Thefuck?

Games are a hobby. If they give you pleasure and joy, then there is no “better” thing to be doing.

How much of your time at 18 should be spent on hobbies is a different matter, but to dismiss games as an unsuitable form of leisure at that age is insane.

The games people play growing up and as young adults can be formative and massively influential.

They tell stories, frustrate, entertain, let you form social bonds, and even enlighten you in ways no other form of media can by allowing you interactively explore the thoughts of other people.

Plus, I’m not even 30, I am already noticing a decline in my performance in terms of precision and reaction time when it comes to the competitive genre.

“Cut through the enchanted woods, they said”

That’s not what I’m saying.

Obviously not everyone needs to code. Once I write a bot, it could potentially be used by anyone.

Only a small percentage of mods need to also be developers. But since that group isn’t big enough yet, the solution is growth.

Not asking the platform devs to do even more. They too, are volunteers.

I’m not against any of that.

What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It’s a nice-to-have.

Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.

As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.

Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.

Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)

Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven’t shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.

Indeed.

My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.

Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.

After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

By now I’ve written four bots using the lemmy API.

Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven’t. Several communities and instances already have them.

Honestly that’s how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.

Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.

Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.

If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.

Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.

and if I got into this situation two-times in a row what’s guaranteeing that it won’t happen again

Absolutely nothing.

The way I like to put it, is that most people are nice, but there are assholes everywhere.

It’s not that everyone is a douche, just that there is nowhere you can go, where there won’t already be some, or where they won’t suddenly show up later.

As such, it’s good to try and learn to deal with them, avoid them, or outlast them.

At my last job, my two first bosses were great, then the third was a nightmare. But he got fired two years in and then the fourth was good again. That job lasted me seven years. 5 out of 7 is not bad.

Overlay that with all your colleagues, and yeah, you’re almost bound to have at least some of them be bad… It’s a numbers game. If most of your colleagues are reasonable, then you’re probably in one of the better places to be.

Yes.

If you always direct-play, the only bitrate you can use is original.

If you ever need to watch on a slow connections using a lower bitrate, that will require transcoding.

Because optimism without realism is just a recipe for cynicism later on.

Dude. I’m not on my way to cynicism. I’m past it.

If I didn’t believe change is possible, then I’d be part of the reason it isn’t happening.

Looking for, and pushing in the places it might occur, is how you help it come about.

How is that not realistic? What am I missing?

Does the way you argue, not contribute to maintaining the status quo, even as you agree that it is not desirable?

The problem of systemic gambling won’t just fix itself.

Did I say it would?

Advertising and other propaganda creates a great deal of countervailing pressure.

That is a very verbose concession of a point.

Well yeah. It was being developed by Rocksteady, beloved for the Arkham games.

But interest, despite the marketing, dropped off a cliff the second people smelled live service elements.

The game came out a died a quick death even more quietly than Concord.

while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care

People, fundamentally, care.

That’s like the whole point of having a hobby.

No-one games because they don’t care.

You won’t find anything people are more passionate about, than something they do for fun.

I’m not claiming that there’s some point where people magically come together and stick it to the megacorps.

I’m saying that if you consistently burn your fans in ways that result in them hating you, eventually, you wont have any.

That’s not something that happens overnight. A slow-ass process that leads to a gradual decline, which you can only put off by duping brand new people who haven’t sworn off ever purchasing your product again. But eventually, you run out of those, too.

Doesn’t matter if they’re okay with it or not, as long as they tolerate it and don’t do anything about it.

Not being happy about it is the first step on the road to doing something about it. How does that not matter?

Sure but many many more have accepted it. Otherwise they never would have done it again.

Who is doing it again? I’m not.

I remember Overwatch still being a wild success regardless.

Is it?

We are on like 2905295734th now.

And? It takes as many times as it takes.

Indie game studios could only ever dream of achieving the heights of revenue of games like Fortnite, that survives entirely on microtransactions.

Why? There are absolutely indies who’ve made millions. Why is there zero chance that one day, the next Fortnite or Roblox comes from an indie?

It already happened at least once. Minecraft.

They are doing everything they can to screw their own customers and yet they pile in by the millions every time they have something new.

Yes. But again. It takes as many times as it takes.

Remember when gamers found out Suicide Squad, which at one time did have real hype behind it, would be live service BS?

And people literally just didn’t play it.

People. Even entire demographics, can a do learn.

Why are you trying to convince me my omptimism is futile?

What good does that do?

You’re not wrong.

But all I’m doing here is saying “things can get better” and your replies are just you pointing out how bad things are right now, as if that proves the only way things can go, is to get worse.

The worse things get, the faster the number of people wanting to fix it will grow.

Am I wrong?

They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on.

No shortage of marks you say?

And there’s always new marks.

If your market is small enough.

You bring up gambling. Its de-regulation and consequent proliferation via online casinos has made the problems it causes more likely to be addressed than ever.

The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes, the more likely you are be ousted entirely.

A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever, because there didn’t use to be a casino in every persons pocket, worldwide, that might’ve already taught every new mark to be wary.

It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it.

For now. But eventually they do. That’s how entire governments have fallen time and time again.

They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day.

Indeed. People can get used to a lot. But being used to something isn’t the same as being ok with it. No-one I know is ok with there being ads on their tvs, phones and laptops. Living with something isn’t the same as accepting it. People are tolerating more BS than ever, but that doesn’t mean they wont rally the second there’s a way out of it.

Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.

I still am. So are many others. Remember when people thought NMS would be a good game on day one? Remember when Fallout 76 was going to be bigger and better than 4? Remember Concord? Remember when Overwatch was going to have a story?

Suicide Squad.

There was real hype. The second people found out it was a live service, they simply didn’t play.

Every fuckup, is another portion of the masses getting the memo. And the fuckups aren’t stopping. If anything there’s more of them than ever.

These corporations used to be afraid of looking bad, but mistakes happen. Except when they did, and stocks didn’t suddenly implode, their takeaway was they could be horrible, and still make a profit. Because yeah, most people don’t learn the first time. But what about the second? Or the third? Or the tenth?

If you ask me, given time, the one thing every person on this planet can do, is learn. Eventually.

The only reason Roblox and Fortnite keep growing is that there are markets they haven’t penetrated. Finding new customers faster than the old ones leave doesn’t work forever. There are only so many humans on this planet.

Meanwhile, indie games with actual passion behind them and fair business practices that still feed the mouths of the devs, without private equity firms in the middle sucking up all the value, are absolutely exploding.

XBOX is dying. MS won’t say it, but they are less involved in the game-industry than ever. This price hike is a death-throw. Not the next step in their master plan to dominate the market forever.

IMO, the only gaming mega-corporation with the goodwill to exist 20 years from now is Nintendo, and even they are burning through the nostalgia people have for them faster than ever before in their insanely long history.

Ok?

It’s not sustainable. Tricking people faster than they wise up to your BS is not a business model that leads to a healthy, content, customer base. And if it’s what EVERYONE does, you get an unhappy SOCIETY.

No-one will enjoy where that leads, and is already leading.

It’s a ratcheting mechanism. Unless something about capitalism changes SIGNIFICANTLY the masses will simply grow more and more discontent.

Yes. And that shit is a one-way door.

Every customer you piss off the way you are pissed off, is A LOT less likely to be a return customer.

Oh that is gonna piss people off.

Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work, when every person who sees them is gonna feel like it’s a middle finger.

I’m not on windows personally.