But then the blocks got full, fees and wait times skyrocketed, and in response to the customer backlash Steam removed Bitcoin.
Meanwhile Bitcoiners were (and still are) only focused on number go up instead of other, more productive, use cases.
Such a waste.
Good luck censoring purchases on ETH.
Am I missing something?
And Ethereum's Proof of Stake algorithm is highly censorship resistant. That's why it took seven years to design.
The problem isn't technical, the problem is getting people to care.
The simple fact is, Visa/MC don't want to deal with porn because the number of chargebacks and fraud from porn purchases is significant and a huge outlier compared to most other charges. Their crusade against processing charges for adult material isn't about purity, it's simply business.
Given Valve's generous refund policies, and the fact that a steam store purchase on your credit card statement looks quite innocent, and that the credit card companies didn't complain to Valve about chargebacks but about content, my guess is there are hardly any chargebacks, and this is just about moral purity.
Their generous refund policy, and more importantly their very-non-generous chargeback policy. If you chargeback a Steam purchase, your account is locked.
Fraud is likely more realistic of an issue, but that's probably an issue with games in general, not just adult titles.
There are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements, but AFAIK companies like Valve aren't being given any options other than comply or be destroyed.
This is part of a long-term plan to de facto ban lgbtq content without having to deal with first amendment protections. First have the payment processors ban explicit content, then have queer content categorized as explicit.
Adult business is legitimate business in many parts of the world and companies using their monopoly to suppress it should be a case for an Investigation.
The permanent solution is a federal government operated electronic money system operated as a utility with constitutionally protected rights.
Or cryptocurrency, I guess.
They're aiming to reverse that trend.
https://cphpost.dk/2025-06-28/general/new-political-agreemen...
Not all European countries still have these independent networks.
Sincerely, Ted K.
merchants don't deal with mastercard, they deal with an acquiring bank
of which there are hundreds
no doubt one of which will be happy to take the business
and I very doubt it's the case, the card networks simply don't care, given you can buy adult entertainment from millions of websites
the acquirer will care if it pushes up their chargeback rate, but this is normally solved by the merchant by paying a couple of bps more
it's a negotiating tactic, nothing more
I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.
Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.
Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.
The problem isn't some people being upset, it's that a single digit number of companies effectively control the ability for anyone else in the world to do business with them. Those companies get lobbied as much as politicians but with no accountability and any overreach being far less visible. And no freedom of speech rules.
Steam does police their store. It's just that Visa/Mastercard don't approve of how they police it.
What.
Seriously what? I thought pro-choice is a core tenet of feminism?
I live in a red state in the South. I'd say about 2/3 of the women I know well enough to be confident of their politics to that degree of detail would describe themselves as both feminists and anti-abortion/pro-life.
If you want to put a name to it, they're basically second-wave feminists with a few third-wave beliefs tacked on.
The real lesson here is that politics are nuanced, and the US party dichotomy doesn't come close to covering it.
I consider myself an AnCap (shocking given my username, I know), but grew up here surrounded by Republicans. I fit in well enough overall because this is where I developed my "social mask" in the first place. I lived in a community with nearly directly opposite politics (Charlottesville, VA) for a few years and found that I fit in pretty well with that crowd as well.
I share enough with both parties that I can have conversations on things that I agree with them on and connect to the point that they assume that I'm "one of them". Invariably, once conversation turns to other topics I'm accused of being a member of the other party. It's to the point that it amuses me when it happens, and I frankly enjoy being in a place where I can connect with most everyone and serve as a sort of translator: I've spent enough time "in enemy territory" from their perspectives that I can explain the other side's position fairly and with empathy while explicitly not holding that position. It makes for stimulating conversation with little risk of offense.
What does ancapistanism have to do with it? Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
The libertarian view tends to much more favour the parents rights to make choices for their children if I remember correctly, and obviously favour the option where the government isn't deciding for them.
My personal belief is that life begins at conception. As a result, I’m opposed to abortion in all cases.
… but I’m also an anarchist, and therefore believe it is emphatically not the state’s role to make these types of decisions for people.
I don’t think there is a “right answer” here in terms of policy. Some large portion of the people will see it as a violation of their rights no matter how extreme or nuanced the line is drawn.
Of course there is. It's not hard to construct an argument to that effect either. For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights.
I'm not saying that's a bulletproof argument. Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever. So it is possible. I'm also quite certain that a cleverer person than I could construct a better argument which still doesn't require any religious dogma. This is an ethical topic, not a religious one. Obviously religion has a lot to say on ethics, but that's no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist.
That's not persuasive at all. It's not just not "bulletproof", it's blatantly wrong. Also you can make the same argument in the other direction.
> Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever.
They wanted someone to give a plausible argument that isn't religious.
> no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist
I care about the merits of positions that people actually have, not theoretical positions.
And in the general case, if nobody can be found that has a simple position, that is a reason to believe it's not a coherent position.
One grain of sand is a small amount of sand. Two grains of sand is a small amount of sand. Therefore, by induction, any amount of grains of sand is a small amount of sand. The Sahara contains a small amount of sand.
This is fun.
That's roughly my position, as an atheist libertarian. although I don't back it up all the way to conception, just to a point in early pregnancy where it seems overwhelmingly clear the fetus has no attributes which could reasonably demand respect for rights.
Abortion has been conflated with feminism, like how, say, tariffs are conflated with Republicans right now, but there's no ideological necessity for that. Just cultural trends.
Sounds like you're not actually using that deeply flawed argument then. You're making the distinction that not every day has the same effect.
And could you estimate how many weeks you put that point at?
> It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights.
A _lot_ more happens to a fetus during and immediately after birth than just moving a few feet. You're minimizing it here, but if you give it the significance it merits your induction thing falls apart.
Their perspective is that abortion is killing a human being. Given that, it’s entirely consistent.
> What does ancapistanism have to do with it?
Nothing, other than that I was providing some context on where I’m coming from.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
While religion is certainly a factor for a lot of these people, this question doesn’t make sense to me. Is there a non-religious reason to be against killing any person, regardless of age?
The base difference in perspective is that the other side here believes that the fetus is a human being, with all the rights that come with it.
Stuff like this is why Autism is probably the next form of human evolution.
VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.
And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.
They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.
To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.
Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.
Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.
Try buying a second hand car and you want cash from the bank. Used to be very easy, but now you need to declare what your spending your money on.
You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?
Over here they are even cracking down on stuff like ebay, amazon because some people run a business on those sites and do not report the taxes. Result: If you make over 3k in the year on ebay, you need to provided your tax number, or ebay closes your account. And above 3k, it get reported to the IRS.
But wait, what happens if your a foreign national from some specific Asian countries and want to open a bank account? Refused, refused, refused... But you need a bank account for a lot of basic things. Well, tough luck. Lets not talk account closing issues.
And that is the EU, and just normal people. Nothing tax evasion, guns, or whatever. Just everybody putting up umbrella's to be sure, not understanding that when everybody does it, it really screws with people.
They are going crazy with this over regulation. Yes, i understand you want to fight black money but the people who get the big amounts will have ways to hide it. Your just hurting the normal people wanting to know what everybody is doing exactly with every cent.
You see this gradual effort to slowly phase out cash. Cashless payment are getting encouraged, cash withdrawals cost your money more and more, more questions regarding origins (so you say f it, and use bank deposits with release approvals).
Its not a surprise that we seen the increase in cryto usage (and the efforts of governments to control that also).
(I'm not in the US)
I'm curious about how does that happen. Do they reach out to you? Your bank?
The bank collects the information necessary to submit that form at the time of transaction.
You’re also required as an individual to file IRS Form 8300 if you accept >$10k in payment: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Banks in the US and EU are legally required to report large transactions. I know for a fact that in Europe, that cash handeling over 10.000 euro gets reported.
That includes withdrawals and deposits. The later gets even more questions asked regarding the "origins" of the money.
There are other fun events that we have seen, like transferring 15.000 euro from my wife to her brother (between countries), that had the money blocked as the bank needed to investigate the origin of the money. So the bank starts calling you to figure out what the money is, what is it used for, where does it come from, bla bla bla...
Why are you giving 15.000 to your brother. Is it a GIFT!!! Translation: Can we TAX it! I suspect that banks in some EU countries get a cut from reported money that can be taxed by the tax office (that is just my speculation).
No, it was his money that he loaned to us for a house buying, and that we returned, but they really tried to push the "gift" narrative. Large money transfers (above 10k), triggers investigations.
And as you can guess, large cash deposits or withdraws get even more questions.
Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.
So ironically, you perform actions like a criminal (will do to avoid detection), just to avoid getting questioned like your a criminal. Hahahaha...
I feel like we have no more privacy in our lives with everything being monitored and checked. Your browser spies on you, your OS spies on you (W11 Recall even worse), your smartphone, you get tracked by Wifi signal in the streets, your customer store card (that they push and push) is to track your buying habits, the banks track your every movement for the tax office, you can not even freaking sell stuff on ebay and get reported.
Like 3000 Euro is nothing. You sell a few piece of PC hardware and you hit that limit. And Amazon/Ebay/... report your behind. And now its about backdoors in encryption because you may be hiding something. What, you do not want to share your talks on XYZ platform to your wife, family. What are you saying, illegal stuff????
We are really moving to a dystopian world and have been for a long time.
Breaking up deposits into smaller amounts is a crime called structuring.
I wouldn't recommend doing this as an alternative to dealing with the reports and scrutiny on larger transactions.
https://screenshot-media.com/politics/human-rights/pornhub-p...
Exodus Cry leader was later fired for sexual misconduct
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/anti...
Trump changed banking regulations so that "reputation" can no longer be a reason for banks to "derisk" customers after crypto industry outcry, but the reason to exit customers must be factual money laundering or similar reason. But the change does concern cards, as payments are not under FDIC surveillance.
So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)
Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.
Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.
TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)
They shouldn't be able to leverage their nigh monopoly on modern payment processing to choose winners and losers in the marketplace.
They are using pornography as a wedge issue to establish that they get to dictate what companies are allowed to exist in the modern distributed market.
It would be entirely reasonable to legally require them to act blindly towards retailers, with restrictions needing to be based on universally applied financial criteria.
Card payments have become inseparable from modern life.
Regulate them as a financial utility. The electric company or water company can't refuse to hook up a business just because the owner doesn't like that business.
https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27
Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/01...
And I’m willing to bet some content removed does not fall in these categories
You can find the list of removed titles if you go looking for it. Feel free to point out which ones you think are collateral damage. I’m not looking at that list with my eyeballs though. I need them for later.
Are you claiming that the content removed was encroaching on this law?
A Quick Look at the list has me wishing I hadn’t thought to look at the list.
I suspect the vague “certain adult games” was chosen because it makes it sound more controversial. If the headline was “Valve removed incest-themed games under pressure” there would be a lesser reaction.
Hopefully they don't know about the little-sister route in Making Lovers.
Thus I can imagine that they don't want to become criminally responsible if that's illegal.
This statement imply that:
* Simulated violence is not violence.
* Simulated sex is not sex.
* Simulated sorcery is not sorcery
It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.
That attitude has recently become normalized, and I find it Concerning(TM).
There's a similar issue with free speech - the moment you ban certain speech the door to banning your political opposition opens.
