sailsperson

Starfield is a classic case of some misleading marketing on purpose, and, well, it just falls into the perpetually doomed category of games/media that will always suffer from extremely high expectations: sci-fi/space/cyberpunk. The imagination wanders especially far with games like these, and there’s little to none us, the consumers, and they, the devs and publishers, can ever do about it.

That being said, you’re right in not praising the game. It’s a niche fun in my opinion, and only shines if you take it for what it is, but not for what it seemed to have been marketed as.

TL;DR Stafield is a Bethesda game through and through, but with a coating some Microsoft PG-13 “play it safe” attitude.

Microsoft will likely do fuck all and have us all rely on third-party solutions.

Also, Zuck can point to us feddies not wanting to federate with him, and say “see? Interoperability is pointless, even the geeks don’t want it”. Which is oddly accurate…

I think the easiest counter-argument here is healthy disagreement.

Being exposed to multiple opinions is undoubtedly important and is far, far better for us all in the long run than only limiting ourselves to only those opinions and views we already share or at least like, but having an option to wall somebody off on an Internet platform has its benefits, too, like not actually wasting your time in endless and fruitless arguments. As great as it would for everyone to be able to have a healthy and productive conversation about the differences in their views, it simply isn’t wise to honestly expect that from everyone.

Besides, having two opposing ideas communicate on the same platform is not what the fediverse is for - not exclusively for sure. It’s the freedom to self-host and self-regulate places dedicated to specific things to various degrees: lemmy.world, for instance, is wide and large and encompasses many things at once, and has an option to federate and communicate with smaller, more niche communities and vise versa, while letting the users open a single account with either.

Otherwise it’s just the old Facebook formula of encouraging opposing views to constantly clash for the sake of engagement. That’s just not real, not healthy, and only exists for the purpose of being some sort of KPI in a corporation perpetually hungry for money and influence. So yeah, we don’t want that.

Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they’ll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there’s rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.

I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I’m sure many people here know such people as well, so it’s more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it’s nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.

The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I’d imagine that living with me through the years when they’re developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.

Maybe I’ll regret that decision when it’s already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.

De-juro, US already uses metric - there’s samples and document and stuff like that, just like in other countries. This makes it even more peculiar, because it’s just the people that aren’t willing to drop some old system that they brought from the colonial British Empire with them back in the day; you’d think it only makes sense, with all the freedom and independence tendencies, but somehow the archaic measuring system from the monarch is still vigorously beloved and defended by millions… even though they’ve declared independence from the monarch a couple of centuries ago.

We live in a weird world.

Not to whitewash the take, but it’s a bigger issue.

The idea of success and being big meaning nearly the same as being relevant are the true villains of the story here. Every business wants to go big, every businessperson wants to make more, every platform wants to aggregate more and more content, etc. The people making the most impactful decisions in companies are plagued with these ideas and lead their businesses in the opposite direction, while staying blind to the alternatives, no matter how small, because they believe that the fact that their users are fleeing to smaller places is a joke, a temporary inconvenience, or a failure.

But it’s not, truly.

Kbin and Lemmy and Mastodon and Calckey are, indeed, smaller platforms than Reddit and Twitter are, with less content and fewer people, but the fact of the matter is that is a considerable amount of people that fled both Reddit and Twitter for good in favor of smaller, to some “less relevant” platforms. The effect is the same - less traffic for Reddit and Twitter, less influence from these two, less ad revenue.

I don’t want to sound like I truly believe that CEOs and other exec-level people are stupid and make decisions based on ego and simple solutions (like looking at numbers and judging nothing but the numbers), but hell, it does feel like humanity, as a whole, is not perfectly capable of properly functioning at the scale we’re trying to function at right now. Smaller companies are more sensible and have higher net profit margin, smaller communities are often safer and more welcoming (on top of being more manageable, too), smaller projects are easier to keep track of and deliver with more satisfying results, etc. Execs don’t seem like the type of people to even consider these simple facts, instead opting for being the bigger fish with the bigger wallet and market share.

Maybe that’s just me feeling increasingly less comfortable about anything that is sized to unmanageable degrees, thus just seeing things… but then again, that’s the tendencies we’ve seen time and time again in this late stage capitalism, with synergy becoming the same good ol’ monopoly, while the common folk begrudge another “mall”, its policies, and their results.

Tell me about it! I swear they have been making adjustments to their algorithms for the past months year.

Before thee protest, I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed at the content Reddit decides to show me. The subs I chose to follow are all great and often offer something engaging in the best ways possible, and finding a good piece of content there has never been an issue… expect for the past time, where I got what felt like pre-digested and advertiser-friendly posts that I was supposed to maybe vote on and keep scrolling.

I understand that business is about money, but seeing tech largely following the same practices and strategies just to keep pumping cash for execs to liquidate is so mind-numbing and obnoxious. That’s gonna sound stupid, but sometimes I wish the tech people would just kick the finance people out of the field and do their own thing, which is what the average people like, too, simply because that’s the conditions when really cool and enjoyable shit is born.

Or maybe we all should just collectively pile up some cash buy some land, build ourselves a self-sustainable settlement and get away from the hungry execs.