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Hey, so it's obviously *slightly* trollish to post this here, but please bear with me -- I'm not trying to be a dick! My concern:
Right now, there is no way to avoid seeing obvious racial slurs in Dota. It's not the only communication abuse problem that the game currently opts you into experiencing, but it is by far the most omnipresent. The game opts you into joining regional chats and auto-rejoins when you start the game, but it does not offer any means for holding people accountable for their language, nor any reasonably useful way to mute people. If being a hateful, unsafe and unhealthily oppressive environment is what the game is going for, then I guess this isn't a bug. But I'm assuming that you wouldn't want someone to log in for the first time and read a stream of racial slurs aimed at their race. That seems like a real "bug" to me, and a serious problem for the growth of Dota.
To me holding people accountable for their language goes beyond muting. There needs to be a way to report people for using hate speech, and then have some kind of automated muting happen. It could be on a channel-by-channel basis, but if I'm muting people, that should help save others from having to read a stream of hatred, and same for the muting efforts of others.
Also, muting is currently pretty useless because you have to scroll down a list of thousands of names to do it. It should be really simple and available by clicking on a chatter's name in the chat itself.
It also seems to me that some words could just be filtered out automatically -- ones that are just obviously hateful. Or use asterisks. Just do something to keep people from using hate speech to provoke, harass, or just annoy. The fact that the chats are unfiltered is clearly inviting people to just copy and paste the n-word, and swastikas, and all kinds of garbage.
I recognize that there are free speech implications for algorithmically dealing with language, but -- call me crazy -- I'm just not super concerned about the right of white teenagers to use the n-word. I'm a white dude, and I don't want to spend time in space, real or virtual, that's full of that stuff. Words themselves are not the problem, but let's not delude ourselves about the demographics of the game in the US -- this isn't reclamation of terms of hate, here. It's almost always just straight-up racism, at least in the US rooms. It's not good for anyone's mental health, it's not good for the Dota community, and it's not good for gaming on the whole. And it's totally avoidable. So please let's fix it ASAP.
Thanks for reading and, in advance, for being thoughtful about this. And thanks for your work on this great game.
(P.S. And if this isn't the bucket for this, please let's make sure it gets put in a high-priority bucket in which it does belong. Let's not let this one fall through the cracks. Let's not surprise, shock or trigger anyone else with the utter rancidity that the in-client, out-of-game environment has allowed to fester since Reborn launched).
Right now, there is no way to avoid seeing obvious racial slurs in Dota. It's not the only communication abuse problem that the game currently opts you into experiencing, but it is by far the most omnipresent. The game opts you into joining regional chats and auto-rejoins when you start the game, but it does not offer any means for holding people accountable for their language, nor any reasonably useful way to mute people. If being a hateful, unsafe and unhealthily oppressive environment is what the game is going for, then I guess this isn't a bug. But I'm assuming that you wouldn't want someone to log in for the first time and read a stream of racial slurs aimed at their race. That seems like a real "bug" to me, and a serious problem for the growth of Dota.
To me holding people accountable for their language goes beyond muting. There needs to be a way to report people for using hate speech, and then have some kind of automated muting happen. It could be on a channel-by-channel basis, but if I'm muting people, that should help save others from having to read a stream of hatred, and same for the muting efforts of others.
Also, muting is currently pretty useless because you have to scroll down a list of thousands of names to do it. It should be really simple and available by clicking on a chatter's name in the chat itself.
It also seems to me that some words could just be filtered out automatically -- ones that are just obviously hateful. Or use asterisks. Just do something to keep people from using hate speech to provoke, harass, or just annoy. The fact that the chats are unfiltered is clearly inviting people to just copy and paste the n-word, and swastikas, and all kinds of garbage.
I recognize that there are free speech implications for algorithmically dealing with language, but -- call me crazy -- I'm just not super concerned about the right of white teenagers to use the n-word. I'm a white dude, and I don't want to spend time in space, real or virtual, that's full of that stuff. Words themselves are not the problem, but let's not delude ourselves about the demographics of the game in the US -- this isn't reclamation of terms of hate, here. It's almost always just straight-up racism, at least in the US rooms. It's not good for anyone's mental health, it's not good for the Dota community, and it's not good for gaming on the whole. And it's totally avoidable. So please let's fix it ASAP.
Thanks for reading and, in advance, for being thoughtful about this. And thanks for your work on this great game.
(P.S. And if this isn't the bucket for this, please let's make sure it gets put in a high-priority bucket in which it does belong. Let's not let this one fall through the cracks. Let's not surprise, shock or trigger anyone else with the utter rancidity that the in-client, out-of-game environment has allowed to fester since Reborn launched).
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