And those are just explicit limits. Try supporting Palestine on a college campus or mentioning women or gay people in any government funded scientific publication, or finding a book portraying pro-LGBT content in a library or a school curriculum that portrays slavery in a way that "makes white people feel victimized" in the South.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Actual speech is communicating ideas or opinions, even distasteful or unpopular ones. The fact that university morons throw a riot if anyone disagrees with them (many such cases), does not affect your right to do so.
Denmark passed a law in 2023 that makes public burning, tearing, stepping on, or defiling holy texts illegal. It's informally called the Quran Law, because everyone knows who doesn't tolerate any criticism of their religion at all. This is one of many limits on speech in Denmark. In my view, speech is either free or it isn't, hence my argument that only USA has free speech.
things that lightly annoyed the president is now the decider between legal and illegal speech in the US, and the punishment is death, because nothing the president does that could be part of their regular responsibilities like talking to secret service assasins, can be considered in court proceedings.
The show itself was losing viewership cause who the F watches late night TV these days?
whats gonna replace that slot that people are gonna watch? a blank screen?
The ruling ethnic group, of course, as is tradition.
There is TONS of speech that is banned, even in America. There isn't a single place on the planet that has no limits on speech.
This is not okay, and we need to take a strong moral stance here. Some views should not be acceptable in a society.
But, in what way do you think those opposing “extreme” content being consumed by their fellow citizens are silent? State governments across the country are clamoring to censor all sorts of things, presumably to satisfy their constituents.
the people making a stink about this know this but are pretending that they don't because it would overtly out them as pedophiles.
That doesn't make sense.
If we are going down this path there's a lot of literature popular with women about to be banned
I totally support this type of pressure being exerted on companies involved in editorializing and providing an audience (e.g. I don't think Valve should be required by law to carry any form of content, just like a publisher can't be forced to print any content it doesn't agree with). But infrastructure, due to being both fundamental to doing business and generally living in a society and very often being at least regionally monopolistic in nature, should be open to anybody that's acting within the law.
And conversely, if something seems ethically or morally unacceptable to a rule-based society, what ought to change is the law.
That's all assuming a functioning democratic and political process, of course, but it generally seems to be possible even in the US, with its strong protections of speech, to limit certain types of speech under obscenity laws, so I don't really get the desire to outsource this inherently political process to private corporations.
What does that mean?
For example if something can be shown to cause actual harm to innocent individuals, i find it morally unacceptable.
But some people will tell you anything banned by their favorite fairytale or their upbringing is morally unacceptable.
The state is a less bad alternative but bad (unintentionally harmful) and malicious (intentionally harmful) decisions are generally not punished either.
When people set rules which affect others, they should also be held accountable.
And in general, rules limiting a person's behavior should only exist when that behavior can be _proven_ to be harmful.
They should be determined by individuals capable of critical and logical thinking and without anything personal to gain from the rules.
They should not be determined by individuals who have antisocial traits or who are indoctrinated into various belief systems which are founded on preferential treatment (such as religion).
I'd wager most "normal" people would recoil at the idea of eating excrement and, for all my open-mindedness, it's probably not something I'd actively endorse. But banning it is on a whole other leaf. Things can and should be allowed to exist on the fringe.
Otherwise we're moving towards the subject of the T.S. Eliot quote where "everything that is not forbidden will be compulsory, and everything not compulsory will be forbidden."
Who gets to decide these things and based on what?
Flagging my reply is gross (you state that, not me!) and grounds for ban. I'll just leave this 2nd rebuttal here as I take back both my legs to stand on and yours as well :P
https://www.pcmag.com/news/take-it-down-act-deepfake-revenge...
Let's simulate grave digging
Let's simulate blackmailing the dead for an eternity
For fun AND for profit
Which is possibly because violence is not as awkward to watch with your family as sex is.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...
Regards: Game dev who cares about conservation and doesn't like chilling effects.
I’m not that someone; I don’t think Valve has any moral obligation to platform ”any content, as long as it is not illegal”. They have the freedom to choose what they publish. Petition away, see if anyone cares!
"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany."
So, I hear Europe doesn't have these problems about puritanical censorship in games......
Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
But they have partnered with GS and MC. Far from any sort of "finance industry roots".
They essentially offer a fancy UI on top of GS products and other traditional banks.
Apple Cash -> Green Dot or some other no name bank
Apple Card -> Goldman Sachs
Apple Pay -> some very small percentage of the bank and network fees charged to merchants
In some countries the vast majority of payments are done via phone apps for national payment systems already, bypassing Visa/Mastercard etc. entirely. Even kids pay for candy by phone.
> Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.
Apple used a very large bank headquartered in the US for its credit card processing as of about ten years ago. Given that the cost of change is significant once these processes are put in place, it is likely this remains the case.
Note that this is not the same as what Apple Pay supports.
In days of yore, Visa did processing on IBM iron. The iron in question took a while to boot, and time is very definitely money to Visa and they wanted to speed up reboots (e.g., after a crash). Saving seconds = $$$.
Visa to IBM: "Please give us the source code for the <boot path stuff>, it's costing us money."
IBM: LOL
Visa to some big banks: "Please tell IBM to give us the source code for this, it's costing you money."
IBM, a little later: "Here's a tape. Need any help?"
Visa is a clearing house whose members are banks. Think of it like a payment router between issuers (banks) and processors (banks).
Only sponsored organizations can directly use the "Visa rails", where "sponsor" is defined as a bank, a bank subsidiary, or an entity previously sponsored by one of the other two.
This is also the case for MasterCard and Discover. "Traditional" American Express is different though.
> Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
Those merchants use banks or one of their subsidiaries for processing credit card transactions. Most large merchants do as well in order to minimize their discount rate as well as other transaction fees. Smaller merchants often use ISO's or VAR's for business specific reason, knowing both ultimately transact with a bank or one of a bank's subsidiaries.
I know at least two of the above used to use a specific US bank for the credit card transactions backing their payment services. For others, if service usage requires a verified credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they too use a processor owned/operated by a bank, bank subsidiary, or an entity sponsored by same.
EDIT:
For payment services which do not require a credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they almost certainly use the ACH[0] network. This is a more intimate financial relationship and best used with a dedicated bank account not linked to any others, as fund transfers can be bidirectional.
From a card holder's perspective regarding a transaction being voided or refunded, sure. What I was talking about are services where the account holder can equally perform purchases as well as receive payments.
> I meant to mention Zelle and Plaid too, since they integrate with many (most?) banks already to allow transfers via your online account login authentication credentials instead of traditional ACH
For the purposes of bidirectional fund transfers, the mechanism for how it is implemented is moot. The net effect and account access (intimacy) is functionally the same.
China would never! /s
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58384457
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-issues-draft-rules...
[1] as a random example: https://archive.kyivpost.com/technology/japanese-payment-sys...
Interac[1] is Canada's debit system, originally created as a non-profit by our largest banks way back in '84, and these days is supported everywhere. The large banks are already used to bullying their way through political or bureaucratic challenges, and a single Canadian bank typically has trillion(s) in managed assets - they _can_ bully Visa.
Zelle[2] (2016) is a limited (etransfer only) clone for the American market, UPI (2016) in India, UnionPay (2002) in China, carte Bleue (1967) in France, etc etc. What's missing is cooperation between national systems like these, as well as lending as they typically only do debit instead of credit.
Any cooperation between these systems would likely get spun out as a separate entity, which would eventually just turn into a new Visa or Mastercard - but 3 choices is better than 2.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
Those are all US companies so subject to the same puritan pressures. Their cards would still be good for buying ultra violent games but not sex games...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36012866
And really, even banking isn't a safe harbor. I am pretty sure they were at the forefront of the rise in neobanks and products like green dot cards.
It's just like matter and antimatter being created at the same time, money and anti-money (debt) are created at the same time and when they meet, they cancel each other out.
So borrowing literally creates money (and debt), and repaying debts literally deletes money (and debt).
Does the bank itself use its own money to pay off the debt (deleting some of their own money), or do they simply delete the debt?
In principle, it is 'the bank uses its own money to pay off the debt', as long as you accept that the bank's own 'credit worthiness reputation' and other assets count as 'money'. The hit is _ultimately_ taken by the capital shareholders in the bank, which is the important part.
> Leaked internal slides peg Steam’s net revenue last fiscal year at just under $10 billion
https://www.simplymac.com/games/3-5m-per-employee-how-valve-...
Maybe crypto is an option but I haven’t seen use in retail. Only speculation instrument.
Apple tried. Failed. Google tried. Failed. Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
> Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
Could Visa just reject payments from this bank and kill your whole thing?
To replace visa/mastercard you need to have thousands of banks support ValveCard across the world. It's hard to imagine how it's going to happen. Players will not switch to another (probably foreign) bank just to buy Half-Life 3. They'll pirate it.
By the way, Gabe has a very famous quote:
> Piracy is a service problem.
He knows it very well that if it's hard for players to buy something they'll just get it free anyway. You can say he's probably the first person in the world who realized this idea profoundly enough to turn it into a business. It's very risky for Steam to make buying games even slightly harder.
Through Visa and Mastercard
You can’t run your own card network easily because you would have to convince all of the merchant banks that take card transactions to do business with you.
Digital money movement requires an operating agreement between at least two financial entities - but most of the time there’s a lot more. Depending on the type of transaction you may have two or more gateways, facilitators, processors, issuers and underlying banks involved.
It’s a very fragmented system that relies on many, many different entities all having agreements and contracts with eachother.
You get your card from your issuing bank, so the consumer’s last mile is the bank’s problem. The merchant get their POS/gateway from the acquirers. Your bank and the merchants acquirer don’t know each other.
Visa and Mastercard are intermediaries. There’s no way a NatWest card in the UK is connected to whatever POS is in Chile or whatever. They all route through the card brands.
This is why it’s so tough to break this monopoly.
The issue is Visa/Mastercard/whoever is pressuring Valve isn't happy about the very existence of incest games. They don't want to be associated with incest/rape even indirectly.
If a book publisher was selling erotic fiction about children online, you could bet your ass they would have a hard time with payment processors.
I’m not sure you have a case with this argument.
All that stemmed from an unlikely but existential fear that Microsoft could lock-down software distribution on Windows. My suspicion is that SteamOS sales and Steam Decks aren't actually profitable, they're just too valuable as a bargaining chip not to invest in. And Valve can invest in them, because they're rich and private.
While Valve bigwigs probably aren't losing sleep over the missed revenue from incest games, having the rest of their revenue stream threatened might make them seek another form of insurance.
mindgeek then wiped all _unconfirmed_ content regardless of whether it was revenge porn or not.
The weird part about the first-world sexual liberation mindset (usually said about feminism, but not limited thereto) is that it actively ignores how massively abusive sexual liberties very often and easily become.
they have their own banned topics lists and if you fuck up you lose your income
https://www.aclu.org/documents/federal-trade-commission-comp...
Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.
However, that's clearly not all that's going on -- it doesn't seem like the government is still doing this.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-ar...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being-blamed-on...
[3] https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstreams/761eb6c3-9377-...
I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.
Well, this coverage identifies two restrictions that Valve is enforcing:
(1) No video footage of humans. Animation only.
(2) No incest.
Onlyfans clearly hasn't implemented restriction (1).
If they've implemented (2), that seems like much less of a problem as applied to onlyfans than to animated content on Steam. But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.
Of course the constituency that is openly pro-incest is small. On the other hand, I believe the constituency for a quite encompassing freedom of speech has to be taken seriously.
