I miss the old days when the internet was a free-for-all. Anyone with minimal html skills could get a domain and basically make a site on whatever they wanted. Sure there was a lot of twisted stuff, but was also so much more fun.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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neocity is the closest to it.
I fucking hate algorithm speak so much
Someday soon an AI company will win a court case where they argue that their LLM is an expression of their free speech rights per Citizens United and is therefore legally allowed to say whatever it wants and in fact has the same rights to freedom of expression as the corporation itself does.
This precedent will be the basis on which future AI rights are eventually won, not out of egalitarianism or altruism or respect for (possible) sentience, but because corporations want to avoid liability for the behavior of their products.
"Dead Internet Theory" would turn into the "Law of Dead Internet" if that happens. It's pretty close right now as it is. At that point either a new "Internet" is born from a technology renaissance, or humans continue to co-exist with AI in their new role as Internet Zombie Cash Cows.
I think tools for detecting and filtering out ai material from search results would go a long way to improve the current situation, and is a middle ground between an internet revolution and a technological dystopia. There is still an unfathomably large amount of good information on the internet, the issue is that there is 20x more trash. And the trash is scaling rapidly, humans are not.
If you haven't already, give the Marginalia search engine a try. They're doing something interesting in this space. You can filter out results with javascript, affiliate links, tracking, ads, and cookies. After filtering, the internet feels a lot more like it did 20 years ago, more sincere, more human.
If I recall correctly, Marginalia is made and maintained by one guy. As the trash to good content ratio worsens, I think more people will want to build on and use projects like Marginalia.
Ironically, those tools to filter out AI will also be AI. I do believe they'll be necessary, but also what the fuck. It's a bit like a bunch of people have decided to just piss all over the place, and rather than cleaning it up and putting an end to the rampant pissing, everybody's just gonna end up putting on masks so they don't have to smell it.
Do not give idea!!
Honestly same with music services.
I never want to hear an edited/censored song. I'm an adult, not someone listening to Kidz Bop
VEVO can eat a dick
I wish Steam didn't have porn on it
but I double-plus wish that Steam didn't stop hosting porn only because of payment companies with outsized control over creative expression
It's thatbsimple rule: if you don't want it don't subscribe to it. Leave it for those who enjoy it.
especially that there's been easy set and forget filters for that kind of games for ages
especially that there's been easy set and forget filters for that kind of games for ages
youre telling me you didnt know you can control your adult content preferences until right now
You can hide those porn games in your preferences at least. Not the same, but at least you don't have to see them if you don't want to. It even distinguishes between games that have nudity/sex and those that are flat out porn.
Wait, for real? I only ever saw the 'sexual content' tag, which is annoying to block, as it covers stuff like Baulder's Gate 3 and such.
Yep, it's under account details then store preferences. I posted this in another comment somewhere else in the thread but here's a screen grab of it on mobile.
There should be a forced tutorial for that (and tags) when you first open the store lol
brainrot people have been skipping past such prompts since long before tiktok, and complaining loudly if they can't
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Y'know what? I'll disagree with you there, let the porn games be on Steam. BUT! Do a thorough quality and content check (i.e. no rape, kiddy diddling, spousal abuse, any other type of abuse, etc.) on ALL of them, and throw the slop away. Then do this for every other genre, and make the porn harder to find - like the video store backroom.
Edit: Steam should assume more curation roles. I mean, even SOME curation roles, because the Steam library looks like my old dorm room the morning after my birthday party: filled with trash, vomit, and loneliness.
Edit 2: speaking of video store backrooms, maybe they could do just that, branch off that section of the library and set it on its own domain, like a Steam After Dark, or whatever.
Edit 3: STEAMY AFTER DARK! I want my 10.000 Internet Points NOW!
BUT! Do a thorough quality and content check (i.e. no rape, kiddy diddling, spousal abuse, any other type of abuse, etc.)
Genuine question, why? It seems just that you want your arbitrary moral rules instead of Visa's or MasterCard's (or PayPal's).
I am not being glib, I simply don't know how else to respond to "why not allow games about raping people, or paedophilia, or abusing people in a romantic context" other than with "because all of those things are objectively unconscionable." And, yes, I'd argue that they are all worse than Video Game Violence™ even when just taken within the "it's just vidya" context.
I dunno, I fully accept that it may be just getting old and outdated, but... I genuinely can't see that stuff otherwise, nor could I agree with the distribution of such stuff out of the same website on which you can also get, like, Tiny Tots' Fluffy Fun Town Adventure, the hit platformer for 1-year-olds, y'know?
I'm not stupid enough to believe that such stuff will never exist, as I've seen it exist already. Like, ok, but that's different. Horrid stuff will exist in one way or another, there's still a market for snuff films and such, ok I can accept that as an inevitability. But it's one thing for It to exist, and another to sell It as one would a can of soda, in full view and reach of just anyone.
Edit: Steam should assume more curation roles.
Never going to happen. It's valve lmao.
Also porn games will keep getting delisted and removed because ultimately it's the payment processors powering the store that have the final say. And nobody there is interested in indulging in your content checks, they have their own.
Do a thorough quality and content check (i.e. no rape, kiddy diddling, spousal abuse, any other type of abuse, etc.) on ALL of them, and throw the slop away. Then do this for every other genre
There are games that talk about or depict abuse as part of their story line. I think adults can be trusted to engage with art that has adult themes. In the end the hardest part (of letting adults in but not kids) is enforcement, games are rated for that reason but it's on parents to care.
