There's RPG-ish & enchantment mechanics to build up better tools & armor, different biomes to get different resources from, NPC villages to trade/upgrade/protect, and various enemies with varying drops, including in bases/dungeons/strongholds.
The common game loops are "I want to build X, so I need to find area Y to defeat mob Z to get the resources", and "I need to mine resource X, so I need to get resource Y to build tool Z to be able to do so", as well as building resource farms and some rudimentary automation.
So there is enough structured activity to drive actual gameplay beyond just having a pile of virtual blocks to stack, but it contains an additional unrestricted sandbox mode as well.
Even as a non-youtuber, I think it's been made quite clear that the "motive" is selling ads, and advertisers don't want to be associated with particular topics or tones. It's no longer "Broadcast yourself", but "Deliver us specific content we can monetize, and don't dare touch major IP holders' content", which is a completely different creator audience.
Detriment is wholly subjective here. When it comes to politics or social issues, people have different views on how society "should be", and those differences are offensive and considered toxic to the other side. In that sense, everybody is toxic and the label is meaningless and unactionable.
Obviously, most people hold beliefs of some form, and those beliefs will clash with others. Bandying around "toxic" as an absolute in those situations is narrow-minded and prejudiced. Reasonable people with contributions in one neutral area and one controversial area are lumped with this same label as trolls, doxers, and inciters of violence.
Specificity of labels is very important, especially when they are tied to consequences.
Where "toxic" can certainly be used is in relation to a certain goal, like reasonable level-headed discussion, or subscription to a certain worldview; instead of as absolute. Even actions like deliberate trolling aren't considered toxic on sites like 4chan, because that's part of their accepted and promoted culture.
As I said before, propaganda always has and will exist. Certainly measures can be taken to combat it, but some nonzero amount will be there and people first and foremost should expect to face it.
You're injecting an opposite extreme, implying that I don't think propaganda should be combated at all. But the first line of combat is broader communication, so usurpation for propaganda isn't the only content that flows, and multiple points of view are freely shared. With respect to free speech, legal action against propagandists should generally be reserved for origination of falsehoods and incitement to violence, which tends to already exist in our legal frameworks.
I didn't suggest mingling at the park. I suggest being in online places that aren't the hyper-segmented social media sites. Even here, there's a big sorted bag of articles, each with a big sorted bag of comments. Everybody engages with the same bag of stuff. We don't all have our individual view of the world; we see the entire world of HN together, depending on the time of day we visit. That's healthier for diverse discourse and diverse exposure than a pigeon-holed, AI-enforced separation of only your "targeted interests". Of course, you can argue the mob selection bias of articles here, but it's just 1 mob, not a system which enables an unbounded set of mini-mobs to slice at every discernable difference. We're all in HN together, and that has a striking effect on the style of discourse here in comparison.
(As an aside, I have zero problem with using social media for communication with actual friends, relatives, and activities you're a part of. It's all the extra crap they shovel on to chase that unbounded revenue growth that ultimately feeds the problem.)
Regarding the group manipulation, individuals are always at least legally held to their own actions even under manipulative circumstances (distinguished from coerced ones).
Group manipulation only lasts for so long as people don't recognize what's going on and how it's negatively affecting them, which is much harder to keep under wraps these days. There are movements against using Facebook now, which is the proper response to seeing how manipulative and literally unhealthy its ecosystem has become; whereas I don't consider it a reasonable response to call for wide censorship and scanning of personal information and "private" exchanges that happen there, in a big ol' ball of establishing precedent. If manipulators broke laws by posting or accessing stuff, it's a matter of jurisdiction as to who penalizes them, which is always a problem online, but that legal process seems to be properly progressing against CA.
Because Facebook is theoretically not a news media channel, with hired content creation promoting something as factual reporting. Certainly if an individual posts libelous content, they should be legally responsible for that content. But it's ostensibly not Facebook's content, as a social media provider, and international users make legal enforcement near impossible. Propaganda has always existed in opinion pieces, reporting on "rumors" to disclaim themselves, flyers outside official media channels, etc. Facebook doesn't affect any of that whether it's social media or becomes news media.
Again, it's 4chan with more rules. Anybody can post anything. It's not a place of fact or truth. It's of people sharing their lives, thoughts, hobbies, opinions, notices, likes & dislikes, etc. Some extremist $SIDE-wing Facebook channel is simply posting such things. It's not an official channel for trustworthy news, it's users being social, whether that user is Aunt Flo or CNN.
The core problem is that people think it's a "trustworthy" information platform (and Zuckerberg wants that trust for more customer buy-in). It's not. And it won't be, unless you remove the core personal family & friends social aspect of it.
If somebody keeps their own private matters or dealings, it's not your role or your right to pry there to ensure they're "right". Other than that, people freely share both ways about what they believe and discourse continues. The solution to "wrong thinking" is to spread "good" information, not to witch hunt for censorship.
The overarching social problem with social media platforms is the pigeonholing. Freely sharing and discussing is quickly segmented away. The marketing & political money is made on outrage and tribalism, and these amplify differences to the point of segmenting others off if there's any dissonance at all.
Less categorized places of discussion, where members share a broader forum or space, must be more civilized by nature. You have less cherry picking of engagement. You end up exposed to (and exposing others to your) offensive differences, and need to deal with that exposure. We get that outside of social media circles, and it's overall a more healthy environment. Consequently, more and more people are recognizing that social media is not a place to anchor their trust, information, and time, which is a positive change.
