This is what I fear the most with these platforms. They have these shitty automated moderation systems that can just decide to delete everything you have there on a whim. Already common on places like youtube and facebook, but it just keeps getting worse. Every site is pushing users into signing in with their google/microsoft/whatever accounts.
Remember the guy who lost access to his smart home when amazon banned him for no reason?
Not under their new owner, since he's the one that pushed for the definition change in the first place, among many other blatantly biased changes to the ADL in the past decade.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different, but i agree with your sentiment.
if you are depending on a platform where you are the goods being sold, not the customer, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are taken of the shelf on a moment’s notice.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
The accusation was completely false, and even if the guy actually were a racist pos, remotely disabling devices he paid for and owns is not a good road to go on.
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
ok, that doesn’t even make sense, but it shows how wildly different and random the “reasons” can be.
i was thinking about the case where guy took a photo of some rash on his son’s penis to send it to a doctor and some automated system flagged it as child pornography.
while you are technically correct, i would refrain from disrespecting these poor people.
Facebook content moderators in Kenya call the work ‘torture.’ Their lawsuit may ripple worldwide
By EVELYNE MUSAMBI and CARA ANNA Published 9:52 AM GMT+2, June 29, 2023
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — On the verge of tears, Nathan Nkunzimana recalled watching a video of a child being molested and another of a woman being killed.
Eight hours a day, his job as a content moderator for a Facebook contractor required him to look at horrors so the world wouldn’t have to. Some overwhelmed colleagues would scream or cry, he said.
I remember that story. Thanks for that perspective - certainly, no disrespect is intended. In the context of people who should ever see your child in the nude, social media company employees are strangers which I used a synonym for. Strangers who aren’t paid enough for what they do. “Underpaid randos” sounds OK at the moment but I’ll sleep on it.
i didn’t mean to accuse of anything, it is just morbidly interesting how many layers there are to this modern dystopia we are being lured into right now.
before reading that story, i wouldn’t give content moderators second thought as well.
I use Gmail, and am concerned about the same thing. But of the alternatives I don’t know any that have wide support for social logins, which are damn convient.
i have my personal and important mails in my private mailbox, on my own domain. i use gmail as a backup and spam mail, i use it everywhere where i assume the mail can go to some spam database sooner or later.
so if i lost access to it one day, i would lose history of some confirmations from various eshops and shit like that, but nothing that would really cripple me.
i would definitely not put my family photos there and hope they stay there forever.
Yeah, see that is the issue. The social logins (though not for anything real money related) and the photo backups are so well integrated. Nothing really competes. My personal emails are even less of a concern to me than the rest.
Yep. If you ever shared a political opinion, that could put you on someone’s naughty list. If that someone gets a position of power and decides they want to attack, well, you could be the next metaphorical Palestinian.
Man, messed up innit. & how could it be made private without enabling a whole different set of bad actors (astroturfers, marketers, political axe grinders)
I have always been pro-privacy, but in a kind of lukewarm, “I wish someone would do something about this” way.
What has finally pushed me to ditch services from large corporations over the past couple of years is not really a concern for privacy, its a drive for self-sufficiency.
As basically the last stepping stone, as of a couple of weeks ago, my email, calendar and contacts are self-hosted, and it’s just… So freeing.
<span style="color:#323232;">First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">—Martin Niemöller
</span>
Today, BBC News put out an investigation having spoke to 20 Palestinians living abroad who claim Microsoft has permanently banned them from their systems for calling relatives in Gaza.
Skype might have fallen out of favor for general messaging purposes over platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, but it remains an affordable service for calling cell phones directly via the web.
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas, the terror group behind the notorious October 7 massacre that killed hundreds of concert goers near Re’im in Israel.
Microsoft declined to respond to the accusation, but claimed that it doesn’t block calls or ban users based on geographical location.
“Blocking in Skype can occur in response to suspected fraudulent activity,” a Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC — potentially implying there’s more to the story.
But given how much of our online life is basically handed over to big corporations like Microsoft, who are under no obligation to guarantee access to these services, it is alarming how they can just ban you with no real explanation or transparency.
The original article contains 647 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Nah. I’m staying at my current stage, paying for Live and then doing the extra $5 for Game Pass…shit tier? Idk what it’s called now. I don’t need to play CoD on day 1.
Last day 1 game I tried to play on game pass was starfield, and the queue was so long everytime I tried to play I was unable to play for hours and stopping using the service all together which sucks because I have another year or more left.
The steam deck is definitely my best purchase in a long time. So many games in my library that I can play now if I don’t want to sit at my PC after working on my PC.
I’m still glad I paid for it when it was a good deal. It’s not like I was committed. The unsubscribe button is pretty easy, and I don’t need to play a lot of those singleplayer games anymore.
Does that include xbox gamepass core customers? Because that’s basically an entirely different service, and it’s also something you’d expect a very high adoption rate of among Xbox console owners, given the platform’s historical emphasis on multiplayer games. There’s also rather a lot of people who stacked many months of gamepass for quite cheap.
While the platform has certainly seen some success, it’s hardly in a dominant position, so making moves that make the value proposition of the service look worse is surprising.
I did no such thing lol. People had to be surprised by this turn of events based on the response to it in this very thread. Whether or not people are forced to continue paying for it has nothing to do with anything I said, speaking of straw men.
I got a ton of hate online when they announced the Activision deal and I said that though they’d get COD for “free” but they would almost immediately start hiking the price a lot. This has been obvious but some people refuse to think MS wasn’t going to try and recoup their $70B?
Xbox takes a 30% cut from devs, has ads on its console and wants to charge a subscription for online gaming (now raising its price by 25%). Can’t triple dip like this, Microsoft.
Haven’t renewed PS Plus either since its price hike. Just gonna play disc games on my PS5 till the end of its lifespan.
Lol, enshittification came faster than expected. At least Netflix was successful before the price hike, and then decided to be greedy because their user base was willing to pay.
On the other side of the fence, Xbox Series consoles tanked harder than XOne (which was already a colossal failure) and Game Pass subscribers fell short of corporate expectations every year since its inception. And they decide that this is the best time to double the price of the service? Good luck with that decision, Microsoft.
Who is gonna pay $15/month for a catalog of old games? Old games are already cheap enough that you can buy them directly and still “profit” over keeping an ongoing subscription. And $20/month for day one games? At that price, you’re better off just buying the damn game. GP was already hard to justify at its previous price, but this new price point is egregious.
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