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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

  1. The biggest problem is that payment processors are usually an unholy alliance of governments, banks, and financial groups. This makes them allergic to competition and new entrants to the market. The Internet has reshaped society over the last three decades and I'd say only 1.5 payment processors came out of it. PayPal, and the crypto market. The term "coup complete" got thrown around a lot in the Biden presidency to describe what was necessary to build a competing Internet ecosystem.
  2. I'm worried this might signal the revival of the religious culture wars that happened in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's. It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind. I think woke culture has plenty of religious elements. The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious. But it seems the longer term strategy is just have a different religion.
  3. Neutrality as a default. This is the end goal. Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics. We are cancelling thots and porn this year. 4 years ago it was lab leak conspiracies. I certainly think some things are more important to not be censored, but the machinery of censorship seems to work regardless of the subject being censored. Once it is built it will be used.

and that adult products have higher charge back rates

The banks are not wrong on this point. The industry is rife with bad practices on the customer side - teenage boys using their dad's credit cards, dads telling mum that a teenage boy used dad's credit card, people paying (real and virtual) card thieves for stolen credit cards to protect their anonymity, people who just feel comfortable committing so-called "friendly fraud" (i.e. buying something and taking advantage of the pro-consumer bias in the chargeback process to avoid paying for it) against a pornographer in a way they wouldn't against any other website, real post-purchase regret. And it isn't immune to bad practices on the website side - particularly hard-to-cancel subscriptions. Also, from a bank perspective, the low barriers to entry attract the kind of business that will be surprised by this and go bust under a wave of chargebacks leaving their acquiring bank with a loss.

Most banks are not interested in providing payment processing to the online smut industry for sound commercial reasons - it is a specialised market niche for banks who are happy dealing with massive chargeback fraud and whose fees reflect this. I suspect the Venn diagram of "Banks Valve management are comfortable working on Steam payments with" and "Banks which want to bank smut" looks like a pair of spectacles.

I think the capitalist solution would be that you simply charge smut providers higher fees.

Also, I am not sure if this applies to steam accounts, especially if they have years of content on them. I imagine if I tried to cancel a CC purchase made to my steam account, the first thing steam would do would be to lock my account -- after all, I have just said that it was used by an unauthorized person.

Also, steam is kind of a big platform and unlikely to go bankrupt over some porn game chargebacks.

teenage boys using their dad's credit cards

This is puzzling to me. If daddy told the CC company "actually, that was my 15yo son paying for smut online", I would imagine the CC company to reply "no problem, here is your money back. Also, we have just reported your son to the police for wire fraud. Have a nice day!"

This would reduce such claims to a very small number, because most families would gladly forgo 100$ to avoid having a family member investigated for financial crimes.

Instead, they mostly react without the middle sentence. But my view of CC is that they are a laughably insecure system whose insecurity simply gets papered over by them absorbing losses through fraud.

Everything you say is correct. You absolutely can bank smut providers, and charge high enough fees for doing so to make a profit - precisely because there are things you can do to manage the high risk of chargeback fraud. But this is a specialised niche banking service, and apparently not one that Valve's first-choice banking partner wants to provide.

But my view of CC is that they are a laughably insecure system whose insecurity simply gets papered over by them absorbing losses through fraud.

Precisely. It turns out that normies find dealing with effective security difficult and confusing, which means that a laughably insecure system that charges high enough fees to eat the resulting fraud losses is hugely socially valuable.

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