This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentially criminal content needs to be reviewed.
I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Now what?
If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again.
Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again.
If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble.
And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking.
You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
Yes but no. Currently the issue is that these two payment systems - both credit/debit card networks - (1) have the power to decide with impunity, because they have critical mass. And (2) have visibility into who each vendor is and what they are selling. If there is one case of abusing market dominance, this is it - and for all we frequently hear, this is REALLY not all that common. (And it's "funny" that we hear a lot about Apple's app store - but not about their anti-adult content rules!)
For example, right now a bank would have a VERY hard time preventing you from paying for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT with crypto. That bank would have no visibility into who you are paying with that crypto. There are other crypto intermediaries but they are "diffuse". Nobody in there has both visibility and power.
For example, right now some vendors accept gift cards as payment. Buy a Home Depot gift card in cash at your local store and use it to pay for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT. Obviously this is not a very efficient payment infrastructure but it exists.
But yes of course, imposing to credit card networks to be content-blind would be helpful and soooo much more efficient.
Terrorism, money laundering, illegal things like drugs, whatever.
If it’s hard enough to get crypto, then it doesn’t matter if it’s technically an option.
You could make it possible to buy this stuff with Fruity Pebbles box tops. They’d have no visibility into that either. And roughly no one would do it.
They just have to make this stuff hard enough. And that’s currently very easy.
Step 4 gets you thrown in jail for violating AML.
The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible.
Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well.
But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media.
I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing.
That’s why.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
eliminate central promotion of abortion; comprehensive
sexuality education; and the new woke gender ideologyThis way, abusers can disagree about what constitutes abuse in private, but can form a bloc in public, unifying around the common ground that the boss's whims should be respected in matters where the bandying about of facts is taboo. Might makes right, etc.
Does that term still have any meaning?
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.
That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough. Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.
> (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Wow, not crypto, but GP fucking nailed it.
Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.
At least I hope that USPS is forbidden from not (eventually) delivering legal packages ?
> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
It shows you the effort that some people will go to be able to buy things if they also don't have good alternatives.
But if we're talking about a hypothetical Steam competitor, then Steam still exists and takes credit cards.
They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.
If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
Charge backs, etc... can be effectively solved by appropriately pricing in such risks (or not offering those services at all).
This isn't a payment processor issue, it's a political choice.
This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.
But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.
Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.
Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
I'm speaking of Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best chess players in the world. He is also a streamer on kick, and actually talks in the way I demonstrated. It's not an exaggeration, he actually repeats the same thought ~5 times in the regular.
He is the only kick streamer I know, so that's what I think of when I hear kick.
There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.
The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally. That’s worth the investment than that pipe dream of a global, frictionless cryptocurrency.
Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.
What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.
(But it's kind of spurious- in practice, Coinbase, Block, etc. would be targeted far before someone running a Lightning node would be. The larger point is that very few people would interact with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as a peer in the network.)
But you're doing this with credit cards already? Different amounts, but still supporting everyone in a chain. If you want to "buy" something without supporting intermediates, then barter is the only way to go. Everything else requires common trust, and common trust comes with operating cost.
That's not true, at least not in general. Polygon (and USDT/USDC on Polygon) fees are near zero, Ethereum is lately very cheap, and even Bitcoin fees are no longer outrageous. EDIT: ...and Bitcoin Lightning is cheap.
A lot of p0rn payment processing is done in crypto for exactly the censorship reasons. If you can't use the payment processor, who cares what their fees are? (not saying they are cheaper or more expensive than crypto - I don't know)
Though almost all of the sponsors are from almost 6 months ago, so it might die in committee anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
> Operation Choke Point was an initiative of the United States Department of Justice beginning in 2013 which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies that, while operating legally, were said to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
There's a whole list on the Wikipedia article of the kinds of legal businesses that were targeted by this. Some of them make sense, but others look like very serious 1A and 2A violations.
Had to look into it a bit.
From looking at the text of the bill, it looks like the sponsor did not like Operation Choke Point [0], which was specifically targeting banks that did business with Payday Lenders, Ponzi Schemes, and other shady vendors.
This also included pornography, but I'm willing to bet that's not what Sen. Cramer was upset about. More likely, he's simply serving the interest of his donors.
He also might have extremist "small business" constituents that are perhaps selling racist/sexist/homophobic merch, and they don't like being told that their bank/credit card processors are refusing to process payments on that swag.
ammunition sales
ATM operators
cable box de-scramblers
coin dealers
credit card schemes
credit repair services
dating services
debt consolidation scams
drug paraphernalia
escort services
firearms sales
fireworks sales
get rich products
government grants
home-based charities
lifetime guarantees
lifetime memberships
lottery sales
mailing lists/personal info
money transfer networks
online gambling
pawn shops
payday loans
pharmaceutical sales
Ponzi schemes
pornography[5]
pyramid-type sales
racist materials
surveillance equipment
telemarketing
tobacco sales
travel clubsIt seems to me like if you thought something was good and then switched to thinking it was bad based just on who proposed it, you need to stop being prejudiced. Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.
Ideas? Sure. Bills? No.
So much of how a piece of legislation affects society has to do with the agendas of the people behind it (no matter what it says in text) and the means by which the executive implements it (often hand-in-glove with the agendas of the legislation’s originators).
https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/understanding-the-cascade-of-...
You can read the bill's author (Kevin Cramer) discussing that bill and his motives for writing it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250715113010/https://fedsoc.or... ("Debanking: The Newest Threat to Free Speech and Religious Liberty?) (2024)
> [Senator Kevin Cramer] "...I've heard that one from some pretty big bank presidents - but they get a lot of noise in their left ear and you have activist investors and whatnot that are saying, hey, you know what? We don't like coal. We don't like oil, we don't like natural gas. We don't like private prisons, or we don't like ammunition shops or gun manufacturers or whatever the case might be, the entire category or industry and says, "Well, so we're not going to bank them. We're going to debank them. We're not going to bank them. You're disqualified from getting money from us.”, and they're starving these industries out. And all this really is, in my view, you guys is this is a political agenda where they're utilizing the leverage of the financial services sector to accomplish policy goals that they can't accomplish any other way."
If they are easy to sway in one direction, why not the other? Simply do what Collective Shout did, but in the opposite direction?
In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong.
Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic?
None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal.
BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored.
So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt?
Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!
But the lack of reading comprehension on this site is making me lose my marbles.
I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with.
If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting.
Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.
Sounds news to me. Do you have any origin for this?
You might want to check that because it's not so cut and dried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A
> (c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726
> I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.
> So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.
> Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.
Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits.
What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.
And yes, you need a lot of private capital to pull this off.