Middle-aged gamer/creative/wiki maintainer
FFXIV, Genshin Impact, Tears of Themis, Rimworld, and more
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  • 2 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • While absolutely too many things are charged for in gaming today (exp boosts? skip potions? cheat armor that was already fully developed at launch? all ways to get your company on my high seas list)… in the specific case where (1) new content is continuously being developed AND (2) the game is not asking for mandatory spending to continue playing (e.g. no expansion pack to purchase, no subscription fees), I don’t think the concept of charging for in-game content at all is abusive.

    If I buy once and then a year later some optional paid cosmetics or other goodies are added, I think that’s permissible. And if I’m in a free to play live service game, I recognize the ongoing dev costs need to get covered somewhere.

    I do vastly prefer those companies that give their games TLC and updates for free, and I’m not saying the standard pricing for optional purchases in the modern market are reasonable. But I think the existence of in-game purchases, if not their current state, can make sense sometimes.




  • I don’t think the fediverse has this, but I’m a bit confused why so many of these comments are puzzled at why you would want it. We have fediverse twitter, fediverse insta, fediverse reddit, fediverse discord, etc – why not fediverse facebook/myspace/carrd? Where users could just have small personal (or corporate) pages about themselves that aren’t as blog/news focused on the main(user) page.

    I don’t even think it would be a huge stretch to implement: a big focus on user page customization with a small microblog interface taking up a portion of the screen would do it. (Disclaimer: not saying easy to create, just not that far out of reach vs everything else the fediverse has).




  • I don’t really understand why you’re comparing these two things? One is a group of people refraining from consumption of certain goods for personal reasons - health, ethics, climate impact, whatever. The other is a group of people consuming arguably more goods than they (we tbh) deserve since we’re not willing or able to pay for it for one reason or another.

    A better analogy would be comparing piracy to… I don’t know, a veg-eater of whatever type who still enjoys the taste of bacon and resorts to stealing it because it’s better to hurt the meat industry than to pay? It’s a product that person really doesn’t really need and absolutely would have never paid for, yet the person still wants it and obtains it in a way that hurts the industry.

    (The analogy doesn’t hold up since stealing physical goods has a different impact than distributing digital copies, but it’s the best I’ve got off the cuff)

    E: okay, after reading your other comments, I’m both confident this didn’t address the point you wanted and confident I don’t really understand your deal well enough to do so. Both of these groups have some members who have a problem with industry practices and others who are into their chosen lifestyle for other reasons. It seems like you’ve made some odd decisions about which groups are most prevalent among each and are framing your premise around that, and I don’t think we’re going to see eye-to-eye on it when the premise is Like This.

    Or are you trying to say veganism should be more widely accepted because “DRM is wrong” is roughly equivalent to “animal suffering is wrong” re: “industry bad”?



  • I don’t mind the lower quantity - that’s expected on a small platform - but I’m definitely not enjoying the lower quality.

    I think the issue here is that there’s a sweet spot where quantity and quality are in equilibrium. You NEED a certain quantity before you have a high chance of finding insightful comments on a given topic – to simplify things, if there’s a 1% chance a given comment is going to be from an expert with great insight, you have a ~9.6% chance of finding that on a post with 10 comments and a ~63% chance of finding that on a post with 100 comments. The threadiverse just hasn’t hit that threshold yet.

    Of course, there’s a tipping point which reddit is long past, where higher and higher quantities start to drown out the insightful posts with memes and quips, or downvote and mock them with a confidently wrong counter-opinion the mob wants to hear more.

    I hope the barriers to entry with decentralized services that the masses find “confusing” are such that we eventually manage to reach equilibirum and not tip too terribly far past it.


  • have there been any writings, surveys, or studies

    If this is your core question, I suggest putting it somewhere up top; people will get halfway through your post, find something they want to respond to, and just respond without realizing you’re not looking for anecdata.

    But no, there’s nothing like that as far as I know. And I feel this sort of thing would get a lot of play from ex-redditors, so I agree with the other guy that recent shifts would have been too recent to have been analyzed.

    (As far as anecdata goes, I’ve always found subs that focused on a location instead of a topic had a more prominent conservative presence, as location subs bring out a lot more fierce rhetoric as people feel they’re defending their homes from perceived threats.)


  • I got tired of everything taking so much effort. I was almost always able to eventually wrangle what I wanted out of the OS, but every change I wanted to make and thing I wanted to try needed so much searching and learning. I wanted stuff that just worked, even if it was “dumber.”

    That, and some parts of the community I ran into were really prickly. One that was especially memorable: I was asking for help on a big-ish project with a lot of followers and helpers and didn’t expect the lead dev to answer my question, but when he did, he felt the need to make a snide as hell comment about how I have no business being there if I’m going to forget to start a service. On top of the exhaustion I was already feeling, I had a massive moment of “okay my guy, I guess I’ll just fucking leave then.”

    Anyway, it just feels better being a poweruser on windows. I know enough to keep it clean, safe, and slim (like using powershell to disable the bits they don’t expose to a settings UI, for example) – to truly admin my machine – without having to work so hard for it day in and day out.