I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.

One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the :visited CSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the :visited tag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.

It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.

The thing that finally got businesses to finally get off IE wasn’t from the browser being worse than every other option. Heck, it wasn’t even because it was a decrepit piece of software that lost it’s former market dominance (and if anything businesses see that as a positive, not a negative).

What finally did that was microsoft saying there won’t be any security updates. That’s what finally got them off their ass; subtly threatening them with data breaches, exploits, etc. if they continue to use it. I don’t see google doing this anytime soon, at least not without a “sequel” like microsoft had with edge.

There is the Anno series of games, which are technically RTS games but if I’m honest I find them the most fun when I go out of my way to avoid combat/micromanagement. I’ve only played 1404, 2070, and 2205, 2070 being the best in my opinion, but it has a bad history with DRM so I’d suggest 1404 (known as “Dawn of Discovery” in the US because us americans are afraid of numbers apparently).

Edit: looking at the steam page it looks like they decided to take 1404 down and made a new page where the game is (mostly) unchanged besides requiring you to jump through all the BS hoops that 2070 did, so I’d say if you’re gonna spend money get 1404 on GOG, or if you are willing to do unspeakable things go with 2070.

To be fair, that post specifically asks people who don’t have a technical background. It can be used to show that laymen have the capacity to use a federated platform like lemmy, but not that they are a significant portion of the userbase (albeit that post does have a lot of replies).

Not really an answer to the question, but does anyone else think that the phrases “take a shit” and “give a shit” seem swapped? You say you’re gonna take a shit when you are giving one to the toilet, and you say you don’t give a shit when you are unwilling to take shit.

One of the reasons I really disliked Reddit and stopped using it years ago was this way of using the voting system. If I make a post, and it gets voted something like +4-10, and a reply that is some rewording of “that’s a dumb statement”, what am I to think? I’m certainly not going to change my mind, no one gave me a good reason to.

If one is voting because they feel they can’t stand behind their opinion if they expanded it in text… I don’t know what to tell ya.

I’m inclined to believe a lot of people do this. This is not to say they are terrible for doing this, it’s that it’s human nature. Replying to someone with a well thought out post takes effort and, from my experience, makes the me realize i don’t know shit about the subject. Point is, this way of using the voting system breeds half-thought opinions which is a host of a lot of other problems.

I often hear about the original “Elite” in this context. It managed to do real time 3d rendering on home computers (albeit wireframe) in a time when that was usually relegated to pre-renders or supercomputers. Came out a good decade before making 3d games was more generally viable.

If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn’t put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it’s reasonable to believe Apollo’s existence doesn’t cost them 20M$. In fact I’d be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit’s reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.