Claiming you need to be pro-incest to support the existance of incest themed video games is as absurd as claiming you need to be pro-murder to support much of the entire Action movie genre.
I was talking about human lactation. OF was forced to ban it because these same groups perceived it as "obscene" which is truly nonsensical
What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
Plenty of religious groups have the money to be able to start the "holy card". And there's plenty of businesses that'd be giddy to accept Jesus card.
Consider, for example, companies like hobby lobby or Chick-fil-A banning visa and promoting Jesus card.
It also wouldn't take much for such a card to advertise itself as kid friendly.
Thinking about it, I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened already.
Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.
Maybe? Depends on how customers are sold on the mission. If it's sold as protecting children I could see a number of people ditching their cards.
> Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.
True. It'd take a large amount of initial capital and would likely need a targeted and regional rollout with some nice incentives to the merchants.
The unspoken arrangement is that the government allows them to keep charging a de facto sales tax on a massive portion of the economy as long as they cooperate and de facto ban things that the government wants banned but can't ban themselves due to that pesky constitution.
Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.
The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.
Now, check this out:
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.
> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/ecb_surveys/space/html/ecb.s...
This is to be expected though:
> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).
> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.
Regarding privacy:
> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.
I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.
Now, these guys might be biased, but to quote: "The EUR 500 note alone accounts for over 30% of the value of all banknotes in circulation (1)." (https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cash...).
That would suggest to me that at least 30% of the value of cash is used for "shady" stuff (I mean I don't know anybody that would use 500 eur bills).
The fact that cash would be used mostly for illegal activities by value (I don't know if it is really the case), does not imply that "people that use cash use if for illegal activities".
That said, there is "For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.", which means they primarily use cash below 50 EUR, and you cannot do much illegal purchases with 50 EUR, it is such a small amount.
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established.
Another plausible reading could be that this is just a widely believed incorrect thing (or most exactly, they are just saying it is widely believed, and not anything about the underlying truthfulness of the belief). This seems easy for somebody to observe about the society around them (although I bet it is a regional thing, or something like that) and less likely for there to be hard data on. Perception is also more likely than actual facts to drive behavior, right?
> They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
This, on the other hand, seems like a specific action taken by the government to solve a specific problem, so I’d expect it to be well documented…
I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops taking card is not a given (Bulgaria, Hungary).
Let's not exaggerate. While I am often enough exasperated at how often certain restaurants or bars will still only accept cash (or sometimes EC card), I'm still able to do about 90% of my transactions by card.
COVID caused a major boost in shops adding card payments. Most shops now accept them even for small payments.
There are places which don't take cards, many of them also don't print receipts without asking, which might indicate than an tax audit might give interesting results ...
Some shops try to go towards "card only"
At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees. Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Also the arguments concerning cash restrictions are seen very differently by the population: since there existed two oppressive regimes on German soil in the 20th century, a lot of people realize that the restrictions on cash are just another step towards restrictions of the citizen's freedoms (thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash).
Thus, in Germany there exists the saying "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" [cash is lived freedom].
Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.
Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
Banking in Croatia is like UK banking 40 years ago, or at least it is with Erste. Charged even just to have the account.
They even charge me to send me an email to tell me I logged in to the online banking.
Well as you can see from the US currently, a country that is now free and democratic, might not continue to do so in the future. But once you've given up the ability to use cash because you didn't need it then, how are you going to get it back when you do need it?
Besides, I’m not advocating for the abolishment of cash, but against dramatic claims of an evil scheme to control and spy on citizens. That’s a right-wing narrative in Germany, but nonsense nonetheless.
Hell even France, everyone's just lucky that de Gaulle wasn't much into dictatorship.
I’m talking about the post-WW2 order, which has been remarkably solid. Until Trump showed up, that is. But even the USA are still a working democracy, despite all the fear of an authoritarian regime. So I would at least argue for a bit of calm and reason before proclaiming the end of freedom due to discontinued 500€ notes.
The German Democratic Republic had elections, it even had political mechanisms that allowed other parties to participate (which the East CDU made plenty of use of btw). It even had a lower rate of incarceration than the US and a far more primitive surveillance system.
Pre-WW2 Germany was a working democracy for the most part despite its court system still having being extremely biased in favor of monarchists and anti-leftism. Most of the violence committed by the Nazis at the time resulted in prosecutions even if many were excused for "being motivated by patriotism". Hitler even went to prison for attempting a coup before being pardoned - and the punishment succeeded in changing the NSDAP's strategy to mostly remain within the limits of the law. Hitler's absolute power was even legally granted through the Enabling Act, passed with the help of the government coalition partners including the ideological precursor to the modern CDU/CSU, the Christian (Catholic) conservative "Center" party.
Post-WW2 West Germany under Adenauer (who btw was a massive antisemite to the point of explaining the necessity of zionism with the need to appease the "very powerful" international Jewish community) on the other hand had the government pressuring its constitutional court to ban political parties, reinstate the Nazi era crime of "high treason" to criminalize any political attempts at reunification other than outright annexation and cracked down on pacifists and opponents to the remilitarization as desired by the US to have a regional power base in the Cold War. It also ran a system of rubber stamp courts to rehabilitate former NSDAP members, even when it required a re-trial after the destruction of incriminating evidence from prior unfavorable rulings.
And of course even after Adenauer German policing only ever-so-incrementally moved away from the traditional authoritarian "peace through power" approach following the bloodshed in its handling of the student protests in the 1960s (which led to the formation of the RAF terrorist group) although German federal and state governments still oppose any outside investigations into police violence nowadays even when it's evident enough to make international news headlines like in Lüzerath. Meanwhile corruption in the federal government has become so rampant there are literally score lists available for each political party showing how many of their representatives are tied up in legal corruption scandals with Jens Spahn probably being the most widely talked about case for funnelling government funds into his pockets during the pandemic only followed by former chancellor Schroeder's close business relations to Gazprom and Olaf Scholz's deliberate intervention in investigations of never seen before amounts of massive tax fraud (i.e. the Cum Ex scandal).
And that's just Germany. So: if interwar Germany and pre-reunification East Germany were not "working democracies" but every "western" democracy (I presume this means anything this side of the Cold War iron curtain) post-WW2 is - what's your yardstick? Where do you draw the line?
The major far-right fundamentalist opposition party has built its unprecedented success on a narrative of low government trust, and has been gaining ground in both polls and elections for years and years now.
So perhaps we shouldn't dismiss the parents' perspective entirely.
> Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions.
If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled. In a truly free payment system that safeguards democratic freedoms, these descriptions would be encrypted from end to end. (Just in the same way all personal communication should be protected.) This will, of course, never happen.
> And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?
Germany recently experimented with greater financial control over some parts of the population, and it wasn't a total disaster in terms of control. In terms of freedom, however, it is a disaster.
Unfortunately, the source is German-language: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/faq-was-bezahlkarten-fuer-geflu...
Despite cash being a pillar of freedom and democracy in an open society, there is still no good anonymous alternative to it that is usable by normal people on a daily basis.
And yet, that is very far from the majority.
> If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled.
That isn’t true. If you put "murder contract + 2kg heroin" in the description, at most a bank clerk will call to ask you to avoid that. The description is reviewed to detect fraud, and protects a lot of people from illicit transactions. We have that for the same reason we have KYC regulations; you may disagree with it, but it protects a lot of people, right now. If you need to obfuscate the description, you’re free to use an encrypted string or a numeric reference without any trouble.
> Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?
There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example. There also is fraud potential actively being used for sure. Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen. Still, even Germans could benefit from questioning our ways from time to time.
Remember that our parent said, "Many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government." You denied that, and I suggested that the turnout for the AfD might be a useful proxy for institutional distrust. I don't know how the reference to majorities fits here or what argument it is intended to support. Presumably, there are also people in other parties who distrust public institutions, right? Why are we talking about majorities now?
I argued that the SEPA system has several flaws, one of which is the lack of privacy surrounding transaction descriptions. This can have consequences far more serious than receiving a call from a bank. While banks do check flagged transactions, if a certain number of criteria are met, they will definitely escalate your transaction to the authorities. This is a legal requirement, by the way — it's not specific to any particular bank. This can be mitigated almost entirely by using cash.
As you did not answer my question about why to gamble on institutional consistency, I wonder: Would you actively argue in favour of greater surveillance of the payment sector?
This would align with your seemingly tongue-in-cheek suggestion to manually encrypt transaction descriptions. Payment privacy can only foster democratic resilience if it is enabled by default. It's like saying an instant messaging app doesn't need end-to-end encryption for personal communication because users can encrypt the text by hand.
> There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example.
Liberty is not usually defined in monetary terms. For instance, regular elections are costly. We still do not eliminate them for economic benefit. Similarly, I think the idea of removing the option of payment privacy to reduce transaction costs is cynical, or very radical.
> Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen.
I don't know why intention would be relevant here. The use of cash has been declining in Germany (and the EU) for quite some time now. This basic fact is not new or disputed by anyone in this field. To deny the decline of cash as a proportion of overall payments would be counterfactual.
Problems arising from reduced cash usage, such as the vulnerability of civil society and the reduced resilience of democratic institutions, occur regardless of whether someone is actively working to abolish cash payments.
I know quite a lot of people in Germany who think this way. In particular during the time when there was a risk of negative interest on savings (when this topic was brought up by politicians and banksters) these people were much more open in shouting out their political opinions.
Also the anti-corona measures separated the population into two groups:
1. Those who were in favour of the anti-corona measures also became more open with respect to paying with cards (well, to help avoiding the spread the virus)
2. Those who were against it became much more distrusting towards politicians (for obvious reasons) and banks afterwards. Why also banks? Because various groups at that time brought up idea that anti-vaxxers should be de-banked.
So, I am quite sure I'm not overstating. But if you only hang up with specific groups of people, it is in my opinion eather easy not to get in contact to those who think this way.
Sure, but that's for small, everyday amounts. For values upwards of 500€, I think the familiarity of paying cash would be swamped by the nervousness of carrying way too much money with you, what if it gets stolen?
> this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees
The only time my bank has ever charged me a per-transaction fee was, ironically, when I withdrew cash abroad using my credit card.
Also, I believe when buying used cars and such, most people still prefer cash transactions.
(I remember reading long ago that if if a potential customer has to leave the dealership to go secure the proper form of payment, a significant percent just don't come back at all. They want to keep you there until you buy something, fairly standard sales tactic.)
But for a regular person just trying to sell their own car directly to someone else, they're absolutely going to want a cashier's check or cash. (Even the cashier's check can be risky; I doubt your average person is an expert in detecting a fraudulent one.)
(In Canada, I’ve never actually seen a certified/cashier’s cheque used for anything. My house downpayment and vehicle purchase were both done via bank draft.)
maybe if it was larger, thicker, and a more dense material. most of those matter more to the person holding it, rather than an observer, though
I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.
In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800).
And while convenience stores, fast food, etc., won’t take a bill over $20 (which is understandable but really a trifling sum when you consider inflation - it’s a fast-food breakfast for three people), many other businesses are happy to do so. Nothing above $100 is in circulation anymore, and inflation means that $100 in 1980 is worth over $400 in today’s money even by government figures. A $20 bill 45 years ago was worth almost $100 in today’s money. And, of course, cash declaration rules have not updated the amounts to reflect this.
I had a debit card with some hundreds of EUR already charged, but I ended up using it with an NFC enabled smartphone.
