We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn’t literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there’s no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.
Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)
There’s just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo
Putting the ridicoulous idea that governments are fair and transparent aside, payment processors need to be international. Otherwise, most countries will not be able to access services because their local payment processor is not supported by smaller websites.
However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality so they can’t discriminate payments. And EU could probably launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.
Power finds a way, so I wouldn’t hope for nationalization itself to be anything good.
power already did find a way, its called privatization.
Yes, because without one government that was helping them out, punishing their competition and funding them, also making regulations convenient for them, Alphabet, Meta and others would be even more powerful. /s
…those are all corporations. Nationalization would make it a public service, rather than a corporate profit-driven service like how it is now.
You can bet that if libraries, for example, became privatized, we’d quickly see several different library companies pop up, each with their own paid book subscription service with exclusive partnerships with various popular authors, much like we have today with streaming platforms. Conversely, if we were to nationalize those streaming platforms, we’d likely see the service transformed to be more akin to our current library service.
It’s why the rightmost parties generally want to defund many public services and move them to the private sector - it transforms services that we spend money on to benefit the people into services that the people spend money on to benefit corporations.
its almost like their monopoly on the means of production made them powerful and they used that power to control the state. 🤔
I think it’s the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.
The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.
The state gives them very expensive projects.
The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.
The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.
So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.
the state does a lot to give them that monopoly
yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
if they make a big mistake or want labour law adjusted, they can get the state to coddle them, because they privately control, say, the entire food supply (ie the means of production) without which the state has no power.
this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, a tiny player in the game with not even a slight base of comparison with the oligarchs. shit, having a couple million dollar net worth is still not enough to be powerful like oligarchs.
So you want Trump and MAGA politicians to be able to deny your payments instead?
The problem with “just let the government do it” is when the government is run by people like this.
So don’t let them.
Basically nothing works if no one cares about their community. One of the reasons Trump is in power right now is because of a deep seated American apathy for, like… everything.
Trump, et. al., are dismantling USPS, but I like USPS. It’s bad that they’re doing that.
How naive can you be? You think your vote matters here?
When every single district has been gerrymandered to death for 100 years, nobody’s vote really matters anymore.
How does Putin’s boot taste?
Oppression isn’t inevitable, even in the US, and you’ll never have the equitable anarchism you’re advocating for if the state doesn’t put a stop to these oligopolies.
You are wildly off base if you think I have any love for that monster.
You are also completely wrong in that oppression is the natural state of power.
Do you really think most governments will administer payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner?
They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.
So you expect governments like the Trump administration or Saudi Arabia will less likely block porn games than for profit companies?
You do realise this happened because thousands of people called the payment processors to complain about it, which means with thousands of people, you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government, let alone a foreign government.
I think it is possible to have a government that functions in this way on a long term basis. I don’t think the same can be said of for profit companies.
A for profit company can be replaced with another and is more easily affected by boycotts. A goverment is neither easily replaced or influenced by people from other countries.
Until they monopolize their industry, which is something they’re always going to be trying to do by their very nature as for profits and which has already essentially happened here
A government can be influenced if it is transparent and democratic, which can be ensured if they’ve got good bylaws that are being scrupulously enforced. Like, if you have decisionmakers a) accountable to free and fair elections (whether they’re elected directly or appointed by elected people) holding b) regular and public meetings where c) outside organizations can raise disputes and get them decided under d) neutral procedures that are published in advance and that every party has equal opportunity to understand and take advantage of, and e) if those decisions and the reasoning behind them are also published and cited as precedent to be reinforced or overturned in subsequent decisions, then I really think the rest takes care of itself.
And I think we had a lot of this figured out when we got done fighting totalitarian regimes in the 1940s and turned around and passed the Administrative Procedure Act, but conservatives keep adding loopholes and trying to drag all of us back to feudalism and monarchies.
So you admitted that people have succeeded in adding loopholes to the US government that makes all your argument no longer true, and you think they still should be allowed handle payment processing? To me it just sounds like you’re arguing for transferring the power from one corruptible party (for-profit payment company) to another one (the government).
It would be easier for the government to actually regulate payment processors so they don’t become so big that they can influence online stores that use them than preventing people in governments from turning corrupt and misusing the control over payment processes. Even then, the US government has failed to do the former, so how do we expect them to do the latter?
Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.
And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.
But what’s important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can’t take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.
But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform’s decision to do a kind of business?
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
Because you essentially need a global presence to at all be worth using. That is why it is a joke that NOBODY accepts American Express and only the shadiest of international ATMs accept Discover (saved my ass in Germany back in the 10s though)
You are literally saying that we need to look at why there aren’t more global mega corporations.
I’m going to be really dumb
Why does a payment processor need to exist?
