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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

If instead of "bullshit/no-bullshit" games were tagged with one of many predefined attributes like "pay to avoid grind" or "unremovable ads" it might benefit twofold. First because it becomes that much clearer when a person enters the game it should have that tag and that tag can be filtered by default and enables them to see why a certain game was already entered but not in the list without trying to resubmit. Second because people who don't mind a certain attribute are able to disable one of the default criteria if they want while still leveraging the others i.e. more flexibility in use.

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Hmm, I don't know if I want to add "pay to win" games to the list, even with a tag, as then that will just be every game on the play store. I will think about it, though, thank you!

You don't have to display ones with the tag. But you can make it a checkbox on whatever intake form you use. It's a bucketing mechanism. At a minimum, it makes it faster for you to reject some submissions outright. But it also forces the unscrupulous to lie by falsely checking the box, so there's less debate to be had whether you want their games listed at all.

Ahh a checkbox at submission is an excellent idea, thanks!

Fun fact: The US government uses this same tactic on a bunch of immigration forms including the application for US citizenship. It asks questions like

    Have you EVER been a member of, or in any way associated (either directly or indirectly) with a terrorist organization?
    Have you EVER persecuted (either directly or indirectly) any person because of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion?
    Between March 23, 1933 and May 8, 1945, did you work for or associate in any way (either directly or indirectly) with the Nazi government of Germany?

Answering "YES" to some of these questions is often an easy path to rejection but if you lie about it, it gives the government an easy way to kick you out later without having to prove that you committed a crime.

The last one puts a funny spin on Operation Paperclip.

“Oh, so you _didn’t_ help us develop our chemical weapons and space programs in a cynical ploy to avoid hanging at Nuremberg? DENIED.”

I agree with you, keep it free of bullshit. All the labels they mention fully qualify as bullshit and the website isn’t called “somewhat bullshit games” and we shouldn’t support anyone making this bullshit.

If anything, have a nice list of checkboxes on the Add Game page indicating which things qualify as bullshit and use it to default deny the game.

I'll do that now, thanks! I might open-source the codebase, too, so people can help.

As an example of what I mean: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfa...

Here I can see which stores a game is on, what kind of DRM it uses, if internet access is required, if another launcher is used, what the monetization/microtransactions/dlc is, and more. Now obviously not all of that is mappable to mobile stores but the concepts still apply. Even though that game is "free-to-grind" bullshit I can see that it is right away instead of a "not found" message. They also have categories (e.g. click "free-to-grind"), andin true Wiki style, not necessarily the best interface... but it enables them to effectively crowd source data without having to rely on one guy vetting everything and shoving the bad data into a black hole.

I'm not saying you should then display all games with any tag when the user goes to the site though. Just that it probably makes sense to keep the data on all submissions and allow visitors a path to see them rather than discard data on bullshit wholesale, as that's half the value - seeing what was bullshit. Both for the originally stated reasons, basically "allow the user to do a more advanced bullshit filter than the actual app store supports", and because the absence of a game currently means conflicting things at the same time right now: 1) Nobody has submitted it 2) Someone submitted it but it was rejected for something it did at the time or was misreported and needs to be resubmitted with the correct info 3) Someone submitted it correctly with the current version but it does actually have bullshit.

Hmm, you're right. I do actually have that data, I should give a better message on submission (like "this game was submitted but rejected"), but I count resubmissions as additional "votes" usually, so they still do something.

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