Games and other online communities are societies
YES! I am still amazed that so few people acknowledge this, and still try speaking of society as a singular monolithic entity.
owed a duty of care by their owners
If your society has owners, you are already fucked, and need to set up another society. What we are seeing here is the end-game of capitalism, where propertarians can indulge their wet dream of one-way societal control.
What drew many people online was its more egalitarian, distributed nature. That it lacked the exploitation of the lowest-common-denominator encountered in advertising and mass-media. It was precisely the subsequent corporatization/commercialization of online spaces which has resulted in today’s “trollies paradise”. Centralized ownership of egalitarian spaces is not the solution, it is the problem.
