Schadrach

I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.

Steam has also been hosting numerous outright neo-Nazi groups for many years (PDF) and never really stepped up effectively against them. User reports and media attention has limited effect.

As a general rule, steam discussion boards for a game are moderated by whoever the developer assigns that power to, and steam user groups are moderated by the group owner or whoever they delegate that power to and Steam doesn’t particularly care so long as you aren’t doxing, openly coordinating harassment, or doing something explicitly illegal in the US.

That’s also the general tilt they’ve taken with what’s allowed on the store since they opened the floodgates - if it’s not illegal and it’s not going to get them sued, it’s probably allowed if properly tagged. Which is why you can find Sex With Hitler side by side with Super Lesbian Animal RPG.

Worst they do is block it from specific regions if the local government requests it - see that game where you essentially play as Hamas fighting against the IDF that they recently blocked from the UK, the one where the largest part of the game description is arguing that the game isn’t antisemitic hate speech just because the enemy are Jewish. The call to block it came after a new patch that apparently added a scenario based on the Oct 7 attack.

Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.

Sums up how I feel about them. I have lots of games on my Epic account. I have paid for none of them, and refuse to change that. If it’s an Epic exclusive, it will eventually either release on other platforms, become an epic store free game of the week, or be an epic store freebie on amazon prime. I have enough games in my library I can wait.

Honestly, the Steam Deck has done more for gaming on Linux than just about anything in recent years. Not least because it spurred significant improvements in the software that allows you to run Windows software in Linux (Proton, which is a fork of Wine), since a big chunk of the Steam library doesn’t have an actual Linux version.

Like Android, iOS and MacOS, the core conceit of Steam OS is emphasizing usability on a particular set of devices (in this case gaming handhelds, but presumably eventually consoles too since the whole thing is designed around controller inputs as a central UX concern) for a system whose guts are ultimately built on Linux or Unix, but with the worst of the fiddly bits abstracted away and hidden from most end users.

Not sure if that’s a joke about a since-corrected typo or if you’re serious.

Just in case serious, it’s the Linux-based operating system that runs on the Steam Deck, and soon to be related devices. So, Linux modified to work better for gaming, especially with Steam.

Short version is that for the most part forum moderation for each game is left up to the devs or whoever they appoint, and users can create user groups and curators without much if any restrictions and they don’t particularly give a shit what content the game you want to sell has. The only real exceptions are if it’s illegal in the US, which applies to very little (for example no CSAM).

I find it interesting that the federal government threatening a private entity with legal repercussions if it doesn’t restrict the speech of it’s users isn’t such an obvious violation of the first amendment that lawyers aren’t climbing over each other to fight this one.

And if you don’t see the problem with it, imagine we agree that the federal government should be allowed to restrict what expression can go on on internet platforms content-wise, then imagine Trump and his cronies deciding where the borders lie. They already want to revive the Comstock Act.

The moment you give people a little finger wrt their requests, one of those people will take the whole hand. The same likely applies to modding.

I suppose that depends on which finger.

It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.

Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.

Welcome to society. Frankly, it’s malagency (mis-assignment of agency, specifically in a fashion that often makes men responsible for things that happen to them even when they really aren’t and often absolves women of that responsibility when they really should have it) all the way down.

Malagency as a lens predicts reality better than a lot of other gender focused lenses. “What would happen if women are believed to be less responsible for what happens than they really are and men are believed to be more responsible for what happens than they really are?” tends to map to reality better than “What would happen if everything in society were created by men to benefit men at the expense of women and to oppress women?” Especially once you stop looking narrowly at the top few percent of men, where the two lenses give similar results.

and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.

Something like 95% of people shot by police are men. This of course is not discriminatory on the grounds that men are evil, violent savages unlike every other group that are disproportionately shot by police who are innocent victims of oppression.

“Gamers” are also a group one elects to be a member of, while one is categorized into a race, sex or gender from birth. One is elective, the other is descriptive. No one chooses to be black, or white, or born with male or female genitalia, etc, etc. And a lot of negative views are often along the lines of a rare bad thing being more likely performed by a certain demographic being extrapolated to accuse that demographic of being dangerous or harmful in general (usually an out-group, though under some ideologies it’s only acceptable to have this view with a target perceived to be the in-group - as regards blame they essentially reverse the perceived in- and out-group roles).

To turn it around on you though, imagine we picked some other elective group (a hobby, a political or ideological leaning, that sort of thing) that you are likely to look positively upon (and maybe even be a member of) and did the same kind of thing. Let’s say…feminists? Would it be acceptable to accuse feminism or feminists of anything negative I can point to any group thereof doing, and if you aren’t one of the ones who actually does that then you should not take offense, right? Not feel defensive at all, not question or challenge the assertion at all, right?

The idea is that Spain and Portugal are part of the “West”, but not Spanish or Portuguese colonial offshoots, which are mostly South American and haven’t fared as well as the colonial offshoots from other nations of western Europe.

David Berkowitz. He claimed that in court, and later retracted the statement. Sonny from the Venture Bros parody of the Scooby Gang is also a reference to him.

You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?

Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.

Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.

Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.

Don’t they, err, already do this?

I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.

There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.

The most recent season has a surprising amount of sexually assaulting Huey though. The first time they even play it for laughs.

The Constitution didn’t establish a right to vote for men in general or any men in particular. It left the question of which citizens were allowed to vote fully up to the states.

Or to go deeper: The Declaration of Independence limited voting to landowners. The Constitution set no regulations whatsoever for which citizens could vote, leaving it wholly up to the states. There are various trends in state laws over time but nothing federal regarding who can vote (other than various immigration laws about who can be naturalized). Until the 15th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Technically, men did not have a federally protected right to vote until women did, the 19th amendment. Though state laws had expanded to give essentially all free white men the vote in every state shortly before the Civil War, but that’s not from that federal point of view you’re so worried about.

While you can hunt with an AR-15, it’s not the best rifle for the task.

It’s not the best rifle for any task. But it’s a good enough rifle for most tasks, and between real AR-15s and the various clones they are cheap, in common calibers, and have accessories widely available.

Which is why it’s the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin.

It being the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin is in turn why it’s so often used in public mass shootings, as those are usually done with weapons of convenience rather than something bought for purpose. Likely also why the guy who shot Trump used one.

If a public mass shooter wanted the best gun for the job, they’d get something closer to a PS-90 (the civilian version of the P-90 which is a military rifle designed for urban combat).