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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

Being able to play Call of Duty without people screaming the N word into my ears regularly would be amazing. Intolerance to hate speech could be something enforced by this hypothetical service as well.

Sure I can turn off the death mic, but there's been some really amazing interactions though it as well. For those not aware, the death mic in CoD is a feature where the instant you frag somebody in game, it turns their mic on, so you can hear their very candid reaction. Lots of times it's things like "no way what a shot how'd that guy get me!". Such a fun feature, if it wasn't for people that just utter the most offensive things imaginable on it.

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Have you ever glanced at the Facebook comments under a news article? It did nothing at all to stop online toxicity when they tied your online persona to your identity, photograph, the identity of all your friends and family, etc. Plenty of pictures of smiling grandfathers holding babies next to N-word-laden rants out there

It's not just the tying of ones online identity to their real life identity that would mitigate this issue though. It's the fact that if a punishment is doled out (voice comms restricted for hate speech, or a ban issued for cheating), then you could be certain that the person isn't just going to register a new account and keep doing it, because the barrier of registering a new account would be so much higher (having to prove your identity to my theoretical reputation service).

OK, imagine this: A 13 year old makes an account, goes through your onerous KYC process, plays some game. Gets banned for saying something offensive under his breath when the game suddenly turns his mic on without him expecting it.

You're thinking "Great, problem solved, this kid will literally never be allowed to play another video game as long as he lives"

OK, in actuality, he's just going to use his mom's ID next time. And his dad's. And his grandparents' IDs. etc, etc

There'll be a whole gray market for IDs from all over the world to pair to your ridiculous Orwellian service, because thankfully it won't be backed up by penalty of death

I don't think a single infraction of hate speech would warrant any consequences, it would need to be a multiple offenses before punishment is doled out. This punishment could just be a temporary loss of voice communication privileges. Eventually if they are a habitual offender, it could lead to longer loss of voice comms, and then eventually a repeat ban.

Producing identity verification documents that many times over and over is not something a 13 year old will likely be able to do, relatives would certainly raise questions from those relatives as to why they need them.

I see the ridiculous Orwellian service is being the anti-cheat software we have to run already.

Right now you get muted and banned pretty quickly for mouthing off in any online game. Most games have some combination of costing $60+ up front, being pay-to-win, and/or being grind-to-win, so getting permanently banned from any of them is pretty catastrophic. Yet plenty of people get banned and re-buy the games regularly anyway

>You're thinking "Great, problem solved, this kid will literally never be allowed to play another video game as long as he lives"

And that is great, why? Is it okay to hold people accountable for their whole lives, for actions they did as literal children?

> it turns their mic on,

Well that's horrifying. I'm glad I don't use Windows, and I'm glad my computer physically does not have a microphone for malware to enable.

I'm not sure how the system works, but I think it's safe to assume that the user needs to have enabled their microphone first for this to work.

You can disable it if you'd like, but nearly everybody leaves it on because it's a pretty fun feature most of the time :)

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