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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple’s platform. That’s incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It’s the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.


  • Typical corporate greed in that sense. It’s stupid but I’m not at all surprised by that attitude.

    The part that even if they were morally right in that sense… it’s already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There’s definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.

    Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.





  • That really depends on what their goal is.

    From a business perspective it’s not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can “win” for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.

    People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren’t also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.


  • Yep.

    On paper she’s about as incompatible with the south as you could get apart from that. A liberal WASP that never practices religion (a WAS?). I used her as an example because I think she represents the relative indifference of much of US society on these matters. Politics starts and ends on election day; thinking about the South as a political entity and how their culture and political identities are tightly linked is anathema to her. It’s just getting too involved. Whereas she always hears how nice the people there are, and her books reinforce that idea, so it must be a wonderful place.

    That’s about the level of thought most people will put into it. “I heard they’re nice; the media I consume broadly comports that. Therefor I don’t hate the place.” Younger, online generations that are in discussions like this are atypical.

    I support making OP’s opinion a popular one, I wholeheartedly agree with it. I just suspect that it actually is unpopular overall (not on Lemmy.)


  • The story of the end of reconstruction is more depressing than that, IMO.

    It was successfully implemented for a decade. Then the North started to grow complacent and socially and politically wanted to move on. It’s easy to pretend a problem is solved if you personally face no direct risks to it not being fixed. Southerners became increasingly violent towards those in favor of Reconstruction and towards blacks in general. With many people being killed. The economic and social costs were staying high and people were inching towards just pretending the problem was solved and being rid of the issue.

    Then the 1876 presidential election happened, and that killed off any hopes of maintaining Reconstruction. After the election, the southern candidate, Tilden, had 184 electoral votes; the northern candidate, Hayes, had 165 electoral votes. There were 20 contested electoral votes from four states. The majority threshold was 185. Hayes needed to win all four states to become president. In the end a compromise was reached: the power brokers of the south would not contest having all four states awarded to Hayes if Reconstruction was ended.

    Reconstruction ended shortly after. Congress did change hands to the south at the time too, but that was in no small part a byproduct of their years-long campaigns of violence to sow discontent with the northern populace.

    The only silver lining is that the US actually did learn from this failure. The post-WW2 denazification of Germany relied heavily on the lessons learned from Reconstruction and its ultimate failure.


  • I think in US society at large it likely is an unpopular opinion. The south has successfully sold itself as: affordable, nice climate, with extremely hospitable people. My mom has a highly romanticized view of the south because it’s the setting of so many of the romance novels she reads. Not going to pretend she’s typical, but there’s going to be a decent chunk of people falling for that or the myth of southern hospitality.

    My experiences are limited, but “southern hospitality” has always come across as performative and insincere to me. It’s a superficial level of ineffectual niceties done for social expectations while actually requiring no true kindness to be displayed. A lot of people fall for the myth of it all the same.

    I’d bet that while a majority of people are not pro-south, the pro-south group (excluding southerners) is larger than the anti-south group — with a large majority of people not giving a fuck.



  • The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn’t truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been “fixed.” Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.

    Vista’s issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista’s reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.


  • I don’t think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision’s ability to make money.

    In all likelihood Blizzard isn’t going to be managed any differently. Microsoft’s modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.



  • It’s also because their current shows suck, and because any shows that are actually good get shitcanned after season 2, because Netflix sees less consumer growth after two seasons.

    I’m always surprised at how often other people (not you) will defend this practice from Netflix. It’s classic case of following the data in a stupid way. If their data shows that interest drops off after two seasons, I don’t doubt it.

    But… that comes with a cost. They have built a reputation as a company that doesn’t properly finish shows that they start, that will leave viewers hanging. That makes it harder to get people invested in a new series, even one that’s well reviewed. Why get interested in something you know will end on a cliffhanger?

    That kind of secondary order impact from their decision isn’t going to show up in data. Doesn’t change that it happens all the same.





  • That and the EGS seem to be where Epic funneled all their profits from the height of Fornite. That neither has worked out puts them on shakier ground. How many billions of dollars has been spent on EGS with it being way behind their revenue targets?

    As things stand, Epic has very little in the way of a next big revenue source when Fortnite starts to fade as something new takes its place. That (probably) isn’t right around the corner but it will happen eventually. Their bet was on running major digital storefronts; that hasn’t worked out. UE will continue to make good money but not anywhere near enough to sustain the company as it is. UE is simply far smaller than something like FN.

    This is likely them realizing this in conjunction with what you said. They need a new big revenue source in the pipeline, since digital storefronts won’t be it. Whatever that next thing is will need lots of money.