We've got a bunch of new people now so let's bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?
I'll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being "creepy" through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)
The feds are running Pokémon Go (and possibly other copycat AR games) to harvest data on human movement and shopping patterns, and the feds are the ones who forced Niantic to dismantle the remote raiding economy and focus almost entirely on in person raids.
A development studio deliberately stopping whales from dumping money into them (ie the previously unlimited remote raid passes) is kind of a jaw dropping moment.
I'm fully on board with this one. The update to "scan" pokestops(take a video of everything around you) followed by the gutting of mobile raids sells this one for me.
To quote comrade Finger, they had a good thing going. Whales would dump money into remote raiding and that backbone supported dolphins and minnows who could both host and join raids via pokegenie, which was a completely independent third party organization that Niantic didn't have to manage or moderate. All Niantic had to do was continue their normally scheduled content treadmill and reap the benefits.
The whole 'but the whales are burning through content too fast, Niantic had to stop them' explanation doesn't hold water for me. Wouldn't Niantic rather have some portion of whales get burnt out and drop off the game for a while until the next content release rather than shut off that revenue stream entirely?
I dunno, to me the only explanation that makes sense is there's something about human movement tracking that Niantic really, really wants.
It used to be that Go had a proximity tracker that helped you search for the one's you wanted. It was like a simpler, stress-free version of my day job. Every update since they got rid of it has been a half measure.
The feds have had to tell soldiers etc multiple times to stop using jogging apps and uploading their routes to social media. They're posting detailed maps of where everything is at military bases and government facilitites.