The reason I was working in IT support for a couple years and why that is the biggest team in my company’s IT is because most people aren’t tech savvy. The rest of this comment is written looking at a regular user: My mom.

The section on accounts I mostly agree with except for one thing: Accounts are used to sync things across devices. Syncthing is great and I personally use it. Does my mom use it? Heck no, she wouldn’t even be able to set it up, let alone keep it working or repair it when it breaks. Google’s cloud doesn’t break, neither does Apple’s or Microsoft’s and all of those are already set up for her just by logging in once, when getting a new phone/PC.

Updates: Complete bullshit. The other comment already explains it well. Most updates contain security fixes, the smaller ones, made outside the regular update cycle, are usually to fix major security flaws and should be installed by everyone, not just my mom.

Notifications: Agree, even my mom complains about them and the only ones that are actually useful are the ones from communication apps.

Onboarding: I find it funny that the author writes that they don’t care about Copilot, Figma make and calendar functions and just assumes that everyone else feels the same way. Does my mom care about those things? I don’t know, I haven’t asked her. That’s what these onboardings are for. Telling the user that you have a certain feature after an update or on first start is needed, because most users will not search for it on their own. It’s marketing and it’s gone after you go through it once.

In conclusion: The author seems to not be aware that they are part of a very small group of people who don’t need these things.

It’s starting:

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/japanese-game-and-comic-platform-dlsite-launches-its-own-payment-alternative-following-visa-and-mastercard-suspensions/

DLsite is the biggest platform for hentai that I know of. If something exists, it’s probably being sold through there. This is pretty likely to work out for them and maybe other japanese sites can use it as well.

Yeah, a mass exodus of an entire industry is more or less the only thing could work. Other than regulation from the government, but in the past the USA hasn’t really been keen on regulating their precious “free” market.

As to how much money goes through Steam, consider this: Where I live, most banks only give out Visa cards for free, with alternatives technically available but costing money. So, if you have a bank account in my home country and use a card to pay, it goes through Visa. I’m fairly certain that we aren’t the only country where this is the case. This poses the question: Does enough money flow through Steam for it to even be noticable compared to multiple countries worth of purchases? Maybe? Probably not though. But should enough companies simultaneously decide to stop using them, it’d at least give competitors a chance to take over.

That wouldn’t work. Visa and the others don’t care what exactly someone buys on Steam. They’re saying that Valve can’t sell certain things on their store, or they will stop processing payments that go to Steam. Doesn’t matter if you pay for “points” or games directly.

The only way to get around that would be to remove the option to pay with Visa, etc. from Steam entirely and only accept other forms of payment. This would include physical Steam gift cards that could then be bought with any payment option, but only as long as Visa, etc. don’t start threatening stores that sell those.

Also, to your last suggestion: I don’t see how that would help. Publishers and developers need to make money somehow and if that involves Visa, etc. at all we’re back to square one.

The free review count is also IP based, so for most countries that makes it a daily limit and you can just use a VPN to get around it entirely.

On Android you can use Google Lens or, if you don’t want to use Google products, any random QR code scanner app.

No idea about iPhone as I’ve never owned one, but I’d assume most QR code scanners can do that there as well.

Whenever I hear someone say that something is impossible with current technology, I think about my grandma. When she was a kid, only some important people had telephones. Doctors, police, etc.

In her lifetime we went from that to today, and, since she’s still alive, even further into the future.

Whenever someone calls something impossible, I think about how far technology will progress in my own lifetime and I know that they’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. (Unless, like you said, it’s against the laws of physics. But sometimes even then I’m not so sure, cause it’s not like we understand those entirely. )