IBM Americas President Ayman Antoun Comes to OpenText, Weeks Ahead the Mass Layoffs Begin
GAFAM Mozilla Removes Theora Support, Now GNU Needs to Re-encode Videos

An Open Admission Profits Depend on Addiction

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 25, 2026

This 'game' gets kids hooked, then they use their parents' credit cards

Last week we saw claims that antitrust battles against GAFAM cost Epic Games its stability; but this week we've already seen about half a dozen reports according to which the real issue for Epic Games is lowered "engagement" in (read: addition to) Fortnite. This is similar to what Microsoft does and has internally dubbed "stickiness", either referring to habits or vendor lock-in.

Proprietary software tends to be like this, which is why "doomscrolling" (connected to addictive interfaces such as "infinite scrolling") got its name and many in the Free Software world encourage people to abandon non-free software, instead inviting peers to software that respects users and their time. The latest episode of Cybershow covers some of those things in passing. █

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