That’s a great point about the poster and the contest, I’d never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn’t think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.

Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker’s logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.

I agree with you that it’s a complicated issue with no right answer and I don’t think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don’t think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.

This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can’t remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren’t just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they’re ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn’t make those views okay. Because they’re super fuckin’ racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that’s not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth preserving so that we don’t lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the “better days” or something.

As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera “Mix it Up” posters of the girl with the giant “package” under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that’s the point. They’re intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people’s bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.

There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler’s bunker had been. But even then, it’s vital to preserve that past so it can’t be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can’t happen again. We can’t learn from our mistakes if there’s no evidence that they even happened.

There’s a great video on this that was made when YouTube first started rolling this out called The Cobra Effect: Why Anti-Adblock Policies Could Hurt Revenue Instead, and one of the points mentioned in the video is the rising number of people who use an adblocker, and not specifically mentioned but shown in the video is a graphic from an article from 2015 which shows that just under 43% of people use an adblocker. That number will have obviously changed in the past 7 years, but if we just use 25% of viewers as an estimate, that’s 25% of all viewers on YouTube who may turn to more “malicious” forms of adblocking such as things like AdNaseum and ReVanced or sites that host YouTube videos without the ads, and tell others to do the same if they’re sick of ads. And even if they do give up and watch the ads, the science says that people who use adblockers are much less likely to click on an ad and make a purchase, which is bad for advertisers since they pay for the number of views an ad gets and their clickthrough rate would go down, making it more expensive and less profitable to do business with YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0

For me, it’s more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It’s a very case by case basis for me.

I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money’s worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.

On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.

Steam doesn’t let you actually rate a game; only recommend it or not. So, a game may be a 7/10, but if people can’t recommend it for something like its monetary practices or frequent bugs/crashes, then it can end up on that list. That low rating doesn’t necessarily mean people think it’s the worst game on Steam, but rather that only about 10% of players think it’s worth playing. Though, it’s also worth mentioning that it has something like a 1.2 rating on Metacritic. It’s generally considered a worse game than its predecessor in many aspects (including the readability of its characters, apparently. I guess they made some changes to the original characters’ models that made them less identifiable?), and the reasoning behind shutting down the first one for this new free to play model was canceled. It’s also been having issues with player attrition leading up to the Steam release, so the complaints don’t seem unwarranted, but this probably wouldn’t be happening if these players had some other outlet for their grievances.

Even if you buy a physical copy of Overwatch 1 in a store, when you pop it in your system, it’ll install Overwatch 2 instead.

This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.

If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.

There’s a flaw in your logic around people’s preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn’t be expected to give up what they want from a service. They’ll just go somewhere else if they aren’t getting the services they want.

It’s like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody’s going to put up with that. They’ll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn’t make that a good service model.

Now, I’m not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they’re looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy’s communities to specific servers going down.

In a similar vein, any game that forces your camera slightly upwards while you’re going somewhere drives me up a wall. Like, I’m sure the devs want to show off the pretty world they made, but I want to avoid tripping over the rock right in front of me!