If you're making 2.8 billion in Revenue with no profit on a Twitch-like product, that's a you problem, not the creators problem. They already extract a ton of money from creators and generate revenue with ads. Twitch is spamming ads like it's TV in the 90's.
Without knowing the operating costs your sentence really makes no sense, this single number doesn't matter, what matters is its relation to the operating costs.
It's not as simple as costs vs revenue and you are wrong, it is trivial to speculate in this case.
I am aware that revenue is not profit, we are on HN after all. While it is possible to run a company at a loss with extremely high revenue, contextually, you're making excuses for a company that could easily keep running with 2.8 Billion dollars yearly. It's likely that after they extract more money from creators they will increase their spend more to maintain operating at a loss. At what point does it end?
If your claim is "2.8 billion in revenue is enough to run twitch profitably", I'd love to see the numbers backing that up. What's the cost of serving videos, acquiring advertisers, etc. Otherwise it's just wild speculation.
If you were looking at the product and that number reasonably, you would realize that it doesn't take wild speculation.
Isn't this the same problem IRC had but IRC was (still is?) fairly widely used? (Wikipedia says its peak was about 10mil in 2004/2005 - which makes it 1% according to here: https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm ) Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch. How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?
IRC is long dead. The only time I even see IRC groups anymore is for piracy.
I'm on a sort of global village irc server I found a link to in HN comments, and I keep in touch with a couple other sets of friends through efnet and private irc (with discord relay). It's dead relative to its hay day, but protocols never really die.
I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…
Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people. I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if use…
I have the same opinion. Having to choose a server is a significant hassle. Some servers specialize in one area, while others specialize in another. They "can" federate to some extent, but it is insufficient. The only thing that would eventually work is something that behaved like a centralized service. Similar to IPFS. You have a link, and it downloads from wherever server it is located on.
We HAD an ubiquitous, federated social network that was widely used and it died because the real world has more sharp edges than the stuff of dreams.
I did stumble upon hubzilla/zot which looks closer to what I described than lemmy|mastadon. https://zotlabs.org/help/en/about/about#Glossary What are you describing? Email? The Web? PGP?
Usenet.
It took ONE MONTH of AOL users to be unleashed upon Usenet to obliterate it as a discussion platform for all time. First, it was loaded up with stupid, low-content posters. Then the spammers came to throw dirt on the casket.
I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…
>there would be physical cities whose population consisted entirely of architects and engineers. the analog to a digital federation in the physical world, is literally just that, an actual federation. People making choices about what community they participate in isn't technical, it's social. Everyone who lives in a democratic society does in fact participate in how their city is run and governed or understands how t…
> You do not need to understand the technical details of federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them. Not only is it infantilizing, it's wrong . People create communities online all the time . Whether it's Facebook groups or subreddits or Discourse forums or Discord groups and on…
That's a good point. With those examples though I think being a member of multiple communities and discovering, joining, and leaving communities as desired is much lower friction compared to fediverse servers.
> not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time. IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox
The difference is that email is a one-to-one medium, so it's easy to define spam. It's something the recipient doesn't want. Anyone who sends this or willingly serves users who do is unambiguously a malicious actor, so they get blocked. With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them…
> This problem is created by tying accounts to instances.
That's a huge issue. My identity should not be tied to anyone but me. This has to be one of the biggest things that scares (admittedly more knowledgeable than average) people off early when they're required to pick a server. Mastodon's "don't worry you can move servers later" is better but still not frictionless, and does not work unless your source server is still online.
> drama exists because everyone gets distracted by organized trolling and federation stans don't have a good answer for this problem. Neither does Reddit. Have you not heard of brigading?
Reddit bans users who participate in brigading, at least when coordinated from reddit.
Unless it's from places like AHS who can blithely engage in brigading to try to get other subs banned.