Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Blizzard... who else?
Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Blizzard... who else?
226 comments
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Google Chrome and "Enhanced Ad Privacy".
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That won't destroy their community.
edit: Because people who use chrome, doesn't care about privacy, freedom or anything like that.
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It got me off Chrome, at long last.
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I should start marketing cyanide as a painkiller too, goddamn.
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Zoom: "wE cAnT cOlAbOrAtE iF wErE nOt In PeRsOn. We NeEd EmPloYeEs To ReTuRn tO tHe OfFiCe."
They have stiff competition but this has to be one of the most incompetent boners I have ever seen pulled by a major corporation. Stating very clearly to the entire world that you have no confidence in your own product. If Eric Yuan (Zoom's CEO) wasn't the principle shareholder he probably would have been fired out of a cannon by now.
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And what are zoom employees using from the office to sell their product? Why no other than a fine Zoom call, from our desk to yours!
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Decentralize. Democratize. Demonetize. Time for a new internet, a new gaming industry, and a way of sharing thoughts and ideas where clout is the least important factor.
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Don't forget strong policies to keep everything from enshittifying all over again! Check out Cory Doctorow's thoughts from DefCon: https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?feature=shared
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Time to return to the OG internet then?
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Literally every company is doing this. There was a time when, for example, Apple could reverse engineer the Word document format and make their own word processor that uses them. This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
Now companies use litigation and corporate buyouts to reduce their competition, then set up ways to extract rents on customers rather than providing a service. Business folks love this because it means a consistent stream of revenue that won't go away. And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
For more details, read Chokepoint Capitalism.
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And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
When I reach the point at which I am forced to buy a car like that, I'd just find out from where the feature gets controlled and hack in my own controller and a good 'ol switch.
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Right now it's your right to do what you want to your car as long as it still passes vehicle inspection, but it appears that car makers want new laws that prevent you from modifying your own car.
If we just sit on our hands now, well likely move into a future where we will be forced to either pay subscription or take public transit, which requires subscriptions.
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You wouldn’t steal a car
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This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
i don't think it was due to reverse engineering but bcz of releasing specification by IBM them self due to which other manufacturer where able to make identical clone and can run extracted BIOS from IBM PC without any modification!
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Microsoft. They've been itching to go to a fully cloud-dependent subscription-only model for Windows for a while now.
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I could've sworn that they said win 10 was going to be the last windows and it would just receive updates.
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99% of people who use Windows wouldn't even mind, I think.
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This is a turning point and I'm here for it
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook=> FediverseUnity=> GodotAAA Studios=> Indie devs-
I sure hope so. It's about damn time.
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I support all of this. Especially the fediverse.
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godot
They’re at a turning point alright. To be fair sounds like things are better, new dev fund but still
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Thats some pretty sily drama.
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They’re at a turning point alright.
What was the final fallout / results of that controversy? That was a couple of months ago.
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Enshittification
What'd Blizzard do?
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Warcraft 3 reforged, Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4, ow2, anything else?
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They completely botched the WotLK server situation launch as well.
I waited for that shit for years, and me and many others couldn't play no matter how much money we were willing to spend to do so. I don't know if they ever fixed the servers, but back in December they were still a hot mess.
Also, to a lesser degree, SC2.
They certainly lost a loyal customer in me, at least.
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Those were good business decisions though
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Well this year was overwatch 2, which was pretty much the same game but wrapped in skeezy monetization, with the excuse that they needed to drop a sequel (and delete the original) for their new PVE content. Then a few months later, they announced they weren't even going to do the PVE content, but they were keeping the new monetization.
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Seriously fuck them to death for this. And their “new maps” is just like the same fucking maps but at nighttime or daytime instead! OoO what a sequel! The company deserves to crash and burn.
Also I PAID for one of the call of duty games and after a year they one day just said I can’t play it anymore because they ended support for older versions of windows, of course they also refused to refund me. I didn’t buy “one year” of gameplay I bought the fucking game. Never making that mistake again.
Just relentlessly fucking greedy and shitty. It’s a shame people enable this bullshit by spending $30 on character skins and paying out the ass for lootboxes. We need to answer them with the loss of our business. I did my part and uninstalled all their IP and refuse to give them another dollar of my money ever again until/unless I see a 180 in their policies and practices.
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This year was also Diablo 4. And they have been driving that one further and further into the ground. The OW2 lore shit is another turd on the pile. Dragonflight is continuing a "more of the same but we told it'd be different" trend, but is honestly their smallest fuck up in a list of fuck ups.
