Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences. As someone who loves to engage on trolling for a laugh online I can tell you that if you get banned for being an asshole you deserve it. I know I have.

Hence why I called it gambling.

All I read here is that there are still 8 too many live service games in development. Are execs addicted to gambling or what? Because that’s exactly what live service game development is. Also I would like to know what kind of research they are doing that indicates that more live service games is what the market wants, when people who play them rarely ever switch once they find the one they like and at this point there are entirely too many of them.

Oh I know, I’m just not a big fan of sailing the seas these days. But I might just give it a go with the ones I own just to see how they run.

Can they though? Isn’t the responsibility of porting games to Linux that of the developer? They could create a Gamepass for Linux but that would probably entail more money spent on licensing that platform, and funding ports which they certainly have no economic incentive to do.

That being said, they seem really committed to their “everything is an Xbox” strategy so it would not surprise me terribly if they ended teaming up with Valve at some point and created some kind of Gamepass on Steam thing, where you can play Gamepass games directly from steam or something, which would presumably also include the MacOS and Linux versions of the game if they are available.

I wasn’t trying to contradict them??

Right? I’ve seen a lot of people on Reddit shitting on it and I for the life of me can’t understand why. The only big issue imo is the lack of a proper sleep mode. Hopefully Microsoft addresses this issue when/if they truly build a handheld windows experience.

And yep, I’ll stick with Gamepass until enshitification runs its course. When it does then I’ll switch to SteamOS. But for now the service is still great for me.

It is literally the biggest money maker in the world. The games sell about 3/5 as many copies as COD with a tiny fraction of the budget. And then they sell even more in merch. And there are people (like me in the past) that buy Nintendo consoles just for those games.

Like I said, somewhat challenging. The new ones are brain dead easy.

The ROG Crate software is actually pretty good. It’s not perfect but I rarely have to interact with Windows at all and once you get used to the controls when doing so not all that bad. And I dislike Windows a lot, but if I feel that it’s mostly a non issue. I wouldn’t go for a SteamOS version either, as I like Gamepass.

They actively become easier and shorter every generation. Arceus brought a lot of cool stuff into the series and there was a little bit of hope that things would improve only for them to go back to the stale old formula that wouldn’t be as bad if the games weren’t so easy now that you could beat them by mashing A. I know it’s for kids but damn, the old games were somewhat challenging.

Cool for Nintendo fans but the ROG Ally has changed the game for me. I’ll miss Pokémon but they haven’t been good in a while so whatever.

Holy misinformation Batman! You don’t have to use the App store for anything on MacOS. Matter of fact many popular apps are not found in the AppStore at all.

iPhone and iPad may be walled gardens but I’ll go out on a limb here and say that MacOS is actually more open than Windows or at the very least it’s as open.

Through the discussion I’ve had here I can see that I should have been more specific and defined what kind of algorithm is the problem. But that was the point of making the post in the first place, to understand why the narrative is not moving in that direction and now I can see why, it’s nuanced discussion. But I think it’s well worth it to steer it in that direction.

Exactly my point. In lemmy I can still see all the posts, Meta’s algorithm will remove stuff from the feeds and push others and even hide comments. It is literally a reality warping engine.

I dunno, old forums were fun as fuck and they had no algorithm beyond sorting by most popular, new etc. Hey if it makes people spend less time looking at their phone it is still a win in my book— I type as I spend hours on my tablet. I’m a hypocrite, won’t lie.

I think the point of that article is closer to my own argument than what I myself would have thought. I do still think that the problem is the design of the algorithm: a simple algorithm that just sorts content is not a problem. One that decides what to omit and what to push based on what it thinks will make me spend more time on the platform is problematic and is the kind of algorithm we should ban. So maybe the premise is, algorithms designed to make people spend more time on social media should be banned.

Engaging with another idea in there I absolutely think that people should be able to say that Joe Biden is a lizard person and have that come up on everyone’s feed. Because ridiculous claims like that are easily shut down when everyone can see them and comment how fucking dumb it is. But when the message only makes the rounds around communities that are primed to believe that Joe Biden is a lizard person, the message gains credibility for them the more it is suppressed. We used to bring the Klu Klux Klan people on tv to embarrass themselves in front of all of America and it worked very very well, it’s a social sanity check. We no longer have this and now we have bubbles in every part of the political spectrum believing all kinds of oversimplifications, lies and propaganda.

The easy answer for me would be to ban algorithms that have the specific intent of maximizing user time spent on the app. I know that’s very hard to define legally. Maybe like I suggested below we can ban what kinds of signals algorithms can use to suggest and push content?

Like I said below I think the distinction is that a) I have access to a algorithm free feed here and b) lemmy (as far as I understand it) simply sorts content, rather than outright removing content from my feed if it thinks it will make me spend less time on it. I could be wrong about that second point though.

But correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not a programmer), lemmy’s algorithm is basically just sorting; it doesn’t choose over two pieces of media to show me but rather how it orders them. Facebook et al will simply not show content that I will not engage with or that will make me spend less time on the platform.

I agree that they are useful but at a certain point we as a society sometimes need to weight the usefulness of certain technologies against the potential for harm. If the potential for harm is greater than the benefit, then maybe we should somewhat curb the potential for that harm or remove it altogether.

So maybe we could refine the argument to be we need to limit what signals algorithms can use to push content? Or maybe that all social media users should have access to an algorithm free feed and that the algorithm driven feed be hidden by default and can be customizable by users?