Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition

Need to petition Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and American Express. I don't think trying to get Valve to reverse these recent changes will necessarily be effective, since they are being pressured by the payment processors and they definitely aren't going to risk not being able to effectively do business at all.
- Yeah, nah.
  Petition these people:
  https://www.collectiveshout.org/partners
  Collective Shout is sustained by a small number of Australian partners. These are not big groups, and would quickly pull funding under any sort of pressure.
  Collective Shout has a deep history with Christofascism and TERFs, so highlighting those angles is the way to go to get them pariahed. Once CS is out of the picture, we can work on undoing the damage they did.
  
  Archived page: https://archive.ph/Ttyr5
  Just in case.
  
  Petitioning people to do something that is against their entire purpose doesn't seem like it would be effective.
  
  It's the height of stupidity to try to pressure collective shout.
  You don't tell the child to stop drawing on the wall for the 20th time and expect it to work.
  You take it's crayons away so it can't anymore.
  You fix the tool of abuse so it can't be abused.
- The petition is directed at Visa and MasterCard. I'm not sure why the article says it's a petition directed at Steam, because it's not.
- i would expect the multi billionaire owners of the largest gaming platform on PC to have the ability to not fold like paper mache. I can also be mad at payment processors and valve at the same time
  
  Kinda hard to stay at the top if you literally get blacklisted from doing financial transactions. Big as they are, they're nowhere near the same level as the payment processors.
  
  Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
  Banks and payment processors are the single largest most powerful forces in a capitalist market.
  You literally do NOT get bigger. Full stop.
- Under what arguments would we be able to push back on something like this? Most people would agree that these games where distasteful so arguing for them to be put back to not start a slippery slope isn't that easy it seems.
  
  Mainly that the companies controlling nearly all digital financial transactions across the entire globe should not be the arbiters of what is morally acceptable. If they must exist at all, they should just be handling the transfer of funds regardless of what is being bought and sold*.
  *illegal shit would not be protected.
  They are parasitic middle men that don't need to exist in the first place, though.
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1r5VtCUwPw
  Show people that game that was delisted because of them. The idea that they only took down pornographic games is wrong, they went after things that didn't fit their christofash narrative.
  
  See, THAT is not the slippery slope. STARTING to ban ANYTHING at all from legal transactions is the slippery slope. What happens when they decide R-rated films are distasteful? Or birth control?
  Payment processors should have ABSOLUTELY no role in making ANY decisions about what legal transactions they process. Period.

Petition: https://www.change.org/p/tell-mastercard-visa-activist-groups-stop-controlling-what-we-can-watch-read-or-play
- Signed, thanks for the link <3

I wish it was feasible to hve a large scale boycott of visa and mastercard. american express is already useless so it wouldn't help much to include it...
- Or a decentralized alternative that isn't just used to scam people, that doesn't eat up insane amounts of electricity to process, and is as convenient as regular money.
  In reality, private corporations should not have control over money at all. Money is printed by the local government and should be controlled by the local government. Governments generally have better free speech protections than private corporations, which have none. Obviously, free speech protections are not universal, but countries can already ban content in other ways.
  
  Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B's to buy some A's and you pay with them.
  But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.
  I think that's why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.
  With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There's no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin "123456" depends only on operations with coins from "123*" subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don't need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can't have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.
  And I don't know if it's possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don't know how one can do this.

"Hi there, would you like to sign the petition?"

Make your own payment processor, Gaben. It's the way.
- Is that kinda what PayPal is, or was intended to be?
  
  Yeah but PayPal's awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.
  If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don't trust them they've stolen money from me before.
- Then people would have to get specific cards or crypto or whatever that aren't Visa/MasterCard in order to buy Steam games. That, of course, is if you can get banks to agree to carry "Steam cards". Either that, or everyone would need to buy Steam gift cards as an exclusive form of payment.
  All of these are much less convenient than keeping your existing debit/credit card to pay for Steam games, and less convenience means less sales.
  
  Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?
  
  Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, but all you want.
  
  Yeah, but SteamPay is the future

But we have to oppose CollectiveShout as well, as in destroy them. They're way worse than I thought

Valve please fix