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I used to work with a person who used these principles to say no to building anything at all.

There was an article on HN about Disney internet apps. Disney management consider "safe for children" to be a critical part of their brand. Their stance was very clear: no communication between users under any circumstances, ever.

Probably wise. I've seen online interactions in some games be limited to ready-made callouts or phrases you can assemble from pre-made words / sentences (like From Software games).

Of course, points for creativity if they can still make lewd comments like "time for thrust attacks but whole" near a corpse bent over a banister.

Minor quibble, but I think it's "hole" not "whole", so it's even closer. As in "Watch out for " "hole" "!".

The funny thing is that the game has incredibly sensitive username filter as well. I've fought countless players with names like "The #### K###ht" instead of "The ugly knight".

Probably this: http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

On HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624074

A very good read!

Nintendo is similar. Communicating with other players online is nearly impossible, even if you're friends.

I assume this is why PictoChat never came back :(

It did, as Swapnote on the 3ds. And originally you could send Swapnotes over the internet to your friends. But then it was common to exchange friend codes on message boards with lewds being traded (especially of the apps' mascot, Nikki) so Nintendo axed her and the ability to use anything but local note exchange in response.

Ugh.

I can't quite recollect how, but on WiiU you could video chat with friends

Doesn't Switch have ingame audio-chat at all?

Separate phone app.

Could Disney take over Facebook? Might be good for the world /s

They actually thought about buying Twitter: https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-ceo-bob-iger-abandons...

While they wouldn't have used the Disney brand for that ;)

That was sort of the idea of their old Touchstone Pictures brand. It let them do movies that weren't on brand for Disney.

Miramax Films, too. Except that was via Disney acquisition in 1993 and not homegrown like Touchstone was.

It's always fun to say that technically Pulp Fiction (released 1994, post-acquisition) is a "Disney" film.

I wonder how this policy has changed over the years. Disney used to have a virtual world called VMK that did allow for communication between users. This being Disney, there was a (highly restrictive) whitelist of words that could be used; this being the internet, users found lots of clever word combinations to evade the filters.

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