What if the game is hard to pirate or it has a demo.

If it has a demo like old school days, then I'd try that. If hard to pirate, but it really seems like something I'd enjoy and has mostly favourable reviews then I buy it.

Because someone gifted me a game, my review now doesn't mean anything. That doesn't seem very well thought out. I have a few games with an embarrassing amount of hours on that I'm not allowed to contribute to the score because they were gifted or redeemed through humble bundle. Why even review at this point?

I predict a not-so-small minority will get tired of bots, AI bullshit, SEO optimisation, AI-written articles peppered with Amazon affiliate links, predatory algorithms, etc. That minority will find smaller, human spaces to interact and socialise in. The majority, ever the fan of convenience, will continue to adapt to the corporate enclave of the internet. The answer is decentralisation. The more fatigued we get with the traditional way we interact with the internet, the more common it will become to return to (or create) new decentralised spaces. Maybe those spaces won’t be as large as the Fediverse. Perhaps we’ll fragment further to niche forums, group chats, etc. If we can’t keep those spaces small and safe from corporate abuse, maybe that not-so-small minority will begin using the internet only as a utility and instead leave the socialisation and interaction entirely for the real world only. It’s far more personal and meaningful that way.

Fair enough

I mean, aren't we changing things right now, changing the way it goes? Sorry for all my railing against the mainstream, I can't resist quoting T2. But yes, I suspect you're right. Really, it's a kind of return to the pre-commercial internet, before corpos started trying to capture, valueize, and monetize all of our freely given interactions on their platforms.

> That minority will find smaller, human spaces to interact and socialise in we're sick of the internet to the point we just go to a farm sometimes. we get bands most fridays now, it's kinda grown.

Fuck, we used to do this in the 90s. Big old farmhouses on land no longer used for farming. Owner of the land charged $2 to park and that was it. Bands would play, people mingled, some people would sell bags of chips and soda out of their trunks. So much better....before the dark times, before the internet.

But how do you prevent those smaller spaces from being encroached on by LLMs? If they can write fake reviews they can write fake user profiles, and small spaces often have tiny mod teams that can't react quickly to rapid nonsense machines

I don't see an issue with it. There's no good way for Steam to know where the key came from, you could have been gifted the key, got it in a bundle, or stolen it from somewhere. Since they can't tell, they don't know if your review is compromised. When I'm reading reviews, I don't personally care about that, I just care what the review says, and I'll read 5-10 before making a decision if it's a more expensive or longer game. A lot of reviews are pointless (e.g. "nobody will read this, so I'm gay" or whatever), so I very much appreciate helpful reviews regardless of the source.

See the excerpt from my comment you replied to: > If we can’t keep those spaces small and safe from corporate abuse, maybe that not-so-small minority will begin using the internet only as a utility and instead leave the socialisation and interaction entirely for the real world only. It’s far more personal and meaningful that way.

My first (non-school) band's first gig was one of those farm gigs. It's how I got the idea.

To be clear, a lot of that is the Web, not the internet overall.