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developers handle design, not finances. Microtransactions have always been in the interest of profit, not to make the games better. They were the markets compromise with gamers being unlikely to pay enough to cover costs of a Triple A development cycle.
Reminder that when the NES came out, it was still $60 dollars for a game, which would be about $180 today. And that’s not accounting for all the extra manhours that now go into the major titles. Microtransactions and DLCs are the deal with the devil we made to keep games from being $200+ a pop
Here’s the journal article itself
This whole thing stinks of advertising. They use a sample size of 24 people. The results are underwhelming: “Each disease cohort concordantly demonstrated increases in the NAD+/NADH ratio but did not reach significance individually” (“when we massaged the numbers, the result we wanted popped out”). Looking at the graphs, it looks like the upper half (highest baselines) of the patients worsened over the 12 week study.
My favorite lines?
“The objective of the Phase 2 REPAIR-MS and REPAIR-PD clinical trials was to investigate the effects of CNM-Au8” and “CNM-Au8® is a suspension of faceted, clean-surfaced gold nanocrystals” and course:
“Clene Nanomedicine, Inc., funded this study.”
So we’ve extracted so much gold from the earth there’s not enough left for our bodies?
I know this probably isn’t the case, but the image of extracting precious metals from human tissue solely to squeeze every last drop out of nature is hilarious to me. Plausible, but hilarious nonetheless. Mine owners leaving toxic lakes in the middle of Parkinson’s patients when the earth runs out of gold.
It’s like if Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky all were the same behind the scenes and gave you access to read the posts and follower the on the other sites. “Mastodon” is just the collective term for all those sites that are linked together.
Also you can have a lot more control over what you see and who you interact with, but you don’t have to if you just want to login and look at memes. You can also run your own site ti have even more control, but, once again, you don’t have to.
If you mean you just don’t get the appeal of the “microblogging” format, or the culture that arose online surrounding it, I can’t explain that. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.
As someone who’s not familiar with federated services, I don’t know what to base my instance decision on.
As I said elsewhere, many people just want a place they can go to share memes, news, opinions and misinformation. But on the other hand, there are plenty affiliated with interests/hobbies/identities/ideologies where you can to share topical memes, topical news, topical opinions, and misinformation (as long as it’s on topic).
Snark aside, I’m on two instances: one for socializing, and another for my interest in cybersecurity. So I’d start with: do you want an experience that’s more typical of social media with a more general pool of people, or do you want to focus on a specific interest but with the understanding that entails a smaller userbase and a slower feed?
If the latter sounds best to you, what communities do you find yourself most active in on other platforms (e.g. reddit, lemmy, facebook, twitter)? If not, we can find a relatively well-populated instance that’s likely to have staying power.
Your point about Joinmastodon is too true. It’s a terrible starting point for someone who just wants to test the waters: “I have to learn about an entirely new type of digital networking AND commit to an instance? I bet Bluesky doesn’t have all these layers of obfuscation.”
It would be easier if the community would just agree that there is a default instance with open enrollment—preferably the biggest and mosy popular, or at least one that’s maintained by a group with staying power—and just send all the newbies there. If they want to dig deeper, nothing’s stopping them, but that way their first impression isn’t analysis paralysis.
To your other points:
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for discovery, there are the usual methods: trending, hashtags, the search, and people sharing their usernames elsewhere.
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I assume that people who are making the hard decision to leave the site where they know all the people they want to follow already are, are also prepared to accept some amount of loss to that pool. It happens all the same whether it’s Threads or Mastodon
I mean, that’s fair, but it’s not relevant to usage. I go to mastodon.social, I sign up, I use. At no point is the concept of federation necessary in that process, that’s for the owners/operators/maintainers to figure out.
If people want to know more, they will seek out that arcane knowledge, but it’s not something someone who’s just there to satisfy their FOMO ever needs to know.
Bluesky wasn’t as confusing as Mastodon
I’m so tired of this bullshit. I went to the mastodon.social; clicked the big button labeled “create an account”; read and accepted the rules; filled out a form asking for my email address, a username and password; confirmed my email; and could immediately post.
How the fuck is that confusing, that’s standard fucking practice. Jesus fucked on a pike.
“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” - Shakespeare
You Are Not Immune to Propaganda. You are not immune to ideology. You are not immune to manipulation. Being aware that propaganda exists—nor even knowing what it generally looks like and who generally uses it for what general purpose—will not stop every last bit of it from ever working on you—anymore than being aware of ideology will stop you from having one, anymore than being aware of manipulation and abuse will save you from ever being manipulated and abused.
That is not misanthropy, that is acknowledgement that we are imperfect and occasionally need to let our guards down so we’re not stressed and alienated 24/7. If anything it’s incredibly awe-inspiring that we, as a species, are so smart that we can develop abstract systems that outsmart us. If anything, it’s misanthropic to be so disgusted by vulnerability and imperfection that one finds acknowledgement of such detestable.
Captology isn’t the Borg, sure, because it’s not one single group with one unified goal using it. It’s everyone who vies for your attention/support and benefits from having it; specifically, it’s the techniques they employ to get your engagement. Many will only use a little, consciously or not, to get you engaged because theirs is already a cause worth caring about; many more will use a lot, unreflectively—not considering the long-term impact nor moral implications—because it’s just the mainstream design trends of the time.
E.g. i am trying to persuade you of something right now, using a computer to communicate my views. Am I using Computers As Persuasive Technology? If you agree with the adage “The Medium is The Message,” then using lemmy necessarily has some impact on the way we communicate and behave online; by that token, the same can be said of the hardware and networks we’re taking for granted.
This must be true to some degree, because i’m not talking to you as I would someone in person, I’m typing this all out; i have already augmented my behavior to fit the medium. What other ways has this tech molded my behavior without me giving it a second thought?
Just because i don’t consider it evil or wrong doesn’t make it not manipulation, not propaganda, not ideology, not captology.
two business partners are chatting and one says, “We’re losing money on every sale”, so the other one responds, “Yea, but we’ll make it up in volume!”