No issues at all, even going in far places outside Barcelona. Everyone very receptive in BCN.
I looked at ATM terminals and they seemed full of rules and complications. I tried to get some cash just to collect the notes as a souvenir, but I gave up.
Again, everyone accepted my NFC enabled smartphone, I tested my debit NFC card and my local bank CC NFC card as well
So I think ATMs present a lot of friction for sure.
ApplePay connected to my no forex transaction credit card earning 3% cashback covered 95% of these transactions and a few times I had to use that credit card directly.
I was traveling with family so spending limits were higher than 5 euros
Euro bills differ clearly in color and size, which means they are quickly identified.
Also the Euro coins differ in shape and size quite a lot, which is easy to identify blind even when handled individually. More than U.S. coins which are more similar.
I don't know about an objective difference caused by the fact that 1€ and 2€ are coins and bills start only at 5€ whereas the one dollar coin isn't much used in favor of the one dollar bill.
So, you compare the whole USA to only a part of Europe? Why is that?
Germany is basically 16 countries (federal states [Bundesländer]). Europe is a whole countinent - here a suitable American analogue miht be USA+Canada+Middle America. Or if we talk about the EU, a suitable analogue would be NAFTA (the EU also started as a set of free trade agreements).
I think there are a lot of Americans who distrust government/banks and try to deal in cash as much as they can. And there are a lot of people here who have bad credit and can't get a credit card, and quite a few unbanked lower-income folks who don't have bank accounts or debit cards.
But I think maybe as someone from another country you're misinterpreting the whole "individual freedom" thing that a lot of Americans push. I don't think cash vs. credit cards is really a big part of that, for whatever reason. While it is more common in some places in the US these days for some businesses to not take cash at all, still the vast majority of businesses do take cash, and everyone has a choice in how they'll pay.
There's also a financial engineering component, as most credit cards in the US offer some kind of rewards program or cash back for purchases made. For example, a credit card I have, when used for Lyft rides, gives me the equivalent of 7.5% off (I have to use the savings for travel costs through the credit card's travel site, but that's fine and worth it for me). Some cards are simple and just offer 1% or 2% back and that's it, but some have categories (like "3% cash back for gasoline purchases"), and some people get into the "game" of trying to match a credit card with a purchase to get the most cash back.
And even for people who don't get into the "game", they certainly won't mind a "free" 1% or 2% discount on everything just for using a credit card. Some businesses offer a discount for paying cash, or a surcharge for using a credit card, but many do not, so if you pay with cash, you're essentially overpaying, since the cost of credit card fees is built into the prices. (This is of course another way that poor people who can't get credit cards get screwed.)
I guess often enough, convenience and saving money wins over the whole "freedom" thing for people here.
Finally, I think there's also a bit of separation. Many credit cards don't even feel like they're associated with a bank. Many larger retail stores offer a branded credit card that of course has a Visa or MasterCard logo on it, but you have to dig to find mention of an actual bank. So even Americans who might distrust government and banks just don't see a strong association there when it comes to credit cards.
I also just don't think there's that much bank distrust going on in the US. Sure, people are still sore about the financial crisis of 2008, but also consider that was 17 years ago. We haven't had big bank issues in the US where banks devalue currency, or follow government orders to across-the-board steal money from citizens, at least not in widespread ways. People generally love to rag on banks when it comes to fees and penalties and hidden costs and crap like that, but many of those things have been made illegal, and, again, even for a bank-issued credit card, I think many people just don't make that association. It's just an easier way to make payments, without the risk of carrying cash around (and with protection if the card gets stolen and used), and sometimes you get discounts and cash back... what's not to like?
I'd rather have that than a complete loss of privacy.
thats BS. most people have indeed had such, and while not frequent, it was fully legit.
The real reason they want to do away with cash is so they can monitor everything you buy, and in time, perhaps more
Many banks have tried to start other electronic payments independent from those 2 (for example Wero) but it doesn't really get any traction.
So I don't see how the duopoly is any less powerful here.
Some card fees are capped by the EU: https://www.visa.co.uk/about-visa/visa-in-europe/fees-and-in..., quoting "From 9 December 2015, European regulation on interchange fees (Regulation (EU) 2015/751 of the European Parliament and of the European Council of 29 April 2015 on interchange fees for card-based transactions, “the IFR”) imposes interchange fee caps on most product types within the European Economic Area (EEA).".
It is true though that French banks have huge fees even for debit (0.20%) compared to, for example The Netherlands (0.02 eur).
So the doupoly is not as powerful everywhere, but I have no clue why the difference.
But it’s irrelevant to this issue, because the debit cards are still handled by Visa or Mastercard.
I wonder what is the source for this information?
In my country it's perfectly legal to request your payment in cash. And it should be paid to you in cash if you request it. Therefore, 500 banknotes make perfect sense, making however any payment with it really stressful for you and the teller
Just pushing back is neither guaranteed to succeed nor last for any serious amount of time. The ideological crazies can throw their entire existence at ensuring the fact that the "impure, corrupting filth" is squashed. People who oppose it might like the things that get censored, but none are religiously attached to the cause, not to an extent that would lead to a serious amount of organizing, anyway.
The Pornhub problem came from going after the payment processors for facilitating supposedly illegal transactions--namely, underage porn. The crusaders (in every direction) keep looking for ways to undermine the protections (Section 230 in this case) and all too often the government doesn't fight back.
As for keeping it in the family games--we still have "obscenity" on the books and such games fall afoul of it. I find the concept of "obscenity" bonkers amongst consenting adults.
What do you mean?
Almost certainly won't end there without significant consumer pushback against the payment processor Valve uses as well as both VISA and Mastercard.
Every hassle the porn industry gets, the gun industry gets too, and that obviously has a very different political footprint. I'd also expect some industries with politically powerful friends (supplements, MLMs in general) to be offended by policies that put some merchants into higher risk/higher cost/higher rejection categories.
I had hoped something like FedNow would take off-- a government-backed payment rail with a formal mandate to service any legal business, so neither side could complain about being deplatformed.
They're half of a duopoly.
> What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
The US courts.
Visa was specifically pulled into the lawsuit against PornHub; here's Visa's official statement on the matter: https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/compan...
The lawsuit is still ongoing.
Visa being responsible for CSAM isn't a theoretical lawsuit they're afraid about. (2022)
But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.
Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.
Otherwise, your claims run counter to more credible sources I have read. (Which I am not willing to search up for this post.)
Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.
People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.
No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!
And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.
I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.
Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.
I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).
So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.
Log in to your account and toggle the “I want porn” option? It’s annoying, but not onerous.
> And I know for a fact that the UK has much stricter limits on kink and BDSM in adult content as well.
I know what you’re referring to, but don’t know the full details. I believe it’s around violent porn (rape, etc). We certainly have a “think of the children” brigade. I still think the discourse is significantly more civilised than that of the US, which feels like it’s approaching virtual civil war levels. When these subjects are debated, it's usually in parliament and doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.
I think some of the policies you mention are more artefacts of the politicians not understanding the technological future we’re in, rather than ideology. Many of them think they can make the internet a safe space for kids through policy. It’s naive, for sure, but usually not dogmatic.
> What gives with people claiming it's just the US?
It’s not just the US, but when the people standing outside of UK abortion clinics harassing women are funded by US ‘pro life’ religious groups then you know there’s a problem. Puritanism is a US export.
The vitriolic political divisions in the US, which leads to all sorts of fringe issues becoming mainstream (trans rights, for example), is leaking out into the rest of the western democracies, poisoning the debate everywhere.
The Visa issue is just one more of these puritanical US exports.
So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?
> doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.
When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one. Instead of everyone just handwaving and ignoring it...
> So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?
It isn't law. But even if it was, that doesn't contradict what I am talking about. I'm talking about the export of puritanism. If you think having to turn the porn button from 'off' to 'on' in your phone contract's options is the same, then I don't know what to say.
> When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one.
Yeah maybe, but that's not the topic of conversation here. The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world (like the Visa issue).
Sure, technically its government imposed domestic puritanism which isn't exported. I agree its a completely different thing.
> The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world
Yes, US has its quirks but it's not that exceptional as you are implying. e.g. when it comes to banning/regulated video games Australia is inarguable much more restrictive.
Germany also has a history of banning violent video games and its again much worse than the US e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/ki12if/steam_now_reg...
Post "Online Safety Act" UK is not that much better either.
US is very tame and less "puritanical" by your definition than those countries. The core difference being that the government can't really regulate it directly so credit card companies might be acting as some sort of a proxy.
Or are you implying that US somehow turned Germany and Australia more "puritanical" than itself and there would be no domestic support for censorship there otherwise?
e.g. 20% of all 15 year old in the UK have at least one drink each week:
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...
Despite the legal age being 18.
Also what does this have to do with anything? e.g. adult-only games are simply unavailable on Steam in Germany. It doesn't matter at all how old you are.
It's not like "Germany wants to ban sex games altogether", which seems to be what some other private groups would prefer.
No, in the UK it was left-wing feminists who led the opposition to gender identity policies long before any conservatives got involved, on the basis of this being harmful to women's rights.
Just look at the recent For Women Scotland win in the Supreme Court, it's nothing to do with US religious groups at all, and everything to do with protecting sex-based rights and sexual orientation in law.
In 2014, Time magazine declared trans rights as "America's next civil rights frontier" [1]. For Women Scotland was formed in 2018 [2].
(Just looked at your comment history. Just, wow... is the trans issue the only one you care about?)
Feminist women opposed to the Tory government's plans to introduce "gender self-id" law and similar policy had already started organising by this point. Groups like Woman's Place UK and Fair Play For Women. This had nothing whatsoever to do with religious arguments from the US.
There's also significant liberal opposition to all this in the US, again not linked to religion but, like the UK, on the basis of women's rights.
Look, you have the right to believe whatever you want, but making every single discussion you have on here about how much you hate trans people is not really something I want to get involved with. Good day.
Yes, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, but there is a large fraction that is less sex focused, it's a fair generalization and comment to express that.
Like for instance the outrage if you have a sign on your lawn stating that x president is a rapist to the economy, people will say that children should not be "exposed" to such words.
We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]
” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”
> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.
It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.
Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.
Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.
> Even 120-130 years after the point
There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.
I believe English puritans were also in Holland and France for a while.
Anyway I don't think that the English Puritans/etc. were somehow particularly exceptional (besides the fact that they emigrated to North America) compared to other similar groups in Europe.
I'm not familiar with Swiss politics, but if there's a significant Christian element to it, it seems like it would be pretty reasonable to wonder about whether the historical basis for this is related to Calvinism. If it's not significantly Christian, then it's not surprising it doesn't get mentioned.
> There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.
Sure, but those those were backlashes themselves to the backlash to the secularism that you mentioned happened beforehand. I'm not saying that there weren't Puritan-like influences elsewhere, or that there were no other developments in between the Puritans and modern Christian conservatism in the US, but there's a clear historical tradition of Christian conservatism in US politics, so I don't know why you don't think it's unreasonable to recognize how that has influenced what we see today.
To explain at a higher level where I'm coming from: I don't see historical analysis as making claims about the state we're in today as being a deterministic outcome based on the events that happen in the past because that's not any more possible than predicting exactly what will happen in the future based on the knowledge we have today. The most we can do to explain why things are the way they are now is to look at what things in the past have influenced where we are today.
