Vodka. I had a bit too much of it a few times (100% my own fault, don't copy me) and now I can't stand the taste at all.

I don't know the game, but definitely an Atari.

Depends on what the machine is for.

Nobody is "begrudgingly" accepting scientific results. But you want to tell that story, right? You're looking for an "us vs. them" situation, but that's not how science works.

Also, I think some of your facts are not actually facts.

Finally, a question itself is not "anti-science". How could it be? However, if you're using a question as a smokescreen to confuse readers or viewers to push your selfish political agenda, that would be shady politics, and it would have nothing to do with science at all.

Twitter's rate limiting has been reported as perhaps being a failure to pay bills or otherwise properly manage their servers, and not some specific policy change. So that particular example might not be what you were focusing on or what you meant to focus on. Obviously Twitter made many other decisions, and the recent big one is cutting off access to tweets for people who are not logged in.

As for Reddit, the price of the API is not the point. Rather, the price is so high that nobody's going to use the API, and that's the point. But they want to pretend that it's still possible to be used. And we know this is true because if the API really has such high value, then presumably some of the popular clients out there would have been worth it for Reddit to purchase, and the purchase price would presumably have some correlation to API usage.

On a more general level, though, I think what you're talking about is the process known as "enshittification". It's possible for social media companies to avoid this end result, but it requires great care especially in the early stages.

The best solution is to stop reading Canadian media. Those companies knew exactly what was going to happen, enough of them supported it, and they deserve to lose their readers.

I think you're wrong about people's perceptions. I think the vast majority of the people in the world do not believe that the ultra-rich deserve to have all the money and power that in fact they currently have.

It's also true that trying to upset that power balance is very difficult, and many people spend more of their time worrying about things that are closer to home where they have greater control.

The other point is that the blackout was predominantly about mods and power users showing how much of a difference they actually made. And certainly they proved their point. Administrators had to come in and boot mods. That kind of worked, but now we see other antics continuing. All of this is good for the lulz, but it also shows that the blackout was a success. Reddit can probably survive without us, but the quality will go to hell, has gone to hell, will continue to linger in hell until some years down the road the site gets unplugged.