Ending slavery doesn’t reset everything back to zero. Imagine if you’re running a race against someone else. The person officiating the race (no clue what this kind of person is called 😅) lets your opponent start running the race and keeps you back at the start line. Then, they have a moment of clarity and say to themselves, “Wait a second… This isn’t fair!” So, they stop that person where they are, apologize to you, say they promise never to do it again, and blow the whistle so that you can both start the race.

But wait! That person still ended up starting way ahead! But we already ended head starts before the race started so it’s OK, right? Well, no, because the person who got the head start still got to start from their advantaged position.

But this isn’t quite the same because your issue crosses generations. So, a better analogy might be a relay race. Maybe the head start is stopped just as the second person on the opposing team receives the… thing you pass in a relay race. (Why am I making an analogy to a thing I know nothing about? 😅) They didn’t personally get the head start. So, it’s OK to go ahead and start the race now with one relay team already on their second runner while the other is on their first, right? It wouldn’t be fair to punish that person who didn’t directly gain the advantage of the head start.

Well, no, because that team still got an advantage and the other team still started at a disadvantage. Reparations are less about punishing an individual and more about leveling a playing field.

These “categories” are only superficially the same thing. Here’s what social/casual games and PC/console games have in common:

• Both show (usually) moving images to a player
• Both accept input that is (usually) reflected through an impact on the game’s outcome

Here’s a couple of things that are very different:

• social/casual games monetize by letting you pay to make the game less bad or by preying on psychology. PC/console games monetize by dangling the promise of some kind of experience you couldn’t otherwise have.
• social/casual games are useful for destroying time. PC/console games are useful to stoke imagination and elicit emotions.

I know I’m being reductive here, but I think the point is valid. They’re superficially the same but used for very different purposes. Putting them side-by-side on a chart like this is like comparing revenue across all car makers and determining that, because McLaren made $280 million in 2020 while Kia made $44 billion, sports cars are going away soon.

If McLaren did go away, the McLaren driver is not going to replace the McLaren with a Kia, because those are not the same thing, even though they are in the same way that a pair of scissors and a Hattori Hanzo sword are both blads, or maybe in the same way that both brass knuckles and a bazooka are weapons even though one cannot replace the other. If Baldur’s Gate 3 were never released, I wouldn’t have dumped my $60 into Fortnite skins because I’m looking for something particular out of a game. My goal isn’t just to burn $60 on anything that shows me moving pictures and maps my inputs onto those pictures. Those attributes of a video game may be what make it a video game, but they aren’t the attributes that will make me enjoy it or want to spend money on it.

If McLaren and all sports car makers go away, most of the money spent on those is not going to funnel into compact cars. It’s going to stay in people’s pockets. $280 million dollars doesn’t hold a candle to $44 billion… but someone is going to want to take that $280 million! So, someone will probably keep making sports cars… just like someone will probably keep making the games that will take the remaining ~$73 billion slice of the video games pie.

Some public companies may jump ship to chase the social/casual dollars… but these are the companies that have been trying to blur the lines anyway (think EA), so we’re really not losing much. The talent who delivered PC/console games we used to enjoy from EA have mostly moved on to other studios or to form their own studios so they can keep making what they like.

Reddit can’t be divorced from the leadership. If you hate the direction leadership is taking Reddit, how can you still like Reddit itself? What is it apart from that?

This argument makes more sense to me with Lemmy. Yes, if you hate the direction one instance admin is taking their Lemmy instance, it doesn’t make sense to hate Lemmy as a whole… but Reddit has only one “instance,” so if you hate the “admin,” you hate Reddit.

In my experience, I’ve come across a factor that I don’t think has been mentioned here. When a lawsuit goes to trial, that means a judge has to do work. When a lawsuit settle, other people are doing the work. (Some) judges don’t want to work, so they will do everything they can to force you out of your courtroom into the waiting arms of mediators who will charge you hundreds of dollars an hour to try to settle the case. Surfing the internet is more fun than working, and part of the privilege of being a judge is that you can force people to stop making you work.

Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack

You’ve seen for yourself that it does have a significant effect. You may not want the largest instance because that paints a big target on you. You also need to pick an instance with admins you can trust, or at least reconcile yourself to jumping ship to another instance if they do the wrong thing.

I started on lemmy.ml about a year before the reddit exodus. It was fine, and I didn’t use it much because there wasn’t much activity. I started using Lemmy more heavily when everyone came over… but at the same time, performance at lemmy.ml became horrible. They also disabled community creation because “(they) have enough communities.” What does that even mean? I still haven’t created any communities, but I would like to be able to if I choose to.

I ended up jumping ship to another instance I’m happy with so far… but I almost went to vlemmy first, which no longer exists. That would have had an affect on my experience.

If I were evaluating an instance today, I would start by scrolling to the bottom of the page to see what version they’re on. Is it the latest? That means the admins are engaged at least enough to keep the software updated. If not, you should probably move on. Are they on a pre-release version? If so, are you comfortable with a little instability to have bleeding edge features and fixes? Then, I would just poke around a little to see how performance is on the instance before creating an account. Is it acceptable? Read the server sidebar. Are you OK with the rules? Last, I would find the support or “meta” community for the instance. See what kinds of discussions are happening there. Are the mods and admins active and are they philosophically aligned with you? Are problems being fixed? What are the big announcements? Does the way the server is being managed make sense to you?

Amsterdam made the transition away from car-centric in a much shorter time.

Drop will continue to operate independently

In the case of an acquisition, this sentence always has an implied “for a little while” at the end of it.

Ah, that’s a good point. Hadn’t thought of it.

It’s a 2023 Lenovo Legion 7i. I’m not aware of a feature like this on it, but maybe I just haven’t discovered it yet.

MacBooks don’t have any vents on the bottom, so it seems it would actually be safe to use them on your lap.

Even if you can’t cover the whole thing with your legs, I assume they’re designed for those vents to be entirely uncovered.

I would love to use mine on my lap… if not for the intake on the bottom. I’m traveling, so I don’t have a lot of control over what furniture I have access to as I move from place to place.

I’m a long-time PC gamer but first time gaming laptop (“notebook?”) owner. I’m traveling at the moment, so I had to ditch my desktop for the laptop. Mine is still fairly portable so I’m often tempted to use it on my lap… but I’m always afraid to cover those vents so I’m left scrambling looking for something in my hotel room or AirBNB that would approximate a lap desk. 😅

I’ve been baffled by this design decision. Thanks for the context. It makes a bit more sense now.

How does it help though when the user inevitably uses it on their lap and covers those vents?

Every movement, subculture, whatever is just about fashion for 98% of the people involved. Fashion is easy. Values are hard.

Because they own the content and control over how it is distributed. They chose to grant it to reddit, and you have decided that also grants you a license, although it actually doesn’t. You are taking it anyway which violates their rights to control their content and who may distribute it.

I agree with you that the users are being exploited by Reddit, but that doesn’t mean that we can come in and further exploit them in the interest of trying to avenge them. That should be (and legally is) their choice to do or not to do.

And I also agree with you that the exploitation is the issue. The API stuff just shined a light on it (or should have anyway, but I also agree that it became just a footnote in the story).

Back in the days of shopping malls, you could travel and go to a mall in any city, and it would be virtually the same as a mall in any other city: same stores, same (or similar) restaurants in the food court, same teenagers trying desperately to impress each other… all shoved into a slightly different layout. It was kinda bleak. One reason we don’t just copy our content from somewhere else is that we don’t want to re-create this nightmare hellscape on the internet, where every new social network is a slightly different skin on the same content.

Lemmy is not Reddit. Please let Lemmy continue to not be Reddit. If you want to fuck Reddit, do it by not going to Reddit. Reddit doesn’t own the content, but the contributors do. (Read section 5 of the Reddit terms of use; when you post on Reddit, you retain ownership of your content and grant Reddit license to it.) When you repost their content without permission, you’re not fucking Reddit; you’re fucking them.

I think it just made more sense to make a user’s username link back to a profile containing their bio rather than appending that bio to the bottom of every post. More economical in terms of space utilization and leads to higher signal-to-noise ratio in the thread.