Good luck figuring out how to avoid labeling every game ever made as a “skinner box”. It’s basically a jaded person’s definition of what video games are at their core.

If you value your time, you wouldn’t be playing video games at all. As they are nearly an entertaining way to waste time.

All games waste either time, money, or both. So I guess we just have to make video games illegal now. Oh well. Was fun while it lasted.

Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.

I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.

The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.

Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.

But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.

How about we focus on that issue first?

But both are gambling.

Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.

People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.

That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No froo-froo symbolism, just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal.

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I can’t believe anyone would approve it to begin with…

The main reason it didn’t face as much resistance is how far behind Sony (and IMO Nintendo) Microsoft is in this console generation. And the merger was still really close to not happening at all despite there being no chance that it turns MS into anything resembling a monopoly.

And since AB isn’t really a platform in the same way Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo are it’s not as though it’s directly reducing competition in that market.

And blocking the merger also benefits the market leader in the space.

And MS is a US company, while Sony isn’t (which matters in the context of the FTC).

I would argue it is silly, regardless of the explanation. Every culture has silly things, but that doesn’t make them somehow not silly.

Can’t believe this actually happened.

I don’t think I’ve had a Pixel phone that survived much past the two year mark. They’ve all had various issues, either problems with the battery/charging or just dying altogether.

I still use them because you can get them for cheaper than most phones, but “longer lasting” is the last adjective I would use for them.

If the carriers it supports have poor or no reception where you live, it’s not really any specific person’s problem unless you somehow think that an individual is going to come with a solution on their own. Which seems excessive.

To be fair, didn’t it eventually come out that pretty much everyone was cheating? VW just got caught first.

Which other manufacturers were cheating?

You might think Epic is a terrible corporation. But their ability to affect meaningful change on your daily life is effectively non-existent. Unless you are making a living being a Steam evangelist or something.

But Google has a massive amount of control over the internet. Between search, Android, Maps, ads, Gmail, etc. The level of “terribleness” they can approach vastly overshadows even the most evil stances Epic could take.

So, this “both sides are bad” take is a bit ridiculous.

How thoroughly was this tested? Because you can summarize a lot of these types of timing differences with one word.

Caching.

And from my experience people tend to overlook this when running casual tests like this.

Who is maintaining all these “unused” devices that you will want working pretty consistently? Who is responsible for replacing hardware when it dies? Who is looking into it when someone stops receiving messages? What happens when the person hosting thousands of users just stops wanting to do it? Who migrates these accounts?

Frankly, your argument sounds more like wishful thinking than anything practical. You’ve basically described the plan as “Magically some devices in someone’s basement will suddenly start running a messaging service, maintenance free, from now until the end of time”.

How does does decentralization avoid the costs that Signal laid out in the blog posts?

Decentralization is expensive too judging by some of the sentiment I’ve seen around running Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin instances.

I seriously doubt it.

I wasn’t the one judging someone for posting complaints on the internet, while posting a complaint on the internet.

We’re all here “wasting time”.

And they’re still wrong because not everyone is motivated by money.

How many working people are doing it not because of the money but solely because they enjoy the work?