But the divergence between US and Europe didn't happen until the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.
e.g. according to the census of 1851 ~40% of people in Britain were regularly attending religious services. No hard figures for the US from the time but from what I can find the proportion in the US was comparable. Except while mid 1800s was pretty much the peak in Britain in US it kept rising and reached its highest point in the 1950s while in UK religious participation had almost reached current levels by then.
IMHO the rise of political secularism, socialiam and the near societal collapse across much of Europe during and after WW1 and WW2 had a much bigger impact than whatever happened 400 years ago.
(To be clear, I'm not saying that there weren't existing cultures there before the US expanded out further west, but I imagine most people would agree that the US today isn't culturally as influenced by them as much as from the the colonies and pre-expansion US.)
I grew up in New England and have lived in the South and in California, and IMHO morality is a bigger determinant of the behavior of the average person in New England than it is in the other places I've lived (all in the US). The South and California are more pragmatic, less moralistic.
I don't have any experience living outside of the northeast (although not New England specifically since high school), but I definitely agree that there's certainly more religion in New England than might be obvious from the outside (more Catholic than the rest of the country, which also might explain some of the differences).
They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/campaigns includes a number of campaigns against porn in general, so yes, they absolutely are targeting all sex games - simulated rape, incest, and child abuse are merely their first victory.
Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.
Please explain.
"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany. "
Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.
They're responsible for numerous other calls for bans against games like Detroit: Become Human, GTA, etc.
(It's clear in the article, btw).
And, as I said, attempt to apply pressure on a payment network, in order to apply pressure on its customer, in order to apply pressure on their customers... well, I think it's pretty obvious why this is a problem, and that things are not supposed to work this way.
One way would be to ensure proper competition in the payments space. If there were dozens of options then some of them would decide that it’s a competitive advantage to ignore the busybodies and cater to people who want to buy this stuff. We see this at work with hosting. There’s a multitude of options and it doesn’t seem like adult sites have much trouble finding a host that will allow them, even if others might reject them.
Another would be to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless. We see this model with the Post Office. As long as you’re not sending something that will compromise the safety of the workers, they’ll ship it.
Pure leeches, that are now engaged in censorship
But then you have issues like, what about disputes and fraud? With existing credit cards, buyer and seller have both agreed in advance to abide by certain rules. With an open standard, I as a buyer could stand up my own service that makes the payment and then retracts it, or if FedNow doesn't allow retracting payments then I as a seller could make one that refuses to refund the money and I can just not give the buyer their item. (And yeah, this is already illegal, but we see plenty of nefarious activity like this online anyway.)
I dont understand how anti-trust regulation lets Visa/MC duopoly exist (at least with current rates), they must be heaviest donors to politicians.
and once you understand how 2-3 big corporations establish oligopoly and engage in rent seeking, protected by mountains of regulations, and share some of their wealth with politicians - you understand how American extractive institutions work.
The only hope is some giant like Apple/Google completely unseat visa with their own secure payment solutions that gets around VISA/MC card system
Also, on the matter of the latter problem — fixing that is much easier said than done. Cryptocurrencies in a way were an attempt to fix that, but governments around the world do not want this problem to be fixed. And of course they don't. The field is highly regulated, because, as I've said, having control over the payment network is not that very much different from having a physical army to physically beat you up.
As an aside, I was especially surprised by:
> We see this at work with hosting.
Do we, though? It's another topic of course, but I actually share the sentiment that the current trend is the opposite one: good old days of the Free Web are gone, and the reality is that in the days of Gmail (and other major mail providers), Cloudflare (and other major CDNs) the Internet is inherently not a decentralized structure anymore. It takes a few powerful friends to reach an agreement with each other, and everyone else has to follow.
So, anyway, what I had in mind was exactly that:
> to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless
But, as I've said, I don't quite see how to draw the line here. After all, it would be somewhat unfair to payment networks to trip them from making any choices. Both because formally they are just a business, not a commodity (which may actually be the root of the problem, I think), and they should have some right to choose how they want to operate; and also because different customers and products objectively carry different risks. So they have to be able to produce some policies, these policies just have to… to be restricted to what's necessary somehow.
This demonstrably works. There are plenty of porn sites out there, plenty of pirate sites, plenty of places selling illegal stuff, even Wikileaks is still up.
To your last paragraph, I think we can draw the line at "allow any transaction that you reasonably believe is actually authorized by the people who own the accounts." I don't care about being fair to payment networks. If we're going the regulatory route then we've decided that this stuff is critical infrastructure and the needs of the many etc. If individual people at the company don't like handling transaction for porn or whatever, they're free to find a new job. Different risks do make it trickier, but I think we can add some language to allow holding on to money for a certain period before paying it out, or requiring deposits, with some limits on what criteria they can use to make those determinations and how long/large the period/deposit can be.
No, they should not have the right to choose how they want to operate. All those risks you mention only exist because they choose to keep them around as an excuse to why they are necessary. They refuse to modernize their systems so it works, and they should not be allowed to keep that option.
(Honestly, IMO they should just be terminated and replaced by some public service. But if you want to keep them, they shouldn't have that kind of freedom.)
When it's the speech of the many vs the speech of the few, I'm going to err towards the speech of the many.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorshi...
Interesting that it's 404? Fact check? Retract? Lawsuit?
Payment processors ban many things that are completely legal, even foods and dietary supplements. It's ridiculous. They have too much power.
Visa / MC are the ones who enable subscription scams and benefit from them. They implemented "convinience" option of "updating" your credit card data with replacement card. So even if you cancel and replace card charges continue to pass.
They also totally able to see all the places where your card been tokenised, but they dont push banks to expose this to you.
So... not dietary supplement companies, but a particular food that is completely legal and regulated as a food by the FDA.
You have a business selling food? Are you a bar? A restaurant? Well if you start selling this particular food we don't like, you will be debanked.
You argued that it was due to the prevalence of chargebacks but they already have a fair solution for that (banning vendors or simply requiring vendors to secure their accounts with collateral to manage that risk).
It definitely sounds like Christian morals being forced on us.
This is a solvable geo regulation issue, solvable like many other geo regulatory issues
Punters run a lot of chargebacks on casinos, and people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.
In the case of Valve, a lot of chargebacks would drastically increase the processing rates demanded by the payment providers for all transactions across the board, not just those related to adult games.
There's probably a great market opportunity here for a game store focused on adult games and willing to take on that risk.
If there is a market opportunity, it's probably in a processor for debit-based transactions that are harder to reverse. But then that makes fraud harder to combat, and one of the reasons everyone loves credit cards so much is because consumers are far more confident to buy from random shops if they know they can always get their money back if the shop scams them.
So - this whole system's lucratively is entirely predicated on easy credit and low risk meaning low fees. Anyone who wants to play in the mud that's leftover by these companies taking the good business are inherently playing a low margin risky game.
The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.
Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments. Maybe you won't be an oligarch, but you'll probably end up with a reasonably sized yacht.
[edit] hell, in a few years if the winds shift you might be DraftKings.
Easier said than done. It is hard to earn trust....you would probably need to jumpstart the platform with quite a few indie devs so people start trusting the site and using it.
And how many customers you lost in 2010 because of that? Probably more than 90%. Even now people are reluctant to use crypto but tbh crypto crowd is so big that you can perhaps succeed in opening crypto only business.
I highly doubt that's true. Buying porn games on game platforms is a very different demographic than normal porn/gambling platforms.
I never used ecommerce back in the day on the internet but I can imagine that ecommerce fraud was widespread. And that's why excluding other reasons Satoshi invented Bitcoin[0].
I wonder if cryptocurrencies didn't exist would someone nowadays burn the midnight oil to figure out P2P crypto coin since modern payment solutions are fairly good.
Tbh I think Satoshi invented technology around which he wanted to build products unlike Steve Jobs who said that you first need to figure out the product then build technology.
[0] "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party" https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
"Financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes" is nonsense, they "can't" because it's constantly demanded by their clients, attempting to sell that as a bug rather than a feature is preposterous.
And crypto community speculated that Satoshi or team behind Bitcoin worked at the internet gambling industry and what use to happen is that angry customers would chargeback the money they lost at the internet casino and cause numerous problems for "merchants" or in this case internet entrepreneurs.
Late grammar correction :/
Card not present was and still is higher risk than in person shopping. Now that most US customers have chip cards in their wallets fraud has shifted from in person to CNP. Digital goods are high risk because a customer could theoretically download and enjoy the digital good or save a copy and then chargeback. There's no shipping tracking number to prove delivery. Or a fraudster could go on a spending spree from the comfort of their home in another country. Adult-only games are even higher risk because a customer might have to explain to a spouse what the Steam charges were for.
Of course copy protection and the prospect of a ban of their whole Steam account blunts the most obvious customer cheating of keeping a copy and charging back. Steam games cannot be resold. Digital goods that can be easily resold are magnets for fraud. Such as cloud GPUs or international long distance calls.
I suppose that if consumer behavior is to have their adult game purchases and conventional game purchases on separate accounts, and the Steam platform allows for that, then that may be so.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-49...
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point .
Somehow, it's forbidden for the government to oppress pornographers directly, but it's perfectly fine to impose legal sanctions on banks who maintain business relationships with them.
Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.
No nonsense involved, that's how it works.
2. I think the argument being made is that the credit card companies are not actually experiencing higher risk (from Steam). Not that they have any qualms about putting a business into a “high risk” classification.
In this case, I suppose the argument is that Steam is a large enough entity that they should be able to “self-insure”. If the US had a relatively open way to become a payment processor, the free market would take care of this. Unfortunately that isn’t the case and also is very unlikely to change.
Valve already has a very generous refund policy and a chargeback would likely result in your account being banned.
It is not really comparable. Steam is not a casino, and it is largely the same platform with or without perfectly legal porn. The presence of a few (not even that popular) adult games does not change the overall demographics that much, or the risk profile. I am not even ready to accept without proof that the risks are higher than with all the other, non-porn shovelware.
Sure, if Steam turned into an adult-only platform, then the risk profile could change significantly. But that is not what happened.
Also, as many people pointed out, Steam really does not incentive customers to ask for chargebacks. All the available information points to Valve managing its platform quite well for everyone involved.
If Valve was getting a complaint from Visa/Master about charge back rates of certain games, I believe they'd be more forthcoming with that information. What we're seeing here is more consistent with Visa/Master taking offense with what the platform offers.
In either case, I find the lack of communication from Visa/Master deafening. If Visa/Master was seeing high chargeback rates from incest games on steam. Why would they not eagerly offer that data?
I don't understand this claim. Steam doesn't list specific games on credit card bills- why would chargebacks be higher for a bill that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" than for one that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" just because the latter was used to pay for Undertale and the former was used to pay for Sex Simulator 25?
Per Wikipedia:
> [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.
Based upon what evidence?
US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.
> anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim
This is FUD, not reality. While it’s “possible” for anyone in any country to try to sue, it simply doesn’t happen in the US more often than elsewhere. The relatively high number of US lawsuits are filled with corporate litigation, contract disputes, bankruptcy filings, car accidents, and appeals, among many other things, and not people suing each other for minor grievances.
“Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies.
“More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts.
“Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives.
“The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits.”
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...
But all that aside, taking that Harvard law article at face value, there are specifically mishandled types of suits, and those include those that are intended to inflict cost on payments processors to get them to reject customers that otherwise aren't doing anything illegal, but just operate in an industry that those suing don't like.
