The ''its only censorship if government does it'' defense. Nothing more than bending a definition to make it mean the opposite of the principle. Just look at the words; FREEDOM OF SPEECH. If someone is limiting it, it is limiting freedom to say what people want. So that is not suppressing freedom of speech?

You can't just take freedom of speech the constitutional right and and say non governmental bodies cannot suppress it when its not constitutional freedom of speech that is being suppressed. When government doesn't allow the working of laws related to freedom of speech, its government-backed / sponsored censorship. Otherwise, it is non governmental censorship.

n.o.t.h.i.n.g. ^o^

This goes back to the "right to the speech, but no right to some of the means you'd like to use to deliver said speech"-principle. You have the constitutional right to give your opinion in a public space. If someone doesn't want to hear what you have to say, you don't have the constitutional right to follow him home and staple the pamphlets containing your opinion all over the walls of his house. Now replace "house" with "forum/webservice" and you probably get the gist. Non governmental bodies like Twitter cannot suppress what you write on Facebook, but Facebook CAN suppress what you write on Facebook if they don't want your content on their site. Their site, their rules. Same with Twitter, 4chan, Reddit and really any other digital service that's owned by a private party. If what you post is deleted, said companies don't say: "You can't say that stuff", but rather "You can't say that stuff HERE".

The only way your freedom of speech would be violated by censorship of site owners on their site is if you had a constitutional right to a Facebook/Twitter/Reddit account, but as of now owners of private web services aren't obliged to let you use those services if they don't want to. Thing is, there are other rights in existence and if "freedom of speech" and "freedom to manage your own property the way you want it to" butt heads, the latter comes out on top. Which is probably a good thing.

People still have the exact same freedom of speech as their grandparents who lived in the pre-Twitter/Facebook/Reddit era. No less, no more. I guess those last two words is what bugs some people.

Or if those sites baited you in with promises of lack of certain restrictions but imposed them later on. There are obligations to fulfill what's said in the TOS of sites, which aren't legally binding, but one has to keep in mind those rules were put there for the site administration itself, and violation of those is basically lying. Many of these bans dished out on reddit or twitter are random and are the exceptions to to the banning of rule breakers. Evallion(?) is a great example of that. Out of the many TOS violating channels out there, her's was the only one banned. Plenty of others exist as well.

In the end, its their site and rules, but its come to the situation where they don't obey their own rules and still selectively ban some for breaking those rules. In that scenario, where absolutism is the norm and only some dissent is removed, its practically censorship, although not in principle because the rights weren't probably there in the first place.

I moderated a forum myself a few scores of years back and every once in a while discussions like these popped up.

It's perfectly possible for forum hosts to set some guidelines, find out later that in practice those guidelines aren't sufficient to keep things running smoothly and amend the guidelines accordingly. When people pull the "lying"-accusation, they do so by pretending the new guidelines had always been in place. In truth, what they call "lying" is simply "changing one's mind". There's a subtle, yet important difference there.

A good comparison to this situation is how the police doesn't go after every single person who drives faster than the current speed limit allows. Just because they let 10 people off the hook each day doesn't mean person 11's rights were violated when they slap him with a speeding ticket. The other 10 simply got lucky.

In the end, a site admin doesn't have to abide by his own rules, just like a house owner can get plastered in his own home, yet is perfectly in his rights to expect houseguests not to get plastered under his roof. That's the difference between hosts and guests. Anyway, the bolded part of your quote is all there is to it when it comes to guests being entitled to special privileges on a forum/webservice they do not own.

No, I meant absolute abuse of rules relating to other rules. Ie rules related to banning on NeoGaf. The set rules themselves are not followed and mods make stuff up themselves as criteria for bans. But I agree with most of your post, and say here that those rules aren't legally binding anyway.

As to the police example, most bans seen on sites are more akin to police letting off their friends and chasing down only their outgroup members. Again, not legally bound or anything, but its still suppression of priviliges afforded to others.

Yes, I agree that its their site and their rules. They can run it how they like and they aren't legally bound (unless its a store site for eg) to follow the rules. But I still hold it is censorship to cherrypick stuff you disagree with and remove it. No legal binding, no obligation to not do it, but not totally honest, and people can give negative feedback about that and leave the site if they don't get their wish.

