kittenrobotarmy
JOLLY COOPERATION
I never used SN so I'm not bummed out, but Nintendo shouldn't have shut down the whole service.
Swapnote/Letterbox Shutdown!
- Thread starter marshmallowXO
- Start date
Officer Berri
Cousin Redd's Nightmare
Honestly after reading the notification about it, it's giving me the impression that graphic or sexual pictures were being sent over the program. Sure, kids are probably exposed to that kind of thing all the time, but it was also probably some minors doing the sending. Which, regardless of intent, having sexual images of minors can get you into trouble as a sex offender. (At least that's what the media led me to believe the last time I heard anything about it.)
And since parents don't seem to ever want to make their kids responsible for their actions, if they were to find such content on their children's video game system, you know they'd raise hell about it and bombard Nintendo with hate mail and threats of suing them/boycotting all their stuff. Not to mention the media hellfire that would come up because Nintendo, with it's squeaky clean child-friendly image, has a program that can be used to send graphic and mature content to minors. It's always the fault of the program designers, never the fault of the people abusing it, of course. 9_9
Nintendo pretty much HAD to shut it down. Because the only other solution I could think of to prevent the problems they had would have been a system where every single picture submitted to them would have to go through heavy screening to make sure it wasn't inappropriate, and can you imagine how annoying that would be? Send picture, wait for picture to get through the que in the screening process, much later, picture is sent! Or returned to you and telling you the picture you sent was too graphic and that if you do it again your usage of the feature would be revoked. That sounds pretty obnoxious to me.
I'm not defending the fact that Nintendo shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. I'm defending Nintendo's feelings that they had no choice BUT to shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. If they hadn't shut it down, they risked their business and image for allowing the behavior to continue. Because parents can't do their job and monitor what their kids do with their video game devices, and when they suddenly discover little Jimmy and Sarah have inappropriate content sent to them or sent out to others, it must be the fault of Nintendo, it couldn't be their fault for not keeping an eye on their precious, infallible angles. And most certainly it couldn't be their little angels' faults!
And since parents don't seem to ever want to make their kids responsible for their actions, if they were to find such content on their children's video game system, you know they'd raise hell about it and bombard Nintendo with hate mail and threats of suing them/boycotting all their stuff. Not to mention the media hellfire that would come up because Nintendo, with it's squeaky clean child-friendly image, has a program that can be used to send graphic and mature content to minors. It's always the fault of the program designers, never the fault of the people abusing it, of course. 9_9
Nintendo pretty much HAD to shut it down. Because the only other solution I could think of to prevent the problems they had would have been a system where every single picture submitted to them would have to go through heavy screening to make sure it wasn't inappropriate, and can you imagine how annoying that would be? Send picture, wait for picture to get through the que in the screening process, much later, picture is sent! Or returned to you and telling you the picture you sent was too graphic and that if you do it again your usage of the feature would be revoked. That sounds pretty obnoxious to me.
I'm not defending the fact that Nintendo shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. I'm defending Nintendo's feelings that they had no choice BUT to shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. If they hadn't shut it down, they risked their business and image for allowing the behavior to continue. Because parents can't do their job and monitor what their kids do with their video game devices, and when they suddenly discover little Jimmy and Sarah have inappropriate content sent to them or sent out to others, it must be the fault of Nintendo, it couldn't be their fault for not keeping an eye on their precious, infallible angles. And most certainly it couldn't be their little angels' faults!
kittenrobotarmy
JOLLY COOPERATION
They could've just taken away the function to add pictures, which would be a lot easier than not having the service at all.
Unidentified Floor Orange
avatar by windfall
They aren't trying to be moral guardians of gaming. They are trying to protect their brand of kid and family-friendly gaming.
That said, I don't think they handled it as well as they could have. I'd just have Swapnote be something that, like the Internet Browser, can be blocked by Parental Controls for any parents who are worried that their children might give out personal info or be exposed to inappropriate pictures.
taylalatbh
Senior Member
Nintendo clearly need to work on their parental controls. Or the parents do. No need to make the rest of us suffer. It's such an innocent piece of software.
Ichigo Senpai
Senior Member
I think it's a shame. I would love receiving cute swapnotes from a friend in France and a friend in Japan! Unfortunately, i have no other means to contact them by. 
marshmallowXO
Chilling on my island
Was there not a parental privacy setting to stop kids using swap note/letterbox? :/
Ah well. Seems we won't be having it for a while, if not indefinitely.