Was HotS dying last year? OW1 was basically on life support for the past two years in order to support the OW2 fiasco so I feel like that should count as it's own entity... Once we're into last year, there's Diablo Immoral
The list goes on.
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They took the dev team away from hots (only blizzard game/moba worth playing) so they could work on their pve
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Overwatch 2 PvE got cancelled, although it was basically the selling point of OW2.
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Seriously? They've been one of the most shitty companies for years. They've been on the top of the most talked about and widely shown because of all their bad decisions. How does anyone who has even a remote idea and interest about this not know that?
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Twitter Reddit Unity Blizzard Microsoft Epic Google All of the Movie industry. All of the animation industry. All of the Gaming publishers.
Basically, everything, everywhere.
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You forgot car companies asking for subscriptions to use your heated seats.
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Cars are going to get really terrible really soon if not already. They are becoming less of mechanical machines on wheels and more of computers on wheels. Car companies like Tesla are already harvesting every tiny bit of personal data from you as they possibly can. Other car manufacturers aren't much better. It is truly a privacy nightmare. Any new car you get you will basically have to gut it and cut out the part that tracks everything you do.
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Charge more, pay and offer less.
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What did Epic do?
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Epic is trying to make every game exclusive so they don't have to compete on the market, instead of providing a service that is actually competitive.
Tldr: Epic waits until a game with hype annouces a launch date on Steam, then contacts the developer saying "We would love to have you on our platform" and offers an exclusivity deal.
Dev turns down exclusivity deal because backers were promised a Steam release.
Sudddenly Epic has no interest in making the game available on their store if they have to actually compete with another store. Despite saying previously they would "love to have it".Having it on their store as well would provide a better service for their users but that's not what Epic is interested in.
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All of the animation industry.
Corporate enshitification and the Woke/anti-Woke debate are two very different things.
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Casino industry. I.e. mgm, penn, Caesars, station casinos, etc.
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Unfortunately and admittedly, we are the problem. These companies know that people pay for convenience and stick to what they know. If we were less likely to do so companies would have to raise their standards. Take Twitter for example, even with Musks over inflated numbers other sources indicate there's still hundreds of millions of Twitter users. They see all of the things Musk has done and it hasn't buried his business thus they are now taking pages out of his book.
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Blaming individuals for not performing collective consumerist acts against corporations is liberal bullshit that only excuses corporate wrongdoing.
EDIT: To spare other people from having to read the smug corpo clown buffoonery beneath this post, I'll put the most relevant part I wanted to stress up here instead:
The eight hour day, the end of widescale child labor, the concept of minimum wage, and much more that improved the lot of the working class and of society as a whole were not the products of "vote with your wallet" nonsense. Slavery wasn't abolished in the United States (it still isnt if you count the prison system, and you should, but stay with me here) by cotton buyers coming together to only buy "ethical" cotton.
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It’s not liberal bs. It’s lazy thinking on your part and people are agreeing with you to shuck accountability. None of the services are essential services. We could easily drop them and it have nearly zero material impact on our lives. Spare me the BS. Just say you’re too lazy to pull away from comfort. People vote with their dollars all of the time. It’s also not liberal, there’s been conservative stances against businesses and corporations as well. As humans some of the biggest influences we have in society is our votes and our dollars. Quit being lazy and just state you’re fine with things as long as it doesn’t disrupt your comforts. That’s better than calling it “liberal”
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I just think people shouldn't be chided for doing what is convenient when so much of our economy is attention based. Kind of like hating the players instead of the game.
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I have enough hate for both and more tyvm
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Agreed on convenience being enough for most people. Unity isn't going anywhere. They are priced above Unreal now but they have the market share to justify it. There are a million other game engines with newer approaches than "coke and pepsi" but they take more work and there's less community to pull from. There are just so many assets and abilities pre built in those game engines that allow a young developer to be productive. If you don't need all of that then you have a wide pick of frameworks to apply your code chops to. I'd love for Godot to become Dr Pepper but it's got a long way to go for even that slot. If unity had done this in a year or two from now it might be a different story but it takes a long time to reach a status like Blender, and even Blender isn't the go-to for industry professionals. I love LibreOffice but I've never worked at a company that is willing to tolerate those little rough edges.
Twitter is still the centralized place for a mainstream figure/organization to engage from. They have all researched mastodon and the like, opened accounts, and can't get the same engagement. It takes people more work to find their accounts in other places and most lay-users just aren't going to put in the effort. They're only in it for the lulz. This may reach a critical mass someday like with myspace but any alternative still needs a central point to funnel them to. Reddit doesn't benefit from centralization the same way and I think Lemmy/ap will scratch the itch for major topics, but it's still harder to grow smaller communities that aren't risa.
