Content moderation has no silver bullets nor golden hammers, and where platforms claim it is a continuing process, we find that their idea of progress is glacial. The early days of UO saw players moderate each other using reputation systems. Think of the seeding/leeching numbers on magnet links, to wit: if you torrent something, and don’t continue after you’ve fully downloaded it, you’re a literal leech – you’ve slurped up your download, and gave nothing back*:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-brief-history-of-murder-in-ultima-online

#Twitter and MMOs share common ground in the fact that everyone gets clumped in with everyone else. Koster’s articles invite juxtaposition to Elon Musk’s laissez-faire approach to moderation on Twitter. His idea of free speech is being able to non-consensually thrust shitty opinions into the faces of folks who *didn’t fucking ask;* regular users are deprived of power, because “that’s the admin’s job,” and, well, the admin *didn’t fucking care.*

Ironically, if the rumours are true, Musk’s Twitter buyout has a sliver of provenance in his being kicked out of the Bay Area babyfur community. Yes, read that again: A group of furries who do a little ageplay (regardless of what you think of that) formed a cohesive enough commons to keep fuckwits like Elon Musk out of their community. Fur-curious!

https://social.coop/@katanova/112885524200418276

> Rather than driving him to introspect, and look inside himself to put together the broken parts to understand what drives his behavior, [he] concluded the way to have friends is basically to own the building where everyone hangs out, until only people who will talk to him are left.
- https://social.coop/@katanova/112885524200418276

While I’ve yet to follow more blogs on the English language, Nancy Friedman's @Fritinancy is one I cannot recommend enough. Recently, she explored the #etymology of the word ‘coconut,’ with particular attention paid to its usage in Kamala Harris’s campaign:

https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-the-week-coconut

I don’t know about you, but depending on where you are in the English-speaking world you definitely hear the a that got left behind more than you do the ‘o.’ Which is a good enough segue into Jim Cummings’s audition for The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, one of many samples used by diskkunt nearly 13 years ago to produce this banger YTPMV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVli0334lD0&t=195s

Now, go back and listen to it from the beginning.

Pokémon #EmeraldRogue is a ROM hack that offers a modern Pokémon experience in a modified version of the Gen 3 engine. Here’s the twist: it’s not just a modern #pokemon experience, it’s a roguelite – you go through areas with randomly generated Pokémon and trainers, fight gym leaders, an elite four, and then become the Champion. If your Pokémon faint, they are out of play for the rest of the run:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Rogue-lites_and_procedural_death_labyrinths

And I really want to sing a chorus of praises for it! I want to sing so hard that the hymn sheet blows off the stand. I can’t do so, however, without pointing out a few things common to every modern gaming community. It is an observable fact that most #fangame or #romhack projects these days are hosted on #Discord, and said guilds often contain the only canonical download source of their creator’s (or creators’) love and labour:

https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/112925311334419527

This violates the web’s end-to-end principle in the most egregious and, frankly, ignorant way. A person who wants to download your game should not be forced to sign up for #Discord. And because Discord is a #WalledGarden and not indexed by search engines, if most of the discussion about your game happens there, your community looks more dead on the outside than it actually is.

Check the other replies to that post – here’s a few of my favourites:

https://infosec.exchange/@johntimaeus/112924004143029516

https://hackers.town/@lori/112926485091752831

https://social.glitched.systems/notes/9wql8e2mw5a60acj

This is in temporal proximity to the sad news that romhacking.net is closing its shutters. It’s no longer accepting new uploads, and all of its content over the years can now be found on the Wayback Machine:

https://www.romhacking.net//#article3074

https://archive.org/details/romhacking.net-20240801