Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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1,577

Comments

8,893

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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Why resist?

I was happy to pay family premium and have some portion of the revenue go to creators

Yeah same. I was a super early adopter in fact, and paid for it back when it was called YouTube Red. But then in the wake of Elsagate, YouTube cracked down on a bunch of long-established good creators, cutting off small-time creators from any revenue, and introducing stricter algorithmic checks on bigger creators. That was the last straw for me, after years of them doing the wrong thing by creators by ignoring fair use and censoring valuably content. I cut off my Red subscription then and there, and started installing adblockers.

Today, I pay for Nebula to give back to some of the best creators on the site, as well as get some exclusive and early content.

Oh nice. Wilkie? I think he's the only male independent MP. Seems like an awesome stand-up bloke, and has done since the Gillard years.

Brave's weird love of cryptocurrencies turned me off, so I've switched to Firefox. Which allows some extensions to work on Android, including ad blockers.

Honestly I don't think so. It would have been so easy for the politicians to not include a rule that specifically bars sites from using government ID as their only age verification method. And to not include a stipulation that any information gathered for age verification must not be used for any other purposes. But they did include those.

Hanlon's Razor seems the best thing to apply here. There's a lot of evidence of incompetence. Not a lot of good evidence of nefarious purpose.

I wonder if the instructions are consistent enough that someone could make a bespoke video on YouTube that opens its mouth at the right time.

tbh it looks like most of these platforms are going to be predominantly relying on historical analysis and account age, so most people probably won't ever need to provide any evidence. If your Facebook account is 10+ years old, has photos of you on it already, and you've shared content including boring adult subjects like politics and professional sports, they'll probably already assume you're an adult.

I've definitely been getting increasingly frustrated at Facebook's algorithm though. At the very least I am seriously considering installing an extension that hides the entire News Feed, so I only see stuff that I specifically seek out, which will likely only be on a handful of pages I actually care about.

Yeah, I'm majorly hyped. Back when they announced the 2nd expansion was Japan, a lot of people were disappointed that it wasn't Aztecs. My comment was that I thought Japan was an excellent pick, because of the geographic closeness to the already-released Chinese, but only if they were going to be doing Aztecs later. If the Japanese were going to be the last expansion, I would be disappointed that it was Japan rather than Aztecs.

And here we are!

The 500w have only been legal briefly due to a loophole. They were never meant to be so

Got a source on that? All NSW's pages describing the law, which presumably had to be specifically written describing the intent of the law, said 500 W.

a 500w bike won’t do what I need

What is it that you need? If you can make a good case I might be convinced. So far, nothing I've thought of fits the bill, since 500 W + a bit of leg power is enough to be able to get up hills while carrying heavy loads, as far as I can tell.

According to the AFR...almost literally any. Many platforms don't even stop you if you tell them you're under 16. And none seemed to stop you viewing content if you told them you're an adult, without any further verification.

If it were me, I’d be doing phased rollouts. You don’t want to piss off everyone all at once. You just drip feed it out.

Reasonable, though the law requires it be in full force as of today. If they wanted to phase it in, they should have started that a month or more ago.

And besides, you'd think the very first phase would be...banning new under-age signups. Which they don't even seem to have done.

After the first two Age of Mythology expansions were Chinese and Japanese, with no more updates guaranteed beyond that, a lot of us were worried that that would be it. Its player count numbers on Steam don't look great, so we thought it might get put out to pasture like AoE3 did. But we're now being promised the Aztecs, as well as a new major god expansion for Demeter, and a major visual update which "introduces dynamic blood systems, prismatic essence for myth units, and evolving transitions that make each skirmish feel visceral and alive – exclusive to Expansion Pass owners".

That "Expansion Pass" is good news, too. AoE3 had one more expansion announced, but it was cancelled along with the cessation of future development. But this one is going to be taking people's money as early pre-orders. That gives them an obligation to follow-through to a much greater degree than something that was only announced.

AoE2 gets a new South American expansion with 3 new ranked civs: Mapuche, Muisca, and Tupi.

AoE4 gets two new expansions, one "will feature a sweeping story inspired by Chinese history" in a campaign, and the second will bring 2 new civs, one of which is Vikings. I kinda hope they don't call them that though, considering the trend so far has been that civs are largely named based on actual historical political entities. "Vikings" was historically a term for a thing some people did. The actual people were the Danes or Norsemen.