Blizzard has been being blizzard for years, that's not just a 2023 thing!
I wish it was different. We all hate nodding to authority. But there's a certain momentum that carries with popularity and they can surf that on their enshittification for years to come.
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I hear Discord is due for its enshitification.
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I'm surprised they made it this long. Never bought into their cutesy signaling.
But also, that place felt oppressive with a smiling face.
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Moderation there is worse than a joke. I gave them a motherlode of screenshots, discord links, timestamps to Nazi content being posted on a single server, and their employees would simply pretend I didn't give it to them and keep asking for discord links, as though they were unable to follow up on it otherwise.
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It really needs a competitor
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Check out Revolt
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I hear Discord is due for its enshitification
I'd really like to be able to use it without having to give up my cell phone number to do so, especially when I'm on my PC / web browser.
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But how else would they tie your account to your real identity for marketing data collection purposes?
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Netflix.
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The streaming industry has been slowly burning down for a while now. I see more and more people pirating than buying another subscription for another fucking streaming platform that has like one good show to watch.
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Red Hat (Enrerprise Linux) & HashiCorp (Terraform) closed the source of their products in different ways, also fucking over their community of clients and contributors, though their reasoning seems slightly more sane than "no more free money, aaargh!"
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Companies can no longer continue to grow through innovating their products or services. Companies are no longer competing in that domain because they have already conquered it completely.
Companies can no longer grow through marketing and branding. Branding is everything and everywhere now, even normal people have personal brands, they have already conquered that domain and most people have grown to disdain marketing and branding so its less effective than ever.
Companies can no longer grow through data collection and advertising. All data is collected, ads are everywhere and they are always listening to everything we say and do. They have already conquered that domain.
Now all that's left is competition through exploitation. It's the only way companies can continue to grow. That is the stage of capitalism we are entering.
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Also, for a long time back until this year, money used to be close to free. Now interest is way up and suddenly companies are forced with the prospect of needing more revenue.
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Continued unlimited growth turns out to be not sustainable...
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Okay wait what the fuck is this picture
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I don't know, but the guy is having a hard time.
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Seems to be from the "No Poop July" trend a few months ago.
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Heart attack speed run
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Forgot WotC. They sent Pinkertons after a leaker and tried to drain every last dollar out of third party creators with their OGL update.
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Why is this a trend?
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Twitter, Reddit, and Unity have not been profitable. This was fine when money was cheap (near zero interest rates). The market was awash with capital trying to find something that could turn a profit. A business plan that was basically underpants gnomes (1. Gather underpants 2. ???? 3. Profit!) was acceptable. Twitter’s and Reddit’s 1. was “gather users”, Unity’s “gather projects”. Now money isn’t free anymore, and capital is demanding that these businesses fill in 2. with something. Twitter is doing whatever Musk thinks is good, Reddit is trying to monetize its API to make AIs pay and to serve real users ads through its first party app, and Unity is trying to monetize the projects it has gathered. All of them have been offering a product below cost, and users are understandably angry that the cost is going up. (And in many cases, finding that the product isn’t really worth anything.)
Blizzard is different. It operates in a creative field and has been very profitable. Games are art as much as they are products that are sold. As such, they’re fickle: you can’t assembly line manufacture games and make a hit after hit. Artists in music that turn out bangers decade after decade are rare, as are authors, directors, etc. Blizzard’s streak of awesome games was bound to end eventually. AAA games are also extremely expensive to make: if you make an AAA game, it must be a hit or you’ll lose money. Alternatively, you can use dark patterns to monetize it, then it doesn’t have to be as good to make loads of money. Banking on your creatives to keep beating the odds is risky; infesting a good enough game with scummy monetization is a safer bet.
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You’re spot on. The changes we’re seeing are seen as “radical”, as users had previously utilized them on the cheap. Given the recent changes in the overall market, shareholders are making radical demands. So companies have to think of something to pivot.
When we look at video games, we’ve seen micro transactions creep up, a slow boil if you will, so consumers have adjusted to the increases in these “optional” purchases. Video games overall have been largely stagnant in terms of price per copy. Even accounting for inflation, we’ve really only seen a 20 dollar increase over the years for the raw “license” of a game. Then you add in premium packs and other “optional” nonsense and most have just accepted it.
