I think there could be reasons a government/people would want loot boxes to be not allowed that don’t relate to gambling and/or kids. I know there were some people that said “think of the kids!” when the discussion was going on, but my point is that there may not be direct overlap because the implementation and its effects are greater than simply disabling the ability to buy loot boxes in a particular region.

The loot box issue is more like telling a vape company that they can sell oils as long as they don’t contain THC. This issue is more like saying, “You can sell the THC oils in any market or store, but every market and store in the country must check every item every user wants to buy for the presence of THC by to sending an image of that product to an AI that will tell you whether or not the user needs an age check to buy the item. If they do, the user cannot buy the item unless you take a photo of the user’s ID and send it to some random company that will use the photo to verify the user is allowed to use THC.”

It’s an entirely higher level of complication and risk, so I’d excuse the “think of the kids” people that went after loot boxes in this particular case. But I’d also be curious about how much “think of the kids” overlap there is anyway.

I didn’t mention any other cases because I didn’t know which specific issues you were referencing other than loot boxes. I wasn’t sure which social media content you were referring to, but you can imagine how I’d view it if it’s something like chat control or any other system relying on AI or age verification to control access.

Also, the lower the taboo of the item being accessed, the more generous I am with these things. I still don’t like it, but no one is going to be ashamed if their love of loot boxes is leaked, for instance.

That’s when you take a break and let someone else deal with it until you’re ready again. Or focus on a different fight and let that one go. You’re irreplaceable, but your participation in that specific fight is not essential.

I hope you can find a break. I get tired of it, too. Sometimes just not reading the news or social media for a while is enough to recharge. The news and online commentary makes it impossible to even get small breaks that would’ve been common two decades ago and the consumption of it all can be exhausting enough to prevent us from taking any other actions.

I wonder how much it has to do with the success and subsequent loss of this operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield

Because it seems like a lot of countries in the west are pushing this kind of thing rover the last several years and there’s a heavy push right now. https://www.privacyguides.org/videos/2025/12/16/taylor-lorenz-on-kosa-the-screen-act-and-repealing-section-230/

I did not downvote but you’re asserting several things that you can’t possibly know. 1. War with China is coming. 2. It will inevitably be nuclear. 3. This is being done to prevent people from protesting when #1 & 2 occur.

None of those other things should require any sort of identity or age verification, though. In the case of loot boxes, government should be able to tell companies, “hey, you can’t sell that here”. In the case of age verification and nudity scanning there’s a whole host of issues from the fact that people don’t find loot boxes to be taboo or embarrassing to the fact that people do find nudity and porn embarrassing, to the fact that any scanning systems will false flag, to questions about who has access to the data that is submitted and how long it is stored, to how easy it could be to misuse the systems to go after disadvantaged groups (we all know LGBT content will intentionally be covered by this, whether they’re open about it or not, right?), to whether or not the system will be used for other purposes that either aren’t being said aloud or won’t be realized until after it’s implemented.

Every person against this sort of thing that checks out is just giving them less resistance. It sucks to have to deal with it, and it’s a constant fight, but you’re not just fighting for yourself.

Your Pokémon comparison reminds me of something I’ve noticed with gaming. Sometimes the game just has to hit me at the right time, regardless of nostalgia. I’ve had games that I bounced off of multiple times, then years later I decide to give it a go and get sucked in. I’m fairly sure this sometimes happens due to other factors in my life at the time (situations I’m currently experiencing, things I haven’t experienced, etc.).

For me, personally, these games are the closest thing on a computer to a nearly endless sandbox tabletop rpg experience. I don’t like having to do some grand “save the world” narrative that RPGs push you into, and in Skyrim I can avoid it after the intro or mod it out. Then I create characters like a tabletop RPG (I develop a backstory and where I choose to go and what I choose to do is based on the character’s personality in my mind) and essentially play it like it is a solo tabletop game where the engine takes care of a lot of the work.

I haven’t played in years, though, because I can’t get the same level of immersion as I did when playing for 5 hours straight before having kids.

Some just want money.

I think this article: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17043978/uk-porn-age-verification-law-mindgeek

Is about pornhub’s parent company trying to lobby in favor of this because it thought it could make money by selling age verification. I read an article saying something to that effect quite some time ago, and I think this is the article, but can’t be sure because it’s requiring a login and the archive site isn’t loading for me at the moment.

Scrolling to the right is also slow as hell with this. It used to scroll across several videos at once but now it scrolls one per swipe.

I stopped using the main page and started using the subscriptions page, which still has the smaller icons. I’m using YouTube a lot less, though.

The messed up thing about this is that the original image was talking about some random project being maintained by one person in their spare time. This is about a $69 billion company

I keep seeing this a lot lately. I also saw one that had the style from the image (accept all or refuse maybe), but if you hit refuse, a second one popped up that said:

[pay to read]

Or

[read for free]

I opened it in private mode and read for free just let me into the article. I’m guessing it accepts all.

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We already do it for utilities. A financial company should not be deciding what its users are allowed to spend their own money on except within the confines of law.

It’s too hot for that and I don’t think Google should control what people wear.

Seems like they could just release the server software for the online only games. I’m pretty sure people are reverse engineering it anyway.

0.286x damage done, 3.5x damage taken. Doesn’t scale well at all. It would be nice if it were more granular and they had separate sliders for damage done and damage taken.

Invisible weapons are all the rage these days.

Honestly, I don’t want age signals sent at all. As long as I (the parent) can use parental controls to limit app access, that’s all that matters. Give users the option to deny ad personalization and that protects children from ad personalization. Companies don’t need to know anyone’s age. Meta is pushing for more data, but this feels like an underhanded way to take a middle road that gives Google more data (but not as much as Meta wants). We should take the high road and tell them both to butt out.