But if you understood what they were trying to say as you said you did, you would understand they’re not claiming that is de facto what NK is. They’re just saying what NK is on paper. Even sham governments frequently live in the shadow of legitimacy cast by what their system does on paper and still follow protocol even if parameters are tightly controlled for a certain outcome. So a lot of this could have been avoided by not fighting that premise and reiterating your point differently. Such as with Xi, you did not mean to deny he wasn’t elected by the NPC instead of the people, but you wanted to deny the legitimacy of the entire process including the NPC. So say that instead of denying the former. “Even if he’s indirectly elected, the process as a whole is a sham.” or “You’re right, he is indirectly elected. But that doesn’t change my point, the legitimacy of that election is also a sham.”, and none of this would have been necessary.

You say that, but you also claimed out of nowhere that they said NK holds fair elections. Which they clearly didn’t. So if you aren’t misunderstanding what they’re trying to tell you - why are you putting words into their mouth and being combative?

You really should know how silly this makes you look, even to someone sharing your judgement of how democratic those processes are in NK or China. They’re just explaining how things work in the political systems of those countries objectively.

If you’re from the US - someone can explain to you how the electoral college works without making a judgement on whether or not that’s democratic or not. If you’re not from the US, many democratic systems have such mechanics like indirect appointments or indirect voting, whether good or bad.

Objective knowledge gives you the power to form better opinions and take action, including for those systems of power that you are a part of. Rejecting such knowledge unconditionally because it’s about a country you don’t like (or anything you don’t like) is incredibly self defeating in the long term. It makes you easy to manipulate.

As someone without aphantasia, I don’t always quite get it either. Reading is often a last resort medium for me, but it does have it’s place. Plain text primarily engages my narrative imagination (where is the story going) and only a little bit of visual imagination (since it’s kind of hard to convey certain things like body language in text without being very boring), while for example a video might invoke narrative, visual, and auditory imagination. Video games are even better to me, as they engage narrative, visual, auditory, and decision making imagination. It’s about stimulation to me, the more coherent the better, and books just don’t seem to stimulate enough for my imagination to kick off to where it’s enjoyable to read.

Outright bans never work with vices.

It can’t be taken 1:1. Vices being banned in the past was typically because legislators saw them as productivity drains, despite the pleasure it provided. Therefore making those bans inherently tyrannical to habitual users and certain non-users, incentivizing disobedience.

But this time, it’s being banned for a group that’s not habitually using already, meaning extraordinary reasons would require them to become habitual users in the first place. And smoking is typically not very pleasant at the start to begin with, so there’s little incentive to start. And, unlike in the past, smoking is no longer present everywhere. And of course there’s the knowledge that it will give you cancer and cut your lifespan.

There’s just not much enjoyment left, so even if 1% of those affected by the rolling ban slip through the cracks with an underground market, there isn’t the room for growth that sustains or spreads an illegal market like for eg. recreational drugs. Which is why those bans need to be enforced to perfection to have a chance to work, which they never do, and which is why they never work.

There are so many ways for people to harm themselves that we don’t need to ban because they come with severe risk to the person, so they self regulate. The only reason smoking needs that ban is because of how widespread smoking was, and so even if way less people start smoking than before, that’s still way too many people. A ban just needs to be successful at getting far less people to start, not absolutely halt every single usage, and eventually it will fade from culture on it’s own.

EDIT: Slight corrections. But kinda wild to get overly downvoted for the thing pretty much everyone else is saying in this thread, just with a little more in-depth analysis. Come out and tell me where I’m wrong, I don’t think you can.

Most if not all of the donation services allow you to use Paypal though. Ko-Fi does for sure.

OP got banned from the US news community because they made some pretty controversial statements and (from their personal PoV) questioned if MAGA cult followers exist. That’s the only community on LW they got banned from, cited as being for “rage baiting / trolling”, which yeah it very well could be, even with a benefit of doubt.

But that’s hardly an echo chamber. It’s just one community, and moderators are typically completely unaffiliated with the server and can pick and enforce their own rules, nothing stops them from making or joining another US news comm. They even boasted that blocking that comm made their feed better, so it’s not like they wanted to be there either.

You are right, when Gabe dies, that will be a huge point of uncertainty where people’s trust into Steam will need to be re-established to keep going as it currently is. But that’s a point aside.

Companies do not have to indicate when they are going to enshitify. It can and has happened over night.