Myeah :-<... it's a damned shame, though...
And I was referring more to games which have you abuse other characters, broaching abuse as an element and studying it for what it is is ok. Hell, I'd even argue we need more games which show the effects and repercussions of abuse...
Not even Nintendo, who for a long time branded itself as the most family oriented company in videogames, is doing any sort of proper curation for stuff entering their shop. Unlike Steam, they don't even care to label whether the slop has AI or not
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There was a push... way back in the 90s, to implement a regulation on the internet in which "adult" material would register itself under the ".xxx" domain. And then you could do whatever horny shit you wanted under that heading, in the same way you could drop F-bombs and racial slurs on Satellite Radio or Cable TV. If someone didn't want their kids to watch certain material, they could very easily block the content by censoring everything from the ".xxx" domain. And ISPs could even offer "child-friendly" connections by automatically refusing to serve that content to opt-out customers.
The plan died in committee, because conservative politicians considered it unfriendly to businesses.
Similar pitches - broadcast frequencies that could be blocked with special chips in TVs, registries that businesses could add themselves to in order to let systems auto-filter there material, HTML metadata tags, FCC rules updates, state funded industry managed ratings agencies - all got the axe under a political class that insisted it was too hostile to the interests focused on making money.
And so now we don't have any kind of tagging or sorting or filtering option native to content. It's all just a mass of generic data. Which is good if you want to engage in traffic quietly under the radar. But awful if you want to be an above board commercial enterprise with normal customers.
And then several conservative states voted to enforce "age verification" wholesale, with garbage implementation that serves no one but identity thieves. Fuck politicians.
It is worth noting that the .xxx domain does still exist.
Its... a lot more like the late 90s / early 00s web.
I... am uncertain as to whether or not payment processors ....care at all, or a lot about anything going on here...
But uh yeah, people could just... start using this domain more and try to force a re-evaluation of internet/society norms.
The internet is a lot less of a 'US sets all the rules' thing these days.
I seem to recall the .xxx going live/large-time in the late 00s era. There was an article series in the newspaper about my area's colleges all suing to gain control of the (college name).xxx sites.
Those ideas don't really solve this problem though. Advertisers and payment processors would just not service these "adult content" sites. So all the popular sites wouldn't allow adult content.
somebody would fill that gap. there's a market there, so somebody will see the opportunity to make money when there's no competition
And network effects would ensure 95% of users stay on TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/...
Somebody, sure. There's advertisers on porn sites. Just not the same ones on all the other sites, and they don't pay the same. It's a different market. Any company for whom all-ages content is a significant part of their product is gonna want the non-porn advertisers
Several adult friendly platforms have come and gone. Many of them very profitable and self sustaining. They all eventually get screwed by inability to process payments.
And when people try to create their own payment methods not subject to arbitrary morality rules, the full weight of the existing banking system comes down hard and strangles them in the cradle.
We could absolutely have safe, profitable, self sustaining adult friendly spaces, but the powers that be don't want that to exist and work hard to undermine that from every possible angle.
It's really no different than all those efforts to ban local fiber ISP coops or how abortion clinics get shut down by arbitrary full hospital regulations because they couldn't ban them legally.
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My question here is why hasn't anybody come up with a solution?
It is a known problem that the current large payment processors do not want to work with adult themed companies.
It is also known that regardless of that, there will always be adult themed companies and they will handle a lot of money.
It is also known that processing payments for reliable companies that handle adult themes is a very profitable venture.
So, why is it that there are no payment processors that will work with these companies?
I thought we lived in a capitalistic society where the market would decide whether or not something was valuable.
Its a Stop Killing Games kind of issue.
Governments generally don't care, don't really understand it or take it seriously.
So, no one ever ... attempts to regulate some new paradigm for payment processors.
You'd need a mass social movement to petiton governments.
Or maybe use I2P?
...
Also lol at your last line.
No, no living in a capitalist society means the richest capitalists are in charge, the free market isn't real, capitalists hate competiton, and love being as close to a monopoly as possible.
They just say 'free market good' because it easily convinces those that have not studied economic history.
If capitalism just, was a purely efficient societal structure, it would assign prohibitive costs to corruption, racism, sexism, sexual preference discrimination, etc, etc.
( the naive, pro free market interpretation, taken to its logical conclusion )
Or, you could argue, it is pricing those things correctly, and that the general will of the people is infact racist and sexist.
( the ancap interpretation )
Outcome is still the same, either way.
The free market naturally corrupts itself, concentrates wealth, and money talks louder than poverty does... in a market based society.
You have to have an effective societal counter balance to that at all times, otherwise, you just end up with oligarchy with extra steps.
And the capitalists are of course motivated by their own capitalism logic to undermine and destroy that counter balance... so they uh, do that, all the time.
There are payment processors that will work with these companies, they just charge more because of frequent chargebacks and legal risks. If a porn company found a way to solve these issues, they might not have such troubles, but that's obviously not really feasible
I wonder how long after the purchase most of those porn related chargebacks happen. I suspect that, for video content, it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours, as the post-orgasmic regret kicks in hard.
Sometimes their spouse sees the bill, and they deny that they made the order so hard that they actually go through with making a chargeback for a purchase they know they made
Also, teens get ahold of their parent's credit card, and "totally swear" that they never purchased anything with it.
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Puritanism is, apparently, profitable.
'Control of the people' has always been appealing to those in power.
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