Why? Why do you buy into this meme of tyranny of censorship and dictated truthiness?
Progress cannot happen in society without good & bad ideas freely propagating, and individual decisions to buy into them or not. Every significant cultural movement stems from a counter-cultural uprising, and these sorts of things would be swept up in the "vetting".
> How am I supposed to talk to my neighbours or colleagues about current events (or “fake news”) that I don’t know exists?
I don't quite understand. This reads really negatively to me, like you want to proactively judge what others privately engage in so you can "re-educate" them in case you disagree, and lack of access to that is a problem? That's a horribly authoritarian view, compared to simply broad exposure to shine light on the multiple sides of issues, to promote more informed judgment (which AI-driven content "optimization" specifically works against, as its own broader problem).
> We can reject the lunatic town crier, but it is much harder when he knows you deeply and is whispering in your ear.
Of course, on the receiving side of info, with somebody with deep knowledge of you trying to convince you of something, again that's vigilance and exposure on your part. We all have family members in this exact role, trying to convince us all of their viewpoint, with intimate knowledge of us. What's the difference if it's a 3rd party? What if it's you promoting your ideas, and how would you want any "safety" mechanisms affecting you?
The responsibility always falls on the person receiving information, not to police other's receipt of information. The latter ends up with people arrested for googling pressure cookers.
> In this way, the entire democratic process was corrupted.
Let's call this what it is: Propaganda. Same as it always was, just with more input tailoring & curating it.
The biggest problem I still see here is that people expect "truth" from random Facebook posts. It's a website where basically anybody can upload anything. It's 4chan with a few more rules.
Democracy works best with an informed voter base, but misinformation has been there from the beginning. I don't see how this "corrupted the democratic process" any differently than in the past where propaganda was being pushed through other common media outlets, and making money off catering to their audience's outrage and gullibilities.
Judgment of information is something where voting citizens need to be personally vigilant, no matter their sources. That vigilance includes recognizing echo chambers and lack of exposure to a breadth of ideas.
Seagate sold (sells?) them as consumer packaged single external USB-3 drives, so at least their marketing posture doesn't promote them only for that particular use. Which is part of the problem.
I bought it new. It was used by me in a prior filesystem (ext4) to attempt backing up files, so the drive had actively written user sectors on it before trying out a linear log filesystem for the same backups. If instead I had used such a FS on the drive in its new state, there might have been a possibility of better performance, depending on the internal drive management software. The notion of returning it to a state where it considered sectors unused is also dependent on that software.
Higher capacity drives often have higher platter data rates, because of the increased density (or more platters & heads) at the same rotational speed. They should have better I/O throughput than 4TB drives... as long as they're not SMR. :-P A SMR drive that takes multiple days to transfer 500GB to it isn't useful as a maintained backup either.
What I was doing was large backups, no overwriting, and it slowed down massively. I reformatted to a linear log filesystem, and still had the same unusable performance trend. However, since the drive was already somewhat used, and the drive itself knows nothing about the filesystem but only about sectors, I'm sure it was shuffling all the old data around as well.
Strangely enough, I could imagine it might work for a primary hard drive, as writes tend to be small and bursty allowing the SMR shuffling to catch up. But installation would take days.
Marketing them as "Archive" drives as Seagate did is the absolute wrong case for these. It's impossible to get any backup/archive copied over in any timely fashion. As a live mirror which gets piecemeal changes as they happen, then maybe. But that's still not an "archive".
I bought an 8TB shingled drive. While the initial hundreds of MB of backup files wrote at reasonable speeds, it quickly dropped down to 4-5MB/sec sustained average for the rest, until it was idle for hours to catch up. Host management probably can help, but I'm not touching another SMR drive again.
It could be that the chip itself is throttled when in handheld mode, and the dock provides additional power and cooling, as an alternative take on that option.
No touch controls or motion controls in sight! I think they'd ultimately be incompatible with this anyway.
You can't have good local portable multiplayer if one player always has their fingers on the screen, blocking the other's view.
Motion would be very haphazard, due to all the usage styles. Where would the motion sensors go? If it's part of the tablet, you can't play while docked to your TV. If it's part of the joycons, you'd probably have to remove them to play some games, which would be again annoying if it's docked. If the pro controller has motion controls as well, some games requiring both joycons wouldn't bother using it. You'd have to have at least 4 sets of motion controls across the parts for it to work ubiquitously.
All in all, it makes a lot of sense that we might not see those 2 clunky features returning, which is great.
But all the bits (dock, tablet, 2 joycons, joycon mounting stump, pro controller) is a bit too clap-trap for me. I had used Wii Fit for a while on someone else's Wii and liked it, so I got a Wii U version. The addition of the touchscreen plus wiimotes in the Wii U made it a mess of always picking up and putting down things, which was super annoying. Having fewer input schemes, and using them well, would be preferable, in my opinion.
The common game loops are "I want to build X, so I need to find area Y to defeat mob Z to get the resources", and "I need to mine resource X, so I need to get resource Y to build tool Z to be able to do so", as well as building resource farms and some rudimentary automation.
So there is enough structured activity to drive actual gameplay beyond just having a pile of virtual blocks to stack, but it contains an additional unrestricted sandbox mode as well.