151–160 of 226 posts
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I mostly play single player games these days because they've been spared. I played a Plague's tale a few weeks ago. Really strange premise but a lot of fun!
Game publishers must fear the day when a FOSS game engine will be interfaced with a FOSS AI capable of creating credible worlds and interacting NPCs.
I really want someone to make BoringBook - it's free until a billion people have signed up and then after that it costs $1 a year. It gives you a page you can post to and customise like myspace, an encrypted messaging client, local group pages and business pages. There are no ads, other than whatever businesses post on their pages. There are three feeds: your immediate network (which is the default), your local netwo…
Eh, first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton. So, to actually pay for that you're going to either ask for VC money or show ads. But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increas…
I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or medical research or something. We don't need it fucking around and messing with the social structure of society anymore.
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"We will figure out the business model later" Meaning: Once we have hooked enough users, we'll make them the product. Free lip piercing...
Corollary: "We have a business model, its built on bullshit and blue skies." Quote from my wise father about being careful when being recruited by a startup that sounds too good to be true.
Your father could have saved me…
They are the hot glue underneath a AML/KYC-based identity verification systems at scale and the sticky requirement for anyone looking to build such a system at scale. There is no better verification than social context for identity, and at core these are giant graph databases that have personal histories which can be leveraged for social credit and reputation applications.
Watching these oligarchs jockey to try to concentrate people into social platforms is clearly more than a casual priority, so that’s why I suspect multiple motives that exceed the intrinsic social value of the platforms. It’s been my learning that the really massive companies in Silicon Valley a often have a back door leverage-style data platform to try to build a monopolistic position at some future inflection point in addition to their “front and center” business.
I further suspect is a land grab to try to build the “WeChat of the West,” which explains quite clearly the relatively sky-high Twitter purchase (at least vs revenues) price as simply attaching a financial valuation to a portion of the initial userbase more than makes up for the purchase price.
People are very focused on the front side applications (the social network hook) but the true value of these businesses is in building the next generations of FICO.
When I read comments like, “Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time.”, and “We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us.” I do wonder if people think as I do that it’s far more extensive than simple social networking companies. The approach to global finance is incredibly clear: social credit is the new core and communities are the oil of social credit.
In the end it’s all about financial inclusion, as is laid out in this WEF article that explains just why social credit applications are so important to financial inclusion and global growth:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-...
So, consider that niche social networks do not serve this purpose very well, and so there is little incentive to “build small” at this stage. I’d love to see more social network applications that are focused on quality connections myself, and for a while that was Reddit. But Reddit’a value was really just the aggregation of all the independent communities that used to exist in forums and similar into one website.
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This is one of the major reasons why I stopped playing most games entirely. When the fun has been monetized out of them, what's the point?
I mostly play single player games these days because they've been spared. I played a Plague's tale a few weeks ago. Really strange premise but a lot of fun!
That means there are quite a few single player games that are off the table for me as well.
Social networks wouldn't have any users if they didn't solve a problem and/or fulfill a need that people have. What problem is it that they solve? IMO they solve exactly two problems. 1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their direct contacts. They do not want to have to use a…
The cost per user to maintain these kinds of platforms is extremely low. That's why advertising supported models work. So that means if you charged for a platform, you wouldn't need to charge each user very much on a monthly or yearly basis. Such a platform could still be one that require no technical skills or knowledge from the users, who just want to publish their stuff. Many people (especially tech people) have a…
That is what confuses me...we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money to join a social media. Are there any third options to support platforms that don't require payments, or advertisement viewing?
I am from a generation which grew up with phpBB forums of various kinds, and I loved the format. I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to us?
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lol it's so explicit at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle
Framing things this way suggests that the reason the metaverse is failing so hard is because facebook insists on jumping straight to enshitification without spending time on the stages users actually enjoy.
Meta did not spend enough time thinking about monetization in the long term, realized they were in a really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to come up with a new platform they could monetize.
They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think about monetization early.
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Eh, first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton. So, to actually pay for that you're going to either ask for VC money or show ads. But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increas…
> first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside fo…
Ok, so who are you getting that money from? I mean from me that $1 is some inconsiderable fraction of my income, it's nothing. But there lies the problem with income inequality in the world. For a huge portion of people you're asking for a pretty damned considerable payment for something they can get for 'free' from somewhere else. That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
The problem here is you want to develop a 'rational' and 'reasonable' product. This would be useful if humans in mass were either of those things. The world would be a much better place if people were not dumb, including myself. But here we are.
The author mixes services such as Whatsapp and telegram which are mostly messaging apps with "social network" features, and full blown social networks that revolve more around posts, followers and content. Meta launched a new platform today and got 10M people to sign up in the first 7 hours. I am lost for words. Not sure how anyone still wants anything to do with Meta. How can you possibly want more social platforms…
I guess people want something similar to Twitter that is not Twitter, since Twitter has become a roaring dumpster fire. I've never much understood the appeal of Twitter, because the discussions devolve and it seems like the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Also the UI makes it hard to follow threads; I much prefer a nested layout a la HN to whatever Twitter is.