• 38 Posts
  • 1.97K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Does anyone else miss traditional forums?English
    6·
    3 days ago

    Everyone here saying they still exist.

    That’s not the point.

    :-/

    It kinda is, though. “I’m here, rather than over there, because I’d rather product content complaining about a lack of a thing than adding to the content of the thing I say I wish I had”.

    I miss them because is was a concentration of each niche and there usually wasn’t much competition. No competition for “likes” or whatever.

    I think its easy to mis-remember the past. But the idea that people on forums weren’t competing for attention, or that whole communities weren’t competing for degrees of participation, is a product of nostalgia. Jump over to 4chan - a very Old Internet relic - if you don’t believe me.

    The thing you remember was the fun you had in your younger days doing a thing you were passionate about. And the thing you hate about Social Media is largely the absence of fun.

    I’ll tell you what was good about the old school forums. Once you got up the right combination of browser add-ons, there were no ads. I go on Instagram now and I’m getting 2-3 ads for any given real post. I’m getting a flood of click-bait “Suggested For You” content I didn’t subscribe to or ask for. I’m getting pop-ins and notices and updates and reminders shoved on me. That’s what fucking sucks in Web 2.0/3.0 Just a deluge of corporate shit raining on you at every interaction.

    But this dogged insistence that the newer model of forum organization - the Reddit or Wikipedia content ranking formula, rather than the traditional Groups organized by Last Update - is somehow ruining the internet… I just don’t see it. What I see with the newer model is more images and videos, which would have sunk an old school dial-up powered forum 30 years ago.

    And I think what old-heads are really asking for is a community that doesn’t use thumbnails/images/videos in the feed. And I’m sympathetic to that. I’m just not nostalgic for fucking WoW forums or SomethingAwful posters or 90s-era content rings. Just like with the modern internet, that era was choked with shitty posters, bot posters, and endless scams. Those things just weren’t memorable in the same way as the fun stuff.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market pricesEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    It can’t pop if the US Treasury just keeps dumping tens of billions of dollars into it as a backstop.

    The Infrastructure Reinvestment Act kicked this mess off, but it didn’t pad the wallets of the right people to the right degree. So now Trump is just cutting idiots and assholes across the VC Tech Sector ten-digit checks to keep doing what they’re doing.

    We’re increasingly operated as a Planned Economy that exists to turn natural resources into AI slop, because this is what the federal government’s leadership believes they need to maintain the illusion of control over the public.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.”English
    43·
    3 days ago

    Conservapedia already did this something like twenty years ago. It missed the entire purpose of the project, which was to invite a kaleidoscope of specialists and journalists to document the volume of known information categorically, primarily through citation to other online works.

    Instead, you had a basket case of ultra-orthodox ideologues carving out a very niche set of contrary opinion posts that weren’t well documented or continuously maintained.

    Conservapedia isn’t a right wing vanity project because of it’s hot takes on Hitler, it’s a vanity project because of the yawning gulfs in it’s data set. Nobody engages with the site, because it is so heavily censored.

    I get the sense Grokapedia will suffer the same fate. If a subject doesn’t tickle Musk’s interest, it’ll either go undocumented or be a naked plagarization of some other online encyclopedia. And as soon as Musk loses interest entirely, support for the service will go the same way as so many private vanity projects.

    Incidentally, Wikipedia’s fate is also an open question. What happens when Jimmy Wales can’t administer and fundraise for it anymore? How long until some hacks get their hooks in and corrupt it like so many other private media outlets?

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•The median price of best-selling new games on Steam has dropped in the past 2 years, research finds: "Charging >$25 is getting trickier, as players compare value to the $10-$15 indie titles"English
    6·
    4 days ago

    I’m sure that plays a role. But it might also be worth noting that the market is absolutely saturated. You don’t need to go out and get The Latest New Game to enjoy yourself. There are titles that are 20 years old and can stand up to anything the AAA titles will put out next week.

    The marketing budget is what’s driving a lot of the prices of these bigger titles. You see a Superbowl Ad for the new Call of Duty or GTA game? That’s $5 of the sticker price right there. Sometimes firms are spending 50-100% of the actual production cost of the game to tell you to buy the game. Other times they’re just going out to the gaming mags/influencer groups and leading you with “The game is coming!!!” news articles for years at a time, hoping to build a critical mass of pre-orders to fund the next title in the pipe.

    Once the game is out, though, its done. Anything you can flip it for is free money for the owner of the property. So why not re-sell the SquareEnix back catalog for $10/ea? Tune up the graphics a bit, maybe spring for a few new cut scenes. You can take a title that landed on shelves in the mid-90s and turn it into another eight-figure release just by hyping it back up again.