An amazing read. I can't imagine being in that situation. This is the sort of ordeal that movies should be made of.
Silly. This wouldn't explain why people still get the delay in a "clean" version of firefox, or why the delay disappears when the only thing changed is spoofing that your browser is chrome instead.
"Public companies...legally have to put shareholders first."
I thought this too, but it is apparently a myth.
"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false.
To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
I think the term is A-B testing. When a company wants to see what effect a change will have, they don't force it on everyone at once, just on a certain number of people (A), and then see what happens compared to the rest (B).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/A-B_testing_example.png
This is why you'll always get people saying, "Huh, I haven't seen that. It's not doing it for me on [browser]." They're in the (B) group...for now.
The data the company wants is to know if, do the test people like the change (or are at least willing to tolerate it)? Or do they spend less time on the site? If so, how much? If the results are within their predictions, they'll expand the testing until everyone is in (A).
There can also be A-B-C-D-etc testing, where some people who get the blocking windows would be able to close it, and some wouldn't. How many of each ended up disabling their adblock?
This also helps to "boil the frog", where they can slowly get people used to the idea that this is happening, rather than having a whole wave of surprised outrage at once.
Yeah, it seems we agree. My stance was only ever that I can understand why some people would've wanted to remove political controversy from their escapism if it made them uncomfortable and added nothing to the gameplay itself.
There's no difference between a movie casting a woman/black man as the main character, compared to casting a trans person?
Whether or not it should be, isn't LGBT issues political/controversial?
I dunno, being a man, woman, or black person isn't political. Trans, non-binary, etc is, and normalizing it is political, regardless of if it's right or wrong. I think that you're correct and that it seems like something done as ammunition in the Culture War; normalizing identity politics rather than a design decision done out of a necessity to improve the quality of the game apart from that.
My earlier analogy was about having a pro-life/pro-choice option forced on you, but I guess to make it more accurate it would be more like the game just telling you that you're pro-life as part of your character settings? Because it's not just putting the politics in the game, it's taking a strong side. Again, rightly or wrongly, I can see why some people would resent that in their escapism.
I mean, I sorta get it. Identity politics are political and often divisive, and some people don't want it in their escapism.
It's not a perfect analogy, but if a role-playing game had a mandatory character-selection choice to choose if my character was pro-choice or pro-life, I could see myself mildly resenting it.
I see...and why is it the thumbnail on an article for a piece of computer hardware?
Okay but why is the thumbnail an erotic underwear model with her bush out?