Schadrach

The implication is that someone is going to come off as a likely mark and for example get invited into a private user group with people “joking” with things like the Happy Merchant or being ridiculously over the top in a way that’s hard to take seriously to ease people in to taking white supremacist ideas seriously.

Ever seen the South Park episode about the Passion of the Christ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Jew)? The idea is basically that that is constantly happening online anywhere it’s not sufficiently prevented.

The ADL considers Pepe a hate symbol, which I agree with is daft but that’s kind of key to their data and they are considered experts in the field by most. They scanned Steam with some automated tool looking for hate symbol images, came up with like a million hate symbols detected. If something contained more than one detected hate symbol, it got counted as however many hate symbols the tool detected (so for example Pepe saluting a swastika would count as a Pepe and a swastika).

Almost 55% of those were Pepe. The next highest was the swastika at 9%. A literal majority of hate symbols they detected with that tool were Pepes, at more than 5 times the rate of the next most common symbol. It’s literally included to make the problem bigger in the hopes that most readers either won’t look that deep or won’t know what Pepe is.

EDIT: Another fun one is if you go look at their hate symbol index, about an eighth of two digit numbers are either hate symbols or part of a hate symbol.

I am a big GOG enjoyer myself, but when I need to use steam for anything, I have never encountered such content.

You’ve never seen a Pepe meme on Steam? I’m not kidding there either - if you dig into that ADL link and follow it to the research, they have a list of top extremist and hateful symbols on Steam and the swastika is number 2 at 9 percent of detected symbols. #1, representing something like 55% of extremist and hateful symbols their automated detector found on Steam was Pepe.

Perhaps there is such content in private or otherwise not very visible spaces (such as user profiles), where they will not get reported, but that is true for any site with user content. I call BS on this being an issue.

If you dig into their research, it’s mostly private user groups and profiles. Game discussion pages are moderated by their respective devs or whoever the devs appoint but user groups are moderated by their owner/appointees and user profile pages aren’t really moderated at all unless you’re doing something actually illegal in the US.

So unless you go looking at the user profile pages of white supremacists, or go searching for white supremacist user groups you won’t run into much of it.

The two could be combined. Any shooting of three or more executives would be a mass shooting of executives. By a mysterious masked man that no one can identify.

…and the fancy steam engine version of solar is probably greener to build that photovoltaics, since it’s basically just a boiler and some mirrors.

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.

So even if this saves HB from further persecution by the Talibangelicals

I know right? Man who is soon to no longer be politically relevant had to make his son who is only politically relevant because of the father immune to prosecution for any and all crimes he may or may not have done over the last decade to prevent the GOP from using him to politically attack his father who will no longer be politically relevant at the same moment they gain the ability to hypothetically start the process to do so.

It’s just blatantly corrupt in the same way (but not the same scale) as what we all expect Trump to do. This is Biden getting to be a little blatantly corrupt, as a treat.

You know what, I’d be all behind a subscription mouse so long as it includes periodic hardware upgrades and unlimited warranty replacements no questions asked so long as the subscription is paid.

Admittedly, I’d be trying to figure out the most interesting ways to actively destroy mice to make them rue the day they thought a mouse subscription was a good idea, but that’s beside the point. Why no, I can’t return the damaged mouse, it’s at the bottom of a hole in the woods no human has been down since the civil war. Just like it was none of your business how I found out that the mouse isn’t resistant to hydrofluoric acid.

Which is true, there are parts I like about being a man, and there are parts I dislike about being a man.

…and these days there is probably some specialized label to describe that that isn’t merely “man” because that would be too easy.

just constant quarrels between instances, defederations and crap like that

Sounds like you picked the wrong instance. The one I use doesn’t defederate, from anyone. So when some drama about "should we defederate from some server because they are a big corp/because they are right wing/because they are tankies/because they allow loli/whatever, I basically get to watch and laugh knowing it’s not going to effect me.

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.