Sort of. Mostly this is just what happens when you build a platform that allows basically anyone to sell something on it. Local businesses have limited space, so necessarily they needed to limit product to trusted brands/partners/publishers.

Amazon has actually made it possible for self publishing to exist. There are a lot of successful authors now that never would have made it in the old ‘local bookstore buys books from publishing house’ paradigm.

But this of course has also opened the floodgates for scammers which utilize those same indie-friendly options to try to exploit people.

I think the issues are a little more nuanced than just ‘local business good, Amazon bad’. Not that I think Amazon is good, I just think there are real, valid reasons why small bookstores (and their large book publishers) had problems.

As an RTS player who only ever plays for the story and does not care about multiplayer at all, new RTS games with a decent story and gameplay are kind of thin on the ground these days.

I can’t even play C&C RA2 anymore because I can’t get it to run on my PC. Tried several guides, but it refuses to run properly.

A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.

I understand what you’re trying to say, but I think this will grow increasingly unclear as machines/software continue to play a larger and larger part of the creative process.

I think you can argue that photographers issue commands to their camera and then evaluate the output. Modern digital cameras have made photography almost a statistical exercise rather than a careful creative process. Photographers take hundreds and hundreds of shots and then evaluate which one was best.

Also, AI isn’t some binary on/off. Most major software will begin incorporating AI assistant tools that will further muddy the waters. Is something AI generated if the artist added an extra inch of canvas to a photograph using photoshops new generative fill function so that the subject was better centered in the frame?

My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others ‘please don’t go here’ and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn’t care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.

Will it eventually be AIs at the marketing firm telling the execs that their ads are successful because the AIs on the other side are ‘reading’ it for new training data on how to better optimize viewer attention span? Just two Ad companies paying each other back and forth?

I didn’t even think it was in development. Weren’t they only working on Starfield?

I’m still using discord for basic party chat functions for my small group of friends. As long as that continues to work, I don’t care at all about paid memes.

I generally hate that I have to go into other servers because indie games confuse a discord as being a replacement for forums and a wiki

Brand new to lemmy, but this is my take as well. The first account I created was on lemmy.world and then I had to create another to come here. Imagine if Verizon ‘defederated’ from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.

The problems are real, but the solutions Lemmy currently seems to offer are going to stifle it’s growth before it can truly go big. I can deal with it, but as it currently stands I could never get my friends to join and even if they did, a defederation event happening would kill the concept dead for my more casual friends.

Which is also why corporations shouldn’t be able to give money to political causes. If my ceo wants to donate to some politician let him. But he shouldn’t get to do that and also direct company funds there as well.

From an end user perspective, I want a singular UI to browse all my various Lemmy identities in a cohesive manner. Not logged in on multiple tabs, trying to keep my subscription lists synced or otherwise organized. This is where a good app front end could smooth a lot of user friction out of the process.