Likewise, I think this bill could be used against companies with Chinese investment, like anything Tencent investment (e.g. Fortnite, League of Legends, etc).

IANAL but I believe that would not be covered under this bill. Those games are run by American companies with foreign investment.

Maybe when it gets to the point where the foreign power is the majority shareholder. However, I think in a publicly traded company they’d just be forced to divest and that would likely take a different law.

Just the standard “you can sue if you think this is unfair and have your day in court.”

What it looks like is if China or Russia has a competitor to a US product (say, Yandex or Baidu), a US company (say, Google) could lobby the President to mark them as a threat and ban them from the US. The product doesn’t need to actually have the capacity to cause harm, it just needs to be from one of the adversary countries (currently China, Russia, N. Korea, and Iran).

This is true, but it’s also pretty unlikely. Even TikTok is just a vine ripoff, but a vine that was successfully monetized.

There really hasn’t been much to come out of our “foreign adversaries” that I think most people would care about. If that’s the price we have to pay … I’m not the least bit worried about it really.

Furthermore, China is happy to use public money to back companies (as a sort of “state run venture capital”); that is a threat to competition in the same way venture capital is a threat to competition.

I think you should check out this article in The Atlantic, it goes into the history of the US government’s previous laws to protect against foreign propaganda and manipulation of the media. What you’ll find is this is more of an update (to catch up with the internet era) than a revamp of US domestic policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/

Also a key point I think you’re missing here:

but it also allows the President to denote any other entity in one of those countries as a significant threat

The president can only do this for apps from the countries covered in the US code as Foreign Adversaries, which means the president can act quickly against threats, but this is a bad avenue for attacking competition in other friendly countries (e.g., shutting down Proton would require congress to pass a law that Switzerland is a foreign adversary – which would not be good for relations – AND a law specifically targeting Proton accompanying that or the president to then act against Proton).

All of this is still subject to judicial review as well.

See https://lemmy.world/post/14643617

I’m sure it’s just even more detail about the scope of that influence campaign (and possibly an extrapolation of effectiveness on public opinion).

The major thing is manipulation of the public’s information pipeline by a hostile foreign power. There are already existing laws about foreign owned media (as cited by the New York Times this morning https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/).

I haven’t given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.

The entire premise of Discord’s free service was to gobble up the market from TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble and capture the ecosystem using a ton of venture capital. In any sane world it would be an illegal mode of operation to provide “free service” based on venture capital like that.

TeamSpeak did manage to react but their reaction has been slow (I think they’re a much smaller team and still a private company). Their new client is fairly feature complete but still not out of beta (AFAIK).

Mumble is an open source project and is still ticking as a result as well (though obviously it’s received much less love since Discord stole the spotlight).

Don’t forget “I thought Republicans were the party of states rights? Why are they trying to ban abortion nationally after some states held elections to protect abortion in their state constitution?”

Gamers don’t understand software development and it shows

(You’re absolutely right)

Google is introducing planned obsolesence in Fitbit

Have they? In what way?

They’ve done good work for Android and Pixel, promising 7 years of updates for the latest Pixels. Samsung has also gotten much better about this with their recent phones. That’s going to put a huge dent in the e-waste as Android phones have surely been heavy contributors (certainly much higher than fitbit).

TVs get bricked with firmware upgrades.

What TVs? Vizio, Hisense, the Chinese junk budget brands?

Very sympathetic to your e-waste concerns; I think the source of the problem is actually getting better not worse though. In general, the mobile tech sector is “growing up” and supporting products longer.

I think you should be a bit careful… Ideally active community members with an interest and a fairly level headed post/comment history. Some people want that “power” too much 😅

Also consider finding one or more people that have time zones different from yours.

So far the communities I’ve moderated have all been pretty small (<1000) and there’s not much of anything in terms of reports. It would be great if some folks that moderate other large communities showed up and talked about how they’ve grown their moderation team.

One thing I do like is that they have (the option of) whole grain buns… I’ve been unable to find that elsewhere.

He should enter politics.

Please don’t do this to us.

I’ve wondered if it would be possible to have a federated award system for funding… Similar to what Reddit was doing at one point. I actually kind of enjoy that and the fun emoji-like things that you’d see on interesting posts and comments.

That sounds like it’s asking for some crypto currency mess though, or some (most?) instances just hanging them out for no charge.

You can mute everyone from every game made in the last 20 years.

I literally just listed one where you couldn’t that was released within the last 10.

If tea-bagging pushes your buttons so much the only solution you find is to ask the dev to remove crouching

Didn’t ask for that.

“If someone pushes your buttons repeatedly to try and tick you off, and it does or you just generally don’t like it, you’re the problem … it’s just a video game”

I don’t buy this argument… and characteristically that’s the exact argument you’re making. If it didn’t work other people wouldn’t be in here defending it as a “mind game.”

This has been sorted out in other competitive spaces, there’s no reason gaming has to be this way.

I’m not sure I even regard this as a developer studios responsibility.

I mean, they’re the ones running the servers and ultimately providing admittance. There always going to be “bad people” unless owners of establishments actually exclude them (or as I’ve suggested – since this is an imaginary world – just take away their ability to be a jerk in said world).

Change what is in your control: Play in a good state of mind where this stuff does not get to you (not when you’re tired after work). Turn off voice comms. Don’t let it get to you. Worst thing you can do to a troll is ignore them.

Definitely good advice. Part of it is genuinely just friends too though. Like this isn’t “my friend”, this is my friend (though that’s not to say I enjoy this crap either)… and sometimes it’s hard to gage their mental state, or even though they’re in a bad mood, I’d really like to do something more challenging … and of course they get t-bagged or abused on comms … and then everybody is having a bad time.

I wish I had access to these game’s source code… then the whole thing would be in my control ☺️

Yeah that’s very fair; I definitely miss when I could run my own servers for big games and just axe anyone who didn’t behave

I love outplaying people … I typically don’t find AI enemies challenging/creative enough … I just don’t care for the childish “mind game” (which seriously whoever started claiming they’re “mind games” is … well I’ll let you finish this sentence with your own choice of creative words 🙂)

It’s pretty typical that my team is all friends on discord or similar 🙂

Definitely see the issue with monetization… but also depending on the game the emotes have value outside of this particular situation.

Freeze frame (or just a black screen) is a good idea

I think it’s a bit more disrespectful than “you’re going down, bro!” But typically when I’m thinking of this, I’m thinking of situations where the person has like a 10-0 KDR vs the person and is either clearly just way better or cheating and t-bags after every kill. It’s completely classless at that point.

Like, if it’s a fairly even match and occasional … sure it’s not worse, but when it’s mixed with outright domination (or as you said talking massive shit) it’s more than that.

In either case… it’s just so unnecessary.

… and to be clear, I think that’s okay.

But, I don’t think those that want a multiplayer shooter (or game in general) to be a mind game should be able to force that on everyone else. I just want my games to be games.

Like, even if it changed how match making worked, I’d personally prefer to just avoid that stuff entirely. I can “deal” with it, it’s just not fun/annoying to me.

Ultimately, I think just being able to visually “disable t-bagging” and “disable emotes” while dead as options in major shooters would be fairly easy to implement options.

For the people who don’t want “that experience” they can just … turn it off.

For the people that do, they never need to know whether it’s on or off… just like they don’t know if I have a profanity filter on… or if I’ve got voice coms muted… etc