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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, Steam, Itch, Pornhub - they all had ample warnings and complaints about the kind of content they're hosting, but chose to forego introducing moderation in favor of continuing to make profit. Complaints about Pornhub went ignored for years, for example, until enough pressure built up.

And it's a similar same case for Facebook. The EU complained for years about anything from hate speech spread by the general public to outright propaganda campaigns, Facebook did nothing - but complained when the EU finally had enough and introduced the DSA.

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Pornhub hosted material featuring sex trafficked women for years without taking serious action. Other porn sites were doing the same.

I do not see how a game in steam or itch.io where everything is fictional is anywhere close to that or requiring such moderation. This is a totally different issue, in the same way that a game involving killing others is not the same as an actual video of somebody killing people. Shall we ban books featuring similar themes too?

The payment processors have been held criminally and civilly liable in court for processing payments for pornhub. I don't see how we can expect Visa/MC to not censor their customers, if we also intend to hold them criminally liable for the actions of their customers in such cases.

If Visa spends years in criminal court because a book store accepted a credit card payment for an illegal book, then yes, expect Visa to start placing limits on card processing for bookstores.

Do you have examples where there has been criminal or civil liability for a purely-fictional game?

I agree only partially with you. Yes some problems were ignored for far too long, but these providers sometimes block stuff that is just adult content. And it is an issue, if a small amount of providers have so much power. Visa and Mastercard more or less have the entire market. Both US american as well, so not even an alternative from other countries.

And with Facebook: I mean yes theoretically it is good that the EU is trying to do something, I'm all up for it. But Facebook is in my opinion worse than it ever was and gets more worse every day.

How would have applying moderation years ago enabled Itch and Steam to sell porn games today?

Applying moderation and reacting to legitimate complaints in time would have prevented pressure from building up so massively that payment networks or politicians even have a leg to stand on.

It's one thing to have occasional issues with stuff slipping through the cracks, that happens. But it's a completely different thing to just not do anything for years. In the case of Steam, let's just take the recent Nazi scandal [1] - reports of users using blatant Nazi imagery and vocabulary date back almost a decade [2] and that's the oldest thing I could find in a minute of Googling, I 'member this being a thing even years before Trump's first presidency but honestly I can't be bothered to search for more old Nazi shit at 9 o'clock in the morning.

Had Steam done something about the Nazis back in 2017, I guarantee you that 2024 Bloomberg piece wouldn't ever have come into existence. That's seven years in which Steam did nothing to combat users using swastikas - stuff that could trivially be caught using machine learning, even back in the time.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-14/white-sup...

[2] https://forum.gamespodcast.de/viewtopic.php?t=2478

> Applying moderation and reacting to legitimate complaints in time would have prevented pressure from building up so massively that payment networks or politicians even have a leg to stand on.

How would moderation help when the games that are being removed from the platforms are perfectly legal, and in compliance with the terms the platforms out on the creators?

The only problem with the games is that a highly influential group of people views them as immoral, and use them as a stepping stone towards achieving their broader goal of censoring all adult content.

The nazi thing may have brought a little bit more attention to Steam but I really can't imagine it was a big decisive factor instead of Steam's allowing of porn games and displaying them on the best selling lists with the adult options enabled

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