this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there's been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it's fine to disagree, I'm finding it suspicious that there weren't comments like this posted a week or 2 ago

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[–] MisterNeon@lemmy.world 167 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I haven't seen anyone here against it.

Ross got hit with some anonymous legal complaint so I wouldn't be surprised with astroturfing.

I'm also an American so I can't help.

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The entire complaint was based on nothing too. They claimed he’s orchestrating some crazy financial scheme, and getting paid 6 digits from it, when he’s not only doing it for free, but can’t even participate in the initiative to begin with

[–] AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

If he helps bump the gaming industry in a better/healthier direction, he deserves 6 figures imo

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 112 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Are people criticizing it? There is a certain critical mass that when something becomes popular enough a subset of the population will automatically oppose it.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 73 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's also a threshold where Industry Groups will start astroturfing. Especially when it comes to worker's rights or consumer's rights.

[–] a_jackal@pawb.social 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It seems like it's a bit too late now to start astroturfing this though

[–] Dultas@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

It's a fine line because if you do it too early you'll just add more attention to it. They probably predicted it would stall out.

[–] who@feddit.org 88 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I don't find the absence of criticism suspicious. The petition makes sense. It aims to solve a problem that affects many individuals and a significant part of human culture.

What I do find suspicious is the sudden emergence of criticism now that it looks like it might succeed. I smell astroturfing and media manipulation.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 39 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is exactly my point for the post, though your take is better worded

[–] duchess@feddit.org 15 points 1 week ago

As the petition got more successful it became a bigger topic on here. Bigger topics draw more opinions.

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[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 67 points 1 week ago

Because it's about to affect big money so they sic their bots on it to shape public opinion and stomp it, like everything else.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 57 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Welcome to the age of bots.

Enjoy your perpetual unavoidable and even undetectable bias and opinion influencing astroturfing.

Paid for by whoever doesn't want the things that you want, to influence the people around you to bite at each other's throats and work against their own interests.

[–] Rolive@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 1 week ago

This is one of the biggest reasons Reddit has turned to shit.

[–] alessandro@lemmy.ca 51 points 1 week ago

One year ago, right at the beginning of the petition, PirateSoftware came out misreading the initiative by suggesting the idea the petition was about forcing indie developer to host their server, at their expense, forever and other stupid idea on this line. A fabricated these narrative to act as the typical popular youtubers that say endlessly: "this is st0pid, they are st0pid". The fabricated narrative confused other popular YouTubers with mixed feelings; and there was very little support. This assured PirateSoftware the first place on the youtube rankings when you search for "stop killing games", plus had lot of kids brainwashed into thinking " this is st0pid". This kind of criticism never went away completely, the were partially silenced by the very recent roaring as people understood correctly what it was actually about. As SKG keep hitting its milestone the angered roar did lowered, so now you can ear again the "this is st0pid" team

[–] Rakonat@lemmy.world 43 points 1 week ago (22 children)

There's always been criticism but until now it's been low level insiders and nobodies like pirate software. And the reasons the publishers and big names that would be affected did SKGs didn't say or do anything until now because they didn't want to give it any oxygen. They were smart enough to ignore it because they knew if they said anything it'd rile up a shift storm. Which is exactly what Pirate Software did so he's probably got a lot of people on both sides pissed at him for being too narcissistic to shut up and let the movement die.

Now that it has enough signatures to be taken seriously you're going to see the fire hoses open up and a lot of misinformation spread about how the movement would make the gaming industry unviable for the current model. Now is the point where if you are an EU citizen that you write and call your representatives who would consider this issue and help write the law if it did pass on how important it would be to you personally to not allow game companies to revoke your ability to utilize a game you paid for.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

There was criticism about it every time it's been brought up. But it's only been like 5 or 6 people just parroting what some AAA studio's CEO (or the son of the ultimate WoW neckbeard) said about it.

[–] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah bit he worked at blizzard, so he knows way more about assaulting co workers than you. Wait what are we talking about?

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[–] burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

what right do you have to stop me from killling your games?

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[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago

Well certain EU politicians support SKG, so yeah it's making a lot of corpos uncomfy

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I’ve made some comments critical of how relentlessly PirateSoftware is being harassed and how annoying it is and how distracting from the actual movement it is.

Nothing wrong with the petition itself, and I haven’t noticed any negative astroturfing about it.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 43 points 1 week ago (34 children)

PirateSoftware is being harassed for a whole lot more than just his SKG misinformation campaign.

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[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 week ago (13 children)

I have posts being critical of it from over a year ago. I'd assume most people who have criticism don't leave a comment because it'll get you massively downvoted and your inbox will be flooded with angry replies.

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[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago

Attention work both ways.

People who were not aware, now are. From all sides.

[–] abbotsbury@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

No, there was definitely some criticism before. Prior to this month, it wouldn't be unusual to hear people complain about how it would destroy the live service market and was therefore Bad Actually for games and game preservation

The topic getting much more mainstream just brought all those people with.

[–] Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The implication that “games as a service” is somehow a positive for game preservation is its own kind of illiteracy.

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[–] Red_October@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

I think suspicious is the wrong word. Suspicious seems to suggest doubt or a lack of certainty, but the criticism is pretty predictable. Industry forces could afford to ignore it when it looked impossible to get the signatures, but now that the signatures are in the bag they're having to take a different tactic.

SOME of the criticism is certainly genuine and exactly what it appears to be at face value, but it was inevitable that those doubts would be artificially boosted now.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why would they? Most people didn't know about the petition until a few weeks ago, and I think people are largely knee-jerk supporting their favorite streamer (in this case, PirateSoftware). I don't think there's a concerted effort here to kill it, just people coming out of the woodwork now that it got a lot of attention.

[–] descartador@lemmy.eco.br 7 points 1 week ago (8 children)

This may have killed piratesoftwares career

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[–] 007ace@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I saw it posted on here much before it reached the threshold. I think that before then it was really just a few people running with it, now that it has gotten momentum, more people are sharing and we run in similar circles so it can appear to be overwhelming.

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[–] mriswith@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Not at all.

More attention means more people see it, so even if the percentage of complainers haven't changed, there are more people who know.

On top of that, there was criticism before. There's that streamer who was mocked relentlessly in comments and some defending him, there were articles about game developer lobby groups complaining that were posted here, etc.

[–] Deflated0ne@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

The bot farms and clout grasping social climbers don't care about things until they reqch a certain size.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Maybe not specifically this comm, but I had been sporadically arguing with people on various places on lemmy about SKG before Ross even dropped his 'SKG is probably dead' video that (re)ignited this whole thing.

A whole, whole lot of people I talked to basically had the same talking points Thor initially did, a lot of them were dedicated to various facts that were simply wrong, rhetoric that was either bipolar/hypocritical, or just ultimately nihlist (nothing can be done).

I was actually very relieved, initially, when Ross made above mentioned video, simply so I would no longer have to keep explaining all the various intricacies... Ross had addresed all this stuff before, but you'd have to watch about 2 or 3 hours of videos to truly get it, in all its detail.

The 'SKG is probably dead' video did a good job of doing both a broad overview, as well as going into detail with the more common, in-depth misunderstandings... which were pretty much all popularized by Thor.

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