It can happen, but it’s not the norm by far. Reputation is still to some companies their key indicator of profitability, and Steam is certainly one of those. By that logic you should at any time be expecting loot boxes instead of products in your supermarket tomorrow, but that’s kind of ridiculous because everyone would hop to a competitor immediately, assuming no foul play. As I mentioned, paying customers hold a firm grasp of the value of Steam. If the people stop coming to Steam, the companies do too, and Steam dies.

Kinda presumptuous to call it naive when I never said Steam couldn’t ever die, nor do I believe so. I’m saying that unlike other platforms that enshittify, paying customers hold the final say for Steam. Paying customers are why companies come to Steam, paying customers will not spend money on Steam if they even get close to enshittifying. There is no multi billion dollar ad industry in between that pays the bills, that dictates the enshittification because it demands advertisements be shoved down people’s throats.

I agree, though this was in the time when he wasn’t really crazy. But two things can be true at the same time, and I wasn’t trying to make a point in that direction. I could’ve picked other examples of developers that kept a level head, they would just be much less known and would’ve made the point harder to get across.

(Not the previous poster) The real issue is that pretty much as always when this comes up, nobody is really defending Gaben. But to some people, just pointing out that something isn’t quite logical or true, is the same as “giving them the benefit of the doubt”, because it’s doesn’t meet their sky high criteria of negativity for the subject.

The truth doesn’t matter to them, but how negative you are about it. If you’re not personally crafting the guillotine for Gaben, you are a fanboy. It’s frustrating, since I do think we all agree at the end of the day that Gabe should be held to high standards due to his wealth, and he should face incredibly scrutiny if he should tilt.

Holy shit dude, go to bed and dont text your ex.

You really need to take a good look in the mirror, because you are reading things that aren’t there and embarrassing yourself and the industry you claim to care about.

Unfortunately for your bad faith argument, I make games myself. And this kind of behaviour is absolutely detestable if you ask me. Engaging with people like this presenting yourself as someone in the industry is actively doing damage to game developers’ reputations. You aren’t automatically right for having been part in making a game once.

PC developers don’t work for Steam, they work for themselves or for a publisher. And the same massive studios that make games for consoles make them for PC too. Feel free to provide some actual stats that aren’t just your personal feeling on the topic rather than just saying “nuh-uh” while running off with the goalpost.

Challenging biased views, half truths, or having your own opinions isn’t kissing some billionaire’s ass. I don’t want billionaire’s to exist. Gabe shouldn’t need to be a billionaire. But all of this is absofuckinglutely irrelevant to whether or not Steam is a good platform, unless Gabe was wielding Steam in a way that would promote a billionaire class, which he isn’t.

Exactly. And unlike many other companies there isn’t even any indication they would want to enshittify anyways. Why would they destroy the foundation of their platform? They have actual paying customers paying the bills, not some force-feed ad slop machine.

Epic made it very clear from the start they were trying to undercut Steam, not by being better, but by paying out developers to create exclusive games for the Epic store, something extremely hated on PC. Even on Steam you can still sell your games elsewhere too.

Steam also controls the larger markets share of PC gaming. Of course they’re going to have to price themselves competitively. Because why would you pay more for a platform that has way less users and a bad reputation?

You can actually just pay an almost 0% cut by delivering directly to your customers, but that’s exactly why you use a storefront to sell your game. You go where the customers are, and they are at Steam.

BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.

It doesn’t really seem to be publicly verifiable, but if this article is to be believed, then yes. Would be kind of weird if they wouldn’t either, since selling games is their business too, and they have to compete with Steam / PC.

This isn’t really a problem though, more a consideration or trade off. If Valve’s services are worth that 30% cut, because you reach more people or don’t have to make other costs that would dwarf the cut, it’s worth it. Nobody’s forcing companies to sign up with Steam, other than indirectly because it turns out doing so is a sensible deal.

Exactly, this is the clear sign that Steam is providing actual value to both developers and players. The PC ecosystem has always had the guaranteed threat of an open platform, so you could cut out any middleman. Which is why it’s such a hostile platform to predatory middlemen. The fact this isn’t being done to Steam demonstrates them as an example of a (relatively) good middleman.

Best example of Steam being left out and still succeeding on PC - Minecraft launched in a time when Steam was already around and just said “nah, we’re good” (citing the 30% cut and concerns over monopoly status) and just went it’s own way. There are still plenty of games being created on PC without Steam in the mix, itch.io, self publishing. Steam just makes it a lot easier so many people legitimately want to use them, others don’t and can do so. And that’s how it should be!