ok it's about itch. yesterday someone posted something like "they're disabling payments for adult games now!!" and it turned out to just be that one person they know can't take payments via paypal for unclear reasons. i objected, they blocked me, so the generalization stands i guess

today i woke up and ana valens had posted a big screenshot from reddit as an example of itch's payout problems, only to follow up with "ok that guy from reddit might be a scammer". like, come on. so i objected, she blocked me, but she did delete the thread afterwards at least

now she's grandstanding about being The Press, but this isn't the first time she's jumped on reposting something dubious within two seconds of seeing it. i mean she boosted that godawful "trans news network" piece earlier

anyway at this point i am so far beyond "i like itch let's give them a minute". i would just like to hear things that are actually true please. i am pretty tired of watching people turn singular anecdotes into systemic oppression via the sheer power of their own imagination

it's already hard enough keeping track of what's actually going on. please stop editorializing based on nothing and stating it like the thought you had is a known fact. please i am begging you. especially if you're going to call yourself The Press jesus christ

the trans news network article did exactly this same thing by the way. they interviewed 1 dev who said "yeah my game was taken down, i guess because it has lesbians?" and extrapolated that to the fucking moon when it was never the reason

something to bear in mind, generally— if you're a bad actor, and people are currently mad at someone you're trying to pull a Scheme on, it is INCREDIBLY advantageous to join the crowd and complain that your Scheme is failing

relevant anecdote (not data) many years ago, ash ran a collaborative art project open to anyone. one of the mods turned out to have been approaching Every Fucking Girl Artist he could find and trying to get them to draw vore of the canon characters. so he got the boot. […]

[…] later, ash got an unrelated callout on tumblr, and the person who wrote it also published a bunch of anon asks from other people chiming in one of those asks was someone complaining about how mean ash had been to his brother... who turned out to be, you guessed it, vore guy. but now a victim

we would not encounter vore guy again until a few years ago, when he joined ash's discord to apologize, be fairly normal for a few days, and then tell ash they needed to divorce me so they could marry him instead. i'm not sure what the moral of this part is though

honestly as someone who shared some of this, it's a fair criticism and I appreciate you contextualizing it

haha i saw the ana thing via you yes but that's exactly why the "haha oops" followup isn't great — people who aren't following her probably won't see it (this is a running problem with the twitter model tbh. you can delete and repost but you have no way to reach people who saw your wrong thing)

literally had that conversation with other twitter engineers when I was working there in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it sucks and it's a structural thing that should've been fixed, but Bsky and Masto are fixated on cloning twitter mechanics exactly

birdwatch seems like an improvement but it's only really gonna hit things that are sufficiently high-profile, and retweet-deduping means it still won't hit a big chunk of people who already saw it. idk.

Could immediately tell what post you were talking about since I saw it and went "ah, a definite lie, much like the last 100 times someone said this"

I've probably seen the post this is about and it made me go insane the moment i saw it

What kills me is how many people are trying to make a deal out of shit like this and yet I have not heard a single thing from the actual, legitimate claim that itch is holding 6 figures from the vintage story devs they just dropped that and then... Nothing. Can someone follow up on that??

the last thing i heard was that they were basically using itch to sell steam keys, without which the game is unplayable, and itch found that highly dubious. but i don't know what would actually resolve an impasse like that

Wasn't even Steam keys; itch has a mechanism for that. The "purchase" they were selling was just a key for their own proprietary account system, and itch took down the listing because they don't allow you to just charge money for an empty download.

from screenshots it looked like they were advising people to use the itch steam-key mechanism... did they add their own keys to the steam key system even though they weren't steam keys??

I'm not sure. I know that when I looked into it, I also found some people saying they didn't actually get the keys they were promised from itch purchases, but also not direct from VS either. The whole thing just sounded like maybe VS is having problems delivering across the board.

wat. what the fuck