Turns out, pretending the entire Internet is equal to 5 apps from mega corps (largely fueled by pretend money) wasn't the best long term play.
Who would have thought?
This has become the prevailing opinion for most of the tech-savvy folks that I know, but it's gaining traction with a wider audience.
Having steeped in corpo-climate for two decades, it's naïve to say that the C-Suite has ever maintained a realistic perspective on the business that they run; but it is baffling to me that corporations like Reddit have completely lost sight of their actual product - a clearinghouse of perpetually donated content - and seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
It's exciting to be an insider as new paradigms like the fediverse become more widely known. If the last week is any indicator, there is a non-zero chance that ultra-capitalist hubris will be punished.
The fact of the matter is that I don't care if something is a monopoly as long as it's a monopoly for it's quality. Reddit used to be that, a hub for damn near all of my interests, and I used Boost to make the experience great.
But reddit is getting worse with this change, so I'm here now.
Yeah. There's nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. The problem with them is just the behaviour that they tend to slip into, the squeezing of their customers for maximum revenue while not bothering to invest any of it in improving their services. There are some "natural" monopolies that manage to do okay, though usually as a result of government regulation.
Some monopolies are so solidly "okay" that we don't even notice that they're monopolies. The Internet, for example. What alternatives to it exist? None, really. But since it's a decentralized protocol rather than some sort of Internet Incorporated with shareholders and quarterly profits to maximize and whatnot it's managed to stay good and the fact that it's a monopoly is actually beneficial in many ways.
As for monopolies.. they are inherently bad because of the lack of motivation to innovate, or improve. You have no other option, and no ability to create one.
I don't want to stray too far from the topic, but I feel like I need to address the mention of the internet as a monopoly.
If you're talking about TCP/IP, it's just a protocol that the most widely used - but others exist, and outperform it in their niches.
The internet is a collection of technologies that are owned and operated by thousands of companies. All have competition in their arenas.
ISPs have constructed local fiefdoms - but there are nearly always multiple services that one can use. Backbone companies own the major routes, but you can almost always go around one if it misbehaves. Myriad email providers, websites, etc exist to offer choices, as well.
Categorically, the internet can not be or become a monopoly. It's core purpose is to provide as many avenues as possible to connect machines to AVOID monopolization.
Interestingly, the downfall of Communism was precisely that political communism forms a government-managed monopoly, exhibiting exactly the characteristics you outline. People who rail against communism are really railing against monopoly and the stagnancy and corruption it creates. And yet somehow some of these people are all-in on libertarianism.
I don't care if something is a monopoly as long as it's a monopoly for it's quality.
But the problem with social media is that monopolies in this area aren't about quality, they are about user base size. Which makes them impossible to dethrone once they hit critical mass. Reddit and other social media sites have a massive amount of content with people willing to figure out a way to sift through the garbage.
It will be interesting to see how bad things get once reddit moderators can no longer use bots and other tools in order to help them sift through content due to the API changes.
Whether their hubris is punished or not is of no consequence to me. In some ways the ultimate karma is waking up every day to find out we are ourselves. I'm more concerned with building cool stuff for us to use than with anyone getting what I think is their comeuppance.
seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think they are right. The value in social media is in the size of their user base and I don't see a mass migration to another platform really happening unless reddit itself went completely offline for several weeks. People do not like change and Reddit will continue to be just "good enough" despite the API changes. If anything their decline will be extremely gradual since moderators will have lost most of their third party moderation tools. And niche communities can probably keep ticking along without them for the most part.
I don't mind if most of reddit users stay there, we just need to attract the valuable ones. Back on reddit I wouldn't have welcomed the entirety of Twitter for example, too many bad contributors.
Contributors also want their content to be seen and communities with 500 subscribers aren't all that attractive. So I don't expect anyone to abandon the mainstream options. The most we can hope for (and all I'm really asking for) is cross-site posting and participation.
Go ahead and visit Reddit, just be sure to post/comment on on the fediverse as well.
Previous sites died because there was a continual stream of new VC funded initiatives still in the 'seduce new users' phase of low-zero monetization for people to jump to. That tap of new, user-friendly sites has been shut off by the recent interest rate hikes curtailing VC funding.
