Kichae

All prohibitions do is create a space where kids are doing it, but without any discussion about the risks. It's the abstainance only education model, or the "war on drugs" model.

It doesn't work, especially when the "authorities" are doing it anyway, and they're not even quiet about it.

Honestly, 15% sounds like it's right in the range of the number of people who will just lie on surveys - be it purposefully or not -- in order to present a superior version of themselves to a piece of paper.

I'm not convinced there should be. I think any feature that treats different commumities as somehow the same thing, even if they have the same content, is ultimately bad for the ecosystem. It trains users to see communities as interchanheable, and to see value in Lemmy and the fesiverse primarily in consumption, rather than discussion.

We can't compete on consumption. It won't sustain this space.

It's not "conservative voters". It's people struggling under the weight of corporate robbery. When your life keeps getting harder and harder, you are more and more likely to accept the easy, empty answers, and direct your anger and hurt at whatever convenient target manipulators point at.

People are bombarded by this manipulation. It shows up everywhere they're logged in.

The drive to be a parity product with centralized social media keeps the biggest platforms on the fediverse looking like knock-offs of the most popular commercial platforms that "don't work right". Mastodon being "distributed Twitter" is always going to be limited, because distribution is complicated, jankey, and kind of confusing. And because someone is always going to make a new, centralized, corporate Twitter replacement.

The fediverse cannot win on ease-of-use. In a straight comparison, it's never going to be easier to use. Even if it becomes quasi-centralized (which has been the trend), there are a lot of highly active users who are on alternative platforms, who will never end up on masto.soc or the .worlds.

The current paradigm -- which is mostly being driven by Mastodon, AFAICT -- is platforms with bundled-in default web clients that lack any meaningful customization. There seems to be little selection of, or appetite for, custom themes, and 3rd party clients remain similarly utilitarian. There's very little way for site admins to present any kind of character or set any kind of tone with visual elements. This appears to be purposeful, as it's both a way to provide value to the 'Mastodon' brand, and to encourage the genericization of any given Mastodon-based website, leading to the impression that they're completely interchangeable, and commodifying the thousands of independent small social networking and media sites that make up the fediverse.

As attempted parity platforms, the question of "which server do I sign up on?" is nonsensical. From the end-users perspective, if this is emulating centralized social media, it has already failed. If there's no meaningful distinction between nodes on a homogenized network, I shouldn't have to make this choice. It's weird I'm being asked to do something.

On the other hand, if the fediverse is construct of independently operating small social spaces that just happen to be able to cross-communicate, then there's no reason for them to all look the fucking same. But then we can't "market" "Lemmy" or "Mastodon", because Lemmy and Mastodon are not discrete and containable things like Twitter and Reddit are. They're technologies that power liminal spaces, like Apache HTTP Servers, or WordPress installations are. Imagine trying to sell the World Wide Web to people by having literally every website on it look exactly the same, and trying to get them to 'join Joomla!'.

We can't market a hundred large, generic Lemmy instances, each with c/Politics, c/News, c/VideoGames, etc. on them. We especially can't do that while trying to hold it up as a singular Reddit clone.

The fediverse is not centralized social media. If it's going to have real value and staying power, it's not going to look like centralized social media.

It can't.

It will just get eaten alive by the next shiny, proprietary, VC backed social mobile app if it tries.

Nah, they pay so poorly that you actually need to be invested in actually wanting to make games to take a job there. But you have to keep in mind that about 40% of people working on a game are not what the consumer world sees as 'creatives'. Software developers have to be invested in what they're doing, and often have to be really creative problem solvers, but it's not a "creative industry", so their contributions often go overlooked.

From the game design and art side, though, it's absolutely not an indie publisher. Development is highly collaborative, often involving thousands of contributors across multiple studios that span 2 or 3 continents. There isn't room for an auteur junior game designer, intermediate programmer, or individual environmental artist. The people who get to exercise creative liberties are the leads, and there's a handful of them on any game.

This is true basically on any project at any game studio of any appreciable size.

Where Ubisoft really kills the process is in editorial. All of the big publishers have editorial and marketing departments that work closely with each other to try and guide the creative outputs of those project leads towards an outcome that will see some amount of market success. The expectation and goal isn't even a runaway hit, just for the game to find an audience large enough to pay for the endeavour.

Ubisoft's editorial department is very influential, which you can see by how every single one of their games looks and feels exactly the fucking same. Everything interesting, unique, charming, or truly creative you do gets chiseled and sanded down into the same shape as everything else once the project actually starts coming together.

It's a soul crushing process, and if you resist it, you get labelled as "not a team player" and slowly relegated to the back of the room.

Low Quality Facts. He's one of the best things on Mastodon these days.

Yeah, product managers and executives will never find a performance metric they won't immediately pollute. They seem totally immune to the idea that once you start trying to directly impact them, they lose all meaning.

When I was interviewing for my first job in the video games industry, I came across an anecdote that spelled the whole thing out to me. Some game team discovered that players who completed their tutorial in under X amount of minutes (let's say 10, to have a concrete number to play with) where significantly more likely to make an in-game purchase (I worked in mobile gaming). So, the team was instructed to reduce the length of the tutorial so that almost anyone could complete it in 10 minutes or less.

Weirdly enough, this did not work.

Decision makers who "use data" to "drive decisions" seem to totally lack the ability to consider what the data means, who their customers are, or why people behave in the ways that they do. It's exhausting.

One of the things that I think we can make better use of here is partnerships with other groups (communities, magazines, what have you). This is especially useful with other on-server groups, for several reasons, but it's generally applicable. Building a web of trust and engagement can go a long way. Obviously, forced, artifical engagement-for-engagement isn't the goal, but creating a sense of "these are other spaces we support" can be big.

Personally, I'm a proponent of themed servers, but that's a step earlier than what we're talking about here. But having servers focused on certain topics can help keep moderators and admins engaged, potentially reduce inter-node communication, reduce federation issues, etc. Plus, it comes with some of that "trust network" built right in.

Apparently the guy holding the server keys up and disappeared, and the sysadmin left. Without the former, they can't get a new latter.

Ubisoft isn't a coherent entity. It doesn't want anything.

I don't say this to be glib, or to "well acshually" anything. I say it because it's core to their issues. The place is a snake pit, where anyone with any kind of sway is trying to Game-of-Thrones themselves into higher positions of power and prestige. The people who are supposed to be helping you make better games are actually just focused on getting some kind of win over Jean-Michelle over on that other project, so that when the time comes to jump to a different position, you have the social capital.

This involves focusing on increasingly niche performance KPIs that change at the drop of a hat. I'm talking really boutique vanity metrics that have nothing to do with enjoyment or sales.

On the business end of things, it also means real geniuses saying things like "streamers should have to get licensing agreements before using out games", and saying so publicly enough that everybody in the company hears that you've said it.

And this is without even touching on the sexual assault and harassment allegations, or the abuses of power.

Thr company cannot want anything because its constituent parts are too distracted by and busy with self-interested civil war, rather than working together to establish any kind of coherence.

Ubisoft isn't a video game publisher. They're an office politics survival game. I'm very glad I got out of there when I did.

Ignoring how wrong he is on that point...

Why is he even bringing it up? Like, ok, what if the Nazis were socialists? What does that have to do with him, and his position, right now? How is this in any way relevant to Canada, federally, today?

Like, it's really weird that he's talking about this. We should be highlighting out weird it is.