I think where people get heartburn on these things is when you introduce such a whiplash of a change with such short notice. I think even if Unity changed the pricing to 2 cents an install starting 2024, then upped it to 5 cents in 2025 and kept it at an incremental increase, it would have been a better “slow boil.” By going outright with the 20 cents per install for the entry level, the market reacted just as radically as the proposed changes.
While I don’t personally agree with the changes, I can understand through your point why they’re trying it. Late stage capitalism and all that
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TL;DR quantitative tightening
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I'm still laughing at reddit and the ads thing. They pushed me more into blocking all their ads and tracking even harder, and to patch their official app when I had no choice but to go to reddit. Everything they've done has backfired as far as I'm concerned.
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I am extremely skeptical of the claim that these companies have not been profitable. Fuck they said LOTR trilogy lost money and they were some of the biggest movies of all time. I don't think these companies are above cooking the books to make it look like they are losing money on paper.
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It varies from company to company, but when infinite growth becomes unrealistic they get desperate for new revenue and start doing shitty nickel and dime tactics.
More specifically for Reddit thoughts are they realized that these new AI tools had already pilfered all of “their” content and they did not see a cent from it and responded wildly.
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Not only Infinite growths, but infinite money. Since at least 2008, money was almost free for tech companies and somehow nobody cared, that they never made any profit - Twitter had like 2 profitable quarters in its entire history.
Now that interest rates went up, investors want to see results and if you can't burn through venture capital anymore, you have to get money somewhere else.
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The AI training is one thing, but they are also looking to drive all traffic into their own mobile app and site with their own ads.
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Reddit's decision about 3rd party apps and API changes actually made business sense. Not only was their content being pilfered on Reddit's expense, but a decent portion of their user base were using 3rd party apps that didn't collect as much data nor serve Reddit ads like the official app. At the expense of losing a decent portion of their community, moderators, and any goodwill their userbase had towards them, Reddit now has all their mobile users on a single, add ridden app that they own and can collect as much data as they want going forward as well as ensures that they get paid for AI API usage
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Disruption to settle into a new norm.
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Please somehow let YouTube/Google be next. Somehow.
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I keep up to date with a lot of tech stuff through youtube so I genuinely don't know who can offer a service as big and reliable as google. I'm pretty sure they're offering at a loss or something right? I've tried Peertube and Oddysee but not all creators are on those platforms.
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yeah YouTube looses a shitton of money for google, so much that they stopped reporting it and just add it into their total loss now
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Google is pulling shenanigans with Chrome through it's inbuilt ad tracking and web integrity.
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Oh yeah, and that's only going to get worse. I'm honestly hoping for YouTube to somehow crash and have a reformation. I know that's a pipedream, but still
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Netflix... except that move is sadly paying off
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I've done my part. 🏴☠️ Cancelled that shit immediately.
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The year is 2023, every single major companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No.1 and shoot themselves in the foot in as many ways as they can think of.
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That's what happens to monopolies and oligopolies. Pretty much unilaterally. That is the steady state of capitalism without very heavy government regulation
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companies want to go back to feudalism
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Companies be like:
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Literally every top 500 company
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This is such a fucking post. Activision-Blizzard is drowning in cash because people continue to buy their garbage. Diablo Immortal was a great move. OP is completely clueluess.
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Lol
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i fear mozilla may be in the line here, finally giving-in to google on manifest 3's limitations, web 'drm', and targeted ads program, in exchange for keeping the lights on (google is their single biggest source of funding via payment for being default search).
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I see literally no incentive for them to limit their API to just the Google version of Manifest v3. If I recall correctly they already expanded their implementation to offer more.
If they ever implement WEI (the "web DRM") then it's because the Internet forces their hand. A web browser is only as useful as the websites it can browse. If our banks will demand WEI support Mozilla doesn't have much choice. We need to worry about the website providers changing the web, not Mozilla adjusting Firefox to these changes. In the latter case it's already too late and it's hard to blame Mozilla at this point.
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I agree on WEI, and that's the scary part since crappy companies will demand it in the name of security and everyone gets fucked and the Internet becomes a little less free.
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People wouldn’t use Firefox if it couldn’t run google and if it made bing default then you’d see a bunch of idiots making memes about how it’s so bad and they won’t use it because it’s default
Google has been worse than bing for a decade and chrome has been worse than Firefox for longer. But people still use them and think they are the best.
You even have people make jokes about edge only existing to download chrome
I feel like you vastly overestimate the audience
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That would be a tragedy
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I'm honestly astonished that Google hasn't pulled the plug on Mozilla yet. After all, their missions completely and utterly oppose each other and Mozilla probably causes the biggest losses to Google.
