Pup Biru

(i’m an aussie so i have no place to actually comment on lived experience in the US)

… but i will add, because this is similar in most places i think:

• Public activism and willingness to volunteer is frequently redirected by capitalists to spoil outcomes or just waste activist energy.

on the rare occasion that activism is getting somewhere, they’re very good at giving just enough to make just enough people stop participating that it falls apart, and the “just enough” that they give are short-term concessions that they claw back in other ways (or sometimes not even in other ways: just straight up revert)

They don’t care if you play on steamOS, Windows, or a steam powered adding machine.

i think yes and no: they make their money from selling games, so they want more people to buy more games from them

… but, SteamOS achieves that in a multi-faceted way:

• it provides a fit-for-purpose platform for handhelds and consoles which previously steam didn’t have any market share over, and if that’s in SteamOS they have a massive advantage
• it gives valve some leverage over microsoft (if MS controls the platform that you depend on, they can do some pretty wild things and you have no recourse). in this case, they definitely care about bumping their numbers - more on SteamOS means less power microsoft has over them
• it creates competition, which forces microsoft to invest in making their own experience better, and better experience anywhere means probably more people game more often

i think that last point in particular is critical: every $ valve spends on steamos is multiplied, because microsoft has to spend their own money to keep up, and it propels the whole ecosystem forward

imo bsky is not 100% of what we want, but it has roads out of their system… its not decentralised exactly, but you can build bridges and that’s super important

the main reason people stay with facebook, twitter, reddit, etc is what’s called the “network effect”. for social media, it’s hyper important to get people onto the platform, otherwise it’s not social (reddit and lemmy a bit different: you still need a self-sustaining amount of people, but the more you get to the “people you know” platforms, the more you need as close to everyone you can get to keep people there)

now, twitter, facebook, instagram, etc have no functionality to allow people off-platform to contact people on-platform (and visa versa), so if you leave the platform you loose all those connections - the first people to move have a terrible experience because the platform is pretty much useless (there’s no social in the social media)

bsky at least changes that part so now we can bridge: bsky users can interact with mastodon users, which means that in the future it’ll be much easier for people to make the choice to leave, if they choose to: they don’t have to give up the creators they follow, or family and friends… there might be a slightly degraded experience, but i’d argue that’s pretty negligible

heck, i’d even prefer to trade twitter for threads at this point: imo facebook as a whole company is worse that twitter, but threads at least allows that off-ramp

if facebook itself were federated, who knows maybe one of these days i could convince my parents to move to friendica

individuals create echo chambers: if someone spouts intolerant garbage, and the people who fight that garbage block the speech, there’s nobody to oppose it and without voices speaking out against it, it becomes mainstream

if society doesn’t enforce rules around hate speech, it places a burden on minorities to defend themselves from hate, otherwise hate becomes the mainstream viewpoint

i think the only way it could work is with the community notes model, but perhaps with more of a “your choice” fediverse flare: perhaps your instance can bless specific users whose notes get higher pirority etc

lately

it’s possible that the grok model was trained or fine tuned somehow to help with moderation. in that case, it’s possible that things like these bullet points are somewhere up it’s context chain, or in its training data in a manner that it can relatively accurately recall

the luddites then have basically the same argument as coal miners now - it’s entirely about loss of their livelihood, and ignores the bigger societal good that comes from the changes that result in the loss of their livelihood

from the luddites and the coal miners perspective, it’s entirely self-serving and everything else is just used to support that

as long as they don’t use a logitech controller i’m sure it’ll be fine

lots of leopards though

some are pretty revolting

there are many groups to blame

i mean, the sea level doesn’t have to be a limit… people edit wikipedia etc or contribute to reddit just because they like their number to be higher or their community reputation. i get that it’s meant to encourage contribution, but i think you’ll get more contribution by people just wanting to make the information better

also yes

hey now let’s not go too far… they should be taxed at the level any other business is taxed at, and their philianthropic endeavours should receive the same tax breaks as any other business too… if they’re entirely charitable (their existence is not by and of itself charitable) then they’re entirely charitable

being unwilling to change behaviour in the face of evidence that people don’t like what you’re doing isn’t something to brag about

judging by how the votes seem to be panning out, people seem to think that you’re the one displaying toxic behaviour, and are kinda in favour of OP calling out and defending against genuine misinformation

i hold no particular belief about this particular case either way; i was just replying to your comment about contract workforces

for sure wow… i remember in xfire days it logged like 20-25k hrs

… i literally have nightmares where my character is reaching out of a black void sobbing “please im so lonely come back and play with me”

fuck that whole game

perhaps - i didn’t read the article, but going by your comment: if it’s your contract workforce rather than full time then sometimes you just want to transition from expensive “temporary” employees to permanent positions