I am an artist in OtherCountry. You want to buy art from me. How do you do it?
Physical money? Okay. You now need a way to track that YOU sent 40 bucks in the mail and that I received 40 bucks in the mail and that is (at least) two different national postal services involved. And now I need a way to convert 40 YourLandia dollars into OtherCountry pounds. AND we need to make sure all of that happened quickly enough that exchange rates didn’t meaningfully change
Digital money? Who is running the site? How many different sites do I need to have accounts on to accept payment from all the countries I want to sell to?
At the end of the day: For any transaction that is not face to face transfer of hard currency (and even then but…), you need an intermediary that both parties trust. Payment processors are that intermediary. Sometimes they are the person taking my IOU and turning it into money so that you can give me a hamburger. Sometimes that is effectively a courier making sure your money gets to me no matter where on the planet we are.
It is what lets us have transactions that aren’t “Okay, you drop your armor and I’ll drop my money and then we’ll slowly change places and… who the fuck just ran out of the bushes to steal the money I put down while waiting for you to put down your armor? And why are you now both doing the Carlton?”
You seem to know a lot of this, in order for your point to click for me, could you explain why some extra payment processor is needed? Would a simple bank transfer not work? If you give me your IBAN, we could let our banks take care of it, right?
You DO realize your banks are the payment processors in that case, right? And they are also working through an intermediary to facilitate said transfer (which has almost all the same problems as above). The money still has to get from Bank A to Bank B which gets even harder if they are in different countries.
They should’ve implemented crypto payments long time ago. Now they reap what they sow
It’s the same religious organization that went after them NSFW games on Steam. Like the games or not, it’s always a slippery slope with this kind of censorship.
Of course it would be the bible thumpers. Gotta stick their nose into everyone’s business.
If it’s against your religion to play porn games, fine. Don’t play them.
But fuck off if you think you can tell other people what not to play.
They have a little power in politics now, “give them an inch and they take a mile” is never not true.
The fact that they’ve been successful at censoring stuff is a problem. It will likely embolden them to do worse.
Not just successful. But praised.
Even on Lemmy, if you go check out the initial threads on the Steam censorship you’ll see lots of “It is just incest and furry shit. Of course that should be banned” style comments. Less so here, but plenty of other boards and influencers immediately then chimed in that porn addiction is the real problem and you should watch a stream of a nice bigoted white man rather than give in to it and blah blah blah.
And it didn’t even start there. It ALSO isn’t the start, but the attack on Pornhub a few years back was a big watershed moment where this exact same attack was used (pressure the credit card companies to not do business with a morally dubious site). On the surface? Pornhub is full of revenge porn and child porn so it needs to be destroyed. No rational person would disagree with that… and everyone quietly ignored all the data showing that (and this was early 2020s…) facebook and twitter and instagram and so forth had MUCH more of both of those. But hey, Pornhub Corp complied and actually instituted some REALLY good policies that more or less equates to signed consent forms for every single performer. And… they were still on the shitlist. But everyone had stopped caring.
Yep. A fucking Australian group of Bible thumpers, specifically.
A loud minority.
This is on Visa/MasterCard. Nobody would’ve cared if they ignored them.
Basically I’m suggesting the credit corps are led by closet puritans anyways.
Collective shout finacials year: 2024 revenue: 458043 employee_expenses: 107000 other_expenses: 215488 net_surplus: 135555 employees: total_fte: 2 full_time: 0 part_time: 1 casual: 4 volunteers: 15 donations_and_bequests: 389800 government_grants: 0 commercial_income: 0 expense_to_revenue_ratio: "70.4%" average_expense_per_employee: 39400 Leadership - name: Melinda Tankard Reist role: Founder, Movement Director public_socials: - Twitter: @MelTankardReist - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Caitlin Roper role: Campaigns Manager public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Renee Chopping role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - LinkedIn public_email_address: r******@collectiveshout.org salary: Not publicly listed - name: Lyn Swanson Kennedy role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Coralie Alison role: Movement Operations Manager public_socials: - Twitter: @CoralieAlison - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listedFuck.
These.
Fucking.
Shitsucking
Subhuman
Leeches
Direct link to their statement rather than reading an article talking about it: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
rather than reading an article talking about it
Good as a supplement, but the RPS article gives context itch.io is too much of a cowardly little bitch to include like: “Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article.”
Edit: and yes, the Vice article was removed because Vice’s ownership bitched out over covering Collective Shout.
Edit: and yes, the Vice article was removed because Vice’s ownership bitched out over covering Collective Shout.
Wow, holy shit. How fucking far Vice has fallen. There was a time they would go the extra mile to cover wild shit that no one else was doing. Greed and the wealthy’s critical need to have control over the media ruins everything.
