Has it ever been done right though? A capitalist entity’s mandate is to grow itself and extract maximum profit. It is obliged to become as unfettered as possible to achieve that. This is inheritly unsustainable and in conflict with the interests of society and the environment at large.

Talent is mostly a myth. You have to push though the part where you suck to get good at anything. Pick a thing and stick with it. Even 10-20min a day of practice and you’ll see results. With music the hard part is getting to the point where you can just ‘play’ but you’re young and you have more time now than you ever will again. Pick a thing and suck at it. Keep doing it anyway until you suck less. One day you’ll find even though you still think you suck someone else compares themselves to you and is jealous of your ‘talent’

This is the pcgamer website without adblock!

I discovered this this morning as I was trying out a Lemmy app (thunder) instead of my ad blocked Firefox and followed an article link.

In less than 800 words there were:

• 3 full page ads to dismiss
• an auto playing video taking up 1/4 of the screen that follows as you scroll
• a sticky animated footer banner
• and a half page animated ad between each paragraph.

Fuck that. Fuck any organizational that does that to it’s product or has that level of contempt for it’s users.

I support content creators but ad block is necessary for safety, privacy, and the overall usability of the Internet.

Good on them. I hope others follow suit. As an aside, I recently switched to a lemmy app instead of using my ad blocked browser, and holy shit PCGamer’s website is an unusable dystopian nightmare. You have to read the article through a tiny letterbox of multiple competing videos and across the short article there are three full page ads to dismiss. Fuck that.

Here’s the full article text to save you a click.

If you want official updates from the Minecraft dev team, you better not look on Reddit. A post from a Reddit user bearing the name sliced_lime and a flair indicating they are the Minecraft Java Tech Lead (almost certainly Mojang’s Mikael Hedberg) announced yesterday that Mojang would no longer be posting official content to Reddit, in the wake of that platform’s response to protests over changes to its API.

“As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits,” read the post, before announcing that those changes have led Mojang to “no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer [its] players to”.

The events are only obliquely referred to in the post, but it seems the move has been sparked by Reddit’s crackdown on protests against recent changes to its API that would, in essence, kill off third-party apps that let users access the site.

Subreddit mods have spent the last few weeks mounting various campaigns against Reddit’s corporate leadership, either “going dark” by turning the subreddits they oversee into private, invite-only communities or else marking them as NSFW, meaning Reddit can’t sell ads on those pages. Reddit responded by pressuring disgruntled mods, and in some cases ousting and trying to replace them.

In practice, the biggest impact of this departure will be the end of the subreddit’s official changelog threads, where the subreddit’s 7.4 million Minecraft fans and players can pore over official updates in granular detail and offer their feedback directly to the devs who hang out there. Sliced_lime emphasises that players are, naturally, “welcome to post unofficial update threads going forward,” and can always “visit [Mojang’s] feedback site at feedback.minecraft.net” or else contact it via social media.

User reaction has been pretty understanding, which probably only highlights just how angry everyone is with Reddit’s leadership right now. The top-voted comment on sliced_lime’s post, from DamageBooster, just says “Understandable” before asking where else users can access official changelogs.

Still, even if there are other avenues to reach Mojang, it seems fairly dramatic for a game as incomprehensibly massive and significant as Minecraft to cut off Reddit as one of its official ports of call. It’s reminiscent of advertisers fleeing Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s messy assumption of leadership at that company. Time will tell if Reddit’s leadership will take any notice, though (I can’t say I’m optimistic).

I’ve reached out to Microsoft to ask if any more of its studios are going to follow Mojang’s suit and cut off Reddit as a source of official communication, and I’ll update this piece if I hear back.

For now, I think this is a one-off. There’s no sign of any other Microsoft studio doing anything similar so far, so this seems more like a situation that has personally aggravated sliced_lime (and presumably their fellow Mojang devs) than a Microsoft-wide initiative. But who knows? Perhaps one of the biggest companies in the world will take some time off fighting multiple national market regulators at once to direct its ire at Reddit executives. If that doesn’t get their attention, nothing will.