I buy games based on the following tier scale:

Gameplay > Performance > Price > Expected time playing > Graphics

I agree with your point in the post, especially after playing Darktide, which chucked performance out the window for fog and lighting effects. It doesn't matter how pretty your game is if it's rendering at 3fps.

In my humble experience, bullshitters are the easiest people to take advantage of, because they believe they have to be open to your bullshit for you to be receptive to theirs. Skillfully used, this can be utilized into taking points of their bullshit to strengthen the stench of yours.

What's really impressive is when you watch two seasoned bullshitters go toe to toe. Their smiles get bigger and bigger as things get more intense (threat display behavior), and the volume increases while the tone deepens as both try to appear to be "serious guys". Eventually there's a backslapping of the loser and a crushing handshake, along with plans to meet that will never be followed through on.

It's very similar to how internet troll minds work. They're literally the easiest people in the world to reverse troll, as they're so desperate for attention that they'll jump on any opportunity to gain yours.

EDIT: Aww - that's cute, one of my trolls showed up to downvote me and prove my point. What's wrong @some_guy, feeling lonely today snookums?

Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I'd be on Facebook. Reddit's value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there's no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.

I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won't be returning.

I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.

Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you're actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we're seeing on Reddit after the blackout).

I don't know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it's something I'd try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.

This reduces the minuscule interest I had in replaying Paladins to a negative number. Smite's been nothing but frustrating garbage, but I thought that with a bit of polish and a lot more character development, Paladins had promise when it came out. Starting a labor dispute to begin a practice that will degrade the overall quality of the game means it's not worth my hard disk space to install their products - it's clear things are only going to get worse for Hi-Rez titles from here.

Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it's engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and The_Donald speak to that. Engagement, now that they've got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)... at least until they go IPO, after which it's not their problem anymore.

The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it's very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit's never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It's my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we'll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you've outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.

Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.

The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you're killing your engagement. I haven't used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn't even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.

Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It's generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.

Goddamn it. I knew my Tardis was malfunctioning after that last crash into the #BBC. Apologies everyone - gotta flush the quantum improbability matrix again before I untangle the timelines. By the way, if anyone happens to spot a thylacine with a spiked collar roaming around London, please let me know. He answers to the name of Cryptodile Dundee and likes kangaroo niblets.

No more Githankypanky?

Serious question for the authors reading this - if there was a non-exclusive Fediverse e-commerce alternative to self-publishing on Amazon (including print on demand), would you use it?

Second question - what features would you like to see to make it fly? Dream big here - I'd love to hear all your ideas.

Third question - besides the topic of the article above, what does Amazon do wrong for authors? I've got a fair idea, but I really want to hear your thoughts and personal experiences.

Ok, but if you don't return them this time I'm sending your ass to collections.

They're doing it because it worked in the 90s. Different companies involved, but same ballgame, same playbook.

Here's some relevant info from a Reddit post 6 years ago from Bruce Kushnick, well known for his activism and writing on the topic:

I've been tracking the telco deployments of fiber optics since 1991 when they were announced as something called the Information Superhighway. The plan was to have America be the first fiber optic country -- and each phone company went to their state commissions and legislatures and got tax breaks and rate increases to fund these 'utility' network upgrades that were supposed to replace the existing copper wires with fiber optics -- starting in 1992. And it was all a con. As a former senior telecom analyst (and the telcos my clients) i realized that they had submitted fraudulent cost models, and fabricated the deployment plans. The first book, 1998, laid out some of the history "The Unauthorized Bio" with foreword by Dr. Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet networking). I then released "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" in 2005, which gave the details as by then more than 1/2 of America should have been completed -- but wasn't. And the mergers to make the companies larger were also supposed to bring broadband-- but didn't. I updated the book in 2015 "The Book of Broken Promises $400 Billion broadband Scandal and Free the Net", but realized that there were other scams along side this -- like manipulating the accounting.

We paid about 9 times for upgrades to fiber for home or schools and we got nothing to show for it -- about $4000-7000 per household (though it varies by state and telco). By 2017 it's over 1/2 trillion.

Finally, I note. These are not "ISPs"; they are state utility telecommunications companies that were able to take over the other businesses (like ISPs) thanks to the FCC under Mike Powell, now the head of the cable association. They got away with it because they could create a fake history that reporters and politicians kept repeating. No state has ever done a full audit of the monies collected in the name of broadband; no state ever went back and reduced rates or held the companies accountable. And no company ever 'outed' the other companies-- i.e., Verizon NJ never said that AT&T California didn't do the upgrades. --that's because they all did it, more or less. I do note that Verizon at least rolled out some fiber. AT&T pulled a bait and switch and deployed U-Verse over the aging copper wires (with a 'fiber node' within 1/2 mile from the location).

Here's a direct link to the PDF of his book,The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net that he still provides for free from his website, www.irregulators.org.

For reference sake, here's the link to his post on the bad place. Note I usually try to use better sourcing than Reddit, but Google's search on this topic is either flailing or details on how this went down have undergone an active scrubbing attempt.

The first rule about no Github club is that we don't talk about no Github club