Let’s be real, this should extend even beyond piracy.

History is full of examples of companies buying patents for good innovations and intentionally burying them because they compete with or are too similar to the company’s offerings.

Think about that - literal pieces of human innovation, steps in the ever-evolving game of technological development… just buried for no reason other than because some company thought they’d make more money without it and had the capital to force the situation.

It’s gross.

We as a people should absolutely reject the idea that which has been brought into our world through the creativity of humanity should be able to erased by the greed of monsters.

Free knowledge, free humanity.

Dude that’s not fucking fair.

I wanna see you try to look for evidence with all that bribery and police gang money obscuring your vision and see if you do any better.

Epic: “Steam has an unfair monopoly!”

epic gets pre installed as bloat ware on a bunch of phones

Epic: “What? We never said we didn’t like monopolies, we just don’t like Steam being the ones with the monopoly!”

Imo we need to start attaching criminal penalties to the people behind businesses that knowingly abuse their power and position like this. Corporate bullying isn’t a financial position, it’s a failing of ethics.

I hear and understand your point, and I can’t say that I disagree with it.

That being said, I sure as hell wouldn’t convict the guy.

This is embarrassing, bro

Who knows. Apparently half my country is full of legitimately hateful people who just want to watch the people they don’t like suffer.

How the fuck do we come back from that? Honestly, are we even worth redeeming?

For me, this is it. This is when America died. If you’re still “proud” to be an American after this, you’re brain-damaged.

40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.

I fully agree. Again, I did not think that the random figure, which I tried to appropriately caveat, was the salient part of my comment.

I appreciate the clarity, thank you. As I said, I pulled a random googled number and wasn’t trying to use it as the sticking point of my commentary. But also for what it’s worth, it’s not exactly a fair comparison to the larger giants either as lemmy’s smaller scale means it is also less trafficked by bots, fake accounts, secondary novelty accounts, etc. Depending on what source you’re looking at, twitter is claimed to be anywhere between 15-75% bot or fake accounts. In general my point was there are still a large number of people using lemmy on most scales, we are just choosing to view it on the scale of established corporate social media metrics.

I think we’re going to need to start by defining what “popular” means.

According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, there are 462,745 total Lemmy users. (Note: I know nothing about this site or their metrics; I literally just Googled “Lemmy users.”)

If 462,745 people showed up to my birthday party, I would feel like the most popular person on the planet.

So, I think we need to consider a less abstract figure to answer this. Will Lemmy ever be as popular as a place like Reddit? I think that’s extremely unlikely, at least not anytime soon. But will Lemmy ever be popular enough to sustain an engaged community? I dunno; I kind of think we’re already there.

Maybe this is the old head in me, but I remember the decentralized days of the early internet, where communities weren’t oceans of people on social media giants, but rather smaller, close-knit forums and message boards. If you spent a few months interacting, you would likely get to know and have specific opinions about individual users that you would regularly engage with, unlike the sort of hit-and-run buzz style of the modern social internet. I think right now, Lemmy is almost treading a special sweet spot between the two eras, and I’m pretty happy with it.

Although I will concede that I’m as addicted to social media as everyone else is these days, and I would certainly welcome the increase in on-the-minute activity that additional users would bring.

Maggie’s boobs weighed [69] pounds which was [2], [2], [2] much, so she went down [51]st street to see Dr. [X}; after an [8] hour operation she was [flip calculator]

Is it sad that I still remember this calculator joke verbatim from middle school?

their “latest news” is solely articles about people being arrested for using pirate streaming services or selling loaded firesticks.

So just to be clear, the damage then is not from the actual piracy or due to any invasion from the source of the piracy, but rather 100% of the danger comes from the enforcement of piracy’s prohibition.

Yes, definitely sounds like piracy is the problem here 🙄

As far as I can tell, humanity has been attracted to young adulthood since at least the beginning of recorded history. I won’t know why we’re still pretending this is some strange or weird thing.

Personally I think the rise in incest porn has to do with the rise in isolationism. Lots of people, young men especially, are going out less and less and having more of their social interactions online. As a consequence of this, for a number of these men, the vast majority of the real life female interactions they get are from women in their own homes. And biology has a way of adapting, so I think a lot these men are getting confusing feelings about people in their own homes due largely just to lack of outside exposure to women.

100%. We need more personal liability for the evils of big business, not less

Name one war which was ever fought on a single battlefield.

Yes, we should be pushing for both regulatory changes and changes on platforms like Steam, but we should also being doing our part.

If there is anything I’ve learned over time it is that nobody is coming to save you. Ever. If you are holding out for someone to swoop in and make things better, you will be waiting forever. Either we do it ourselves, or it doesn’t get done.

and demand refunds on any game that adds it after purchase.

This, which is in my original fucking message, applies here. If you think the effort is futile, fine, whatever, don’t try. But my statement was made with full understanding of the timeline, and I stand by it. Feel free to read the rest of the comments in the thread for further discussion of the timeline, or feel free to fuck off, I guess; I’m not in the mood to indulge a pedant clearly just looking for an argument.

Where did I even remotely imply otherwise?

There are plenty of anti-cheat measure that doesn’t require invasive access to your system or performance hits. The objection is not to fighting cheating, it is with the specific overreaching methodology chosen to do so.

Also I personally rarely play multiplayer so it’s even more frustrating to have bullshit installed on my system for a feature that doesn’t even apply to me.

Sadly, a lot of their customers will be pissed about this but will be first in line buying other Rockstar games.

Then they aren’t pissed enough. But yes, talking the talk is completely meaningless if you don’t also walk the walk, I agree.

Companies like Rockstar certainly would meet any requests for refunds outside of very recently purchased with “Go kick rocks.”

If you let them, sure. The reason we use phrases like “fight for a refund” is because these things are hard and they take effort. Like yes it sucks to have to do that and yes I understand our time is valuable, but as I see it there is value in both having your voice heard and punitively costing an offending company manhours in having to deal with you - even if you ultimately do not win the fight.

Again, the point isn’t about winning or getting your money back, it’s about not being passive and just accepting the things that happen to you as if you do not have autonomy.