Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects

Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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

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  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

    However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality where they can discriminate. And EU could launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.

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    • Bubbey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Really the only time they should be even allowed to discriminate on payment is when it is suspected to be part of a crime.

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      • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Well, yes. I just did not consider them to be the ones discriminating if it is against the law, but the government.

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  • chunes@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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  • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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.

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    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      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 American apathy for, like… everything.

      Trump, et. al., are dismantling USPS, but I like USPS. It’s bad that they’re doing that.

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      • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        How naive can you be? You think your vote matters here?

        When every single district has been gerrymandered to death for 100 years, nobody’s vote really matters anymore.

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  • stephen01king@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Do you really think most governments will administer payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner?

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    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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.

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      • stephen01king@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        So you expect governments like the Trump administration or Saudi Arabia will less likely block porn games than for profit companies?

        You do realise this happened because thousands of people called the payment processors to complain about it, which means with thousands of people, you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government, let alone a foreign government.

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    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      A lot of governments already do. The credit card duopoly is the reason the US decided to come after Brazil’s solution

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      • stephen01king@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Because they can't make it illegal in another country. I'm sure plenty of countries would just use US or China owned payment processors rather than spending money to set up their own. This would just give them more control over other countries than they already have now.

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    • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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.

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      • stephen01king@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        A for profit company can be replaced with another and is more easily affected by boycotts. A goverment is neither easily replaced or influenced by people from other countries.

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    • altima_neo@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s end up line the shit we’ve got going on now with. ICE being given access to Medicaid and tax records in order to deport more people.

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      • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        What is stopping the government from just commandeering PayPal’s records?

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Power finds a way, so I wouldn’t hope for nationalization itself to be anything good.

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    • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      power already did find a way, and thats called privatization.

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      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        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

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• rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Payment processing should be treated like a utility.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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.

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      • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        It doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be ran by the state.

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  • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.

    The mining is how BTC, etc are decentralised & secure (so the idea of btc and mining are the same idea in my head).

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

    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.

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    • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’m going to be really dumb

      Why does a payment processor need to exist?

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      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        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.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      GNU Taler is supposed to be a solution. Sort of a federated one. If I understand it correctly.

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      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I am not particularly familiar with that but it will have an uphill battle. Replacing online transactions is a challenge but is feasible.

        Getting to the point that you can pay for food on holiday is a much less feasible one for a purely software project run without the backing of Special Interests.

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    • jadedwench@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Mining is fine when you have a predetermined and adjustable energy consumption that is halved every 4 years. Which Bitcoin does

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• MITM0@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  No grasshopper, the blame falls squarely on the former. The latter was fine with things before

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  • Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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    • MITM0@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Why did they chose to cave in, when they were fine with things before ??

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      • Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        You’d have to ask them.

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The reason for a “fourth party” is because so many of these are fully international.

  The dream of cryptocurrency as actual currency (rather than just reinventing stocks) was the idea that you could use your bitcoin wallet to pay for a pizza in Kansas, London, other London, Shanghai, or Timbuktu with no perceived difference. That IS what visa/mastercard provide.

  Get rid of that “fourth party” and now every single online service needs to have office space in every single country so that they can accept and convert purchases on their own. And the end result will just be dropping the majority of the world.

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