MudMan

See, I hear this a lot, and it's a bit disappointing. Because hell yeah, there is great journalism being done. If you want "investigative journalism"... I mean, why? It's videogames, not politics, but yeah, there are people out there doing that stuff (Jason Schreier comes to mind, even if I don't particularly like the guy, but he's not alone). If you want genuine, in-depth documentaries and explorations of the process of game development then I like you more. Noclip and People Make Games come to mind, in terms of sheer production value and coming from the journalism side, but Youtube is full of in-depth looks at games from that perspective based more on documentation and less on talking to the actual devs.

So maybe the question I have is why aren't those better known? Why is the hype machine still what the audience cares about? Because all of those are publicly available, and some even very popular. Why isn't it the default and why do people not actually engage with it even when they claim they do want to engage with it? Particularly when Noclip started doing what they do, it was such a common trope to say that people wanted that exact thing and nobody was doing it, and then the very, very good 2Player Productions documentary on Double Fine's Broken Age happened and it seemed like it was possible to do, so Noclip started doing it... and they're fine, they're good, they're still going, but they certainly haven't exploded in popularity or anything.

Whatever, this is an old argument. At this point most gaming coverage is let's play videos and Twitch streamers. And you know what? That's fine. that's still better than the relentless hype machine. I just hope the good ones doing good work get to keep doing it as well.

The actual article here gets to a great, very accurate conclusion: that information about unfinished, upcoming games is really not that valuable for users and an entirely artificial hype machine that insists on only paying attention to games before they exist. This is true.

There is very little genuine value in exploring a game in development, that is mostly a commercial concern. Which is fine, this is an entertainment industry. All parties here (publishers, journalists and audiences) are willingly engaging in a bit of a commercial transaction.

But journalistically and in terms of art criticism, the moment that coverage matters is after a game exists, not before. Really, leaking publishing plans or greenlit projects shouldn't be a big deal because publishing plans and business deals should be insider stuff that end users don't give a crap about. The relevant Insomniac game now is at most Spider-Man 2, not Wolverine or any later games they may or may not have deals to make. Mostly because there's no guarantee those games will ever exist or in what form.

But also, screw leaking personal info of game developers.

Oh, hard disagree on the last part, at least.

As always in left-leaning spaces, the best way to disarm any threat of reform is to wait for whatever purity test over a random issue to trigger a schism, sit back and watch. It's not even the first time it happens to Mastodon specifically.

In this case, a potential competitor that already has a reputation for being overcomplicated and having bad UX now needs an extra FAQ item called "can I interact with Threads from Mastodon?" and the answer is "it depends".

It's terrible, self-destructive and worse than either a yes or no call. Zuck boned Masto by federating a handful of employee accounts only AND he's still going to get the plausible deniability in front of regulators from federating with whatever's left. I'd be impressed if I thought Meta did it on purpose instead of it being entirely self-inflicted.

Huh. You'd think more instances were blocking, given the amount of buzz.

Being generallky in favor of letting individual users make this call that's... mildly encouraging. Of course I happen to be in an instance that is blocking, so...

It's worth noting that this still splits Mastodon pretty much in half. That's arguably a bigger concern than anything else Meta may be doing. They may not even have to actually federate to break Mastodon, which is a very interesting dynamic.

I've been saying this from the go: users don't need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.

What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn't add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn't a feature.

Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes "do you want to see Threads or nah?", which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.

Fair enough. As long as the different perspectives are represented and the groupthink doesn't take over I don't need everybody to agree with me.

And that's why all social media is bad.

Look, open socials can either replace closed socials or be a niche little fun exclusive club for techheads exclusively focused on Star Trek and Linux and how open socials should replace closed socials. You can't have both.

So if the conclusion here is that popular social media sucks... yeah, you're right. Because all social media sucks. The content won't be better if the same people join Mastodon than if they come from Threads.