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Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn't literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there's no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.
Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)
There's just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo
Putting the ridicoulous idea that governments are fair and transparent aside, payment processors need to be international. Otherwise, most countries will not be able to access services because their local payment processor is not supported by smaller websites.
However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality so they can't discriminate payments. And EU could probably launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.
To me it's insane that food also isn't on that list. Anything that isn't a luxury can't be trusted to be handled by capitalism.
Do you really think most governments will administer payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner?
It'll end up like the shit we've got going on now with. ICE being given access to Medicaid and tax records in order to deport more people.
I think it is possible to have a government that functions in this way on a long term basis. I don't think the same can be said of for profit companies.
A lot of governments already do. The credit card duopoly is the reason the US decided to come after Brazil's solution.
Why would a government just block payments for something it doesn't like instead of, you know, making it illegal, which it already can do. I doesn't need to block my payment to the heroin store, because the heroin store isn't legally allowed to operate.
They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it's entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don't like illegal, so there's no reason to expect they'd block payments for things they've left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.
Power finds a way, so I wouldn't hope for nationalization itself to be anything good.
power already did find a way, its called privatization.
Yes, because without one government that was helping them out, punishing their competition and funding them, also making regulations convenient for them, Alphabet, Meta and others would be even more powerful. /s
...those are all corporations. Nationalization would make it a public service, rather than a corporate profit-driven service like how it is now.
You can bet that if libraries, for example, became privatized, we'd quickly see several different library companies pop up, each with their own paid book subscription service with exclusive partnerships with various popular authors, much like we have today with streaming platforms. Conversely, if we were to nationalize those streaming platforms, we'd likely see the service transformed to be more akin to our current library service.
It's why the rightmost parties generally want to defund many public services and move them to the private sector - it transforms services that we spend money on to benefit the people into services that the people spend money on to benefit corporations.
I don't believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.
It's not about for-profit or not for-profit, it's about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into "money buys right", because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.
The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It's not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It's an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I'm pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.
One can even say that this is a market dynamic.
So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.
The problem is
in a too complex set of laws (honestly I'd suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,
in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,
in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,
in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,
in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.
So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.
LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.
its almost like their monopoly on the means of production made them powerful and they used that power to control the state. 🤔
I think it's the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.
The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.
The state gives them very expensive projects.
The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.
The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.
So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.
yes that's precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
if they make a big mistake or want labour law adjusted, they can get the state to coddle them, because they privately control, say, the entire food supply (ie the means of production) without which the state is meaningless.
this has been the capitalist state's modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch's power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.
And I'm trying to say that the state helping them was first.
Not really. Every month, year, decade is different.
He had the right ideas of how to solve one particular industry which is the spearhead of barbarism. And he somehow committed suicide in jail.
So you want Trump and MAGA politicians to be able to deny your payments instead?
The problem with "just let the government do it" is when the government is run by people like this.
So don't let them.
Basically nothing works if no one cares about their community. One of the reasons Trump is in power right now is because of a deep seated American apathy for, like... everything.
Trump, et. al., are dismantling USPS, but I like USPS. It's bad that they're doing that.
Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn't fine is the idea of mining.
And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.
But what's important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can't take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.
But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform's decision to do a kind of business?
That's where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
Payment processing should be treated like a utility.
That "treated like a utility" approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don't like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.
It doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be ran by the state.
Enforcement.
The mining is how BTC, etc are decentralised & secure (so the idea of btc and mining are the same idea in my head).
Because you essentially need a global presence to at all be worth using. That is why it is a joke that NOBODY accepts American Express and only the shadiest of international ATMs accept Discover (saved my ass in Germany back in the 10s though)
You are literally saying that we need to look at why there aren't more global mega corporations.
As a daily AMEX user, I think I have only run into 1 place that doesn't take it here in the states. I do remember England being hit or miss at times, but that was over a decade ago. I don't remember it being much of an issue in Germany either, but I didn't use AMEX as often at that time.
GNU Taler is supposed to be a solution. Sort of a federated one. If I understand it correctly.
I'm going to be really dumb
Why does a payment processor need to exist?
I am an artist in OtherCountry. You want to buy art from me. How do you do it?
Physical money? Okay. You now need a way to track that YOU sent 40 bucks in the mail and that I received 40 bucks in the mail and that is (at least) two different national postal services involved. And now I need a way to convert 40 YourLandia dollars into OtherCountry pounds. AND we need to make sure all of that happened quickly enough that exchange rates didn't meaningfully change
Digital money? Who is running the site? How many different sites do I need to have accounts on to accept payment from all the countries I want to sell to?
At the end of the day: For any transaction that is not face to face transfer of hard currency (and even then but...), you need an intermediary that both parties trust. Payment processors are that intermediary. Sometimes they are the person taking my IOU and turning it into money so that you can give me a hamburger. Sometimes that is effectively a courier making sure your money gets to me no matter where on the planet we are.
It is what lets us have transactions that aren't "Okay, you drop your armor and I'll drop my money and then we'll slowly change places and... who the fuck just ran out of the bushes to steal the money I put down while waiting for you to put down your armor? And why are you now both doing the Carlton?"
You seem to know a lot of this, in order for your point to click for me, could you explain why some extra payment processor is needed? Would a simple bank transfer not work? If you give me your IBAN, we could let our banks take care of it, right?
You DO realize your banks are the payment processors in that case, right? And they are also working through an intermediary to facilitate said transfer (which has almost all the same problems as above). The money still has to get from Bank A to Bank B which gets even harder if they are in different countries.
And just to preempt "then why not just do everything with bank transfers?"
No grasshopper, the blame falls squarely on the former. The latter was fine with things before
But we DO need to solve the payment processor issue as well, ever heard of GNU-Taler ??
The regressive asked the payment processors to do this. The payment processors themselves are the ones that actually did it. The regressive barely had any actual leverage. The payment processors chose to cave.
Why did they chose to cave in, when they were fine with things before ??
You'd have to ask them.
😂😂 So one cannot speculate that they might've infiltrated Payment Processors
Infiltrated? Who said anything about infiltrated? Are you just making shit up now?
What happened is incredibly simple.
Anyone can do 1. I could go to Visa and say "stop promoting cats, tell Steam to stop selling Stray and Little Kitty, Big City." It's up to Visa whether or not they consider my pressure worth responding to. If they do, Steam has to stop selling Stray and LKBC if they want to stay in business. The blame here lies with Visa for choosing to listen to me even though, in this scenario, I'm being a total fuckwit. In reality, Visa would turn around to me and say "lol no, fuck off". (Or, more likely, ignore me entirely.)
3 is an inevitable result if 2 occurs. If they can't take in any money, they can't continue selling any games. They can't afford to pay the bills for their servers, or pay their employees, or anything. The only option is to give in.
That leaves 2 as the variable. They decide whether to respond to the pressure or not. And they deserve the blame any time they do.
Again, why were they ok with NSFW games on steam.before ? Why now ?
Jesus christ are you just trolling at this point?
Pretty simple.
They already wanted to do it, but didn't want to take the blame for it. With a vocal minority now voicing concerns, they jumped on the occasion.
So why now rather than when that group started voicing their oppoaition ? Well, if they did earlier they had to deal with a liberal federal government that probably would have intervened in the name of free market, but now with a conservative fed government, they have free reign to impose regressive view on about anyone.