Because he lets them say slurs.

The most direct and effective strategy to inspire reform in their practices is to stop using of their platforms.

The whole “the free market could fix it” is just neoliberal bullshit. The most hated companies in the world continue to bring in record profits and its not because people prefer their chocolate is harvested by child slaves.

They’re fully aware that it never works, but they just keep suggesting it over and over again, growing richer with successive failure, all the while blaming consumers for not preventing them doing sleazy, greedy things.

The actual most direct and effective strategy is regulations. That’s why they hate them and why there are so many of them in politics.

• The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.

I haven’t seen significant numbers of people complaining that their drip feed of content isn’t coming fast enough. I’ve seen people complaining about spending a non-trivial amount of money on a visibly broken game that clearly had plenty of developer resources for microtransactions and loot boxes.

Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.

Being a game developer had its moments but was still easily the worst job I’ve ever had, predominantly due to the community.

That said, I still wouldn’t go diagnosing millions of people with some bullshit I just made up.

To block AI from hoovering up all our data, without paying them.

That’s not how greed works, nor how reddit works.

The only time they’ll do something that reduces profits is when they’re confident it will mean more profits in the near future (and they can’t figure out a way to have both).

That’s why they were happy to platform mask off neo-nazis, the dangerously stupid and communities dedicated to getting as close to child pornography as possible without technically breaking any laws and why they waited until the last possible moment to pull the plug on them.

And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.

Screaming over everyone with megaphones about how they’re not allowed to scream over everyone with megaphones, to a crowd that’s 50% mannequins that have been wired up to play pre-recorded cheering.

Unfortunately, the discussion is important. Everybody hangs out in that public square which means everybody is forced to hear the megaphone Mein Kamph. It’s how the far-right procreate now

It was such a unnecessary opinion that turned up so often on social media that I have to imagine it was seeded by mining companies.

Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.

As is the social media site. This is the kind of shit he bought it for and it someone made a film full of trans people saying “yep I feel much better now”, there isn’t a chance in hell he’d let them run these kinds of ads for it.

But they’re a conspicuous luxury, which many people clearly feel the pressure to own, even if it means sacrificing more basic needs.

That’s the neoliberal secret – you have to play the game, no matter how immoral the rules.

Not as clearly as you seem to think. You’ll struggle to find qualified people with criticism of their response.

That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.

Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.

And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.

They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.

With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:

1. Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
2. Amplifying the voice of the far-right
3. Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it

This is probably mostly 1. He’s looked at the number of users and said “what if they were dollars?”.

But like you say, there’s probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.

It probably won’t dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That’s definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.

I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn’t free to run. But there are several things to consider:

I don’t mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.

I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren’t just trying to cover their operating costs, they’re trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.

And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they’d still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they’d still show just as many ads.

We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there’s an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.

So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.

Also they literally go on killing sprees.

What a shame that would be

This isn’t skepticism, this is actual experience machining parts.

At no point have I suggested that CNC machining gun parts is impossible nor that no desktop printers are capable of it.

I have very specifically challenged people who appear to have no experience machining parts but nevertheless insist it’s no more difficult than printing your homework.

It’s a lie that’s used to undermine gun control and you’re repeating it verbatim.

Your insults are even worse than your hot takes. Are you sure you want to branch out into armchair psychology as well?

I doubt the information needed to accurately predict their costs is publicly available.

But they announced $29.2 billion in revenue in 2022. That’s about as much as countries like Australia, Canada and Italy spent on their entire military.

And that’s just money. Google is absolutely aware of how much indirect value there is in the internationally recognised brand and near total capture of a communication medium.

So again, who exactly am I supposed to feel sorry for? Who is supposed to be suffering? It’s not their staff. It’s not their shareholders. It’s not their suppliers.

They pay a lot of creators fuck all, despite the platform being nothing without them. Will the extra revenue be going to them? Because nobody has mentioned them in any of their guilt trips so far.

As far as I can tell, I’m supposed to feel morally obligated to listen to KFC advertisements at ear splitting volume every 2 minutes for the privilege of watching a video that will make the creator nothing so that some of the wealthiest people in the world can grow wealthier.

To put it bluntly, that’s corporate propaganda.