The article calling their moderation hands-off stuck out to me because you can't really call Steam's approach hands off by any means, they've banned some Japanese VNs before and most VN discovery guides will encourage you to use other marketplaces to avoid possible censorship, because it happens.
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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how do we create a system for digital payments without introducing centralized control (and therefore censorship)?
watches as lemmy tries their best to say anything except crypto
We could lobby our governments to regulate the payment processors. Their job is to facilitate transactions, not dictate what they are. Governments could easily regulate them such that they may not do that.
Governments are centralized control. Just take a look at the current US administration, and the economic sanctions they pushed left and right. You trust them to keep their hands off transactions happening within their own country?
This is so naive it hurts, though. As if there weren’t literally thousands of years’ worth of tales of corruption and failed regulation to learn from.
I, too, desperately want to believe that democracy can still work despite capitalists having captured it. But I dunno…
Nobody has yet solved the "who watches the watchers?" problem. Because of that, I believe every system of government is doomed to fall to corruption and capture given time.
I know that there are a lot of mechanisms that can be put in place to mitigate that problem, such as adversarial branches and divisions of authority, but I haven't seen one yet that does anything more than prolong things and delay what seems to be the inevitable. Until something big changes, the pendulum seems destined to keep swinging back and forth.
In the meantime, I haven't seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion, like making the government a party to the transaction by way of regulating the process, though that's admittedly far from fool-proof, either.
I'm just trying to lay out the available options at our disposal now as I understand them.
In the meantime, I haven't seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion
This is just decentralization. This is literally what I alluded to in my root comment. Crypto solves these problems
So it's all Political Entropy, huh?
Karl Quackenbush
Is Valve's lawyer a cartoon duck? That sounds like the name of a cartoon duck.
Or a duck-themed pornstar.
Just big duck beak pussy lips surrounded by untamed bush. Quackenbush, just like it says on the label (labial?).
Maybe Quackenbush's approach could've saved Valve some headaches along the way.
Oh so their suggestion is that Valve should have bowed to conservative censorship even earlier? What a waste of an article
"I don't want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do." — J.P. Morgan
I imagine gaben hiring a lawyer to be creative and clever to outsmart the puritan censorship control of valve and steam. Then the lawyer taking time to think about it, giving up, and coming at gaben with that as legal advice, resulting in gaben being furious that the lawyer failed and passed that failure as default to what the opposition is trying to strongarm you to do as official advice.
Mastercard+visa: suck my cock and lick my over-ripe anus
Gaben: hey fuck you
Gaben: hires lawyer to try to not have to do that
Gaben: lawyer, I'm not doing that. What are my options?
Lawyer: huh, i am a potato and therefore have no real thought. i hereby legally suggest you suck their cock and lick their over-ripe anus. That'll be $3,000,000. Thanks.
Gaben: what the fuck do i pay you for if that's your opinion?
This is suspiciously like what working with AI is like
Visa and Mastercard, suck it! You do NOT get to decide how I spend MY money. Got it?
I'd put my savings in The Steam Vault
Gabe Newell cursing at a lawyer is exactly what I needed to read to start the day. What a wonderful human! 🥰
Tag as adult and move on.
Wasn't there an issue with credit card processors threatening them?
Payment processors/banks should not be the arbiters of ethics. If a thing is legal, they should be REQUIRED to handle it, or lose their ability to conduct business nationwide.
They should but Americans (where processors are based) will use them as a tool when needed. Also their government could make phony allegations and they would have to enforce them. We need more processors world wide! I hope that EU does it right this time.
Valve could probably just start their own bank at this point.
Steam Bank? Steam Vault? Oh Steam Treasury! Steam Financial Alliance, i would immediately dump the parasites i have now.
Just call it Condensation.
Valve Liquidity
I always figured they could just charge the card for a "gift card" for that amount... Which then immediately gets used for the "adult themed" game. Or at least allow the games to be sold on the store only with gift cards.
That does sound like a payment processor!
Financial censorship is a useful tool for people who want stuff censored.
It's their most effective tool at this point.
I'd say it's their most effective direct tool.
But if you count indirect tools, I think the propaganda out there is more effective. There are school districts where somebody on the school board encountered a bit of propaganda, and then before you know it, the school district is choosing on its own to censor their own libraries of things like LGBTQ+ materials.
No can do. Governments will ask them for age verification. Valve will instead swiftly remove anything with kinky dialogue and move on. True story by the way. Happened in Germany and no, it had nothing to do with protecting customers on Steam's side because the age verification process authorities asked for protects your identity. Valve simply didn't want to deal with it. To be fair it was a bullshit demand anyway but Sony didn't seem to have any problems implementing it so this is a Valve thing.
I’m not happy that I know the thumbnail is a pic from Subverse.
The article is literally just the title?
At least it wasn't a deceptive or clickbait title. Let's give it some credit
I don't know what you read, if it was actually truncated for you, but there is an entire article. It's just that the article's actual content is "Did you know Steam has porn? Here's a few porn-related Steam anecdotes." The part specifically mentioned in the title, though, is just like you said, it has no more information than is in the title.
I think they are saying that more information on that topic is in the linked non-free Bloomberg article.
Newell ripped into general counsel Karl Quackenbush when the lawyer advocated for more hands-on moderation on Steam. "What the f--- do I pay you for if that’s your opinion?" Newell reportedly interjected.
Presumably he pays the legal professional for their legal opinion. Doesn't mean he has to listen, but usually you should listen to your lawyers.
True but there's very liitle context here. It could have made more sense in the conversation if it was meant like "I pay you to fight for our position, not roll over to threats."
If a position is legally untenable it's a lawyer's job to say so, though. We really don't have enough context here.
Sometimes a lawyer has nothing to fight with. The law and constitution are sometimes clear and any judge will disbar a lawyer who tries to waste the courts time on this issue (this never happens because lawyers won't risk it when things are that obvious - and usually it isn't). If you don't like it pay a lobbiest not a lawyer.
The law and constitution are sometimes clear and any judge will disbar a lawyer who tries to waste the courts time on this issue
I've heard about this once in my lifetime, and it made the news because it was so usual...
So not "any" judge, rather one specific one.
They basically have to improve their filtration on pornography content. That’s my guess.