The original article that went with the picture spoke of "a new race of amazons" and calls the woman on the right, "Diana", which may be a reference to Wonder Woman (AKA Diana, Princess of the Amazons).
Yeah, Majestic was incredibly interesting because it was an attempt to create an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that was more than just a marketing campaign and could support itself financially. Its failure led to ARGs being abandoned as standalone games and ARGs mostly remained marketing which - ultimately - led to a slow, but inevitable decline of the ARG as a genre when the marketing money dried up.
They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
In that regard, you cannot make a manager understand a thing that may detrimental to the profits of the company. Because the profits decide upon the size of the manager's bonus - even if the profits are entirely fictional, only exist as a plan, a power point presentation or are pure hype for investors. So managers have a vested interest in insisting that they can circumvent regulations/disregard laws/lobby for exemptions/... in order to make more money, no matter what reality looks like.
I am shocked to hear that the company which needlessly and cruelly killed animals with their experiments, did not bother to keep records of the cruelties they committed. SHOCKED!
The week after: Google introduces AI Mail that will receive and automatically respond to all mail. This will happen without the users' consent or knowledge. In fact, users won't be able to access their mail anymore at all "for security reasons".
Yeah, I am in the same boat: I really don't understand what the outrage is all about. First off, because Mastodon is built on open standards which are 100% intended to be interoperable. Second because everyone can read a Mastodon feed that isn't private and the same goes for BlueSky accounts. Hell, BlueSky supports RSS for its feeds, so people with an RSS reader can follow BlueSky accounts without the user knowing about it.
Personally I do not trust the people behind BlueSky, but neither do I trust all the admins of Mastodon servers. There are a ton of questionable Mastodon servers out there, operated by people with very dubious motives, if not outright malicious intent.
This is incredibly funny for people who followed this. Everybody and their grandma told the European Commission that there was no way that breaking end-to-end encryption was compatible with the law. Yet they constantly pushed for it anyway and now look at this mess.
I am almost certain that the European Commission will claim that there are still ways to break end-to-end encryption, only to defeated in court yet again. Like they tried with data preservation for law enforcement purposes. They just can't stop themselves.
Lemmy not catching on and Reddit dying aren't mutually exclusive, unfortunately. I personally know quite many users who left Reddit, but never made the jump over to Lemmy, because they mostly stayed on Reddit due to particular communities. With those communities getting decimated during the APIcalypse and its fallout, they had little incentive to join Lemmy.
Ultimately my personal opinion is that Lemmy is going to persist, even if it doesn't cross certain thresholds, it is still a part of the larger Fediverse and due to its interoperability, Lemmy can benefit from the success of the Fediverse, even when not being all that successful by itself.
This is the result of a long-term, political strategy.
Anyone remember GamerGate? There has been an extreme backlash against feminism since the mid-2010s which GamerGate was a part of. (GamerGate in itself was part of a wider strategy that the far-right began to use on 4chan in the late 00s.)
Steve Bannon (then EIC at Breitbart) pushed GamerGate's anti-feminism into the mainstream right-wing politics because he saw it as an opportunity to recruit young men. Unfortunately he was right and his strategy has paid off, forming an anti-feminist alliance that has become a core belief of right-wing parties all around the world. It has creeped into the mainstream with figures like Andrew Tate who fulfill the role of recruiting young men for even more extreme anti-feminist, far-right content.
This was the background noise that these young men grew up in. Many of the influencers they followed would tell them endlessly how feminism is to be blamed for bad games (during GamerGate) and - in general - how feminism is to be blamed for most ills of modern society. That young men were effed over by capitalism and patriarchy was - of course - deliberately omitted.
Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.
At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as "Spider-Man 2" and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.
Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.
The original article that went with the picture spoke of "a new race of amazons" and calls the woman on the right, "Diana", which may be a reference to Wonder Woman (AKA Diana, Princess of the Amazons).