The good potential was lost when the old wild west Internet, where any random person could build a site and start a community. Now that there’s enough money and corporate presence on the Internet, they build up all the sites and tools that places use to socialize with others and, lo and behold, they implement algorithms to make sure reactionary beliefs are spoonfed to as many people as possible.

They understood the meta on what communication and community building was going to look like, and now, the only hope to get people out of these pipelines into reactionary echo chambers is either to pray all the big social media platforms decide en masse to stop promoting these views out of the goodness of their hearts, or we all just give up the poison and go back to living like it’s the late 90s and the Internet is just a thing you maybe check a couple of times a day at home and you otherwise live in the real world.

It’s not an improvement in the sense that the new guy is going to be better or do less evil.

It’s a small victory that the backlash to Noem’s time as DHS head was big enough that, even if they don’t admit it, it’s an implicit acknowledgement by the Trump admin that they did something wrong enough to warrant a response.

It’s not a major victory, and it shouldn’t be talked about as one, but it’s an improvement over the alternative, where ICE murders people and calls them domestic terrorists with literally no consequence.

I tried a few episodes because I thought the premise sounded kinda fun. On the plus side, it didn’t have a lot of the anime bullshit that makes something completely unwatchable (the amount of jiggling tits is a fairly reasonable 0), the art is cute, and it does kinda capture that feeling of watching a fun group’s D&D campaign as an anime.

In the negative… I tried watching like 4 or so episodes and they just all kinda felt samey. Every episode I watched followed a very similar arc, very similar jokes, and didn’t really hold my attention.

Nonspecific spoilers for what I meant by episodes being very samey:

I’ve been assured the plot really develops at some point so maybe I just quit too early, but it just didn’t grab my attention at all.

The more active forums are where most of the problems are. It’s easy to moderate slower smaller discussions, but where Steam really lacks is in those more active forums where basically any game that has any real hype around it will turn into an absolute shitshow, especially if topics like lgbt people or women come up, or if the game happens to attract a really horny incel fandom.

My experience has been far less valuable. The steam forums are typically very poorly moderated, and bigotry runs wild in basically all of them.

It’s not inherent to Steam or forums as a concept, but unless the people running it take care to invest in resources for proper moderation, forums will just naturally trend towards toxic behaviour because it’s easier to be an asshole and harass good people out than it is to do the opposite.

The walkthroughs are great for niche games that don’t have many players, true. But at the same time, it’s not like Steam’s walkthroughs are the only ones or best ones on the Internet. Any game that has enough interest for people to make walkthroughs for are big enough to have a fanbase that maintains a wiki, or a subreddit, or a discord, or some other place where you can exchange the same info. Hell, you could even stay logged into your Steam account in the browser and just look at guides that way, while playing the game itself in another window.

They’re not useless, but if I were to think of the things that keep me using Steam as opposed to using a new launcher (or alternatively, the one thing a new launcher needs to get me to hop over from steam), walkthroughs aren’t really high priority imo.

They took a look at Steam and decided the forums were the big thing missing? The community reviews of games are on some occasion useful, and the steam workshop is great, but the actual forum is just about the most useless feature of Steam I can think of. There are so many places on the Internet to talk about games, chat with people while playing games, post about games, etc.