It’s layers of hypocrisy. The Slop post links to one from Hamid, who took down a whole Lemmy instance, quit Lemmy and switched accounts more than once for no clear reason other than Sunshine posting about his tankie takes.

What’s with your misleading titles post to post? Where in that specific post do they cite russian media? sci-hub is a library for pirated scientific papers and such, hosted in Russia because Russia largely doesn’t care about copyright complaints from abroad. Further, I see no outright denying of anti-Semitism in the post. They’re trying to whitewash the Soviet government and possibly minimize its anti-Semitism by pointing specifically to Transnistria, but that’s quite different from your title.

The article doesn’t debunk anything whatsoever. Pointing to the CEO being Asian to counter him supporting MAGA is insane. His posts from the years prior also matter little, because every tech bro, including even Musk, positioned himself as a liberal for years and donated to all the causes until it became more convenient and profitable to side with MAGA.

Proton’s CEO essentially supported MAGA as well.

I don’t know anything about that banned user, but perhaps it’s that they didn’t want to look like the main characters of this community who essentially ban “just because” and needed something they believed would be convincing?

Their own caption says it was ChatGPT and I don’t believe it can be run locally. Either way, one of the many issues with LLMs is that they come across like a person and are convincing even when hallucinating. Couple that with the human psychology of generally taking people for their word, and you have created a perfect environment for being manipulated. Going by the linked thread, in one instance, the AI included a quote that wasn’t the exact quote. You could argue the actual comment wasn’t that different from it, but that’s more like confirmation bias. Even asking an AI to not comment on anything and just distill the provided content to the most important quotes would be affected by selection bias, but that’s not even how they used the model. They literally asked it to find what they were looking for.

Given how LLMs always try to please, asking them to find something specific is very likely to result in just that. A more neutral query would be to ask to simply summarize the history, though it’s weird that a purportedly anarchist group would be relying on a completely centralized corporate LLM in its moderation. Even then, you need to be careful not to be swayed by the LLMs suggestions and analyze each highlighted comment in an unbiased manner.

There were probably more civilians killed in Gaza compared to Ukraine, but the total number of people killed appears to exceed that in Gaza. Many people displaced as well. And Russia has a lengthy record of trying to destroy the Ukrainian culture.

For a browser that includes it opt-in, there’s no supporting of Brave if it’s kept disabled. Then if there’s no wide adoption, Mozilla may remove the code altogether. Alternatively, it may choose not to pull commits from the original repo, making it completely independent from the project run by a bigot. We’ll see.

Seems to be a hidden opt-in option at this time. Mozilla is not a role model for great behavior anyway, given their defending of Google in court driven by their partnership deal.

As I said, we don’t know the terms of their publishing contract, if any, so that would be a baseless assumption to make. I could also flip your argument and say they might not even want to sell on Steam, but feel forced to because of its monopoly power. It’s one of the points of the class action lawsuit.

I’m glad we at least have moved on from people outright denying Valve does this to defending Valve doing this.

Why did the dev have to increase the price elsewhere to “match the price”, instead of matching the price to $7 on Steam?

You’d have to ask the dev, but obviously Valve takes 30%, while the dev would get 100% on its own store. If there’s a publisher involved, and publisher contracts often cover specific platforms, the dev would get much less than 70% on Steam.

Comparing Steam to traditional stores is incorrect. Even Valve’s own argument in the same Wolfire case was that monopoly power requires a market share of 75%, which Steam exceeds.

There would be more if more people used GOG, but even so, I’m not sure I agree with your premise, because what do most people do when they want a game that’s on Steam and on GOG and even has achievements on both?

How explicit does Valve need to be for you to agree that they make the point clear? In one quote further in this thread, they say “we’d just choose to stop selling [the game]”, in another, on p. 161, they say “we’ll be ready to release [once you match the price]”, prompting the dev to raise the price from $7 to $14 elsewhere. It’s highly anticompetitive because it prevents other platforms from competing on price. Great discounts are instrumental as well, as noted by OP’s very article.

Their tactics including not only threats to delist but also threats to reduce visibility does not make it any better. If those numerous examples aren’t crystal clear about the former, here’s another quote from Valve (page 18 here):

“We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market—so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours . . . .”

When you say “undercutting the sale”, I don’t know what you mean. They are talking about developers setting lower prices outside Steam, which Valve obviously sees as a disadvantage to Steam. Your DLC example also does not make sense and I don’t see that on the list. For a few of the quotes on the list, the type of parity is marked as content, but the overwhelming majority are related to price parity.

Did you look at the page I pointed to? It’s done irrespective of Steam key use. Look at the “Type of Product” column.

Funny because they absolutely use those tactics even to this day. Among other things, they go around and tell developers not to set lower prices or discounts elsewhere if they want to be on Steam (see page 160 here).

GOG’s market share being around 1% compared to Steam’s 80% only proves the point that no amount of great features or love by gamers is enough to challenge the monopoly.

Yeah, I’d stay away from anything Brave if possible. It may be open source, but it’s run by a bigot who funds political causes that strip people of their rights.

The “30% is the industry standard” claim is not even true anymore. Epic currently takes 0% to expand its catalog, though from what I remember, it estimated that it needs to take 7% or so to be profitable. Microsoft takes 12%. Itch allows to adjust. GOG’s fee varies from deal to deal. Ubisoft (and EA) no longer sell third-party games, so they’re out of scope here.

The only way I’ve seen people try to counter this is by referring to the mobile and console store fees, but going by the Epic v. Google trial where the jury was asked to define the market and defined it as Android, there’s just no way that argument would hold water. Still, console manufacturers produce at a loss, so they need to make up for that. In the mobile market, Google is already changing its fee to be 20% or less.

Edit: lawsuit->trial