The... author of the article with a bitterly sarcastic title about the product's exploitation of its users?
it_wasnt_arson
joined 5 months ago
I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the "(whatever that means)" hits and it all falls into place.
how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer?
For years now, custom plugins have made public Minecraft servers much less "block building game" than "robust engine for MMOs that every kid with a computer already has the client for," and even though it's mostly against Mojang's TOS, all the kinds of monetization you'd expect have followed. When you hear "Minecraft server that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit," imagine "freemium PC game that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit" and you'll get roughly the right picture. Peer pressure-driven cosmetics, technically-TOS-violating-but-who-cares lootboxes, $500 "micro"transaction packages, anything they can get away with. It puts into perspective why you hear so much about Minecraft YouTubers running their own servers.
The answer I don't like thinking about too hard: mass surveillance. Running facial recognition against social media posts and security camera footage, transcribing recordings of phone calls, and using LLMs to build dossiers at scale. Confabulations? Complete nonsense accusations? Who cares? Are you going to defend domestic terrorists against this huge pile of evidence-shaped text?