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Hard to unionize a digital industry, very easy to find someone willing to take lower pay and “scab” when location is not truly a factor. Not to say impossible, but software development is one of few trades that just by the nature of being digital is pretty hard to unionize.


If we believe that, then the real question/answer for the OP's worries is that software development is in a race to the bottom, and then the advice becomes "have you tried switching to hard-to-automate-and-outsource industry?" because you are certainly never going to get respect by volunteering to be paid less just to remain competitive with cheaper workers


My advice broadly would be to find some way to be difficult to replace, and that’s one way to do it.


Then think hard? Have a level of self discipline and don’t consistently turn to AI to solve your problems. Go to a library if you have to! People act like victims to the machine when it comes to building their thinking muscles and AI and it confuses me.


I have mixed feelings on this assessment. I definitely agree that some of these labels could be better ("can't pause or save" and "competition" are missing a lot of nuance), but some you mentioned feel reasonable on the part of the site creator (for example, "variable rewards", which is to say different reward outputs for the same performance/input, are a pretty classic Skinner box and unnecessary as a core feature to make most games work).

I'd also like to question the idea that that multiplayer games are being treated inherently "unfair" here or that these features aren't worth acknowledging as a dark pattern just because they're core to certain genres. I like Minecraft and there's variable drops and achievements and grinding and multiplayer and a bunch of other "dark patterns". I also like to straight up gamble occasionally, and I'm not a gambling addict as of the writing of this comment. It's more the awareness of things that can psychologically hook you that's important, and then you can do what you want with that (or for parents, they can attempt to restrict applications as they find appropriate).


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