7 ms·

This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentia

This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentially criminal content needs to be reviewed.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
CSAM means material of actual kids, meaning actual victims from the real world have been harmed/abused. Weird video games on the porn side, are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed. When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic? None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal. BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored. So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt? Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!
- progbits 1y ago
  I think OP is saying someone should make a platform that hasn't lost marbles and would allow this content, but you would still want to block CSAM and that is not easy to do.
  - mostlysimilar 1y ago
    Itch hasn't lost its marbles, they're forced to remove this content by payment processors. They're critical infrastructure, they shouldn't be allowed to arbitrate on behalf of an entire society. We need laws to require them to carry payments for any legal transaction. Paying for porn games is legal.
    - progbits 1y ago
      Nobody said anything about itch, this is about the whole payment system. You are agreeing with both of us but writing it as argument. But the lack of reading comprehension on this site is making me lose my marbles.
      - mostlysimilar 1y ago
        My apologies, my anger is at the payment processors, not at you/not meant to be combative.
        progbits 1y ago
        All good, I'm angry at the same.
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
        I think the implication with saying "a company that hasn't lost its marbles" is that Itch and Steam have lost their marbles. You can argue that Steam should have pushed back, but Itch definitely lacks the leverage to refuse here.
- magicmicah85 1y ago
  IANAL, but I understand there are varying definitions of CSAM which is also why I said “and other potentially criminal content”. I’m also not equating CSAM to the actual reasons people are using financial censorship, I’m highlighting a challenge of a censorship resistant platform.
- numpad0 1y ago
  > are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with. If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting. Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    > If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Sounds news to me. Do you have any origin for this?
- slillibri 1y ago
  > all legal to the T You might want to check that because it's not so cut and dried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  > When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.
- bitwize 1y ago
  U.S. law says otherwise: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A > (c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
righthand 1y ago
The major problem is the payment processors though. Unless you defeat that duopoly or only accept cash how do you stop this exact situation? There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.
- badsectoracula 1y ago
  Yeah and it isn't just you accepting cash. Let's say you decide to go with cash (or, more realistically, manual bank transfers) and even get some host like 1984 that'd go to the court for you, but what stops Visa/MC to go directly at your host and tell them to either drop your site or they'll drop them?
  - gs17 1y ago
    In theory, if you went "full crypto", there's probably options like Filecoin and web3 domains (I'm not in that space enough to know what the current versions of these are) that could make something "uncensorable" by Visa/MC, but it also would limit its reach heavily.
- magicmicah85 1y ago
  Cryptocurrency is the only way I see this working.
  - Night_Thastus 1y ago
    Adding a broken, inefficient system to a problem just makes 2 problems.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain. The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally. That’s worth the investment than that pipe dream of a global, frictionless cryptocurrency.
mwill 1y ago
These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly, they're targeting payment processors. I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa. (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
- magicmicah85 1y ago
  You don't need to compete with Steam or Itch for games that they can't sell, you're in your own market.
  - josh_p 1y ago
    being discoverable on the existing markets is extremely valuable.
  - MBCook 1y ago
    And as soon as people find out you exist, they get the payment processors to shut you down too as part of their crusade. Now what? If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
    - creer 1y ago
      The suggestion is new start businesses that do not need credit card processors.
      - MBCook 1y ago
        We’re back to chicken and egg. If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again. Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again. If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble. And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking. You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
BoxFour 1y ago
Even if you manage to sidestep the issues with payment processors mentioned elsewhere, you don’t end up as a “popular platform that just happens to take a principled stance and also hosts some controversial material.” Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc. Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
- magicmicah85 1y ago
  >Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment. Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
  - BoxFour 1y ago
    when you start talking about a business for serving “the few”, you’ve already removed the incentive for most entrepreneurs (unless those “few” are the extremely wealthy and you can charge them exorbitantly).
- hyghjiyhu 1y ago
  I've watched hikaru on kick and the only offensive thing about his stream is how he repeats himself. I don't really like how he says the same thing over and over. Chat, it's kinda starting to bother me how he repeats himself. Yeah I'm starting to think he repeats himself a bit too much for my taste.
  - topato 1y ago
    After the third sentence, I was like, what's wrong with this guy? After the fourth, I was like, Oh. Lol.
    - hyghjiyhu 1y ago
nemomarx 1y ago
create a good censorship resistant payment network (stripe replacement) and these platforms would probably just be your customers?
beeflet 1y ago
I think that the decentralized mechanisms used for censorship resistance would also make it difficult to monetize
nurettin 1y ago
Oh be realistic. Hosting smut isn't exactly respectable at this day and age. Your choice for sponsors dwindles to illegal gambling sites and shady dating sites who scrape monthly fees from lonely men. Maybe an MLM scheme if you are lucky.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Looking at this US administration, I don't think "respectable" is much of a metric these days. And yes, you need a lot of private capital to pull this off.
jajuuka 1y ago
The spirit of Visa/Mastercard isn't wrong. If a platform is doing something illegal they will break ties or give them a chance to course correct. When Pornhub was exposed for hosting lots of revenge porn and illegal porn Visa/Mastercard pulled back, Pornhub cleaned house and put up new stronger barriers to prevent that kind of material being uploaded. But instead of doing business again they said "just kidding" and did not come back. In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong. Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.
- axus 1y ago
  How would you feel about a US Central Bank Digital Currency? https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
scythe 1y ago
Seems like a good place to repost my comment from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726 > I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me. > So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad. > Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats. Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits. What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.
littlecranky67 1y ago
It is already here, it is called Bitcoin (with Lightning possibly). And this is not fantasy, the exact same story happened to Pornhub in 2018 - in which they got banned from Visa/MC and purged 60% of their content. They are banned to this day, and now accept Bitcoin/Crypto Payments as well as SEPA transfers in the EU.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