Worried we'll eventually settle into semi-collusive model we see Cell Carriers and ISPs have. If all 5 major social media sites stay in lock step of monetization, who are you going to go to? And without VC money, what new site will be able to truly scale?
What I really don't understand is, how all these C suites are apparently a) completely unaware of theor cost structure and b) never seem to understand what they're actually selling.
Reddit is nothing special, do you really need a bunch of Valley bros earning 200k or more?
Do you really need all those stupid extras like NFTs? Reddit launched their NFTs way too late, when even the pretty big idiots started to doubt the concept.
The older I get, the less I understand the whole world of business administration. Nothing makes sense, it feels like 90% of the CEO are working really hard to ram their companies hard enough into the ground to hit magma.
the assumption that this will stop lawsuits is very generous, especially when we consider that there are other countries than the US that have lawyers and IP too
putting such an important task in the hands of a government that might be controlled by whatever extremist possible in the future is a bad idea; who controls the past, controls the future and parties could delete parts of the past at their will
a less dystopian thought: future governments might simply cut the funding or restrict the archive to US content only because “why shouod they pay for other contries’ history?”
A legislative approach that protects what the archive does would be a much more reasonable approach.
Overall I agree with you: the government is not trustable to own and manage this service and especially all of the data itself.
I think legislative protection for this function is a good thing, to create a legal protected space for it to operate, while still having it actually operated by the private sector.
The ideal solution, IMO, is for the service to be decentralized onto a blockchain or some other kind of decentralized data store, and have a variable number of nodes running it in a redundant manner so that no single node’s loss leads to loss of data or the service itself.
This is a universal good, one I’d be happy to help “pay for” in the form of dedicating computing resources to it.
IMO all the functions of democracy (including in this case the maintenance of historical memory) should ideally be decentralized enough to be immune to attack by any organization up to and including armies.
Kinda sounds like we need a decentralized, feterated internet archive for at least each nation and maybe individuals… Or maybe I just want to federate almost everything ^^’
Edit: found a discussion here on that topic in the comments
Yeah, and since our government doesn’t work, it’d be better for open source, transparent efforts by the people. That also reminds the assholes in govt that the internet “content” is not owned by those who built machines or the government’s investment in DARPAnet, but by the people. Turn it all into a blockchain or something so there are copies or at least fragments on a ton of computers around the world and is indelible.
The memory speed was slightly slower than DDR4 but the benefits didn’t seem to outweigh the downsides. I think it probably kicked a lot of ass for specific use cases (eg. in-memory database that needs persistence), but the market was too small. Plus, SSDs are getting so ridiculously fast that it would put pressure on a product like this too.
Why does this article (and everyone else) seem to pretend like Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 didn’t exist?
Or how games like Neverwinter Nights came before Dragon Age Origins?
I felt like the article covered this, but more in a hand-wavey way. The article is really about the more cinematic aspects of the game, which is a more spiritual follow-up to Dragon Age Origins. Dragon Age Origins was very ambitious and was made by the same BioWare that made Baldurs Gate and Baldurs Gate II. They were trying to capture the spirit of the old games with a more fleshed out cinematic world where you could get up close and personal with the characters.
Arguably, Baldurs Gate III is the first game to successfully weave it’s way through both. Divinity Original Sin and DOS II both lack this cinematic aspect. They both hem closer to traditional titles like Neverwinter Nights, where you have the three-quarters overhead view of your characters, but your characters are not explicitly detailed, nor do you get that many “close up” looks at them.
I’m fucking floored at being able to do a full on top-down view, and then being able to zoom in on incredibly detailed characters that exist in the world. It’s arguably the best of both worlds.
Anyway, I see the article as focusing on cinematic aspects, which would be the ability to see detailed interactions among characters akin to a film, a thing we haven’t seen much of in this style of game before, barring DAO.
I feel like the threat to “kill off desktop PCs” has been going for years, yet it has never eventuated. I’m a bit too old and too tired of all the threats/clickbait lately to even start to worry about it actually happening.
If it does, I’ll find an alternative, but I very highly doubt it will happen anytime soon.
