Super Mario 64 on my switch. Reminds me of great childhood memories.

Enshittification had already been largely discussed here.

I saw users minimizing the aberrant business practices of Meta and doubting their role in assisting in genocide.

My point was to highlight how unethical and horrendous Meta itself is.

For the Meta apologists, I have a reality check for you:

Threads was immediately subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta’s information-harvesting practices. [1]

Threads was marketed to be open to ‘free speech’ (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3] They also fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads’ launch. [1]

As already established, Meta also assisted in genocide! [4]

Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [5], [6]

This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information.[7] Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads…

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. [8] Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

• Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

• Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

• Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

• Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

• Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

• Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design. [9]

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/

Edit: In case you need more citations for why Meta is a worthless and unethical company…

I have the same approach of browsing all and blocking what I don’t want as I come across it. Which in my case, happens to be mostly anime and shitposting communities.

I hadn’t noticed until the posts were weeks old, so I didn’t want to dig thru the mod log…

i don’t know why they “trust me” dumb fucks

Real quote from Mark Fuckerburg.

yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard just ask i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

That’s precisely why I left L.W. They also were removing community posts voicing opposition to threads federation. I witnessed it firsthand, where posts I commented in (and in which the majority of comments opposed it) were removed.

Now they removed the piracy communities again after promising not to. They are straight up untrustworthy and don’t care about what their users actually want.

I am happy on feddit.de. They are defederated from Threads and the tankie instances.

Yeah lemmy.ml has gotten worse with tankies, but it’s no where near as bad as the others. And I still want to see some lemmy.ml communities (tech, gaming).

But unless it’s changed with some of the recent updates, blocking instances as a user (on lemmy) only blocks posts from the instance but still allows interaction with their users in comments of posts. It’s different for kbin and mastodon.

I don’t want the annoyance of arguing with tankies from their main instances. I’d rather be defederated.

Also, why go back to lemm.ee and do that when I don’t need to on feddit.de? That seems kind of silly in the first place.

I’m happy on feddit.de, as they are really only defederated from the tankies and Threads.

I left L.W when they federated with Threads and tried lemm.ee, but dealing with the tankies is so annoying I had to find another new home and settled for feddit.de.

Absolutely. I cannot fathom how people can justify Hamas’ terrorism or Isreal’s genocide.

I’ve condemned both groups since the beginning and support only the innocent civilians being starved, tortured, and slaughtered.

The ones with more melanin who look different. Too easy.

I don’t disagree with you that it’s the product of racism and discrimination. But the terror attacks also fuel that hate.

I can say the same thing about the consequences of my (US) country’s actions in the ‘war on terror.’ We’re the greatest contributing factor to the formation of ISIS. The casualties of our drone strikes alone (from Bush, Obama, and trump) were vastly civilian targets.

Whether it’s politically/religiously motivated drone strikes on civilians, bombs in subways, or knife attacks, those actions spawn further fear, hate, intolerance, and extremism.

Even though Italy is enacting racist policies/systems, they are able to gather support for/‘justify’ their actions due largely to the terror attacks throughout Europe.

I think it just might have to do with the history of Islamic terror attacks…

Such as the London bombings and bridge attack, Charlie Hebdo attack and the more recent stabbings in France, the Madrid train bombings which killed 193 people, the November 2015 Paris attack in which 130 were murdered, the 2016 Atatürk Airport attack in Turkey which left 45 dead, the 2016 Brussels bombings, just to name a few…

I’m not suggesting that all or even most Islamic individuals are dangerous/terrorists. But there is a long, bloody history of Islamic extremism throughout Europe.

I’m also not suggesting this justifies these bans in Italy whatsoever. I share this because it’s essential context to answer your question.

The Half Life mod Earth’s Special Forces will forever be the GOAT to me.

Couldn’t find a good gameplay video. But man that was kickass with other players or even just bots.

A little of Column A, a little of Column B…

(Want to clearly point out that innocent Palestinians are the ones being slaughtered; not Hamas terrorists.)

It takes time and experience to distinguish what makes something good or bad or just average.

Well maybe some day you’ll have enough experience to distinguish good games. You’re clearly not there just yet.

I liked it more than Ratchet and Clank too, but Jack and Daxter was my jam.

I replayed the original just a few years ago and it still holds up so well…

The far-right movement has been spreading around the world… It’s perhaps most on display in the US right now, but it is a global threat.

I was just thinking I want a list of russia’s senior officers with the dead scratched out for visual representation. Their losses are insane…

I was just thinking about the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards given to US troops, and that if there was one for russia, I feel like half the deck would be dead officers by now.