Samsung always seems to have the paradigm of good hardware with shitty software, and with their recent phones they seem to manage to enshittify both.

I guess if GrapheneOS finally gets spoken to by a manufacturer interested in filling this market gap, that would be awesome too.

Hell, maybe it could be a chinese manufacturer.

What did it feel like before security cameras and personal surveillance became affordable and ubiquitous? Nowadays, I have to internally accept that a majority of my life will be recorded, auto-labeled, and probably marked in a digital vault for sale or future use by some organization. There’s very few ways for my generation to reclaim our privacy - everyone born after the 2000s is basically hosed.

Was it better back then? Did people actually trust one another?

It’s user instance specific. lemmy.blahaj.zone, for instance (where my account is from) has downvotes disabled entirely - I can’t add them nor view them.

It is a bit of a pain to be honest, since my old lemm.ee account allowed me to do both. I suppose I could email my instance admin to ask for clearance or an explanation, but I think that’d border on unnecessary nagging. I can still see the total regardless.

There’s nuance that you’re not including. VAC and game bans are dependent on a per game basis, and don’t apply to ALL multi-player servers, just “VAC secured servers” (which makes sense if you got banned by Valve Anti-Cheat), with the sole exception being Valve games that utilize the same underlying engine for their multi-player (CS:Source and TF2, GoldSrc games, so on…) with the same restrictions.

You can still play VAC and other anti-cheat supported multi-player with games not related to your ban, but you will still have VAC bans on record on your profile, which people may cite to kick you.

All of this (apart from the social stigma) is plainly documented on Steam Support:

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/571A-97DA-70E9-FF74

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/647C-5CC1-7EA9-3C29

Project Zomboid Mentioned!