CSAM means material of actual kids, meaning actual victims from the real world have been harmed/abused. Weird video games on the porn side, are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed. When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic? None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal. BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored. So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt? Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!

progbits 1y ago
I think OP is saying someone should make a platform that hasn't lost marbles and would allow this content, but you would still want to block CSAM and that is not easy to do.
- mostlysimilar 1y ago
  Itch hasn't lost its marbles, they're forced to remove this content by payment processors. They're critical infrastructure, they shouldn't be allowed to arbitrate on behalf of an entire society. We need laws to require them to carry payments for any legal transaction. Paying for porn games is legal.
  - progbits 1y ago
    Nobody said anything about itch, this is about the whole payment system. You are agreeing with both of us but writing it as argument. But the lack of reading comprehension on this site is making me lose my marbles.
    - mostlysimilar 1y ago
      My apologies, my anger is at the payment processors, not at you/not meant to be combative.
      - progbits 1y ago
        All good, I'm angry at the same.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      I think the implication with saying "a company that hasn't lost its marbles" is that Itch and Steam have lost their marbles. You can argue that Steam should have pushed back, but Itch definitely lacks the leverage to refuse here.
magicmicah85 1y ago
IANAL, but I understand there are varying definitions of CSAM which is also why I said “and other potentially criminal content”. I’m also not equating CSAM to the actual reasons people are using financial censorship, I’m highlighting a challenge of a censorship resistant platform.
numpad0 1y ago
> are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with. If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting. Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  > If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Sounds news to me. Do you have any origin for this?
slillibri 1y ago
> all legal to the T You might want to check that because it's not so cut and dried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
Nasrudith 1y ago
> When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.
bitwize 1y ago
U.S. law says otherwise: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A > (c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.

righthand 1y ago

The major problem is the payment processors though. Unless you defeat that duopoly or only accept cash how do you stop this exact situation? There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.

badsectoracula 1y ago
Yeah and it isn't just you accepting cash. Let's say you decide to go with cash (or, more realistically, manual bank transfers) and even get some host like 1984 that'd go to the court for you, but what stops Visa/MC to go directly at your host and tell them to either drop your site or they'll drop them?
- gs17 1y ago
  In theory, if you went "full crypto", there's probably options like Filecoin and web3 domains (I'm not in that space enough to know what the current versions of these are) that could make something "uncensorable" by Visa/MC, but it also would limit its reach heavily.
magicmicah85 1y ago
Cryptocurrency is the only way I see this working.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago
  Adding a broken, inefficient system to a problem just makes 2 problems.
- righthand 1y ago
  Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain. The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally. That’s worth the investment than that pipe dream of a global, frictionless cryptocurrency.

mwill 1y ago

These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly, they're targeting payment processors. I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa. (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")

magicmicah85 1y ago
You don't need to compete with Steam or Itch for games that they can't sell, you're in your own market.
- josh_p 1y ago
  being discoverable on the existing markets is extremely valuable.
- MBCook 1y ago
  And as soon as people find out you exist, they get the payment processors to shut you down too as part of their crusade. Now what? If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
  - creer 1y ago
    The suggestion is new start businesses that do not need credit card processors.
    - MBCook 1y ago
      We’re back to chicken and egg. If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again. Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again. If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble. And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking. You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.

BoxFour 1y ago

Even if you manage to sidestep the issues with payment processors mentioned elsewhere, you don’t end up as a “popular platform that just happens to take a principled stance and also hosts some controversial material.” Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc. Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.

magicmicah85 1y ago
>Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment. Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
- BoxFour 1y ago
  when you start talking about a business for serving “the few”, you’ve already removed the incentive for most entrepreneurs (unless those “few” are the extremely wealthy and you can charge them exorbitantly).
hyghjiyhu 1y ago
I've watched hikaru on kick and the only offensive thing about his stream is how he repeats himself. I don't really like how he says the same thing over and over. Chat, it's kinda starting to bother me how he repeats himself. Yeah I'm starting to think he repeats himself a bit too much for my taste.
- topato 1y ago
  After the third sentence, I was like, what's wrong with this guy? After the fourth, I was like, Oh. Lol.
  - hyghjiyhu 1y ago

nemomarx 1y ago

create a good censorship resistant payment network (stripe replacement) and these platforms would probably just be your customers?

beeflet 1y ago

I think that the decentralized mechanisms used for censorship resistance would also make it difficult to monetize

nurettin 1y ago

Oh be realistic. Hosting smut isn't exactly respectable at this day and age. Your choice for sponsors dwindles to illegal gambling sites and shady dating sites who scrape monthly fees from lonely men. Maybe an MLM scheme if you are lucky.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Looking at this US administration, I don't think "respectable" is much of a metric these days. And yes, you need a lot of private capital to pull this off.

jajuuka 1y ago

The spirit of Visa/Mastercard isn't wrong. If a platform is doing something illegal they will break ties or give them a chance to course correct. When Pornhub was exposed for hosting lots of revenge porn and illegal porn Visa/Mastercard pulled back, Pornhub cleaned house and put up new stronger barriers to prevent that kind of material being uploaded. But instead of doing business again they said "just kidding" and did not come back. In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong. Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.

axus 1y ago
How would you feel about a US Central Bank Digital Currency? https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...

scythe 1y ago

Seems like a good place to repost my comment from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726 > I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me. > So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad. > Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats. Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits. What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.

littlecranky67 1y ago

It is already here, it is called Bitcoin (with Lightning possibly). And this is not fantasy, the exact same story happened to Pornhub in 2018 - in which they got banned from Visa/MC and purged 60% of their content. They are banned to this day, and now accept Bitcoin/Crypto Payments as well as SEPA transfers in the EU.