While I think your point is clear, I would like to point a couple things out:
1. Never just agree with the media unless you have another source that confirms it. Sometimes the 'media' doesn't tell the whole truth about something, which can change people who watches its' thinking.
2. Nintendo did not, in fact, have to shut it down. They could have easily taken off the ability to send pictures, and kept the ability to send words and stuff. If I've heard this correctly, the people were sending inappropriate graphics, not inappropriate messages.
3. The problem I have when people blame one side of it is that they never look at the whole side of the coin. Could it be the people's fault who abused it? Yes. But more importantly did you know, for example, that kids go online to get away from their parents? While this may give a break to the kids, and shouldn't seem to have anything wrong with, this causes problems and, imo, parents need to spend more time with their kids rather than let them go online and do whatever they want. I'm not saying exchanging notes with friends is bad, I do it all the time in fact. I'm just saying it's both the responsibility of Nintendo, the parent, and the person exchanging notes to make sure everything is in order.
4. Here's an example if my point is kind of confusing to you: A large company, like Chocobars (not an actual company), has a manager office (the parents being the managers) somewhere nearby. A new store is opened far away from the manager, and employees (kids) are hired there. Overtime the business does well, but since the new store is so far away from the nearest manager office a couple employees decide to goof off and not do their work. The manager office can't control this, and it takes them awhile to go to the store and confront the problem in person. Since the whole company, not the manager offices, or the new store, thinks this is a bad display of their service, instead of just firing the employees that goofed off, they don't want to break the bad news and shut the whole company down. The product is that this was not the best decision they could have made.
I think a lot of what you said has sense to a point, but I just wanted to share my views as well.
CandyClouds
Junior Member
I'm pretty sad about it. I had just started using it a week before they shut it down I was using it to exchange messages with my friends and my boyfriend back home since I'm staying in another country for nine months. It was nice to see a little drawing waiting for me to remind me of home or a lovely note to cheer me up if I was feeling down. Gutted it's gone.
I was using it to exchange messages with my friends and my boyfriend back home since I'm staying in another country for nine months. It was nice to see a little drawing waiting for me to remind me of home or a lovely note to cheer me up if I was feeling down. Gutted it's gone.
It's usually the most vocal groups who gets their points across, though they might not be always right. Instead of talking amongst ourselves of the disgusting poor decision Nintendo made to discontinue the service, we should contact Nintendo themselves.
Let me stop you there. The moment they, as a company, decide they should play big brother, is the moment they have lost. They can't possibility 'child-proof' a device or game that provides any sort of social interaction. What is stopping someone from making a lewd picture using the patterns in ACNL? What is stopping someone from harassing people with in-game chat? Or inappropriate pokemon names? What Nintendo can do instead is offer the option to child-proof by using parental controls, which is already there.
It's no doubt they are trying to appease a certain group of people who purchase their product and games. Though if they are making more people upset by blocking such content, only then would they reconsider their decision. As of now I don't think there has been any update on this shutdown.
Only fault that could have been placed on Nintendo, would have been parental controls. I'm not sure how the parental controls affected SwapNotes if at all, but there is already prevention to lock internet browser, software ratings, online interactions, sharing images/audio/video/long text data, etc.
Again, we should voice our disapproval of such actions towards Nintendo.
Nintendo Consumer Webform Link
Stevey Queen
The Queen of Mimosas
Disgusting.
At the same time, they should bring swapnote back. It's not the applications fault, it's certain users.
Here's a link since the pic is too small
http://gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=216348
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oath2order
#Porygon2024
I like this quote.
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Also,here's the full article about that.
http://kotaku.com/child-predators-were-using-nintendos-swapnote-service-1459304126/@lukeplunkett
All of that is truly disgusting ._. do you think they would ever bring it back?
If it was because of people sending crudely drawn...ermm...things, that was happening since the first DS where people would draw those things back and fourth to each other using picto-chat. I don't have a Wii-U, but I'm pretty sure they're still doing that.
I stopped using it since I got so many spams of letters each day (making me lazier and lazier to read it).
But I really enjoyed some artist's drawings since they kind of inspired me to draw too ~
I hope it'll one day come back x)
But I really enjoyed some artist's drawings since they kind of inspired me to draw too ~
I hope it'll one day come back x)
marshmallowXO
Chilling on my island
It is absolutely disgusting but I'm sure in some way they'll launch a different version of it.
