• 1 Post
  • 15 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • A quick search doesn’t find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that’s due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.

    Now that I think about it, it might not even be consumer protection but instead a GDPR issue. I’m in Europe. Users becoming inactive can actually force companies to delete their data. Ubisoft might not have any other choice than to completely delete inactive users and of course they’ll do what is best for them, not for the inactive users.


  • They indeed just “license” the games to us:

    The Services and Content are licensed to you, not sold. This means we grant you a personal, limited, non-transferable and revocable right and license to use the Services and access the Content, for your entertainment, non-commercial use, subject to your compliance with these Terms.

    For termination, it’s not any reason but a lot of reasons, including the here discussed:

    for any other reason in relation to your actions in or outside of the Services; upon notification, where your Account has been inactive for more than six months.

    The first one opens a lot of options for them to find a reason. None of those would trigger any reimbursement, though.

    Consequences of the Termination/Suspension of an Account.

    You cannot use the Services and Content anymore.
    In the event of termination of your Account or of Service(s) associated with your Account, no credit (such as for unused Services, unused subscription period, unused points or Ubisoft Virtual Currency) will be credited to you or converted into cash or any other form of reimbursement.

    Source


  • I didn’t want to say that Twitters execution of it is perfect, it’s just why Elon comes up with all these seemingly insane ideas. He has a huge userbase that won’t leave, he had advertisers who he thought wouldn’t want to leave and now he’s trying to squeeze. The problem is that he obviously didn’t have his grasp as tightly around the advertisers as he thought, which is why step 3 of Enshittitication entirely fails, at least from what is known to us. The idea is to keep everyone kind of hostage while you squeeze and while it seems to work with a huge chunk of the userbase, a bigger portion of the advertisers simply move on.


  • Putting a name on a century-old concept isn’t the worst idea because now we can easily refer to it when it happens once again. And yes, the old age of that problem is why I consider it a bit of a rabit-hole. It’s not just something Twitter does now or that tech companies do now because they copy from each other. It’s a quite old concept you’ll hear about again and again and can read up on quite a bit, if you really are interested into more than the basic concept or why companies keep trying even though the outcome does not always see positive (from an outside, users perspective).


  • Look up enshittitication, it’s an interesting rabbit hole.

    Basically, the idea is that there is a path companies go along where they first please users to build a user base, once you are bound to a platform and don’t want to leave (because “everyone” is there) they instead start to shift towards pleasing advertisers until they also feel trapped (because “everyone” advertises there). The final move is trying to squeeze as much as possible out of all these trapped people and companies. It’s not just social media, although this of course makes it most obvious at least for a trapped user base. But this also applies for any other big thing that “evryone” uses.


  • I’m not really surprised, I’d actually assume that sexy John Oliver and the other protests created a lot of additional traffic. People post like crazy and a lot of people want to see that, especially since it got some coverage on news sites. Add to that the big majority of people who do not care (remember that 80% of traffic was still reached) plus some who may have been sympathetic enough to join the two day protest but don’t care enough to continue to stay away. It’s really not surprising that we’re back to normal numbers.

    Thankfully this isn’t the only impact people currently still make, so this isn’t over. The real question now will be how else it might change Reddit.





  • I don’t disagree. The topics are a bit hit or miss and yes, my newest free ebook from them is from 2020, so all contents should be taken with a grain of salt. I did manage to grab some on C++, Machine Learning and different Pentesting tools, so not everything is completely obscure but as you said, usually they do not choose their most recent books. I see it more as a nice free resource on some topics in the books as of course not everything will be entirely out of date. It’s also not necessarily worse than buying their 2023 books today and using them for the next 3 years… That’s just a general problem with tech books, at least these outdated books are free.