Wonder how long it will take for them to start going after LGBT+ stuff. Hope I’m wrong.
Payment processors and financial institutions sure do seem to hold disproportionate amounts of power.
And a single woman and her organization seems to hold a disproportionate amount of power over the payment processors.
I don’t understand it. Payment processors could easily tell her to pound sand, but they don’t.
Welcome to capitalism. 1 person and there company can influence an entire country while being top 10 retards.
talk to anyone that works in the porn industry. Mastercard and Visa have ALWAYS been like this ever since the late 90s/early 00s. they set the rules for what the adult entertainment industry can produce and sell and only now are people discovering because of video games that they’ve been this way for decades.
It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of expression these groups might decide to deem as unacceptable next.
Literally the bottom line. They have found something that works, and they are going to use and abuse it.
I think it’s time for a game platform divorced from Visa/Mastercard to rise to the occasion and step in for these platforms. Websites without these processors already exist, so the model is proven to work well enough (it’s less convenient for sure).
I wouldn’t think the US would be a good country for this hypothetical store though. I think it’s only a matter of time until they attack the publishers and studios directly. I’m not counting on the 1st amendment to help anyone.
Well that is at least something Bitcoin could have fixed
And probably would have if it wasn’t being manipulated by speculators.
Wow, I might actually have to stop using itch.io, is nowhere safe from the craziest anymore? I dont even make NSFW games, but bending the knee to dickheads over some overtly religious bullshit isnt gonna work for me.
Agreed. Game and movie ratings already exist, who the fuck are they to say what we can/can’t access with MY credit card.
I don’t play those games nor use itch.io, but fuck this nonsense.
It wasn’t Itch.io’s fault, but the fact that payment processing has been globally monopolized and can force it’s own arbitrary will on anyone without recourse.
Blame Visa and MasterCard and the christofascist scum from Collective Shout, who is responsible for pressuring the processors into harming the stores and artists.
Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article. They recently claimed credit for the campaign that saw payment providers pressuring the online storefronts to remove content the group deemed unacceptable.
It’s not hard to empathise with the folks behind Itch for being placed in an impossible position, but their lack of forewarning has left creators blindsided and in some cases, seemingly without income. “I wish we had gotten some warning from Steam and Itch,” wrote game developer Robert Yang on Bluesky, “but we already know it’s Collective Shout + payment processors waging culture war against LGBTQ people and sexual expression. I guess there’s nothing else for Steam and Itch to say”.
Personally speaking, I’d be willing to extend that good faith to Itch.io themselves, but they aren’t the one holding the gun to their own heads here. That’d be financial companies, pressured by Collective Shout, who themselves have ties to an organisation whose CEO once described gay marriage as an “unspeakable offence to God”. It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of expression these groups might decide to deem as unacceptable next.
Puritans are going to destroy the world.
That’d be financial companies, pressured by Collective Shout, who themselves have ties to an organisation whose CEO once described gay marriage as an “unspeakable offence to God”. It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of expression these groups might decide to deem as unacceptable next.
You know, if they want to play dirty. Alright. But I am sure this CEOs name is known and so are those of that collective. I wonder what multiple generations of sexually frustrated nerds are able to do to these people?
Everone talks about porn and loser males. Its more than that. Its way more. The banned all adult targeted games, even the ones which are not porn or gore. Many-many gamers are affected, way more than sexually fustrated nerds. They now start to see, that they poked the bear, and it came with the wolf and tiger to take justice.
Damn guess we’ll need to move to the alternative- ah wait- no- itch was the alternative.
I wonder if a federated game platform would work as an idea or if that’s just an inherently bad idea due to the nature of trusting strangers with your money.
Without payments processors, they can’t sell games.
Having a federated platform wouldn’t mean much if the payments processors blanket ban the platform.
Still wouldn’t address the root problem here: payment processing companies have the power to just deny payment from even happening.
Unless you’re referring to making a federated platform that instead allows devs to connect with buyers and make transactions off channel.
Would limit widespread issues like this but now you’re opening a whole new can of worms with trust
Crypto payments is one solution.
This but unironically. I was going to try and use monero recently just to dip my toes in the proverbial crypto water, until I found out that I can’t buy anything with monero other than drugs.
I recall you could pay for some VPS but it was years ago and I know nothing about the current situation.
Cryptocurrency was going to be an alternative coin but it’s just used to speculate and buy illegal things.
buy illegal things
but that is actually what we’re here for in this thread - we want to buy things that our masters say we cannot.
I’m just learning about this and I wonder what has Steam done in this case to protect my rights as their client.
Uh … Steam actually did this same thing before Itch did.
That is exactly why I’m asking.
