Hahah, there are dozens of us, dozens!

But no seriously if you can get past the extremely weird … basically early 00’s style mmo control scheme… for what nowadays you’d expect to be third person ARPG controls… Kenshi is an absolutely incredible game, and it’s got a lively modding scene as well.

Kenshi.

The world is brutal, but its possible to pay for some company, buy some slaves, or maybe, juuuuust maybe, find a quirky friend.

If a drug was rolled out of clinical trials, and huge, huge portions of the people it was given to reported becoming addicted to it and also massive amounts of negative side effects, would you just say

…, well we don’t have a completely precise and thorough model of the causal mechanisms at the chemical and physiological level that perfectly describe how this drug is causing all these side effects…

Instead of, I don’t know, recalling the drug ASAP to minimize harm, maybe do the exact science of it later, in more ethical and controlled conditions?

TikTok obviously has an absurdly huge amount of data, a huge dataset, and they themselves have concluded that their product is addictive and that this very often results in deleterious effects with addictive use, and they’ve intentionally designed it that way.

This is more akin to ‘oil companies have known for decades that their industry causes global warming via their own studies and just decided to not release that information and instead spread confusion and doubt to the public when any other scientists start to figure out the same things they did with the same level of specificity’.

Again: These are TikTok’s own internal studies that they really, really, really did not want to be made public.

Isn’t she more of a Tiefling than an elf?

Fucking obviously duh its knowingly designed to be addictive and they know it brainrots you.

TikTok’s own research states that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” according to the suit.

This is the real reason that TikTok should be massively regulated or outright banned for children, not because of specifically oh we we are worried about data security concerns with a Chinese company, but because its functionally a digital version of a mind melting harmful drug.

If you want to be consistent on the data security concept, then basically you’d have to apply that logic to Facebook and Instagram and well pretty much everything these days.

But also, I guarantee you that if Meta or Twitter/X was investigated similarly we’d find out very very similar things about their products intentionally being designed to be addictive and that they know they degenerate your mental faculties as well, and prioritize spreading dubious inflammatory misinformation.

(Well, in Twitter, now X’s case, probably Elon has already destroyed much of that research after he took over, and X now has different and even worse obvious problems.)

Cambridge Analytica anyone?

Tiktok is only different in that it is primarily aimed at children, and that it’s not American.

I am so beyond tired of pretending that modern corporate social media apps are anything other than extremely societally normalized drugs that make us all stupid angry idiots.

EDIT, several days later:

Oh hey look here’s Sam Seder agreeing with the idea that these platforms are products and they should be regulated akin to alcohol and tobacco and harmful pharmaceuticals, who also all had their own internal data showing they knew their products were/are addictive and damaging but just shelved their own studies:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWMoZJ5OPdg

We got dogfed (dogfooded?) the preview builds.

At some point, one preview was considered ‘good enough’ that basically everyone at MSFT was forced to switch over to it.

Backlash from MSFTs own employees who were forced to use the pre Windows 7 mode version is a huge reason why they ‘sorted it out’.

EDIT: If you don’t know… and maybe they don’t still do this, but I seriously doubt it, MSFT does what they call dogfooding. Most new software versions are released internally to MSFT employees before it goes public, so that they can functionally beta test everything.

Usually it just causes some work loss in minor ways, but with certain widely used or critical software, it can blow up entire projects and workflows for a while.

You are correct, I am not very social.

EDIT: I am also not of the mind that just because something is common and popular doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid, broken and horrible.

… Working as a DB admin / analyst at MSFT through the Windows 8 release also didn’t help.

3 weeks. 3 weeks where we couldn’t do a goddamned bit of work because SQL manager didn’t work properly and you couldn’t have more than 2 panes open at once.

They really, truly thought that taking the windows out of Windows would be just fine for desktop users. We had to argue with people until they stopped lying and admitted that a Win 7 style mode did exist and was useable underneath the Win 8 interface, and they reluctantly made it easier to switch to without following 3 pages of procedures.

MSFT fucking sucks.

Its more than just ‘I’m not very social’, its also, ‘I have a grudge against MSFT from working for them for pennies and being gaslit and lied to routinely, obviously, without shame, for years.’

Google may be getting a looksy from the DOJ for being a monopoly, and now MSFT is doing the same shit that got them antitrusted 20ish years ago, again, on steroids.

I pray that the marinara may flow, that the noodly appendage of the meatball’d one strikes down this objectively evil giant megacorp.

Oh my fucking god.

If I still knew anyone who uses Windows I would be laughing at them.

‘Under’ would have worked and been shorter.

Its not anonymous. Its pseudonymous.

Even if your pseudonym isn’t directly linked to you, even if you are not doxxed, your pseudonym carries its own reputation.

Its up to the pseudonym operator to determine how to manage that.

To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.

It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.

The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.

… Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’

That’s very strange framing to use.

What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.

Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.

But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.

SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.

It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.

I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.

Please reread the second sentence.

It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.

In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.

The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.

And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.

Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.

All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.

A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.

If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.

If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.

If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.

Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’

To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’

So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.

All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’

US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.

EDIT: A few days after I posted this, Ross put out a video with more or less the same angle as I presented, that this solves nothing, changes nothing, and arguably actually makes it technically worse as this functionally acts as the government officially endorsing the status quo: You have no legal standing to contest your evaporating game, as it followed the rules and put a warning or changed some wording.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-9aXEbGNeo

Made me spit out my covfefe!

Oh, this is the first time you’ve left either hexbear or ml then.

The AdBlockalypse.

You really made an account just to post this singular comment?