank you for your understanding.
I mean yeah, no shit. The steam forums could be removed at no loss to the human race, in fact it’d remove a non-negligible percentage of all really shitty talk on the internet if they deleted everything entirely.
The steam forums are fucking cancer. I was looking for info about a bug I was having with a newly released game. I instead saw an entire thread about how the game is woke and you shouldn’t buy it. The game has an implied lesbian character. Who gives a fuck? The game was pretty good btw.
I’ve seen whole threads in game forums dedicated to Nazism, and I myself have been called a “groomer” and the t-slur because people knew be as a boy before I transitioned. Legitimately horrible place, they absolutely need to take more action against this.
Sorry to hear about your experience. Are the forums moderated at all? All I see is people being terrible to each other. I also saw someone requesting a Brazilian Portuguese translation for a game and people calling them a fucking idiot and telling them to learn english.
There’s almost no moderation on Steam at all. Sometimes threads advocating violence get removed, or threads with a lot of hate get locked but it’s almost always long after the damage has been done and often times the ones doing nasty shit don’t end up getting banned.
I don’t use steam forums. But I have questions. Do the steam forums have any moderation at all? Is there a report button? Can you report comments or forum threads?
I want to know because I feel like a lot of social media has the same problem as steam forums and these tools exist on the majority of those. They rely on the moderation of fellow users.
I also question whether or not steam actually has an automod or anything like that. Or human moderators.
Please keep in mind that I don’t use the forums so I really have no idea. This is the first time I’m hearing about this, and I’m interested in knowing more.
While I agree with you that some people are too thin skinned to handle some conversation online… Steam forums or YouTube comment sections are really the very worst of the worst.
If all you read is trash tier content on a platform even if you understand it, it still sucks and remain quite infuriating.
Basically, steam forums are mostly trolling so at this point it’s not about the sensitivity of people but rather that these platform are particularly bad.
I mostly play economic strategy / tycoon games and the forums are pretty chill. The most “controversial” threads revolve around gameplay mechanics discussion or perhaps complaints about lack of updates.
I don’t think I’ve even seen anything approaching what you are describing in economic strategy game forums.
I would most definitely oppose shutting down the steam forums.
Of ylu watch the video other core half life devs state they regret not finishing episode 3 with estimates thagbitbwoulf have only taken another ~2 years of work.
Although theybalsp pointed out we probably would have not gotten another game in exchange, like maybe portal or tf2
Dude, not finishing the story and leaving us all on a cliffhanger for seventeen fucking years and then giving this as an excuse is the real cop out.
Looking back, I actually don’t like what Half-Life did to the genre. It didn’t push it forward; it made everything after a linear, set-piece experience with minimal replay value. It might have been different back in the day, but it wasn’t something I had hoped other developers clung to like they did.
:It doesn’t necessarily have to be open world as is currently used these days. The OG Doom isn’t exactly linear, but also isn’t open world in any sense. Remove the loading times between levels and it would be open world in the way that term was originally used. The desirable aspect of an open world, for me, has more to do with the continuity of the play space than how games calling themselves open world games are designed. Free to explore the map without it just being a series of hallways with only one actual path and maybe 1 dead end per fork where they stick a “secret” or treasure.
The OG Doom is fairly linear, unless you play on the lowest difficulty level where all doors are permanently open. Else you need to kill specific enemies that can only be found in certain rooms to get keys.
At this point, I’m aching desperately for that linear shooter. They have other strengths. Halo Infinite offered a ton more freedom than the old games, but it was worse off for it.
I think it was inevitable. Before HL2 we had Deus Ex. It was glorious. Fans loved it. Game devs looked at it and went “F*%@ that! We’re not making 3 games worth of content when you’re only going to see 1 on a given play through!”
So that defines the basic tension. Gamers love replay value and multiple paths and different character builds and tons of secrets to explore. Game devs on the other hand want players to see every little blade of grass and tree they worked so hard at placing in the game. I think they also have a lot of data from achievements that show most gamers barely finish the game once, let alone discover all the secrets and alternate endings etc.
I’ll just say as an aging gamer, I simply do not have time to grind or replay things. I could do that stuff in highschool, but not anymore.
Grinding especially is a no-go for me. 100% achievements? No chance in hell that’s happening.
Life moves too fast and there’s too much entertainment. Devs that think people have time to sit there and enjoy some obscure shit they hid, will be disappointed.
That’s an interesting take! I’m getting to be an aging gamer myself and I no longer really play story-focused games. I play Roguelikes which I can pick up and drop any time, 5-10 minutes at a time, here and there. These games are designed to have maximum replay value. So even though I don’t have a lot of time I spend it on replaying rather than playing new games!
It’s an interesting difference and I think it depends on what we both look to get out of games.
Gabe, you created an obligation when you ended Episode 2 on a cliff hanger. You should have just let Marc Laidlaw and the game devs just make more games.
As long as it had kept the core writers, I’m sure everyone would be happy. Hell, any “innovation” is being handled by the modding continuity. Breadman of Entropy: Zero created a more fun combat loop then any of the HL2 games have. Singularity has a better physics weapons just by being able to use it independent of the selected weapon and making the object transparent.
Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).
Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.
Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.
You know, I knew the next HL game to come out after Ep2 would be a VR title. It was the most obvious direction Valve could go considering Gabe treats the HL series as a tech demo. Seriously, I think out of anyone at Valve, he has the least respect for the franchise. What I didn’t predict that it would a a VR exclusive title and that it would retcon the ending of Ep2 so a character that died(and who’s VA had died), would be alive again. Hell, they didn’t even ask one of the MC’s original VA to reprise her role(or cast into a different character if the age was an issue).
I have way more trust in the fan community to continue the story. Entropy: Zero took some cues from Epistle 3, so I hope the breadman and the Project Borealis are sharing notes, so the can have a shared continuity. I really, really liked the voiced MC of Entropy: Zero and the combat loop, with more enemy types and weapons was superb.
Unfortunately devs at Valve eventually will be swallowed by the money making machine called Steam. It’s the way the company is structured, the people working on the most profitable projects are rewarded the most.
Like the team working on In the Valley of Gods has disintegrated after Valve bought Campo Santo. The devs are all working on other things inside Valve.
I think that’s the thing that annoys me the most. Sometimes, a game doesn’t get a sequel because sales were bad or the studio was bought out or even went bankrupt. Here, it’s just because the guy running the company doesn’t feel like it. They have a constant stream of free money from Steam sales to fall back on, so why not just let your game devs do something? I haven’t kept up to date, but wasn’t there this huge gap of time where none of the TF2 devs had logged and played any TF2?
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