this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Memes

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[–] [email protected] 200 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Google Chrome and "Enhanced Ad Privacy".

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 178 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 128 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Oh I'm so done with their shit.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This is a turning point and I'm here for it

~~Twitter, Reddit, Facebook~~ => Fediverse

~~Unity~~ => Godot

~~AAA Studios~~ => Indie devs

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Microsoft. They've been itching to go to a fully cloud-dependent subscription-only model for Windows for a while now.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I could've sworn that they said win 10 was going to be the last windows and it would just receive updates.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (14 children)

the surprising thing there isn't that they went back on their word, but that they said it in the first place.

Seriously, how could an OS company seriously believe they'd never need or want to release a new major version

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah then MacOS 11 came out after 20 years. The idea was to have the same version number for the dumb dumbs. It's why the Xbox 2 was called Xbox 360 so it'd match PlayStation 3, but bigger.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Enshittification

What'd Blizzard do?

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Warcraft 3 reforged, Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4, ow2, anything else?

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (11 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You forgot car companies asking for subscriptions to use your heated seats.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Why don't you pay for every damn bullet you fire in the game you fucking peasants!!??" -Unity CEO

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's EAs former CEO lmao

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thank you for poating more examples of capitalism being an absolutely miserable and abject failure at everything it claimed to do.

The entire concept of "projected growth" and "company valuations" is the opposite of a market. Extraction of value is the opposite of creation of value... And stocks have repeatedly shown themselves to be entirely unrelated to the health if the company or value of it's products..if there even is an actual product.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

I think the moon monkeys and GameStop showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that modern stock markets have absolutely nothing to do with raising capital to support entrepreneurship.

It's just a big casino, rigged so the house wins, and the only way to win is cheat the house using it's own rules.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I hear Discord is due for its enshitification.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

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!"

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Okay wait what the fuck is this picture

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

I don't know, but the guy is having a hard time.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

Forgot WotC. They sent Pinkertons after a leaker and tried to drain every last dollar out of third party creators with their OGL update.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

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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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Please somehow let YouTube/Google be next. Somehow.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Netflix... except that move is sadly paying off

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

companies want to go back to feudalism

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I heard Plex has something going on so people are switching to Jellyfin

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Companies be like:

trade offer

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Literally every top 500 company

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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