Needs to have a couple of examples of corporate changes and their relative impacts just to put it into perspective

I think it's important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There's a grift that targets basically every personality type. There's grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for 'I'm so much smarter than others', for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there's something for everyone. If you aren't careful you'll be laughing at the other 'idiots' while you yourself fall into a different trap.

Honestly once you start paying attention it's really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I've clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.

Yep the flaw is assuming that humans would actually select for constructive comments. It's a case where humans claim that's what they want, but human actions do not reflect this. We'd eventually build yet another 'algorithm that picks what immediately appeals to most users' rather than 'constructive'. You'd also see the algorithm splinter along ideological lines as people tend to view even constructive comments from ideologies they disagree with unfavorably

Sims is pretty popular and the main version everyone plays is PC only, but can be run on laptops and other low end PCs. There are a lot of 'I only play Sims' people out there. Could account for some of the numbers

The only issue with your second point is that it can eventually become a quagmire when you do need to upgrade it.

I work for a very old company who held to that philosophy for many years. And while any individual component could be looked at and seen as running fine, when they did finally decide it was time to upgrade they were faced with needing to upgrade everything simultaneously.

All of the tech was too old, so no current tech had the sort of backwards compatible bridge that helps you move forward. It's like figuring out how to get your telegram system to also work on your WiFi network, nobody makes any interfaces for that.

Instead of slowly and gradually replacing components over time, they're faced with a single major overhaul that's put the entire company at risk because they have to completely shut down for over a month.

Until TV is setup the same way Spotify/YouTube music/apple music is where you just pick one you like and listen to the same music the other platforms have, they'll continue to have pirating problems.

I currently pay more per month for the various components needed for highly effective pirating than I would for cable and that's purely because it offers a better experience. I can't buy a plex-like experience anywhere for any price legally.

Fix that and I'll go legit just like I did for music.

Yep. This is totally good enough to outsource PR speak to AI. ChatGPT has this down pat.

Same kinda logic as people who complain about ads saying that they'd rather pay for the service, instead of ads. The reality is only about 1% ever do pay. I assume it's similar for clothing, where most people naturally gravitate towards the clothes that look 'best', even if they don't have pockets.

Blame chrome. Autofill doesn't include .com? Welp, guess I'll just hit the top search link instead then.

Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit for my casual scrolling needs. But for research purposes for things like buying advice, tech support, etc I still find myself at Reddit. Lemmy may get there someday, but it's not there yet.

I didn't delete my account because I hate permanently removing information from the internet. I get annoyed when links are dead or information is lost. I understand why others are doing it, but I can't help but be sad at all the information we've lost and I won't contribute to that.

I get it. But I also hate how useless the internet has now become for me. Kept trying to do research on a topic the other day and kept ending up at private subreddits or reddit comments with nothing but deleted comments. It will take years (if ever) for that kind of knowledge to grow again. I'm just completely at the mercy of random SEO crap reviews or gut instinct now when I need to research stuff to buy.

Yep. The Fediverse has a lot of growing room in the QOL department and is hampered by the relatively small (and often part time) dev teams working on it. Meta comes in, builds a compatible platform, then starts offering meta-platform only 'improvements' that offer those QOL features. Rest of the Fediverse dies out because 'meta' isn't that bad and they aren't abusing their position (yet).