[1] https://instituteforlegalreform.com/wp-content/uploads/media...
The cost of litigation doesn’t prove the US is more litigious, it only demonstrates litigation is expensive in the US. The fact that Germany is the most litigious and that multiple other countries are more litigious than the US is extremely easy for you to verify.
The Institute for Legal Reform is a group that historically denied climate change, and they are funded by and run entirely in the interests of the US’s largest corporations. Personally, I like clean air and water, and US corporations don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about their impacts on the environment. Forgive me if I don’t readily put a lot of stock in their complaints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme...
If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.
But at the same time chance of "oops it's not mine" charbacks likely much higher compared to other spending.
A regular purchaser of adult entertainment almost certainly has enough cash flow to pay their bills. And they'll have a hard time claiming it's not them when it matches their previous activity. Having an interest in sex doesn't in the slightest suggest a person is bad--if anything, the apparent lack of interest would be more worrisome. (Not that purchase history can be used to discern this.) Some of the ones who don't are asexuals, but some are those who are repressing their sexuality--and that's more likely to show up in unacceptable ways.
A first time purchaser of adult entertainment is another matter--that's going to have a lot of spouse-found-out chargebacks.
Generally no, but they exist in a regulatory morass where it's impossible to do what they do without arguably or perhaps technically being in violation of hundreds of regulations at any given time.
The US government then uses their power to selectively enforce the voluminous mess of bad regulations to coerce parties to undertake actions which it would be flatly illegal for the government to perform directly such as cutting off sexually explicit content from payment rails.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
The practice isn't limited to payment processors but they're a particularly good vector given the level of regulation they're subjected to. Choke Point (and Choke point 2) are just specific examples of a general tactic to end run around the public's rights that has been used by the US government for decades. In most cases the abuse isn't so well organized that it has a project name you can point at.
Congress and the whitehouse leaning on social media companies to suppress lawful opinions on covid policy is another example of that kind of abuse that has received some public scrutiny. Most cases, however, go without notice particularly since the ultimate victims of the actions generally have no way to know the cause.
From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
Sex freaks hyper specialize in things all the time. Monks and priests also had reputations as horny perverts in Medieval literature. Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. This is such an out of touch, ahistorical take.
And there are plenty of western countries that do not work like that, as well.
It is a feature of a subset of the culture in some countries. It is far less universal as you say.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
This really does not follow. How does the existence of laws prevent someone to live a normal life? In a liberal democracy, laws fundamentally guarantee that we can do so, as long as someone’s fundamental individual freedom does not cause unacceptable harm to someone else. In that framework, what we do in private with consenting adults is absolutely nobody’s business. Rule of law does not change this.
> From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line.
What line is this? In which way was Turing’s persecution a requirement for him being a genius? How do we benefit from him killing himself instead of leaving him be and make other contributions to our intellectual development?
> It’s an ugly recipe, but it’s working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves.
It is not. What you are advocating is a theocracy and there are many examples in History and around the world that show that it is a terrible idea.
> A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
All I can say is LOL. Ceremonial clothing is more nuanced than that.
> Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
The fact that you only see these possibilities says a lot more about you than the way human beings work.
I don't know if he had major active relationships specifically while working on Enigma (other than the short engagement to Joan Clarke in 1941), but Turing famously did have sexual relationships since the discovery of one eventually led to criminal prosecution of both him and his partner, his chemical castration and eventually possibly suicide.
Paul Erdős might be a better example, though I don't think he was deliberately self-denying and more just a huge oddball. Newton also never showed much interest, apparently, though an engagement was rumoured.
Many of the biggest and best-known brains in maths, engineering, physics and computing did marry: as a quick random survey: Euler, Chandrasekhar, Faraday, Maxwell, Watt, Babbage, Einstein, Dijkstra, Wiles, Hopper, Hamilton, Knuth, even Ramanujan and the Woz (4 times, even).
Men must have their sexuality attacked and stymed from the very beginning of birth, or else they will waste their brain power on promiscuity. That's the only thinking anyway that explains why over half this country still circumcises.
Kant and I think Newton were famously virgins and a whole lot of moral crusaders in this world get extremely angry at the idea that people in this world have enjoyable sexual relations. A lot of people want a lot more sexual frustration to exist in this world, as it's good for capitalist exploitation.
It's done now out of basic tradition (father is circumcised, so son is too), conformity (his peers are all circumcised, we don't want him made fun of), doctor advice (fewer infections, easier to keep clean), and plain old cultural inertia. It's slowly dying out but I expect it to stick around another several decades.
They claimed it as their own victory on X this week.
You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.
Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.
I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.
And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.
I read somewhere that criminal organizations and individuals love KYC and AML because they have the resources to go around it and it makes their operations look legit.
It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime.
If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc.
This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.
The content might be illegal in some countries and thats fair if we can assume the people who pushed for these rules were voted for. No one voted for Visa and Mastercard.
Mirrors what Marc Andreessen said on Lex's podcast.
The problem isn’t just regulatory overreach, it’s delegated enforcement w/out accountability.
Financial institutions are now playing judge and jury, not because they want to, but because the cost of scrutiny or punishment is too high.
It’s soft censorship by infrastructure...
Maybe is time to do a reboot of the economy, what about everyone goes to the bank and withdraw all their money, and when everybody has his money, we put the money back in the bank? Would be funny to see how banks would react :)
There isn’t. Even worse, there’s no legislation prohibited them from doing so.
Payment processors (eg: Mastercard, Visa) are the ultimate deciders of whether you can sell something online or not, regardless of whether it is legal.
They haven’t just blocked adult content, they’ve also blocked non-profits with which they disagree in the past.
We need much stronger legislation around this. Private entities shouldn’t be capable of deciding that a given organisation can’t charge online. Only institutions which represent the public’s interests should have this level of influence.
Why would you consider those abhorrent while games where you can slaughter people, or commit all kinds of crimes like any random GTA, are widely considered normal?
I'll never understand American morals. What's clear is that we need non-US payment processors so that the values of a given culture aren't imposed worldwide.
On the other hand, stable-coins suffer the same problems as visa. They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
If buying, selling and transacting fees are low enough, I don't see why bitcoin's (to pick one) value changes would matter much.
On-ramp has costs, then transaction has costs. And in my country at least, selling crypto (which is what you're doing when you buy something with it) is a taxable transaction. So now I have to keep all my transactions and report them to HMRC each year if I do that.
It's not going to happen. If people wanted to transact in crypto, they'd be doing it by now, it has had more than enough time.
I've had to pay my DNS registration in crypto from time to time too. I don't know why but sometimes the anti-fraud AI at the bank gets triggered by my DNS provider and that's literally the only method I have for paying them.
The currency wouldn't have to meet any particular definition of a stablecoin as long as it is inflationary. It could be exactly like Bitcoin but with a different mining algorithm.
The reality is that, even if the stocks you own are going to the moon, if you need food or want a television, it isn't at all "stupid" to sell some of your hoard to buy stuff.
Not all stablecoins are the same. There exists 2 main categories: Fiat-backed (as initially described), & collateral-backed.
(There also exists hybrid versions, but they're a combination of the 2, and as such will be covered by just mashing the 2 categories together.)
Fiat-backed stablecoins (USDC, USDT) are centralized: Their connection to external cash/bonds requires them to have an accountable name to be attached to.
Collateral-backed stablecoins (GHO, DAI/USDS) don't have to be centralized. A primitive form of this is a stablecoin (S) that can take in any other token as collateral and return $X amount of S stablecoins, up to a limit of (total_token_value * collateral_limit). However, it is known that this structure is inefficient capital-wise, when compared to fiat-backed stablecoins.
People can also buy TV shows and movies in which their content is far more grusome and disturbing than the video-games targeted by the activist groups putting pressure on payment processors.
I noticed someone else posted a list of other groups, but another one is called "Collective Shout", who censors their own ads because their subject matter is considered harmful.
As for the morality angle though, while I definitely agree that these companies' main motivation has to be increasing revenue and profit, and that their only reason for doing anything is cost-driven; you never know what middle-manager who is swayed by what belief is actually making these decisions. So as much as the monolithic goal of the organization is more money, there are still emotional (and financially fallible) people pulling the levers.
There are also large anti porn lobbying groups applying pressure to the payment processors, so that angle creates costs in a different way.
Cyberpunk is coming for us.
And the legality of them--we still have obscenity statutes on the books. Garbage as far as I'm concerned, but they're still there.
Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
Got any source for that? What they got sued for? Aiding human trafficking?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/business/dealbook/pornhub...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/california-court...
>This week, US District Judge Cormac Carney of the US District Court of the Central District of California decided that there's reason to believe that Visa knowingly processed payments that allowed MindGeek to monetize "a substantial amount of child porn." To decide, the court wants to know much more about Visa's involvement, calling for more evidence of legal harms caused during a jurisdictional discovery process extended through December 30, 2022.
According to Court Listener, the case is still ongoing - https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59992265/serena-fleites...
Steam has its virtual wallet and marketplace as well, so Visa is twice removed from where the money will actually go once it enters Steam ecosystem.
Even as an abundance of caution, this doesn’t make sense to me.
Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions
It's why it's so hard to become an acquiring bank on the network.
I think the general idea is that acquiring banks are hopefully large enough to absorb any single merchant insolvency, but there are obviously limits to that. Airlines and event tickets are notorious example of that, since they usually take payment weeks or months ahead of providing the underlying service but want to get paid immediately.
Though i agree with the idea of a debit card that doesn't allow chargebacks, but without so many annoying restrictions.
No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.
Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.
No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.
What's the status of FedNow?
Cards like the Freedom card will never fly with either the Networks or the Issuing Banks as these kinds of payment instruments are immediately used to wash illicit funds.
Visa's stance with Steam is bollocks, and it is another example of the monopoly they hold over payment processing. They shouldn't have the ability to impact a legit merchants catalogue.
But the idea that we can have a Freedom card also doesn't checkout. The less known about what the money is spent on the higher the risk. And cost of complying with Suspicious Activity Reports regulations is really high (as the costs of you breach the requirements), so any attempts to create / run this kind of thing often don't stack up.
You can never rely on governments or corporations to have reasonable policies. Any payment system that is centrally controlled will inevitably be corrupted.
The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.
The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.
I think you underestimate just how much governments like the ability to control financial transactions within their borders, and in some cases (cough US) outside of it
That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).
The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.
This is one of the problems that crypto was attempting to solve (if implemented properly and used correctly). There is a third party(the "network"), but its decentralized and at least for "proper" networks, no one organization has a controlling interest in the network
Now any given miner/producer does not necessarily have to accept any random transaction. In practice however, for mature networks such as Bitcoin there are so many different miners/producers, its unlikely they would all conspire to disallow certain accounts or types of transactions.
Now this is certainly possible for a crypto exchanges and therein lies the rub with cryptos - if you want to get the cryptocoin, you generally have to buy it with good old fashioned hard currency. Conversely if you want to convert the cryptocoin back into hard currency. And exchanges nowadays are facing increasing regulations from governments. Which means practically you are still largely under the thumb of those powerful organizations without some real gymnastics involved, such as trading crypto for cash with a real person in a back alley somewhere, or vice versa
If it were the case that the payment rail censorship were limited just to cases where there was an obvious elevated fraud risk-- then that would be the whole of the story. -- and there would be an obvious answer: use a payment mechanism where the fraud responsibility is entirely on the user, such as Bitcoin.
