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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2025

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  • It’s not a trick. Just like eating sugar, or drinking alcohol etc. you need to have the self awareness to say “hey I’m indulging too much in this and this is not good for me, let me take a break”.

    I think my first post on lemmy was about the necessity of limiting algorithms on social media. So I’m in favor of that. But even before social media people were getting addicted to online interaction, like I have met people that have told me they were addicted to chatrooms in the 90s and early 2000s. So even if you do limit the power of the algorithm you’ll still have people glued to their screens scrolling for hours.


  • For every issue there is someone absolving individuals of responsibility. Either people have brains and can be responsible or they are brainless and can’t have responsibility. If it’s the latter then I think we should structure society in such a way that people can’t have free will because they clearly cannot be responsible for their choices.

    Edit: every time I’m spending more time than I should on social media I just turn on an app like JOMO and in a week the problem is solved. Techbros do it, they call it screen fasting or some shit like that.





  • I mean my problem is that they didn’t learn from Fallout 4 and furthermore they went and doubled down on it in the worst ways possible. Radiant quests on FO4 were kinda lame, but at least I can say that they sent you into unique dungeons. In Starfield no only are the quests repeated but also the locations. It’s a huge step back.

    On the positive end though I do have to say that the Faction quest for the Federation (I don’t remember the name) is one of the best quests lines Bethesda has written hands down. It felt like it could have been the main quest all by itself.


  • Wait until you realize that there’s like 5 dungeons and they are literally copy pasted all over the galaxy. Not like Oblivion were the rooms were copy pasted but had different mobs in it etc. These are literally the same dungeons, some of them even have a little narrative told through terminals, and not even that changes.

    I used to be a Bethesda fan and a huge Todd apologist, but he’s literally out of touch with what made his games good for the core audience and instead panders to the audience who buys games based on the laundry list of features they never get to see because they don’t finish or play games after the hype is dead one week later.

    It’s a shame because they actually got a lot of things right like going back to the TES conversation style, and having actual builds and the ship building which is pretty cool.

    My last hope is that they actually learn the lesson with this game and stop this bullshit they’ve been trying to pull of since Arena of having endless content.


  • I gave the only instance in which piracy is permissible in the comment you replied to. When there are arbitrary restrictions on how and where you can consume the content that you purchased. But a purchased must have had happened, because that’s what entitles you to access to the content. That’s literally the only instance in which piracy is valid. I’ve seen all the other arguments and they really don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny because games, movies and books are not necessities and you are not entitled to access to anyone’s work while everyone is entitled to price their work however they like. If you want access to the content you pay what the gatekeeper is asking for, and if the content is not good enough for you to pay for it then surely it isn’t good enough for you to spend the most valuable resource that you have on it which is time.



  • I’m not pretending anything, I never stated that marketing pretends to present products as they factually are. Look selling a product that no one wants is really fricking hard, no matter how much budget you have. So in order for something to sell well, people most have already wanted it. It must solve a problem, increase productivity or just fill the daddy shaped holes in their hearts, but they must want it and they cannot be truly manipulated into buying it unless you flat out lie, which is not really a good model on which to build a long term company on.

    All I’m saying is that if marketing convinces people to buy a shiny poop they are in all the freedom to do so. But marketing never had the ability to manipulate people into buying something for which there is no desire. The shiny poop might fulfill some inner desire of the masses, who cares? They wanted it, they got it.


  • Comparing opioids to a truck or a phone is wild. I guess if opioids was something you could just walk into a store and buy without a prescription you would be somewhat right but that hasn’t been the case in a long time. The situation you describe is more about physical availability than mental availability which I think is more to the point of what we are discussing here but sure I can concede that rugged phones being less visible than the sleeker phones leads to them being purchased less often. But again, Samsung once had a mainline galaxy phone that was rugged and it didn’t do well, so maybe people really don’t want an ugly brick of a phone and want what is more aesthetically pleasant.

    Let me put it this way, if you do not trust that people can make good purchase decisions. Why do we allow people to make any decisions at all? Much less participate in things so important like democracy?

    Your line of thinking, that of removing completely the responsibility of the individual in a free market dynamic will necessarily take you to one or two conclusions depending on what you value more: we accept that the masses will not necessarily make the best choices available but they are absolutely free to make said choices, or that we should divide society between enlightened and non enlightened and the enlightened will dictate how the non enlightened will live because obviously these monkeys need guidance in order to make good decisions.

    I flip flop between one or the other, but I always settle in the former because I can’t guarantee that I won’t be lumped with the monkeys.


  • Is the marketing department putting a gun to your head to force you to buy anything?

    I have worked in marketing, and I have a very good, almost academic understanding of it. One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that you cannot create a desire for a product, you can only create products that satisfy a desire. The big trucks are not there because the corporations forced the people to buy them, they are there because the people wanted to buy them and monkeys that we are as soon as we see many big trucks we also want one. There are small trucks in the market. They don’t sell as well as the big trucks. It’s simple free market dynamics and I really hate this pov because it makes it seem as though the corporations dictate what people want when it has always been the other way around.

    The real disconnect is that you as an individual are alienated from the wants of the mass market, and this is all too common in online communities because guess what? People who spend time on discussion boards online do not think like the average person. Thankfully as barriers to entry dissolve even in markets like car manufacturing which used to be huge, we start getting more diversity of products, some of them tailored to niche buyers like yourself. But you cannot ask that these products be supported at the same level as the product that 80% of the people want, you have to live with the tradeoffs.






  • If you like Apple devices you also know they are opinionated. Sure there’s no reason not to allow X or Y thing on it, but if it requires dev time why would Apple invest on something that they do not see as a priority for the device? The iPad is not aimed at developers or engineers it’s aimed at creatives and board room executives. I know many tattoo artists that use it, they have 0 complaints about the device. I know it’s widely used by illustrators as well.

    And yea it’s true Android has had all those features for ages, but who gives a fuck like I said? The apps are not there and no one wants an android Tablet because of it. If those features were so good and so better than what the iPad offers people would be ditching their iPads for Android tablets, but that’s not what happens at all.