While I strongly appreciate the elite's desire to highlight influence science fiction, I assert that cosplay is a sufficient means of doing so and directly acting the severely flawed actions of the villains from said stories benefits no one... not even themselves.
And wonder how long reddit will last when people start moving away cos of this.
People won't move away because bots get screened. They'll start moving away if the screening process shows too many false positives.
Their bigger risk is financial. If they're honest about getting rid of bots, traffic and subreddit participation will slow thereby resulting in reduced ad revenue and potential and valuation. If they're OK with that, then they'll do well. If, however, their shareholders press them to "increase ad revenue at all costs" then they'll loosen up bot restrictions, claim that the tech is advancing too much, and simply claim that all user accounts are humans for the sake of revenue generation.
"Identity Verification" is being thrown around too much and it's getting people whipped up into a frenzy when they don't need to be. Identity Verification establishes actual human uniqueness by recording and validating Personally Identifying Information (PII) (government ID, birth information, biometric data, etc.).
When California passed a law requiring operating systems to make available the self-designation of the primary user's age group so websites and application programmers can query for that information and then NOT provide inappropriate content to minors, people lost their minds because it was called "Identity Verification". It is not.
The same goes here. From the CEO's own mouth in the video linked in the article:
Every platform wants to know, 'Is this a person?' Now, Reddit's version is 'Is this a person? But we don't want to know which person this is.' Because part of our promise for our users is we don't know your name, but do what to know that you're a person.
Is this not what we want? Fewer bots and NOT exposing my PII to companies unnecessarily?
Unlike many on Slashdot, every computer I use has a Windows installation. That's just the reality of my needs. So, I apply the same philosophy here I do for all other products: "All good customer service is appreciated. All reductions in bad customer service is appreciated. That said, all hope and praise is withheld until at least some of the committed product is delivered."
The FBI has resumed purchasing reams of Americans' data and location histories to aid federal investigations
Do we still use this term? Are people seriously delivering 500 million stacks of paper with dot-matrix-printed text noting who showed up at which Starbucks and when?
No. They're not. We could just ballpark the data in GB/TB/PB.
The quarterly report standard was set to ensure that the public is sufficiently well-informed about the fiscal health of publicly traded companies prior to their making investment decisions. Moving to a 6-month cycle increases the knowledge gap between the general public and those with inside knowledge.
Some people will see a benefit and get an expensive keyboard with a split space bar. Good for them. Everyone else will continue using the absolutely massive number of keyboards following the standard format.
If we increase our investment just 10-fold, we could probably get that to 16 minutes per day. Imagine the possibilities!
From the press release:
But they can have significant monetary value. Rare items from Counter-Strike alone have sold for thousands of dollars on third-party marketplaces, and the overall market for Counter-Strike skins has been estimated at more than $4 billion.
Nearly every user who opens a loot box receives an item worth far less than the price of the key. For example, a user who pays $2.71 to open a Counter-Strike weapons case will almost certainly receive a skin worth only a few cents — an item that could have been purchased directly for a fraction of the cost. But the remote chance of winning an item worth hundreds or thousands of dollars is what drives users to keep spending, just as with a slot machine or lottery ticket.
No loot box items have monetary value because the policy prohibits transacting digital items for real currency. One NEEDS to participate in an illicit market to turn an item into currency.
Why are you so upset about this?
I'm not "upset", per se. I just don't tolerate wrapping less popular causes in more popular causes. The goal of this lawsuit is to punish Valve for their part in crashing illicit market that I described. The "think of the children" call to action is to distract from this.
Do you feel that you are being threatened by this action?
Nope. I've never purchased a loot box and don't gamble. In fact, I despise the massive increase of easy gambling over the last 10 years. The only threat to me, as an elder gamer, is the potential momentum of the "think of the children" cause which was a **massive** detriment to gamers/gaming until relatively recently.
Why are you so quick to dismiss this as a personal fault of those affected by these "ADULT MEN"?
I'm drawing a very stark difference between the claimants-- the VAST majority of people who have gambled these funds away are adult men, not children. I find it shameful that they're using the exceedingly small proportion of related loot box purchases from children as a front-and-center cause. It's disingenuous at the very least and I personally find it downright shameful.
If they actually wanted to allege that "Children have been had access to gambling games and Valve should have been able to prevent that," that's fine. They would then need to show an approximate number of affected children, and approximate money expended, and most importantly, why it's unreasonable for the parents of said children to oversee their children's access and actions. The numbers would be comparably small.
But they're not doing that.
If they were honest about trying to stop **online gambling**, they would go after Draft Kings, Fan Duel, Fanatics, BetMGM, and on and on.
But they're not doing that.
This is not an anti-loot-box case. This is a case meant to compensate those involved in illicit markets for the massive and immediate devaluing of their digital items.
The "think of the children" aspect is ridiculous on its face.
Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 are "carefully engineered to extract money from consumers, including children
How much money do children have? Don't you think that a purported evil gambling company (Valve?) would know that children don't have much money at all, let alone access to their own credit cards with which to purchase in-game currency?
Can we just drop that charade and say what's really going on:
1. Some ADULT MEN gambled a large amount of money using a combination of in-game currency and money-laundering sites
2. Valve crashed that illicit economy by making it easier to obtain previously rare in-game items (https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestubbs/2025/10/23/valve-just-crashed-the-high-end-counter-strike-skins-market/)
3. Those ADULT MEN are now they're angry.
What's that? Some children have stolen their parents' credit cards and used them online? Wow... has that ONLY happened with Valve loot boxes or has it happened with Amazon purchases, porn sites, etc.? Ya... That's a parent-child issue and not a gambling concern worthy of months of litigation.
I agree and disagree.
Corporations are obviously not alive and thus have none of that stuff. They're contractual arrangements. However, corporations are operated by humans. Those humans make decisions in the name of "the corporation". Those humans are choosing to put the financial advancement of the owners, investors, and higher ups above those of the workers.
This isn't an issue of being absent of a heart because that would imply a lack of malice. These decisions are made by black-hearted people. People with the capability of caring, but who choose not to.
Without seeing a full multi-month chart of Linux use, I think it's safe to say that there was an abnormal spike (maybe people playing with Proton in anticipation of new Valve Hardware releases) and then going back to what they normally do when Valve announced the hardware delays.
And baseball cards. And computer processors ("silicon lottery"). And Woot.com bags of crap (https://www.woot.com/offers/bag-o-crap-8).
It's a charter flight on a 6-prop helicopter piloted by a human (with hopes of being autonomous in the future). All standard flight and landing requirements apply.
Ride-hailing's innovation was the deception of lawmakers and the app-based dispatch.
Where's the innovation here?
Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nation's largest storage market
So they may soon have the most electricity storage via battery... Is something supposed to happen if they do? Do they get a prize? Does something happen to California if they're no longer #1?
[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. -- Joseph Campbell