Just leaving this here if anyone wants to revisit the topics of what reviews and gaming journalism ought to be - via what accessibility in games should mean. Ergo of Ethics in gaming and gaming journalism... [sarc]oh the horror![/sarc]

Love him or hate him John Walker of RPS is a unique voice - provocative in a poitive way on net IMO. The discussion in the comments is well rounded I'd say, so worth going through the numerous comments. Otherwise I'd not post this here as the OP is too one sided.

It's also all mostly polite and respectful. Even John is mostly refraining from his reflexive insults of those disagreeing. So maybe let's also try to keep things out of the gutter?

You don't need to be good at games/

PS: also I'm catching up on podcasts, and just got reminded of the Dickwolves thing in 2011.

2011 folks... and yet some people would like to believe GG came out of nowhere back in '14... takes a bit of ignoring context if you ask me... even the Dickwolves thing had roots some years earlier likely... and that's regardless of if you are into the GG as harassment narrative, or the narrative of reaction to SJW subversion.

Just by reading the article and some of the comments in it, I can't imagine these people trying to play old rpgs, space sims, and sierra/dreamforge adventure games!

Agreed.

And nothing wrong in that if you ask me, as long as no one tries to argue implicitly those genres/games are "exclusionary" and "problematic" and kind of should not exist.

What worries me more about these companies and "censorship" are the ones who let bullying and harassment decide what to ban. If a person gets X number of complaints, they get banned, means hate mobs rule the day.

And I don't care if its an SJW hate mob or a Gamergate hate mob getting something removed, although it appears this occurs far more often from the former group.

The other problem are ideological moderators. There are many cases on these forums where a moderator took it upon his/her self to squash comments that are in opposition. Stupid claims like "Gamergate is a known hate group, so anything in their defense qualifies as hate speech and should be banned."

Erpy, do you not see a problem with this last example?

Don't worry, some Social Jaded Whiner out there somewhere will complain that rpgs freedom to not be pro pc should be remove, there needs to be more women in space sims, and adventure games need to be less sexist!

I could swear I've seen much of that said about the Deponia series...
Just do a search for Deponia and misogyny and you'll see all the whining.

What more I can tell, that's how the meaningful debate should look like. Anywhere and on any topic.

Between loving and hating, I choose the third path: respecting John Walker for his "intellectual honesty". Even if I completely disagree with his stance (like in the case of accessibility), I am actually glad that there is something to disagree with, that there seems to be actual thoughts and conviction behind the rude words.
I can even see where our viewpoints (his and mine) fundamentally differs: I simply don't know how the "average (video)gamer" he's talking about is supposed to look like. I cannot picture him/her any better than "average book reader" or "average music listener".

I love strategy games, and I royally suck at adventure games. The only "classic" adventure I saw till the end was Indy Jones and the fate of Atlantis, and not without skipping ahead (you know, look into walkthrough) - so I never say I "finished" it.
Am I still welcomed here? :-}

If you're arguing for "good moderation", that is; moderation that involves being aware of the context of the situation before taking action rather than purely acting on a forum post being reported for moderation an x number of times, I couldn't agree more. That said, especially if a thread is hundreds of pages long and two parties spend an hour rapid-vollying posts back and forth, most mods are probably like "screw this, I have better things to do with my time". Which is unfortunate, but also part of internet life.

And uh...are you talking about these forums? The GOG forums have a history of deleting pro-GG stuff? You wouldn't say so from the look of this particular thread. In fact, the only censorship I frequently see in this topic are anti-GG posts being down-voted so they become censored in the practical way, that is; they become invisible to casual visitors who didn't un-check the "hide posts with a negative rating" option in their profile. (which I believe is enabled by default)

I do agree with you that this is a childish practice and I occasionally find myself up-voting posts that got semi-censored in this manner, not because I agree or disagree with the content but because the content didn't violate any forum rules and thus had no business being downvoted to begin with.

You value diversity. Always nice to find a kindred spirit. ;)
Pretty sure he meant overall online.