Yeah I’ve been hearing this for so many years. If it were to affect gaming on Windows, it will definitely not happen. MS would be crazy to kill the stronghold they have on gaming.
I remember there was a guy in the D development community that liked to block any and all changes to the DLL support, because he convinced himself, that smartphones/tablets will replace desktop PCs, especially Windows. Then he got so annoying on the forums he was thrown out from there, then he left the project. Since then most of the blocked changes are implemented, now it's even possible to get the D runtime compiled as a DLL file in experimental mode (similar thing is done for ages under Linux with its own version of shared libraries).
This will materialize in the same way that Cloud gaming has taken the market by storm. It's nice when you want/need to game on a phone, but the experience doesn't hold up to native and the laws of physics are immutable, you can't defeat the latency of running your PC in a data center miles from your house. Even running Office apps will be a notably degraded experience.
Microsoft is crazy, but they've not done anything to kill the golden Windows goose in all this time, I can't see them thinking this would fly when they know the costs and downsides from doing xCloud.
I’ve got a cloud gaming machine at Paperspace running Parsec and it works great. Of course, I’m less than 50ms from their data center and have gigabit internet.
youre right, the hardware will never go away.... but there are many in the cloud-only corporate space where hardware is almost irrelevant as every single piece of software, including windows, is provisioned from the net. thats today. whats tomorrow going to look like for retail?
It's kinda built for that market entirely, remember Microsoft's biggest market is licensing. A hundred cheap computers is still 10k in licensing costs. One big bad gaming rig is only a single license.
“[…] switching the default search engine back to Bing […] from Google Search (or whatever other browser is set as default).”
Google is a Browser now, neat. And somehow it’s relevant in a post about search engines.
“Microsoft Edge, the default browser pre-installed on Windows machines, and Bing Search aren’t bad products by any means - they are solid alternatives to Google’s own Chrome and Search.”
They may be good compared to Chrome and now also Google. But even rotten eggs are better than literal shit, at least for most people.
My boss encrypts nothing and leaves all of the machines switched on overnight, every night.
We got burgled once and someone made off with some postcards and £5 in loose change, overlooking access to a vast trove of customers highly exposing personal, financial, medical and legal documents that has never been purged for over a decade.
Because Veeam can be good, but it’s only as good as the user pays for. I do ransomware recovery and incident response management for a living. More often than not, Veeam is implemented poorly and does not do what the customer thinks they paid for.
It’s not specifically fault of the product. However, in my experience in this field, the only time client backups are encrypted is due to a false sense of security due to negligence and ignorance.
Veeam should not be configured by an inexperienced or underfunded tech staff.
Linus is so far behind the competition that it’s not even funny. I don’t need a broken bored system that can’t even do a simple photo edit without crashing the system. No thanks, no loonkeks for me
Fr this crap has been corporatized long enough. Haven’t seen anything great since android 7 and 8.
Not to mention the dalvik runs like a joke by modern standards. Really underutilizing modern hardware by running everything in locked down ultra battery saver java.
I wish even some Chinese company would fund a big OS project given that they have the resources and market where Google can’t effectively compete.
Been nothing but reskins and useless forks for a while now.
It’s not just about saving battery. Phone chips are fast but they lack appropriate cooling and overheat real fast if you try to take advantage of that performance for more tham a moment.
Yeah except Apple has been doing just fine with swift and proper app pausing for years.
Everything App elements in android reset whenever you swap apps for more than a few minutes. Even all the default gapps do this. They can’t seem to hold a context menu open or keep a page loaded when in the background because apparently these elements don’t get saved.
I think the only thing on my phone that has stayed consistent is Firefox, and I can only assume it’s because they hacked their way around this by having its own custom saved state since it’s a browser.
We’re not bottlenecked so hard for storage or memory anymore, there’s really no need to keep enforcing this select feature saved state default.
Android already uses zram and yet OEMs are still shipping with an additional swap switch because these java apps eat an atrocious amount of memory.
I can load a fully decked out compiz desktop with a 3D transparent cube and every window animation imaginable and the ram stays at 1.6 GB. Yet android struggles to stay under 2 at idle on a 2d homescreen.
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