chromodynamic

I’ve often felt that the web should work more like Git, so you can keep the content locally and just pull updates when you need.

You can view and post in channels on other instances from your home instance without switching. For example, I’m commenting from piefed.social

The term “social media” is already toxic. When I started using the Internet, socialising and media were two separate things. Conflating the two implies that every time we say something, we are publishing an article and should care about how many views and likes we get, instead of making a genuine attempt at connection. And it suggests that every reply should be some kind of review of the post it replies to.

In the days of forums, people would just post what came into mind. They were more honest because there was no number next to your comment rating how good it was.

Client-side scripting is a hack. HTML didn’t have all the tags people wanted or needed, so instead of carefully updating it to include new features, they demanded that browsers just execute arbitrary code on the user’s computer, and with that comes security vulnerabilities, excessive bandwidth use and a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

Quite the opposite in fact. Microtransactions offer the promise of fun, but never deliver, because in order to incentivise users to purchase them, the player must feel like the game is 90% of the way to being fun and that tiny additional purchase will get it there.

It’s like the cartoon image of the donkey rider holding a carrot on the end of a rod. The donkey keeps moving to try to get the carrot, but never quite reaches it.

Quite the opposite in fact. Microtransactions offer the promise of fun, but never deliver, because in order to incentivise users to purchase them, the player must feel like the game is 90% of the way to being fun and that tiny additional purchase will get it there.

It’s like the cartoon image of the donkey rider holding a carrot on the end of a rod. The donkey keeps moving to try to get the carrot, but never quite reaches it.

Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer’s resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.

Some good points I hadn’t considered!

Got me thinking about how YouTubers get money. According to a quick web search, YT pays $0.01 to $0.03 per view. So if you release 10 videos a month, you made $0.10 per viewer. But Patreon memberships are typically around $5.00 a month, equivalent to $0.50 per view in the same scenario. Of course Patreon will take a cut, but it is still a lot more money.

So, if a lot of your viewers think your channel is good enough to donate to, ad money basically becomes an afterthought. In this case, the only advantage of YT over PT is discovery, i.e. the number of viewers likely to find your videos in the first place (but there’s also more competition on YT, so…)