EldritchFeminity

Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their "ecosystem" of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you're "invested."

I really don't understand how people use Instagram. I've tried, but it's about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don't follow, it's not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it'll show me about 40 posts before saying "You're all caught up from the past 3 days!" and then refuse to show me any more.

I guess this is why I'm here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I'd rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.

There's a much better correlation between wealth and conservatism than age. Almost like those who begin to benefit from the system of oppression are incentivesed to keep it going.

And the human implementation is why people have been arguing with you this whole time. Because he wasn't executed using proper asphyxiation like that suicide pod (not that execution in itself is morally acceptable anyways), they just slapped a mask on him that was hooked up to a tank of nitrogen.

Even the people watching it found it traumatic because he struggled and thrashed pretty much the whole time.

I forgot about the whole MSI furry arc

Except they're not filtering out the carbon dioxide, so you're suffocating in a mix of your own exhalation plus the nitrogen.

Maybe read the part where the dude struggled for 8 minutes before he finally died.

True

So, how long until the Republicans start calling for this in the US?

Yes. That's the remnants of a massive hurricane that just pushed through Florida. Hurricanes sometimes bring salt water with them in the form of rain many miles away from the coast. When I was very young, there was one time where there was a massive hurricane here that was bad enough that we were evacuated, and when we came back, the glass door at my dad's office was covered in so much salt that it looked like frosted glass. And that office was miles away from the beaches.

This is basically the only time those idiots with the "Salt Life" stickers hundreds of miles from the coast will see salt water.

Since when is 8 minutes of fighting against your restraints and desperately gasping for air "a very short time period?"

Being strangled to death with a piece of rope would take less time than that. A proper chokehold with your bare hands to deny oxygen to the brain would've killed him in about a minute.

I didn't mean that Ubisoft's was better than Steam - just better than Epic's store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.

As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn't exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.

The big reason I think we don't see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam's biggest competitors are the consoles, and that's largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.

Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).

A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn't like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn't offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn't even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.

B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service's website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would've been more willing to give it a chance.

Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?