Khotetsu

You could always buy a second copy to gift to a friend. Then you'd be able to play together on top of giving them another sale!

It is, but with a few caveats that can make it outright impossible, largely down to financial issues.

From a legal standpoint, it's only slightly more annoying than moving from one town to another. You don't have to go through any sort of immigration process or anything, you just inform the state you're leaving and the state you're moving to of the change in address, and then get tax/identification stuff done like registering your car in the new state and getting an in-state driver's license.

Financially, the housing market is a mess in the US right now for a number of reasons, from the number of new houses being built not keeping up with population growth for like 60 years and many empty houses being in unlivable condition due to lack of maintenance, to many homes being owned by investment companies (and wealthy Chinese apparently) as basically a high yield savings account or bought up by companies and people turning them into rental property. And that's before you get into the logistics of moving your life to a new home.

I dunno if I'd call it a massive corporation now. Data grabbing? Most likely, it's got ads at the very least, so it's got ad metrics. But it's owned by the same people who own WordPress now.

Honestly, the best part of modern Tumblr is that the creator sold it to Yahoo for just over $1 billion, and then Verizon sold it for less than $3 million 6 years later. They tried to monetize it, royally screwed themselves in the process, and ended up selling it for less than .3% of what Yahoo bought it for in the first place.

The original owner took his money from the sale, disappeared from public life, and only pops up occasionally when he makes a donation to some charity or another. All while Verizon gave themselves hemorrhoids trying to make it into another data-grabbing social media blackhole like ~~Twitter~~ X or Facebook.

Tumblr, too, once upon a time. Started out as a side project built by a guy and a programmer from his company he paid to help him. He hated social media sites like Facebook and wanted to build a social media site that he would enjoy using. Someplace where he could post his photos and follow people he liked so he could see their content, and that was it.

They even helped develop the COVID vaccines.

Furries need high paying jobs to be able to afford all those commissions and fursuits, after all.

Be the change you want to see in the world!

I decided one day that I was gonna try growing my hair out, as I had it basically buzzed my entire life. I went from that to now having a ponytail so long that it reaches the small of my back (when it's not in a ponytail I have to be careful that it doesn't get caught when I put on pants or sit down), and along the way I inspired boys I worked with to try growing their hair out on multiple occasions. One didn't like how his hair basically turned into an afro and cut it, one has been rocking a shoulder-length viking-esque look for about 8 years now, and the last looks so much like white Jesus that Catholics do a double-take just to make sure the Rapture hasn't happened.

Being a boomer is a choice, not an age.

I've seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it's down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.

They're tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they're not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.

Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to "go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already."

I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they've matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.

Damn right! I was jealous of these kids who had the courage to express themselves how they wanted and explore their identities outside of what was deemed "socially acceptable" back then, and I will fight tooth and nail for kids to be able to do the same today, even if I don't exactly understand what's "it" nowadays.

Open. The decline of the political climate in this country since 2001 has made me fear for my safety since I was in middle school, so keeping the door open helps satisfy that part of my brain that's always in threat detection mode by allowing me to hear everything in the house from my bed.

Plus, I live alone. So pretty much every door is open all the time.

As with many things in life, there's no one simple reason for this, but I can think of a few factors that probably play into this.

One is that 50% of people are worse than the average person at any given thing, and in this case, I think the 2 relevant things would be tech literacy and concern about things like privacy. As Gen Z has entered the workforce, businesses have apparently begun to express concerns over the lack of tech literacy among applicants, especially when it comes to stuff like desktop software. Which makes sense since Gen Z has grown up in a world where basically everything is app based and on your phone. I've worked with highschool-age kids who never had a desktop/laptop in their house growing up. Add to this the average person's concern on digital privacy and other concerns like the corporate greed that shut down the third party API access - which is basically nonexistent, since many people have trouble caring about something until it personally affects them - and it's easy to imagine that your average Reddit user, especially lurkers, probably uses Reddit through the official app on their phone and doesn't even know any other way they potentially could use Reddit. Most of them probably don't even know what an adblocker is, let alone an RSS feed or something. I believe Reddit themselves said that the people who used third-party apps made up like a fraction of a percentage of the user base, with the next smallest group being those who used the website, and that the majority of people used the official app.

Then you have the force of habit. Habits, once entrenched, are hard to break. People like consistency and are often opposed to changes in their routine, especially ones that don't have an obviously beneficial aspect to them and ones that will require some amount of effort to change. This is why doomscrolling social media in general is so difficult to stop. You can change platforms, but it takes a conscious effort to choose to stop entirely.

So your average Reddit lurker probably was upset about the change, but since it didn't personally affect them, they grumbled about it and then went on with their doomscrolling.

Then, you get to the users who actively interact with Reddit, either through posting content or commenting. These are the kinds of people who aren't going to just stop interacting with the subreddits they're in and become lurkers, and they have even more reason to be stuck in the habit of using Reddit, because they have the emotional weight/connection to the communities they frequent. These are the kinds of people I was thinking of mainly for my previous comment, because they're the most likely to stay despite being disgruntled with Reddit's recent actions. It's like they're using Discord even though they think it sucks compared to a similar program because all their friends are on Discord, and all their friends are on Discord because they're on Discord.

There are also the people who financially depend on social media. People like artists depend on platforms like Reddit because their livelihood depends on them putting their work in front of people's eyeballs, so they can't simply leave the big platforms. They might establish themselves on places like Lemmy, but they won't be able to abandon Reddit simply because that's the kind of place where the people are.

All of this to say, that basically the tipping point for the mass abandonment of Reddit will only happen when it personally negatively affects the majority of people, or when the better alternatives have a sufficient amount of users/content to make the effort of migrating seem worthwhile. Right now, Reddit just has too much gravity from being established for so long and having such a large userbase to keep your average person from wanting able to leave.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."

Seems appropriate considering these were found in Lovecraft country. How long until we start seeing the fish-faced people?