If your prediction comes true, which isn't unlikely, Firefox forks that already exist would probably take its spot. Or privacy friendly Chromium based browsers. I know, the latter sounds like an oxymoron, but they exist and one of them I would be hated on for naming has actually been proven to have better out of the box privacy than Firefox.
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I don't think any of these companies resist at all! They keep their head from going red and just choose the path of extra short-term money!
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Sure, but many of the decisions probably don't even get them extra sgort-term money. They're just bad in every aspect.
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capitalists doing capitalism things
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The invisible hand of the free market yet again proving how consistently good and efficient it is
o
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Imgur and Tumblr too
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When narcissistic CEOs believe so strongly in The Secret(tm) that they sell the rope and then expect the rope to have non-rope-like properties when leaping off the gallows and instead let them soar into bazinga heaven.
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Short term gains .... and gain them as fast as possible .... because the end is coming near and everything is going to be over soon.
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While depressing, it makes sense, seeing as this market model isn’t sustainable in the long term, let alone short term.
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Interest rates went up and with it the era of free money. Now the investors come knocking for profits and lots of it. As they get squeezed, they squeeze the customer harder with worse products and services for more money.
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I sometimes do wonder if the rich are just all in the endgame now and we’re just like but we didn’t even get a turn!
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Every modern law of economics?
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Epic Games
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Brands inherently has no value. It's the people that make these decisions. and after the management changes , people expect the same amazing product again but new management wants is profit.
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Interest rates 📈
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Anything
slobbers over, not just Twitter.
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Creative Assembly really shot themselves in the foot lately.
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What did they do?
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They released one of the worst DLCs for the highest price ever in Total War: Warhammer 3. Instead of backing down when called out by the community, they doubled down. This has killed almost all good will, after a long series of whoopsies by them.
They haven't been patching their flagship title (Total War: Warhammer 3) because they're throwing all of their staff onto 'Hyenas', which is an upcoming battle royale likely to die on release. They only have one person part time on bug fixes in their flagship game.
Also, their soonest upcoming game is Total War: Pharoah, which when polled only 7% of people said they'd purchase because the setting of bronze age Egypt is boring in terms of unit variety to most. It is also just a complete reskin of Total War: Troy. The latter of which was a cheaper 'saga' title--you bet your ass they're charging full price for Pharoah, though.
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What did Blizzard do this time? Or is a reference to their same old bullshit?
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Mostly same old bullshit just add D4 being a cashgrab/flop on the pile if you were unaware of that part. As far as I know that's their most recent community oriented fuck up following overwatch 2 drama.
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I didn't know D4 had flopped. I got D2R on a huge sale that came with D3 in a combo bundle that was cheaper than D2R alone at full price, and IMO it's fine as an ARPG but TERRIBLE as a Diablo game. Grim Dawn is a better D2 successor, even if it doesn't have procedural dungeon generation. Torchlight 2 is okay for that part, and having a pet to sell loot for ya is nice too. As for Overwatch I have a low opinion on multiplayer games (I play ARPGs solo) overall and competitive gameplay especially, so IDGAF about that game. Blizz is still a shit company now though, and a prime example of what happens when you sell a franchise to a big corporate overlord.
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Nothing.
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CA recently released a DLC for Total War Warhammer 3 for $25, while the game is still a buggy, unbalanced mess. Folks were not happy, DLC sales definitely did not meet expectations. Burned through 7 years of good will
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Independent communities shall thrive.
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what did Blizzard do this year?
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Apart from the forcing everyone playing Overwatch to convert over to a half-baked so-called sequel that promised it'd be worth it by having a single player story mode (then dropping that) and expecting everyone to roll the battle pass boulder up the hill all over again, well, just the status quo of mistreating its workers and being smug assholes with a credulous big spending cult protecting their reputation.
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And yet, they ain't going anywhere! Guess they're not so bad after all. Look we can shit on stuff all we want, we're still the minority
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They are going anywhere because they have a monopoly. This is why the Invisible Hand of the free market doesn't do anything except for flip us off.
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Budweiser
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Except... its not. Basically nothing changed for InBev. That lip-service marketing thing only generated extraordinairlly loud conservative screeching from 1% of their customer base, that ultimately amounted to a small downward jump in their stock price that hasn't moved since.
Doesn't count when compared to the likes of Unity who have quite literally alienated every single user of their product.
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Budweiser has always been a crappy water-beer. That is kind of its selling point.
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Lol. No. Y'all just got taken for fools.
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