Big ol' cascade effect. Even back in late 2015, they made an update to old-gen release consoles (PS3, 360) that prevented users from loading directly into Online upon booting up the game. If you chose that option; endless load loop and an eventual crash. From that point on until forever, you had to load singleplayer and use the shoddy interface to select an Online game for your multiplayer character.
They have a history of ruining Online with every update. I can only imagine all of the problems that accumulated since then, if it is even playable at all on those consoles.
And whenever they want to drop a site-wide ban for any reason, it's easier to punish the whole device instead of fixing issues or pretending that most of the ad viewership doesn't consist of bots.
"Strike!" is seared into my memory and I want it surgically removed
The creatures at the top can't be human. No one would persist knowing that their wealth is accumulated off of the labor and efforts of multitudes of other people
This is unfortunate, especially the loss of access to half a million texts (and likely more). IA really helped me during plenty of undergrad classes when I needed access to the course text.
Would the "transformative" aspect be valid if IA added a public commentary/note-taking sidebar to their lended books?
It seems that having more facts is indeed directly proportional to having more facts.
Was recently granted the privilege of a permanent ban on reddit for a username I had for over four years and it led me down the rabbit hole of seeing more and more claims from other people who went through similar experiences. Hell, there's a lot of them. Frivolous reports resulting in punishment, appeals being automatically denied, the works, etc.
It might just be a presumption, seeing how many bots slide under the radar each day on that site through posts and comments, but I have a strong feeling that most (seemingly random) admin bans are designed to flush out active and semi-active human users rather than weed out bot code posing as people online. The end goal? Whether it's to create an automated, cyclical platform designed to extract marketing and ad revenue from a steady stream of new users or anything else for that matter, I know not. All I know for certain is that the ban tendencies have ramped up in the recent year and the people actually being punished for it are those who have been using it for long periods of time and manage to conveniently fall on the edge of a subjective TOS offense.
I had my suspicions that it was gradually turning into an AI-fueled cesspit, but now I've had my chance to really believe that it has. Good riddance in that case