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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Content has to arrive first for users to consume. It really is a “both” type of response to some extent.

    In my opinion, the solution is for content creators to simultaneously release on alternative platforms while also maintaining a YouTube presence so they’re still making money from that. However, they should start heavily advertising the alternative platforms on every video and transitioning to a different payment model (e.g. Patreon, Ko-fi, Indiegogo, etc). Content creators could organize with other creators to coordinate the transition. If you got huge channels like Digital Foundry, Linus Tech Tips, GamersNexus, etc (for the PC gaming scene, as an example) to agree, then that’s already millions of users. It begins a snowball effect.

    That being said, as far as I’m aware, there aren’t any alternative platforms that can handle the bandwidth that supports millions of users simultaneously, along with thousands of content creators uploading and processing large videos regularly. There’s a reason YouTube has such a monopoly, and their vast wealth of pre-existing content is the main component, but not the only one.








  • bassomitron@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mldeleted
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    13 days ago

    Sometimes this one place gives me $20 of food before closing when I only intended to spend $5 so the upsell kinda hurts

    But that upsell is strictly self-inflicted. If it’s before closing, I can almost guarantee the staff are just hooking you up because a large amount of that food is just going to go to waste since most restaurants require things to get thrown away (e.g. if it’s a deli, some of the meats may have hit their shelf life limit).

    I’d just tip what you can comfortably afford and what you feel isn’t insulting (e.g. tipping someone like $0.50 on a $20+ order). I always follow the 15-20% rule, and possibly higher in some circumstances. But I don’t know, I haven’t worked food in 20 years, so maybe the manners/expectations have changed nowadays. Also depends where you live.









  • Steam’s voice chat/partying functionality is garbage. Discord is widely used for a reason. Remote Play is hit or miss, but I’ve largely resorted to using Moonlight instead on my Steam Deck because it’s more reliable and stable. The guides on Steam vary wildly from game to game, just depends on the community support for it. It is nice when there’s good stuff available, as it is somewhat convenient (though I wished it saved my spot on the page, I constantly have to scroll to where I left off on guides whenever I do use them). Lutris and NonSteamLauncher makes running Epic on Linux a non-issue.

    I get it, Epic is a lackluster launcher. No one’s arguing otherwise. But it’s hardly a huge barrier to playing games.


  • Not really. Games would’ve gone digital either way, it was the obvious path to go. Steam might’ve sped up that process by a few years, but pretending that without steam, digitalization of the games industry would’ve never happened is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

    And yet consoles still have physical game copies available all these years later. Why is PC so much different?

    And I’m not saying to be happy that Epic is competition, I’m saying that if GOG dies, you’ll only really have Steam and Epic. That sucks ass, but it’s still better than only having ONE option. And like I said, once Gabe is gone, I 100% believe Valve will go full on enshitification mode. I wouldn’t have to worry as much if I could still buy physical fucking copies of modern PC games.

    As for Epic competing by creating better platform, I completely agree. Their launcher has made improvements, but it is still very bare bones and not great. I try to remember that tons of common sense software features we take for granted get patented. Hell, that’s why so many streaming services felt so much shittier than Netflix for so long. It’s not as straightforward as just emulating what Steam does but slightly better. That’s still no excuse though, and they still fall very short of offering the mostly comfortable user experience we’ve grown accustomed to. Steam didn’t start off where they’re at now, they’ve had 20 years with an entire company dedicated to developing it.

    My main point is, we all love Steam and Valve because they’ve been a mostly ethical corporation so far as well as mostly improving the experience of PC gaming, especially with Linux (minus expediting and enabling 100% digitization so they could attain better profit margins on Half-Life 2 sales). But nothing lasts forever, and pure monopolies are bad. Fuck Epic for buying exclusive rights for third party games, but in this specific context, it is their game, so it is what it is.