This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
"They have a lot of chargebacks" is unfalsifiable without a congressional investigation, so it's an easy excuse. And when we did get the congressional investigation--surprise, it turned out to be pressure from ideologues, not getting a lot of chargebacks.
You would have said, at the time, that Operation Chokepoint and the crypto sequel are just the payment processors fearing chargebacks. And you would have been wrong.
Also, I don't think Steam has a lot of chargebacks, because if you do they ban your entire account and every game you've ever purchased.
At the scale Valve operates at, surely banks pass the costs of chargebacks along to them. But also, banks probably aren't worried about them going bankrupt from chargebacks and leaving them with the bill.
This wouldn't be true of a fly-by-night porn site, though.
More options
Context Copy link
Note, none of this matters if what you mean by chargebacks is when you do it through the bank rather than the store itself.
Depends on what you count as a lot. I've done up to three refunds per month a few years ago and they all got refunded, I think at some point I went up to five and only then received a warning, but after taking a break, my account is fine, and I can still get refunds.
You're talking about Steam refunds. I'm talking about chargebacks. The oft-repeated argument is credit card companies hate porn because people get their rocks off and try to chargeback, or tell their wives it was fraud. But no, if you try to go around Steam support and charge back with the bank you're pretty much never interacting with Steam again.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Operation Chokepoint involved a co-ordinated pullback from businesses, some of which (like payday lending) were known to be high-risk businesses which required special handling by their banks (and were charged accordingly) but with risks that were well-understood and a long history of banks who chose to do that kind of specialist business successfully banking them, and some of which (like gun stores) were known to be unproblematic other than politically. This is pathognomic for non-transparent regulatory intervention, which was later uncovered. Nobody who understands banking thought at the time that banks were making sensible commercial decisions to debank gun shops - the question we were asking was whether this was a hivemind effect among woke bank risk managers and compliance staff, or a conspiracy run by the regulators. It turned out to be the latter.
"Online smut generates high chargeback rates" is, among banking risk and compliance professionals, a notorious fact that no longer requires a citation. "Gun shops generate high chargeback rates" is something that would be surprising, if true. (AFAIK, it isn't, and the regulators pushing Chokepoint didn't claim it was).
The "crypto sequel" involves an industry which is well-known to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and which had just turned out to be even more full of scum and villainy than people had expected. This included both the kinds of villainy that, while not a direct threat to bank safety and soundness, are unbankable for public policy reasons (Binance) and the more directly fraudulent kinds of villainy (FTX). Even if banks were unregulated, there is no world in which the Binance and FTX scandals happened without it becoming significantly harder to bank crypto startups - banks do not want to bank scum and villainy for both commercial and ethical reasons! In the world we live in, the banks which specialised in the niche business of banking crypto failed to do their jobs and the regulatory response reflected this. The winds that changed when FTX turned out to be a fraud were not political ones. This Bits About Money post has details and receipts. Two banks (Metropolitan and Silvergate) suffered franchise-threatening losses as a result of banking reputable-by-industry-standards crypto operations which turned out to be fraudulent. That should change behaviour - just like it did when multiple banks suffered franchise-threatening losses due to certain practices in the US mortgage market in 2006-7.
The Steam smut scandal is a bank that chooses not to bank smut (in most cases, banks which don't bank online smut made that decision back when Avenue Q was still running and have retained the policy ever since) re-evaluated the business of a platform that was onboarded as a non-smut business but was, in fact, getting about 10% of its revenue from smut. That they did this in the response to the Kangaroo Karens rather than proactively is an indictment of said bank's customer due diligence, but it doesn't reflect a regulatory-driven change in policy. Valve have said that they are going to look for a smut-friendly bank to take on this business, which is capitalism working as advertised.
Yes, crypto is high risk. And as you mention, payday lenders were also high risk. But even though they are high risk, that doesn't mean that the risk is the whole story, and that there isn't any pressure of some other kind. And without looking at the payment processors' financial records or finding a smoking gun, there's no airtight way to tell the difference between a genuine market-based reason, and something else that's being covered up by giving a market-based reason that's true, but wouldn't have been such a big issue on its own.
So of course, porn generates high chargeback rates. But if you go from "high chargeback rates exist" to "high chargeback rates are the reason", it will become impossible for you to notice any other explanations.
Mastercard also lied about it, which looks suspicious, along with suddenly noticing that Steam was a problem just now.
That particular example was not political pressure, but there was political pressure in addition to it. Again, high risk and political pressure that makes it worse than if it was just high risk, can exist at the same time.
More options
Context Copy link
Yup. They went with "reputational risk", which is overtly admitting that the only 'problem' that could be in play is that some people would disapprove of the banks doing business with gun shops. One may still not think that "online smut generates high chargeback rates" is a sufficient reason to pull back, but it's genuinely a qualitatively different type of reasoning, and the two cases don't really stand/fall together by analogy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link