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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think in part there’s an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit’s behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).

    Historically the rule was supposed to be ‘if it’s free, you’re the product’, which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they’ve figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there’s more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.




  • Sort of. It’s still at its core a game about exploring the universe(s) alone, so you can’t unfortunately just decide to inhabit the same freighter as your friend and adventure with them that way, but it has some multiplayer elements you can participate in if you choose to do so. You can visit each others’ freighters and bases, gift the other person stuff and so on, and you can participate in multiplayer Nexus missions (from the Anomaly). There’s also pvp as a default option and hence unfortunately a few griefers, but mostly the community is pretty nice. These days they also sometimes run expeditions where everyone does a bunch of tasks starting from the same planet and on largely the same mission route and on those days, the universe feels anything but lonely. People also build bases to simplify expedition tasks and provide handy supplies for other players - and the odd person builds bases to lure you into going there and then have you toasted in a volcano before you’ve figured out why it’s suddenly so darn hot, so, you know, caveat emptor :-).







  • The standout example of this for me would be Qube. I was having a bit of a difficult time when I first bought the game and that soundtrack lured me in and getting through to the end just became a total compulsion. I was a lot calmer by the time it was over, too.

    Kairo had a bit of a similar effect on me, except that the very last jump in the whole game just would not work, spoiling the zen. Quantum Conundrum also got a full playthrough in one sitting but tbh I think that was because I wasn’t enthusiastic about coming back to it another day.