It’s not a red flag. It’s just an easy out for that person because they can run the “lol bLoG aRtIcLe” line to instantly dismiss any evidence that exists to the contrary without ever having to read or engage with it. Their entire argument is still just based on a couple of brief tweets and they have never backed their read of them up with anything, yet somehow when other people also develop a counter-argument based on a much larger and wider source of public material and collate it on a blogging site it’s a “rEd fLaG”.

This is such a bizarre take when your own position is based on one or two screenshots of social media posts and the reddit hivemind’s reaction to them. You are asking for someone to disprove/debunk your social media pile-on, which had almost zero substance to it, with some kind of in-depth, long-term New York Times investigation which deep down you know will never happen because this shit isn’t relevant in the real world. That way you can just instantly dismiss the evidence that actually does exist to the contrary, done by regular people and published on their blogs, without ever having to read it or engage with the counter-argument.

It makes a lot of sense if you actually take the time to read his explanation of the context behind his position.

During the Biden administration, the Democrats lead by Schumer (whose family members are lobbyists for big tech) refused to bring antitrust bills Proton campaigned in support of to a vote. Additionally, the only invited senator to show up to a 2024 antitrust meeting was a Republican - Vance. Those are just two examples he cites of Democrats failing in this area and Republicans stepping up in their place.

The crazy thing is that Yen’s argument, that the Democrats have been captured by the corporate donor class, would be supported in any other context by people on reddit and particularly Lemmy. It’s the same thing you guys constantly complain about everywhere else (i.e. Sanders), yet in this one specific instance you ignore all of that and pretend that the Democrats are the good guys who can do no wrong because the idea that they could be as bad as, or worse than, the Republicans in this very specific area triggers you so hard.

More broadly, I would say public P2P stuff - at least in its current forms. I’m not sure it can survive some of the generational shifts that have been occurring in society, since it relies so heavily on community and sharing and demands general technological literacy (not just touchscreen/smartphone/app literacy). Those that do actually have the literacy seem increasingly interested in the instant gratification direct download or torrent streaming stuff, to the detriment of traditional methods of P2P file sharing.

The Proton CEO thing was vastly overblown. He is a privacy advocate and expressed support for Trump’s appointment for head of antitrust, as well as criticism of corporate Democrats who stand for big business which was misrepresented as a love of the Republican Party. The only mistake he made was to publish those statements using the official Proton account, which he later apologised for.

Some people, especially the American left, love to virtue signal and predictably they tried to cancel Proton as a result of this pretty minor and irrelevant social media drama. There were some good write-ups at the time which exposed how counterfactual the “pRoToN lOvEs mAgA” arguments were, but I guess feel free to skip over Proton if it really concerns you. It is objectively one of the best choices if you value both privacy and functionality (Proton still has support for port forwarding), which I think are far more relevant areas to be looking at when choosing a VPN for piracy.

This game has a nice learning curve so far. The basic controls are very simple and easy to memorise, and when you inevitably fuck up it’s usually hilarious. At the same time, it is satisfying to start mastering some of the more advanced (though still relatively basic) mechanics and pulling off through balls between defenders or feints that create space. The three different game modes (3v3, 4v4, 5v5) feel like a nice progression too, as space inevitably gets tighter with more players on the pitch which forces you to make quicker decisions. I wasn’t sure if having prior experience playing the sport would help or hinder but so far it definitely feels like the former. The biggest issues so far seem to be the netcode and the matchmaking time (quite long in SEA and Oceania).