Yeah, so in this hypothetical eventuality they rob themselves of income in relation to games already released, as well as goodwill in relation to games in production or planned for production in Unity. Seems to me like a recipe for backing down on one or the other.

I’m pretty sure devs can just withold payment after Jan 1, and for games already released if Unity wants the money they would be forced to sue the dev for not adhering to their illegal and unenforceable contract. They would have to prove the validity of their per-unit charges without having actually ever measured the units.

Quality won’t increase relative to official methods because it’s already more or less at parity with them. If the file you watch is tagged as a WEB-DL, in most cases it’s identical to the file you’d be streaming via official methods in terms of quality. It’s just remuxed into an open container format like .mkv (the video and audio streams are losslessly copied into a file format which can be shared)

Paying a portion later means more cash can flow through the business and provide utility today. Your post implies that every business operating this way is effectively insolvent without access to credit, but even if your employer has the money to pay for the raw materials today, it generally isn’t in their best interest to do so

I stopped using it because it was kinda shitty. Some page elements in my webapps just didn’t display or work correctly. Firefox is the more polished experience now. But it is kinda nice not having to morally justify your choice of browser, too.

Mostly lurked since 2009, but always had an account so I could vote. Started commenting and posting more over time, to the point it was too much, having pointless internet arguments as a substitute for doomscrolling. So when I got the first notification about the API changes in RiF, decided it was time to cut the cord. I’d already mostly come around to the conclusion that I’d been wasting my time there, but I had a notion that it was somehow OK because the place I’d chosen to waste it was somehow different and better in comparison to other social media. It wasn’t that I wanted to get on a boycott bandwagon. But the API decision, the thinly veiled intent of their ridiculous pricing, and their steadfastness in making no subsequent attempt to mitigate the changes whatsoever truly was the tipping point where I could no longer do the mental gymnastics required to con myself into wasting more time there.

They also screwed themselves over by playing the r/place trump card so soon after the last iteration in 2022. Rather than doing it to create a cool event to experience once every few years, they did it to drive engagement on Reddit. That’s made people lose interest and even if it’s another 5 years before the next one, many of them won’t come back. It’s a self-acknowledgement that the peak reddit era is finished and wouldn’t have happened without the prior backlash against their enshittification. It’s the type of thing that sets up the conditions for a death spiral, because they’ve resorted to tricks to get people to use the site and eventually they’ll run out of tricks.