My favorite slight of hand was that all the dungeons and caves were part of a single rectangular map. Designers carved out a few specific designs, then other levels were clearly what worked with the remaining map screens available so it all fit in the space they had, with caves thrown in to take up single screen gaps.
Humans do a poor job estimating extreme odds. 0% chance or 100% of a high risk/reward event. How many people in rural areas are prepping for a Carrington Event-sized solar flare or nuclear war, but a car accident or cancer diagnosis and resulting medical bills would sooner and statistically more likely to ruin their lives? Many. They see the small chance of survival as being high reward, with low risk.
Likewise, the lure of a 100% chance of life-changing material wealth that takes the low risk of $2 fits the same mold.
The hitch is that it would be more expensive, making it a "premium" product and limiting the market. Smart TV pricing typically includes subsidies based on the assumed data sales from each user over the lifetime of the device.
Yes I am suggesting a premium product, there’s at least $600-$1000 more the market is willing to pay just for aesthetics based on Samsung Frame tv, which is a premium product with mid-range LCD component quality. It’s priced about $200 underneath Samsung’s top of the line OLED
I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable. Meta has infinitely more rich data and an entire tightly optimized ad system and is on a platform where people commonly make large purchases and makes around $10 per user per year.
> I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable.
According to a 2021 article about Vizio's user-hostile advert display devices, they boast of an average revenue of $13/yr - up from $7.30/yr, though consider this was 2020 when more people were at-home watching TV instead of going outside, meeting people, touching grass, the usual.
> A range of advertising opportunities drive revenue, including revenue sharing with programmers and distribution partners as well as activations on the device home screen. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company said average revenue per user on SmartCast was $12.99, up from $7.31 in the same period of 2019.
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If you'll allow me to make an arbitrary assumption that a new TV set bought today will last about 10 years, then $13/yr means the advertising revenue implies Vizio has reduced the sale-price of their TVs by $130 compared to before we had no-opt-out advertising displayed on our own property as a condition for the privilege of using said device.
I only use old.reddit.com when I am forced to sulk back over there and actually log in. To just look around I just use some redlib frontend.
The numerous layers of attempted monetization schemes since 2016ish hilariously touted as "features" are sort of band-aided on top of each other on new reddit in a way that makes it the worst possible way to display the information. It's like a terrible UI challenge.
Kinda, but not really. IRL, feature phones and cheap smartphones subsidized to carry Whatsapp and Facebook apps starting 20 years ago pushed "people using the internet" and at this point Whatsapp is 90% of what people use internet for in Africa because data is cheaper than talk and text.
There's also the perception of usability. I have personally had relatively well-paid Africans tell me that $4 a month for 10 GB of (4G mobile) data was "the most expensive on Earth." Which is not true, I checked, but people say it to try and rumor mill the price down. However, it's sort of almost true in the sense of trying to pay for streaming services and being online like anyone from London or LA on one's hone and not home fiber connections, which only the wealthy have. But that's not how people use their phones anyway. So there's no market for high bandwidth use, and only the wealthy are willing to use bandwidth and pay for it because prices drop per GB once you're doing unlimited fiber connections at home on post-paid accounts. The middle ground is the barrier.
But people like the author who barely know where Africa is on a map love to throw around stats like "85% of Africa is online!" Not like how most Westerners think. Kids in wealthy areas will push being on IG and Tik Tok. In malls in larger cities there's a shop that sells gaming consoles.
Yeah, it's full-on fantasy. Why would we as a species waste time terraforming a planet proven to let its atmosphere evaporate into space? Why waste energy to drag materials from Earth there instead of spending the same energy and materials to fix whatever problems Earth has?
At least in a billion years we can expect we would be either extinct already from our own actions, or hope to be advanced enough as a species to move Earth's orbital path out a touch every couple millennia to keep us in the Goldilocks zone.
Maybe by then we can terraform the Mars by crashing a few dozen comets and detritus from the asteroid belt into Mars to keep the Martian iron core, add heat enough to keep it molten and spinning for a while, add enough mass to get the gravity about 9.8 m/s2, reboot a tectonic cycle, combine 2 satellites into 1 good one, and try to add water to the system overall.
You know, just a regular Tuesday for whatever species we evolve into.
I guess the argument is, that there is just some initial resource usage to get a self sufficient mars colony and all further development can happen without resource strain on earth
I expect that by suggesting something that is quite literally what the author described, we'll both be downvoted to hell because HN has a staunch "fediverse, ew!" mentality.
The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs.
These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.
Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.
And you may say:
> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?
> Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
So no, the problem isn't high numbers with friction to leave. The problem is that the sites' incentives are different than the users. Facebook had high numbers and a lot of lock-in and was a much better product before they decided to basically stop showing me any content from my friends that isn't controversial. Twitter has high numbers and a lot of lock-in but it's better there because I can still get a linear timeline of tweets from the people I follow.
Do any of those networks limit the number of posts you can make a day?
Do they limit forwarding? Or give users an option not to be shown forwarded messages?
For me, unlimited posts (or rather, minimal friction in posting), and blind forwarding are what destroy social media. If you can make only 3 public/group posts a day, chances are lower they will be crap.
I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this. I still have to cut off connections because of the guy who's always ranting about some politician/political party.
Increase the friction for people who want to rant!
> I still have to cut off connections because of the guy who's always ranting about some politician/political party.
What a bizarre complaint. Running into people you disagree with is part of the human experience of participating in society.
Mastodon has great self-moderation options. You can mute a person on a timer or permanently, optionally blocking their messages and replies to you and/or their public posts. You can also use any number of word filters to hide posts behind a warning or silently remove them from your timeline.
But really, this is how socialization works. You meet someone, talk to them for a while, eventually decide if you do or don't like them. I don't really get how you can twist this into a critique of social media. It's just how humans are.
> I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this.
Most of it, at least - it does give the option to not be shown forwarded messages. There's controls on the home timeline to not show boosts, quotes, and/or replies.
> > I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.
You use a quote angle bracket, indicating that it is a quote. It is not a quote, it's a straw man.
Nobody is saying "this isn't perfect, I won't use it." People are saying "I can't figure this out, I guess I won't use it."
WhatsApp and Signal are considered "social media" technically, though plenty of people are still on FB telling the world about their trips and what they ate for breakfast.
I'm always surprised at how HN folks are either unable or unwilling to admit that the fediverse exists beyond Bluesky or Mastodon. I far prefer lemmy to reddit, and Friendica is essentially that the author is describing. This stuff exists already, and it's the perverse incentives of social media such as walled gardens and a critical mass of people that are what keep them alive.
I think the opportunity here is getting money from a bank account to an ETH or BTC wallet using "normal" means and not setting up a new account on a crypto exchange. Unless you're getting a paycheck in crypto, someone has to be a middleman.
https://ian-albert.com/games/legend_of_zelda_maps/
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