After literal decades of middling-to-terrible 3D Sonic games, it seemed like an actual honest-to-god miracle that the Sonic movie and its sequel were so successful. Both movies got largely positive reviews, were praised for the performances of Ben Schwartz as Sonic and Jim Carrey as Robotnik, and made $300 million and $400 million, respectively.

I should have been prepared for the threequel to catapult movie Sonic into the era of videogame Sonic’s “stupid friends,” and yet I sustained significant psychic damage this morning when I came across this tweet from Sonic director Jeff Fowler, showing a highly detailed rendering of Shadow the Hedgehog’s shoes. So long, movie Sonic’s innocence; the biggest edgelord of the 2000s is coming for you.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the holiday run-up has officially begun, and it’s the time of year when every company begins its relentless assault on your newsfeed and email inboxes with as much whimsy and good cheer as it can muster. While for many this is something of an unwelcome barrage of forced bon-homie, there is the occasional bit of holiday marketing that elicits a genuine smile. 

As far as that goes, we’ve always been partial to the holiday tradition of the Windows ugly sweater, and the good news is the 2023 version has just dropped and by ugly sweater standards it’s virtually tasteful. 

Look at it. The majesty. The nostalgia. The wave of good will and sentiment that washes over you as you remember a simpler time, when taskbars were blue, Windows had a sensible naming scheme, and default desktop wallpapers were the thing that gave you an overwhelming sense of calm. Windows XP was here. Everything was going to be ok.

There comes a time in every app, website, or even game’s life where it works about as well as it should. Unfortunately, due to the way society is, the question then asked is: ‘how do we make more money?’ We’ve all seen it. Weird bells and whistles added to perfectly functioning services that take away more than they add.

History has repeated itself with Plex, a streaming app that lets you build your own Netflix, in a sense. Plex allows users to construct their own libraries, either collecting stuff from free streaming services, or creating their own “media servers” with whatever content you’ve got the files for. Then you can broadcast that to your T.V.

As spotted by 404media, however, an attempt to ramp up engagement has led to disaster. The “discover together” feature, introduced at the start of November, tries to capture the “Water Cooler Effect”, i.e. recommending your favourite shows during office small-talk.

This allows you to add friends, which isn’t a bad idea in itself. Being able to share your library of totally-legally-obtained anime with your buds is cool in theory. It’s also meant to create an ecosystem of automatic recommendations based on what you and your friends watch, which hit its logical conclusion last week.

Plex added a new “week in review” feature to the whole discover together thing. In short, Plex will now share what you, and any user on one of your servers, has been watching. In a weekly round-up email. Sent to everyone else you know. And it’s opt-out. Uh oh.

This has been going down about as smoothly as a glass of nails. The Plex forums’ general discussion section has some hefty complaint threads. One user calls it the “enshitification of a good product.” Another commenter remarks: “You don’t just turn something like that on without informing a user and making sure they have the opportunity to stop it before it starts.”

The r/selfhosted subreddit, a general gathering place for people interested in services like Plex, was also lit on fire in a thread that hit over 1.7k upvotes: “On what planet would I ever want this information to be shared with friends on family on an OPT OUT basis?” Whether this is illegal or not is between Plex users and the privacy policy fine-print—but I can pretty confidently call it a bad idea.

On one hand, the wider fear over users having their porn history shared with their mates is only half-founded. As noted in this reply to one of the major threads, Plex only does this with stuff listed on the IMDb or TheMovieDB. On the other hand, that’s still a lot of grey area. I searched “sexy” in IMDb and found plenty of titillating content that could bungle a friendship.  The social implications are an absolute nightmare, whether we’re talking triple-X rated or M for Mature.

There have also been some fair observations that people in vulnerable situations might not want their viewing history shared with family members. For example, a closeted teen living in a house with intolerant parents watching LGBT-friendly shows like Heartstopper. While one response might be “well, why be on the same network” not everyone is technologically literate, and even the ones who are didn’t see this decision blindsiding them.

Both the Plex subreddit and the selfhost blog now have full step-by-step instructions to getting out of this nightmare, but my heart goes out to anyone who had their secret love of catgirls or deep, deep obsession with storage wars outed to their peers without an explicit “yes”, beyond the T&C page your average person shouldn’t (but inevitably will) glaze over.

Not to mention, just looking at these instructions, it looks like you need to go to several different settings to reduce your chances of accidental oversharing to zero. Which both scans as a royal pain to me and would in theory cut you off from other functionalities of the service.