• 0 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: May 31st, 2023

help-circle



  • I think the deal is, you either pay cash or you pay with your data. While it definitely does increase friction for new users (and even existing users as finances fluctuate), a donation based system might be worth it. Something like wikipedia, archive.org, and other NPOs do. Incentives might be possible too, creating goals for getting X amount of donations to fund a specific improvement. It increases interest by defining a product or improvement, and increases buy-in by giving the donor the sense that they’re directly improving the site through their donation.


  • I think Beehaw and many other instances have golden hearts for their goal to start a stable, friendly community. However, like the article says, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, when an instance gets big enough, someone needs to be on watch to ensure things are running smoothly, someone needs to be working on updating, expanding, and improving the service. On top of the cost to run the service, it’s unrealistic to expect it to be free. You can’t expect the admins who have busted their ass to get this much done for free. Call it human nature or the ills of capitalism, but the fediverse can’t run on community and goodwill alone. I saw another post a bit ago saying to expect to pay for internet services from now on. I think, at least in the realm of user-focused and FOSS-based stuff, that may be the paradigm. Donations or subscriptions should be expected, at least for some portion of users, to keep the lights on and compensate the folks keeping things moving.





  • I guess I’m biased as someone who started on Skyrim, but that’s my point of comparison for games anymore. Fallout 3 was awesome, but honestly when FO4 came out, going back to play FO3 was hard due to how clunky it was in comparison. I know FO4 fell flat with it’s character decisions and voiced protagonist but it really didn’t ruin the game like it did for lots of people.

    Disclosure: I never finished the earlier TES games, because Skyrim coddled me I guess. lol


  • The funniest thing is seeing the rage from Star Citizen fanboys about all this. They keep saying “it’ll be buggy and awful on release” like SC isn’t already. I know with Bethesda, they’ll fix it up and the modders will go wild with patches and add ins, delivering all the stuff Chris Roberts said they would. Meanwhile, I try and play Star Citizen and i’ve died or failed a mission due to glitches any time i’ve tried to play this past week.



  • "At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, "

    lmao. Sounds familiar. I think you’re right that Reddit is going to survive, but I think this is a hard enough blow that it’s going to change the personality of the site. For one, the IPO dreams seem DOA currently, with the handling of this, the fairly toxic nature of some areas on the site, and drying up of VC in tech all seem to be bad news for any optimism for Reddit as a company. I imagine that this treatment is going to lead to migration of some communities, maybe smaller ones, leaving only the karma-farming, bot-ridden, main subs to be “the front page of the internet” anymore.

    I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.