But their censorship exists where no such elevated fraud risk exists too, due to abusive conduct by the government to indirectly suppress activity that would be plainly unlawful for them to directly suppress. And the governments out of control abuse of its regulatory power is not limited to fraud-responsible payment rails, and get applied just as or even more extensively on Bitcoin payment processors.
Unless it's a prepaid credit card or a debit card, both of which are serviced by MC and Visa and fairly common in Europe.
It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).
This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.
You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).
Because sadly 80% of people are sheep. Same reason we allow a company to decide what we can and cannot install on our smartphones.
When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.
It really is not comparable.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Traitor...
However, I get the eerie feeling that I didn't buy a product even though I paid for it and I subscribed to some service instead.
It’s not a precedent, its been the status quo for half a century
They should have at least aimed at Living With Sister: Monochrome Fantasy.
But I don't know about the last game you mentioned... the "sister" part sounds sus.
The games you mention are all sold without adult content on Steam, and the customer has to visit the publisher's website to download a patch restoring said content
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
If that’s true, maybe it’s also true that the more people have access to adult content the less babies we create as a society.
A society shrinking causes a number of issues.
The US had more TVs per capita than Congo, and a higher life expectancy. Sending more TVs to Congo probably won't do much for their life expectancy though.
Similarly, I suspect the increase in violent video games and reduction of actual violence is just a side effect of an increasingly technology driven society.
This really is a culture/posture driven issue.
It is not as if many people think (emphasis on "think", as in being honest, reasoning carefully and being scientific about evidence) that banning sexy curves in a video game is going to impact the prevalence of sexy curve imagery, or "save" anyone from anything.
Imagine if financial companies required their employees to sign a legal statement committing to not "use porn, escorts, blow ... or spicy video games!" So strange that they don't do that!!
Financial companies like to make a show of having "high standards" when it comes to "controversial" segments of the market, or unfortunate individuals who don't fit the mold, when that gets them a lot of showy theatre for being hard asses to their audience of regulators.
While keeping very quiet, and not looking into things too hard, when it comes to tens of billions of sketchy dollars going through their systems associated with very high net worth criminal actors, organizations and corrupt governments.
Epstein did not lack for financial services.
There was no endorsement of Epstein.
There was a callout of multiple types of bank hypocrisy. Contrasting bank's "concerns" about small time erotic material vs. their lack of concern about employees use of erotic material, and the blind eyes they turn for major criminals, include prolific trafficking/pedophilic billionaires.
And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.
Do you have any evidence to back this wild claim? I've never heard this argument about chargebacks made before.
I don't think it's about this at all. I think it's about policing content, but then the observation of GP's comment applies: why is violence ok, but sex is not?
You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.
So why do these two things cause credit card abuse to go through the roof?
Furthermore if it caused the credit card abuse to go through the roof wouldn't Valve just remove it of their own accord - at some point the abuse would mean money was taken away from Valve right?
Finally the article doesn't give this as a reason why it was removed - it said "violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors" - which sure, that may mean "high rates of credit card abuse were reported", but I doubt it.
Anyway, a link to studies of this phenomenon?
ps: I would probably believe credit card abuse increase under crypto, due no doubt to my innate prejudices.
Credit card processors don't have to be puritanical. Instead, puritanical people simply have to be smart enough to figure out that the best way to deplatform content that they disagree with is by putting pressure on their payment processor monopolistic vendors.
Giving in to a pressure campaign by ideological people can be a completely amoral and smart business decision.
so that begs the question - what if the non-puritanical people also pressure the credit payment processors to stop curtailing to those puritanicals? Why is it effective one way, but not the other?
The bad news is that essentially ALL such businesses still believe that it is essential for them to accept credit card payments - and that means they must still implement whatever agenda these are pushing. On their entire customer base, even if paying by crypto. For now.
Hopefully this progress continues.
Which begs the question. Why would amoral people decline cash?
Yes the payment provider is making a simple money based business decision, or possibly there is a threat of sanctions against the directors so a personal decision as well.
Someone, somewhere is making a choice to pressure content vendors to not offer this kind of content, and not to pressure them to not offer other kinds of content. It may be upstream of the payment processors but there is absolutely a weird puritan American thing going on somewhere, and it's much more interesting to get to the bottom of that since that's the point where change could happen. If everyone involved was amoral, these profitable games would continue being sold.
What? Puritanism is not about some kind of blanket purity to be recognized or expressed from any angle, perspective or religion. And in American business is both extreme and extremely selective.
It's also very much about appearances and image projected. You have to accept a difference between anybody's personal values (in so far as these can show through the mess of corporate decisions), and the image that businesses believe they much display.
Since the processors don’t actually care, they must simply believe that dealing with these annoying people is not worth the effort, compared to just not serving stupidly marginal markets.
But the thing is, the people upset about the sex aren’t upset about the killing, which I think is ridiculous.
So it’s not even that the controversy is not worth the effort. It’s that it literally costs them money to deal with.
The sex taboo may not make sense, but it exists. And it makes people behave in ways that creates problems for lending to them, specifically fraud and chargeback rates are demonstrably higher.
It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
> We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks
Individual games violating "rules and standards" doesn't really fit with prohibiting a category because of high rates of fraud.
For a new company, the risk of chargebacks might rest on a credit card company (for a little while anyway). But not for a long established one.
Why are you assuming bad faith? There’s no indication parent is being insincere at all.
> It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation. The argument though is one we hear now and then and like I point out, how can it make sense? Like many things, it looks more like a vaguely possible, plausible explanation or chain of arguments... which on closer look doesn't fly. How can Valve, a long established, apparently solid merchant, be a serious risk for the credit card infrastructure? Should there be chargebacks, they can handle chargebacks. This is not limited to Valve. Many of us have run into the issue. The credit card infrastructure goes out of its way to refuse solid business.
If you don’t have a problem with them and you were hoping for conversation, then starting out by accusing them of being disingenuous is a strange way of showing it.
> how can it make sense?
Why didn’t you ask this to begin with instead of assuming they were being deceitful? You know “disingenuous” doesn’t just mean “I disagree”, right?
US is strict on language and nudity, but comparatively lax on violence (except blood).
UK is lax on nudity and language (comparatively), but very strict on violence.
UK being the country that considered the word "ninja" too violent for children, for example.
At the same time those "games" that were affected, well, who on earth pays for that seriously fucked up crap? People need to get a grip. I'd rather send a psycho team to evaluate people who pay for these games...
note: PCGAMER the epitome of games journalism. They didn't even checked which were the affected banned games.
It does feel different in a video game, because you're the one pulling the trigger. I played that CoD mission when the game came out, and I felt a bit sick in my stomach playing that mission out. But I'd probably have exactly the same feeling from violence in films if I wasn't so desensitised to it after growing up watching american movies and tv shows.
Its just new.
Perhaps you're just saying that you're mostly comfortable with the depiction of some forms of violence in some contexts. But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?
In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.
The ability and the freedom to explore the darkest parts of our psyche in a safe, controlled, and fictitious environment IS important. Even if we find certain aspects or fetishes repugnant and distasteful.
I find the idea that payment processors have enough power to dictate the morality of a game market concerning. Given the number of other NSFW fetishistic stuff that is still being permitted on Steam I don't buy the "chargeback" rational AT ALL.
i mean, i can understand a child porn game would be disallowed but we already have anime games where characters that look like children are nearly naked
Yes and yes. We have worse stuff in literature already.
It _is_ just pixels.
If we are already okay with mass murder in video games, then absolutely yes.
Most of the signatories are associated with Australian anti sex trafficking and exploitation groups, although there are several UK signatories and a couple Americans.
A publication[2] by one of the signatories connects the dots. It's driven by the core idea:
"Pornography Use Shapes and Changes Sexual Tastes"[3] which is supported by "In a survey of men involved in online sexual activities, 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them."[4]
I'm trying to steelman when I say I believe that the authors would agree that this also applies to games with sexual content.
To address your comment specifically, while I see the appeal of consistent moral framework. I personally believe that moral frameworks trade consistency for completeness and rarely accomplish either. You have to assume the value-perspective of the other in order to understand why consistency might take a back seat to some other value we could only speculate on.
1. https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391732869_Not_A_Fan...
3. ibid. pg 30
4. ibid
How defensible do you feel this position is?
2) Why haven't they banned all porn games then they banned porn game X? -> it takes a lot more effort to move the needle here. It's not for lack of trying or lack of will, it's that it's obviously much harder to get traction when you've expanded now to an entire category that includes borderline mainstream titles that will finally get defenders willing to put in the same effort as them.
3) Why haven't they banned GTA when they've banned porn game X? -> First, they've tried!. 2nd, again, same principle -> activists aren't stupid, they know they can win the battle one game at a time, and that they can't win it in one gigantic decisive swoop (conveniently enough though, you can leverage this as well to ensure you have a nice long runway to continue to do your activism and keep it as a wedge issue to push at for a nice long time)
4) Why not ban true crime podcasts when they've banned porn game X? -> see again, look, many. many people listen to true crime podcasts, and many people have also objected to them as exploitative. but why does porn game x get banned and true crime podcast Z not? because, well, duh, again, the amount of effort needed to move the needle on something many people enjoy is that much more! i don't think they don't want to, mind you, but again, it's going to take a lot more effort to get to true crime podcasts when they have a thousand other porn game XYZ's they can to work on
And lets not pretend people aren't also trying to get books banned, again, it's being done at a more selective pace, book by book, not category by category. Why is <random niche hentai> banned and not <50 shades of grey>? well, who is published by a mainstream big publishier and who is published by a niche publisher that doesn;t want to get the whole hammer on them?
Repeat at nauseam.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. I'm saying the fact that they've succeeded in getting some games removed while others of the same type still exist or that other similar things still exist is not because they are morally inconsistent but because they can't do this all at once
Thanks for understanding.
I'm still looking at the thread and see people bringing up other titles that haven't been banned as if that's a gotcha and it just baffles me. Like what do they think the activists would respond if they were called out on it?
"Oh we don't care about that we only had a grudge on this game in particular"
Or more likely
"Thank you for bringing this title to our attention, we will certainly try to have it taken down as well as it too is against the values we are fighting for"
Yeah, right.
1. https://www.academia.edu/27521992/Online_sexual_activities_A...
I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.
Where as in violent games like soldier of fortune I doubt most players are trying to achieve the feeling of brutally killing another human being.
And religious groups talking about protecting children (while raping them) is hypocrisy at its finest.
If group A wants to control group or person B, they should prove with very high certainty that group B's behavior is harmful to someone who is not B.
I'm not sure why the payment processors can't just be excluded for the offending games during checkout instead.
I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.
BG3 does feature an incest sex scene. You can fuck the drow twins.
Are you saying that BG3 should be ok because it’s a good game? Or BG3 is only ok because it doesn’t show much of the incest sex?
What do BG3 and the title in question have in common? "incest" (though, not non-con, I don't think BG3 has such)
What does BG3 have that the other title doesn't? Critical acclaim and the support of the mainstream. THis is the same issue with GOT.
Why does BH3 have critical acclaim and mainstream support and the other title doesn't? Is this a difficult topic to grasp?
BG3 is fairly tame. Outlast trials has you mutilate genitals and has people threatening to rape you frequently.
You already know VISA and/or Mastercard will respond if an activist group raises enough of a concern so what's stopping you?
