DarkThoughts

I'd vote for Project Zomboid but that wasn't even nominated. Steam Awards are just a joke / popularity contest.

I think harassment is probably more appropriate, unless said metaverse somehow allows the sexual assault of avatars, which I don't think exists. I mean, IIRC Second Life technically has sex animations but afaik you have to strictly opt into that stuff. People can't just go around and use your avatar for it and even then it would be the question why she went into such a place & features if she didn't wanted to.

That'd be a Tesla truth though.

A few tens of thousand of people. We can see that through the statistics of active monthly users since then. I think many just left Reddit though, but unfortunately not enough. But still, if I look at the content and comments through RedReader it feels all kinda different there. Even more reposts than before, much more bot comments than before, much less comments overall and /r/all just looks different because many previously big subs are not really there anymore, while a lot of more niche subs suddenly appear frequently. It sometimes also feels more toxic with al lthe disinfo and insults but that might just be because a lot of the moderate people left. So the lack of sane comments puts an extra highlight on the shit stains of Reddit.

It's even worse. It only works based on your IP address. If you sit behind a VPN it shows you the weather data of your VPN's server location... You can add custom locations, but you cannot default them to be used within the little weather widget. So it keeps showing me the weather and temperatures somewhere in Sweden, which are vastly different from the ones here in Germany. It's completely idiotic and I just don't understand why this is a thing.

It's like "jaywalking". It purely exists to bully and discriminate against pedestrians and declare the streets belong to the cars. That's what you get when you have big ass corporations do the lobbying.

That was the only appealing thing. The cartoon look and oversized single units not so much. It looked like a mobile game for little children.

I really can't afford Paradox titles. Already tried with Cities Skylines and Stellaris and failed miserably. It's just too much.

We got a very different game then what Will Wright was originally showing in 2005 anyway, which looked way more interesting of a direction than the actual game.

But I'm done with EA since Origin, which was the last straw of bullshit I could take.

I look forward to Ara: History Untold. Seems to be the most promising 4X of this type.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues, which are definitely the main problems here, it isn't just users that behave differently. I've got several bans on Reddit that were literal bullshit, like saying a fascist Italy should be kicked out of NATO and the EU. Apparently this is "spreading hate", worthy of a permanent ban, despite the fact that both institutions require democratic foundations for their member states. Mods and admins are just as ridiculous, be it out of malice or simply incompetency. And once you're banned, there's nothing you can do. You can try to appeal but those are in almost all cases denied too.

But it also goes very much against the basic principles on what the internet was founded on. If we put some heavy identifiable restrictions onto internet accessibility then that's a very powerful tool of oppression. Maybe you trust you current government enough to handle that, right now. I personally don't. But even then, you never know what the next one will do. Tools of oppression like this, or AI based surveillance, could strangle any sort of meaningful resistance before it even gains the slightest bit of traction. Just look at how many far right governments had been gaining votes or even got into power over the last decade. Do you really trust those people to handle such tools with the needed responsibility?

That's a fucking boomer shirt if I ever saw one.