Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content. People all are about free speech when it comes to censorship in media, but not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
I’m sure that there are dating sims that are just fine, but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff . Some of them even enter the morally grey areas imo.
>Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content.
several Otome and BL content was hit by this as well. I don't think this is about protecting the women and children.
>not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
It's not 2005 anymore. Show me any modern AAA game still doing this.
in terms of porn... well, yes. Your reward is sexual gratification with your chosen mate in any given game. Porn is inherently objectifying. I don't think you're seen enough of the porn market if you think porn is focused onobjectifying women, though.
>but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff .
We're on Hacker News. I really hope we had enough background growing up to not wish for "weird" to be illegal.
Well yes, one could argue that if games like GTA don’t turn people into criminals than these games are also harmless. Imo it’s a bit different in this case, as a more natural instinct (sexuality) is affected.
Sure, games can be beneficial for living out fantasies, but how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content? The bottom line of my point is that I think this type of content is too easily available nowadays, and especially too much of it.
>Imo it’s a bit different in this case, as a more natural instinct (sexuality) is affected.
I personally don't see the difference. Violence is a primal instinct and studies on video games and violence only concluded short term increases in aggression. Why would a similar conclusion with yet another primal instinct not conclude with short term increased arousal? I don't see arousal as inherently dangerous.
>how will it affect your view on women if you frequently consume highly sexist content?
Do you feel that people just find "sexist content" from some algorithm, or that already sexist people seek out content to conform to their views? I have my criticisms of Steam, but I am glad they are one of the few bastions left that aren't driven by "engagment boosting" algorithms. Just a simple tag system recommending other content with similar tags and good ratings.
I agree with the undertone that we need better sex education. Those early years where we don't sell content to 10 year olds should be used to talk about the dangers before sending them off. Too bad such groups also go for an all-abstinence approach.
If you start down this road, policing which media people have access to based on your own totally subjective moral standards and interpretations, you will end up with pervasive censorship that severely stunts cultural development. Because who is "you", anyway? The answer is, of course, whichever monstrous nutjob chooses to devote a huge chunk of their time and money to seizing the levers of power so that they can impose their monstrous nutjobbery on everyone else.
Seriously, outside of special, clearly delineated cases with indisputable negative externalities (especially on the production side), when has [effectively] banning certain [types of] media been a net good? Seems to me that all it's good for is political repression and fueling moral panics.
In my book objectification means presenting women as walking sexual organs, bodies of flesh that one needs to conquer, nothing more. Many of pornographic content nowadays do this. Sexuality is not a problem, sexism is.
How would you make porn that isn't "objectifying"? Would you add an hour of prologue showing actors going to work, hanging out with friends, having hobbies etc, to show they are aren't just "sex objects"? I don't know if such porn would be very popular, leave alone cost-effective to produce.
Also, I don't see how women in porn are any more objectified than men. In the porn that I've seen, men are 100% objectified and portrayed as only good for "one thing".
I mean your last point is fine, the problem is when the Overton window of what "normal male sexuality" is shifts towards violating other people's boundaries, or diminishing them as people beyond how it affects men's arousal.
Where would books like Twilight or 50 shades of grey rank on this "weirdness" scale? Sexism? Those two books had orders of magnitude more of an impact on society, where is the outrage?
Imo the world was the same before in terms of corruption and propaganda, it’s mostly us, the common folks, who changed radically.
There are only binary states and opinions, either you’re a genocide supporter or an antisemite. Internet discussion on politics have gotten too toxic. Covid brought everyone online and we’ve been stuck in echochambers ever since.
I noticed the same general reactions for Framework laptops. Some folks are acting like these smaller companies are trying to force their products on the consumers, but their advertising is completely fine.
However I also find some of the supporters of consumer friendliness unbearable (e.g. Framework or Thinkpad fans).
I get that tribalism is present in many layers of our society and culture (politics, sports, music), but I always found it weirder when people do it for products. The only goal of a company is to maximize their profits, why someone becomes a die hard supporter of them is beyond me.
To summarize, I just wish people would put less emphasis on consumer practices. Buy a product you like and is beneficial for you, but don’t judge others for their choices.
> The only goal of a company is to maximize their profits
Overall this is effectively true, but it is not a law of the universe or anything.
Why can't a collection of people have ideals, want to support and realize those ideals through action, and also find a way to financially support themselves and even profit by pursuing those ideals?
The hypothesis you've put forth is that the group that founded Framework were sitting around thinking about the best way they could invest money to make money, and the best option they could come up with was to make modular laptops. What has their return on investment been thus far, and does it clearly and readily beat all other options they had for investing?
Plenty of companies choose different balances between profits and social impact. Compare Unilever and Nestle and tell me all companies are equally profit-focused. Look at Patagonia.
I agree with a live and let live view of purchasing decisions, and I agree that tribalism about companies is weird, but at the end of the day it’s far too reductive to say all companies prioritize profits equally.
Define "tough." Politicians and top tier academics, for example, are often very ruthless people, bred among wealth and generational security. They've never worked a 12h shift in a mine, but if you want to observe utterly pitiless mentalities or people that take being "judgmental" to levels you may have never suspected might exist, spend time among them. If they'll have you.
That’s true, getting spoiled by a rich and powerful family creates a whole another breed of human beings.
Initially, I was refering more to the lower classes, where overcoming challenges can thicken the skin. What I wondered was more the effects of babying a child that does not have everything from the start.
Could it be possible to counter it with another ML model that browses your feed?
For example, scraping your feed and presenting to you only the content that corresponds to some pre-defined labels (with a tiny bit of randomness to spice things up).
Although how could the automatic labeling work for videos from the user-end? Hashtags would be the simplest indicators, however also easily misleading.
If only somehow we managed to make social media uncool for the kids, that’s the most sure way they’d stay away from it.
I guess proper education on the real aspects of the social media phenomenon would be the real deal. For example, explaining how/why the companies use their algorithms to keep you in there; influencers only want to sell you a product; why posts/stories don’t reflect reality at all, etc.
But understanding all that would require quite some amount of emotional maturity from both the kids and parents themselves. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the reality at all, there are adults that still can’t see through the cracks..
I’ve been just thinking about the last point you made, on video games being more engaging than most other forms of media.
It’s quite weird how gaming is still looked down on by the general public. While watching movies and TV shows is considered to be “more mature” hobby, even though it requires less engagement. Wonder what the effects of binge watching are on the brain in the long term, especially compared to gaming’s. If we think about it the latter is much more similar to solving puzzles or reading.
> I always wondered how’s the procedural generation part of the game? Does it get repetitive fast?
Yes and no. They have been adding content and releasing free updates since release, I think the most recent one was this past march. I'm about a 100+ hours in and found out today that I'm missing half or more of the content because I was happy enough just exploring and figuring things out all that time that I didn't do any of the story.
that being said. There is definitely a feeling of repetitiveness across everything.
Makes you appreciate the fact that we have a staggering amount of different forms of life and biomes just here on earth...
Internet Historian made an amazing documentary on how the game's changed over the years [1]. They're still making massive changes to the game!
If it's been years since you played it, you should give it a try. There have been a lot of bug/crash fixes, new mechanics, even redoing some core game systems (I think they recently made some big changes to planet generation).
I’m sure that there are dating sims that are just fine, but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff . Some of them even enter the morally grey areas imo.