Ah right, you think if they got one game removed on a petition, they should somehow also be able to remove every single other game that may or may not meet the same criteria even though it probably took them significant effort to the the first game removed and this is some sort of "gotcha" on their moral inconsistency rather than a simple limitation of resources to try to get their will done all at once?
I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.
My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.
Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).
Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion.
[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host/discussi...
I don’t have any experience integrating to their API myself but Lunar is a relatively new Danish (so EU) 100% digital bank. See https://www.lunar.app/en/personal/what-is-lunar
They have an Open API: https://developer.openbanking.prod.lunar.app/home
Edit: “new” in finance terms - started 2015.
If I understood it correctly, Open Payment Host can register as a TPP and offer direct banking to its users. But a customer of lunar bank can't access the API directly?
I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution.
Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response.
I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as crypto as I want but a single payment from a Dubai account can get my bank account frozen for days ...
If someone wants to buy something from me badly enough, they'll figure out how to get some bitcoin.
I don't have the time and energy to deal with their arbitrary bullshit anymore.
Dethrone the payment processors or they get to decide what is and is not allowed to be sold.
We need real protections, that don't and can't change with the winds of political power.
but they'll tell you that they got pressured to ban "adult content" from steam
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Who's kid is obsessed with microtransactions and cs:go cases gamba on steam?
Psyop and propaganda, calling them out gets you a ban
Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.
These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.
Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.
The civil liberties guys always jump in one too early to defend the guys who want to fuck kids.
Slippery slope arguments are fallacious. I am ready to destroy Visa/Mastercard as soon as it's not child abuse or erotic depictions of child abuse they are censoring.
Seems strange to go after obscure videogames (which presumably don't feature real human beings) in this way. Unless they really are unusually extreme?
> which presumably don't feature real human beings
I don't really care. As soon as you've created something people will pleasure themselves to you've created the negative feedback loop on the pleasure but the positive feedback loop on the real thing IMO.
Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.
We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.
Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
People launder money in the way you describe do that via extremely popular titles (so they can sell the whole account later) or rare items in online games like CSGO or Dota. Not "Incest Simulator 2023".
Full-on murder simulators: OK.
Exchanging consensual pleasure with the wrong person: NOT OK.
In ancap logic I think the fault here is all on gabe for not lobbying the government enough and/or for not having been able to gather enough force to fight against those companies somehow.
If someone wants to sell something and someone else wants to buy something, it should be nobody else's business to police it as long as two parties are settled.
That's why I want to see crypto take over and get rid of the middleman and regulators.
It’s the S. And so very few people have any idea. Visa/MC doesn’t actually hate money.
They have better argument fiduciary defense accept porn money than deny it - unless they don’t and no one asks or thinks about it.
I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like.
And this is why we need laws and regulations that are actually enforced. Because companies and larger organisms do not necessarily operate on timescales that are able to be reasonably responded to within a human lifespan.
This isn't a very good comparison, as this involves a payment processing company. An apt comparison would be the payment processor company demanding that you stop doing business with a Jewish store because that goes against their Nazi values.
Contrary wise, consider a Jewish payment processor who wants to knock off a Nazi store. You can’t have it both ways.
Bigger problem is that for most real world problems who is Nazi and who is Jewish depends on who you ask. Sucks to be Jewish in a Nazi world where even payment processors hate you.
It's clearly not the case at all. Valve wants to sell third party games. Third party game developers want to sell their games. Customers want to buy third party games through Valve. Do you understand this bit?
A payment processor company is far excluded from the process. Users want to pay Valve money. Valve wants to receive the user's money. All fine, right? Except a payment company somehow feels entitled to tell Valve which products in their product line they can sell. WTF?
Going back to your far-fetched example, it would be like a supermarket selling all sorts of products their customers want to buy, but the Nazi bank somehow feels entitled to tell the supermarket they should not sell any product related with Jews. Does that make sense to you?
Now imagine your phone refuses to take a picture of the Nazi flag, because the owners of the phone manufacturing company have a certain moral code.
There's no human looking at each transaction, there's nobody to be bothered about the content of the game, and no justification for not processing offensive stuff.
This is why anarcho- anything can't work. Some people specialize in building thing, since in providing a service, some specialize in making money and grabbing power. When the builders and providers don't unite to hold them back (like... forming a government) those people end up forming a mafia. Of course the state is a mafia too. You gotta pick your evils.
Or they really do understand and are of the opinion that they will be the beneficiaries. That they are in a position to exploit this difference.
Same goes with abusive individuals and flying monkeys. Some people wanna be like those strong successful abusers so they take their side.
Off topic: I heard this word for the first time last night and now I’m seeing it here. Funny how that works sometimes.
Off topic, but when I was looking at cars when my old one died, I started noticing way more of the models I had been considering on the road. Funny how the mind works.
Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.
It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.
Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.
If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be against.
If you transact on the blockchain, you're broadcasting who your wallet transacts with on levels that are far more publicly transparent than how fiat is traded via institutions.
Projects like monero (https://www.getmonero.org/) ensure privacy and fungibility of the crypto you hold.
It should still be easier, but let's not pretend this is technology only available to those with deep tech experience.
I don't think this is effectively available to anyone without deep tech experience, and any non-technical user who's willing to click through this kind of thing is definitely drowning in malware that will steal their crypto.
In any case, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying with crypto I need not ask permission to make a transaction. Whether that transaction should be open to government inspection after the fact is another matter entirely.
People complain that 24/7. The absolute majority of HN comments sided with Epic when they challenged that.
> or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
It didn't happen. What happened was the bakery refused to make a cake for gay wedding. It's established that you can't refuse to sell something existing to someone just because of their sexuality.
there are 2 solutions to this: 1. steam accepts eth and other cryptos; most people associate btc with crypto because it is the original but it is now technically vastly inferior. 2. the seven seas (nobody ever turns your free transaction down and you get to keep whatever it is forever with no fancy license/tos/eulas attached)
If you buy smut game on Steam, your bank statement won't show the name of the game. It looks exactly like any other transaction you make on Steam.
> "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out"
This is a scenario that literally can't happen in the Steam case. It could happen with Pornhub but not with Steam.
And Steam has a very generous refund policy. If your playtime is less than 2hr you can ask for a refund with a few mouse clicks. No phone call or email needed. Actually in my experience if your playtime is just over 2hr for a bit they'll still refund you.
If you chargeback you can get your whole steam account suspended.
I can't back this up with facts but the chargeback myth smells of an old astroturfing campaign to justify the moral policing on porn in general. But nowadays porn is more commonly accepted so they're shifting to more specific genres.
The new myth seems to be that payment processors can he held legally liable for facilitating illegal transactions, but the only lawsuits vs payment processors I can find is about child pornography, which has always been banned on steam.
When added that there was an advocacy group that sent an open letter to payment processors a week ago for this same exact issue[1], then the chargeback excuse has zero merit.
So yeah, it's 100% a moral crusade. Which side you sit on the crusade it up to you.
[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
Why is that above the bar then?
The card companies are cutting off all the low hanging fruit to establish precedence (steam is not the only one affected). One it's established that they can ban certain things, then they've established they get to control the purchase of literally any idea, cause, or product they want. The card companies want to control and starve anything or anybody they don't like - especially their competition and regulators. They'll control the spice.
Net neutrality regulation would have prevented this and forced them to play nice with each other, with the side effect of a net benefit to society instead of tearing it apart.
We all warned you the free and open Internet, and by extension irl, as we knew it would unravel. Fundamental property rights are now dead; we just watched it happen.
You gave up the fight. You voted for it. Twice.
A lot of folks I'm sure will say this is what crypto is for, but if that ever gained enough traction then (the US) congress would clamp down on it. They'd probably call it "money laundering" or something like that. Remember the guy that went to jail for exchanging crypto for fiat?
Are you mad at Visa/Mastercard? They don't care about porn, they care about not having congress smash them.
You want regulations that would prevent MC/Visa from doing this? You've got it backwards. Regulation is on the side of surveillance and morality police.
Oh god they delisted Crusader Kings???!
If I buy a physical good with a credit card, and the merchant either never sends me anything, or sends me an empty box and ignores my emails, well, that's a use-case for chargebacks. 3DS doesn't help with that.
In many countries Steam supports plenty of alternative payment options that do not use VISA or mastercard.
Thinking about it, if a platform as enormous as Steam just completely stopped accepting VISA and mastercard, they'd a) probably still be fine b) VISA and mastercard would probably cave - few companies will prioritize outworn politics over literally billions of revenue. In fact I'd expect these two to be the last to do that. Valve would be more the type to put principles first. Too bad they didn't this time.
Do you really, really think fraud and chargebacks for games covering specific fetishes on Steam have even the tiniest iota of relevance here?
Steam readily offers refunds for a multitude of scenarios!
Valve is also large enough to make itself known to payment processors to not be erroneously lumped in with seedy merchants.
From my understanding, VISA and Mastercard have relatively vague rules that payment processors must follow and payment processors must interpret that based on their own risk tolerance of adverse action being undertaken against them by VISA and/or Mastercard for not following the vague rules in the manner VISA/Mastercard interpret them as at a given point in time.
This is how you end up with situations where both payment processors and the big credit card networks point at each other when politicians ask "why are you withholding financial services from (insert company here)?" and, technically, both entities are correct at pointing the fingers at each other.
There's other factors with respect to contract law in a global economy spanning varied jurisdictions that add additional wrinkles, but I'm skeptical they're the culprit in this specific case
If you think it's illegal under PROTECT then you should enforce the law, not use credit card companies to force people to use a VPN. And if it's illegal it should be illegal everywhere, not just where people are paying rather than sharing. Clearly if many people are paying for a work it's less likely to be obscene
timpera•6mo ago
ranger_danger•6mo ago
jajuuka•6mo ago
Ancapistani•6mo ago
My understanding is that payment processors are obligated to follow the policies of Visa/MasterCard, AmEx, and Discover, but that those parties' policies don't explicitly ban these specific things for sale. Instead, they "strongly encourage" processors to ban them in their user agreements under the implicit threat of their risk level being increased, which in turn impacts the fees they pay to the credit card companies.
I've not been deep in this world since ~2014, but at that time the only processor I could find that wasn't specific to the porn industry, offered physical terminals, had reasonable (if high) fees, and didn't ban legal transactions in their user agreement was PAI ("Payment Alliance International"). A quick look at their site today shows that they seem to have been acquired by Brinks, so that may no longer be the case.
Mindwipe•6mo ago
Some of how to interpret that is left up to the processor, but it is broadly under MCs and to a lesser extent Visa's control.
bobsmooth•6mo ago
slaw•6mo ago
latentsea•6mo ago
vouaobrasil•6mo ago
raincole•6mo ago
There are other payment processors in India/Japan/China/Brazil/etc. But none of them is internationally adopted like Visa/Mastercard.
jandrese•6mo ago
astura•6mo ago
giancarlostoro•6mo ago
david38•6mo ago
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Dylan16807•6mo ago
Also that's not a reason to ban certain genres/kinks, which is what's happening here.
AIPedant•6mo ago
But it is possible that Visa sensibly and correctly said "anyone who makes or purchases such a game is a despicable scumbag, and we shouldn't assume the financial risk of dealing with them."
Dylan16807•6mo ago
Or you think one person did that and it made the credit cards decide any story with incest would be the same? That would be ridiculous on their part.
mitthrowaway2•6mo ago
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