Unfortunately I don't think the law allows for that.

I've only looked Facebook, Discord, and YouTube so far. No general age gating, but today is the first day I've been asked for age verification by Discord to view NSFW channels. Frustrating, because the only NSFW channel I actually ever look at is for some very slightly memes in a server that I'm a mod of. Hard to mod if they're gating me.

I suspect they've tagged my account, so a VPN won't work. But I wonder if pointing my camera at some fake old people will work.

I had no idea it was an mmo now

Oh sorry, it's not. Still an RTS. I just figured since you had mentioned MMOs, Minecraft, Roblox, and CoD, a specific genre wasn't necessarily what you were looking for. But if you are interested, the games are on Steam and the Xbox store for Windows, under the "Definitive Edition" titles (Age of Empires 1, 2, and 3: Definitive Edition), or Age of Mythology: Retold, as well as the new Age of Empires IV. AoE2, 4, and Mythology are also on Xbox and Playstation with a pretty clever controller-friendly control scheme.

I try MMOs but honestly the chat is full of cooker stuff and people raging. Minecraft servers are full of kiddies and I wouldn’t touch Roblox or Call of Duty with a ten foot pole (and I’m hoping Steam doesn’t get got).

If you're interested in multiplayer games with a more mature playerbase, may I recommend the Age of Empires franchise? With its most popular game having originally released in 1999, but being rereleased in an excellent remaster in 2019, plus a brand new entry in the franchise in 2021 and remasters of the other games having come in 2018, 2020, and 2024, you get the feel of playing a modern game, with an audience that is mostly more mature purely because they're older (or because they learn the community norms from people who are older).

That said, Minecraft is a very diverse game, and I'm sure there would be some corners of it that are more mature. I know there's an ongoing project to very faithfully recreate the entire Middle Earth, I assume that attracts a more mature type.

Just touching on the RPGs mentioned in another comment, if sitting up at the table is the problem, the prevalence of virtual tabletops and online TTRPGs these days may mitigate that concern. If you can sit at your computer for video games or social media, you can likely also sit at it for an RPG. Though focus may be its own issue still, I can't speak to your experience with that since it's so personal.

or constantly updating the adblockers in an arms race

Tbh once they started cracking down on adblockers I switched to uBlock Origin and haven't had any problems since. Which is funny, because I previously used Adblock Plus specifically because I liked their "acceptable ads standard", where they would let through ads that are designed unobtrusively. UBO doesn't support this. So now instead of less terrible ads getting through, YouTube's actions have caused me to get rid of all ads, entirely. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot there, guys.

Will not be able to watch friend’s channel

I have never had a TikTok account. Occasionally people send links, and those work just fine in the web browser on a computer. On mobile they try to force you to download the app though.

I also didn’t get it together in time to back up my comments in order to delete my account

I believe data dumps of Reddit are available from third parties which would help you with this, if you want.

I mean this completely sincerely. Take this entire comment and send it in a letter (a physical letter) to your MP. Especially if they're Labor or one of the independents who voted for the bill. (Those who voted against it, like the Greens and most independents, are already on board with you, and the LNP are just beyond saving. But enough pressure might be able to convince Labor to do better.) And encourage all the parents you know to do similar.

Comment, respectfully, on their Facebook. Make sure everyone knows that even if the goals behind this might be good, the thing they've actually delivered is not.

I usually create new repos through GitHub or another central repo's system, where it defaults to calling the main branch main. But I did recently create a new repo with my local Git's git init, and had to deal with a master branch on a completely new repo for the first time in a while. It was actually kinda a weird experience.

Yeah, unless you can succeed in turning your city into the next Vegas or Macau, gambling is pretty much all negatives. We're at a point here where I honestly wish the giant casino was the only problem we have with gambling. And the casino itself is a big enough problem even aside from app-based sports betting and ads for that. Our huge new casino opened up a year or two ago. It has its own bridge that funnels people directly from the extremely popular pedestrianised tourist/cultural area on one side of the river (if you happen to be a parent of a child who's watched a lot of Bluey, you'd recognise Southbank from its appearances in that show, though I don't know if they call it by that name) into the casino's landing area. And they've been allowed to degrade the major riverside bike path, the city's busiest commuter route for cyclists, into a shared path and plaza, with even further degradations regularly when they use (sorry "activate") the area to run commercial events. So the casino is allowed to significantly degrade the entire area even for people who never have anything to do with them.