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Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

This is just outright pathetic. This pattern of treating words equally, or even worse than actions is just dystopian. There is way less harm from calling someone mean words/slurs/whatever than from ruining their gameplay by cheating (and they might not even know about it!)...

For fuck's sake, "griefing" and "blocking your teammate" isn't even on the list! That's a way worse offence than swearing in a game, c'mon.....

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>There is way less harm from calling someone mean words/slurs/whatever than from ruining their gameplay by cheating

Is this just your personal opinion? I'm assuming you're not a member of a group of people that gets called slurs in meatspace with that opinion.

"I'm assuming you're not a member of a group of people that gets called slurs in meatspace with that opinion."

Your assumption is really wrong but I do not wish to talk about it further. Who I am shouldn't matter. What I do should matter instead.

I think their point is that your position appears to be much more common from those who are in the majority (e.g. straight/white/cis/male) than those in one or more minority groups.

Assumedly that’s because people in the majority don’t get harassed to the same degree, or aren’t phased to the same degree as minority members.

This is a pattern that seems to repeat a lot in tech. Majority people design a system with serious safety/harassment issues because no one who has experienced it was consulted, then are surprised when standard harassment techniques are repeated and the designers are taken by surprise that well known abuse patterns exist.

I'm queer/gay and I can't tell you the amount of times people tried to use gay/fag as an insult online.

It might've affected me negatively when I was younger or a teen, but now that I'm grown up, it just seems so... Stupid? Thinking back, I feel stupid for ever letting such unsophisticated attempts of a primitive world view ever even remotely affect me.

These day, at worst if they're irritating I just mute them. At best, it's an invitation for free trolling (making jokes about their dad on Grindr, telling them their dirty talk is giving me a distracting boner or "flirting" with them, saying they sound like a used-up twice-divorced wife, etc; it's easy to push these people's buttons).

Them throwing my game is much more annoying than them projecting their insecurities in voice chat, and sometimes it's hard to counter a disruptive player (sometimes you can work around them, but the game is much more challenging for the wrong reason).

> It might've affected me negatively when I was younger or a teen

Isn't this the point, though? Considering how online gaming is generally focused more on younger demographics, being harsh on hateful speech is likely to improve the experience of those who are vulnerable to it.

Detecting hate speech is much easier compared to intentional feeding or throwing.

You can mute people who slur, you can't "mute" cheaters.

Dystopian how? And does it become non-dystopian once hate speech is treated harshly but slightly less harsh than non-speech actions? What exactly do you mean?

I mean that it's pretty sad that we went from cheating being basically the worst thing you could do in a game to.... no one caring about cheating, griefing your teammates, being toxic or being disruptive, instead we only care about things like hate speech or profanity. It's not like people don't bully, harass and demean others with "acceptable" words and "acceptable" in-game actions....

Does nobody care about cheating or griefing or toxicity anymore? That doesn't match my experience.

I don't understand why you bring up profanity. I don't understand what you think is dystopian, or why you think it would stop being dystopian if hate speech was treated slightly less seriously than cheating.

It is dystopian because the frog (all of us) is being slowly boiled. We've come to a stage where you start to own nothing anymore, only licence or rent it, your access/licence can be revoked for any reason if you breach their EULA (which they can change at any time) and your rights are shrinking.

Locking people out from their games which they've purchased (even from singleplayer!) for what they said on chat is just pathetic and dystopian. I wouldn't put it past them that the next step would be brain sensors to detect "harmful" thoughts and ban you before you say them.

"Hate speech" is not the same as "swearing".

You are 100% right, although I think "hate speech" is kind of an extension to swearing in this context. After all, what is classified as hate speech is practically insults, just based on protected characteristics instead of something else. The goal is the same - either to take the mickey out of someone or to make them upset. The major difference is the way of doing so and how much it hurts the target. I think it can reasonably be argued that those two are related and comparable things.

"Hate speech" isn't well-defined, which is the core of the problem with any policy trying to censor "hate speech".

In the context of video games the distinction between words and actions seems very mucky. For example, is it an action to in a competitive team game (say Dota) to get on the mike and just keep talking so you drown out everyone else? Why is that less of an action than instructing your computer to say something to a sever so that it registers an action that you didn’t take? Normally we might distinguish actions from speech by saying actions effect the world, but “actions” like grefing don’t impact the world either.

I was on and developed mods for a Minecraft server (https://www.civcraft.co/) as a teen where moderation except for cheating was self policing. I think there was a news story that I can’t find now talking about how some Jewish kid had been majorly harassed in a very antisemitic way, but I actually think the severs behavior there was fine. They wanted to provide tools for the community to police itself and I think that’s a cool and worthwhile experiment, but also it’s totally fine and maybe reasonable for Microsoft to decide that hate speech is more important to them than someone just cheating. Hate speech can at the extreme end have much more impact in the real world

Speaking is an action?

Technically yes, but you know what I meant, please argue in good faith. There is a fairly clear dividing line between words and actions, with the only remotely gray areas being incitement for violence or doxxing. That is (rightfully) regarded as something highly condemnable and punishable.

Cultural revolution, friend.

Is that supposed to be a positive thing?

There is no war in Bao Sing Se!

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