51–60 of 149 posts
Information costs nothing to replicate, but it's attention that is the great scarce commodity of the information age. I expect to see extreme escalation in the sophistication of methods for getting peoples' attention in the coming years.
I get it. Here you have a developer who just wanted to make games, and maybe a bit of money. He creates a hit, by accident, with a game that has addicting gameplay (and it is, I personally love it). Then everyone in the media calls his game crap and accuses him of cheating the system (without producing any proof). I'd quit too.
Then when he said he didn't like the attention, more hate came. Then when he said he was pulling it, death threats came.
Reminds me of people who win the lottery. All their friends just want something, charities start bugging them, they can't be left alone.
I feel sorry for him.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. It is not obsession with money, it is just confusion over it. I mean, it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails, and a small price to pay for riches. There must be something else going on, and that is the bit th…
It is not obsession with money, it is just confusion over it. The actions and statements of the author seem completely at odds, and he literally could not do more self-promotion if he tried. Seriously, beyond assassinating a world leader dressed as flappy bird, I cannot fathom how he could have cemented more attention. He had a hit game. These come and go, usually with the creators completely shrouded and hidden. But…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth noting that pewdiepie has 22+ million subscribers. The flappy birds video[1] from January 27th already has 9+ million views. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQz6xhlOt18
Ya, but the pew pew video wasn't posted until well after the game hit number 1.
However YouTubers had picked up Flappy Bird much earlier, again for the "so impossible" angle (in the same way that there were tonnes of reaction videos to the game Amnesia, though it was far less accessible so had a lower ceiling). For instance-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMQSLT7e9Q8
The linked article assumes bots during this period, but more likely it was simply that it started making the organic transit through the YouTubers.
I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it.
Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1].
Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming.
A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point!
There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function.
It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game.
In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain-reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess?
Some externals that had a huge influence on Flappy Bird are Vine and then a couple of huge play along YouTubers (such as "pewdiepie"). I made the analogy before that Flappy Bird is the 2 girls 1 cup of games, and while I saved myself from ever seeing that video, it became famous in reaction videos. Exactly the same thing happened with Flappy Bird, first on Vine in early January, and then as the mega-YouTubers picked…
Interesting. So there were a lot of reaction-style vines of people playing Flappy Bird?
I think the story of this game exemplifies the fact that content needs a minimum amount of attention to reveal it's true value. The journey of Flappy Bird appears to me like this: Stage 1: Almost no attention, almost no growth Stage 2: Some kind of grey market paid downloads / ratings service Stage 3: Attention of minimum critical mass of early consumers (increase in audience of 1 or perhaps 2 orders of magnitude) St…
I think the story of this game exemplifies the fact that content needs a minimum amount of attention to reveal it's true value. The journey of Flappy Bird appears to me like this: Stage 1: Almost no attention, almost no growth Stage 2: Some kind of grey market paid downloads / ratings service Stage 3: Attention of minimum critical mass of early consumers (increase in audience of 1 or perhaps 2 orders of magnitude) St…
Say I found a link here and it's a really good long form story, I really got into it, even had a coffee break while reading it. Then I want to vote for it, but the link has fallen down and is hard to find back.
It is even worse on Google, Facebook or Twitter, because of the infinite scrolling. I always open seemingly interesting links in the background and continue scrolling, but then hardly ever even try to like, plus one or favorite good content.
It's like a perverse filter, selecting cat pics and crash gifs over really nice content that require more than a few seconds to digest.
The one who will fix this will actually revolutionize content selection and probably kill curation.
I really doubt anyone really got 9999. Not being cynical but what is the odd of so many ppl getting that thigh score?
If a player can get one point a second that's 2.78 hours of continuous play that would be needed to score 9999.
I think the story of this game exemplifies the fact that content needs a minimum amount of attention to reveal it's true value. The journey of Flappy Bird appears to me like this: Stage 1: Almost no attention, almost no growth Stage 2: Some kind of grey market paid downloads / ratings service Stage 3: Attention of minimum critical mass of early consumers (increase in audience of 1 or perhaps 2 orders of magnitude) St…