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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 25th, 2023

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  • i mean reddit is bad, but you can get sitewide banned just for using a vpn. i haven’t used reddit in a long time and basically never posted but a few weeks ago my account got banned because i have to use a vpn to access reddit.

    this also goes along with the recent policy of blocking all access to people that have not logged in and are using a vpn.


  • i wish people would stop complaining about leftists and linux discussion in general. i guess it makes me a hypocrite complaining about complainers but still it’s annoying.

    also imo lemmy is basically reddit now (with the way .world is), with all its pros and cons. you cannot replicate something’s mechanisms to the tee and expect federation to somehow transform it into this otherwordly experience.

    one positive thing i can say about lemmy compared to others though is that the small amount of content forces me to spend less time, and there are less reactionaries here than other places.


  • victims don’t “encourage” their abusers. these are predatory practices designed to hook in as many people vulnerable to gambling addiction as possible. you have a misconception about the people that get hooked into these things. most of them are not “idiot gamers” nor oil barons, they are either children or neurodivergent people.










  • not a game dev and we don’t have a console/pc game industry here, but i’m friends with a mobile game developer in a third world game studio (targeting a local audience rather than an overseas audience which means ad revenue is going to be higher rather than micro transactions), and the best way i can summarize it is to compare it to a monkey experimenting to see where its own excrement could stick to.

    their productivity is measured in games they can make per month, they have to monitor and see what shit could grab attention anywhere and replicate it as fast as they can. no creativity whatsoever and the gameplay must be preferably loopable so that it shows better in ads/you can automatically generate a crap ton of levels for more ad spots. on the slim chance that your game might have a whiff of story, working on anything besides a very basic premise (which serves its utility by being converted into direction for producing art assets) is time wasted on not working on the next game.

    the result is what you expect, word games tile matching games and those basic infinite games where there’s a ball jumping on platforms and its jumps are synced to a basic loop that can be made (and has been made) in FL studio in 5 minutes but is somehow broken into levels (for the aforementioned ad spots). if someone is bold enough they try their hand on making another supercell clone (which almost instantly fails because somehow clash of clans is still king after 12 years).

    every two weeks they meet and see which 2 or 3 games are ok enough that they can polish, insert ads and micro transactions into and push onto the market. they change their name on marketplaces every couple of months so each studio name doesn’t have more than 5 or 6 game on it. if a game gets successful enough (some idiot kids actually come back to it everyday) they assign one of the devs to it to milk it dry, basically pump out “content” and micro transaction and ads, until the audience leaves and they get back to making more games.

    and this business model is barely profitable. the mobile gaming market has been already calcified by gambling companies that have made better and more addictive products which have hooked audiences onto themselves and won’t let go. there was a golden window to grab a captive audience when smartphones were still relatively new, and that window has passed since at least the pandemic, and making money in a market where your audience is not willing to spend money on transactions is hard.



  • Roku is a pioneer in most of this crap but don’t be fooled to think that only cheap stuff is gonna have these and that somehow you are safe if you spend a lot on your TV. as it turns out high end and average TV producers would also like to squeeze the tiniest profit margins out of their consumers and if they could get away with it they would do the same.

    in fact nowadays most TVs regardless of price are actually collecting and selling your data and in the best case it’s an opt out option in the worst possible place in the menu.