Some of the responses here dance around the truth, but none of them hit the nail on the head. This is a bit of an artifact of how the mobile industry works and the success rate vs profitability vs the way ads work on mobile.

Yes, hands down, this is not an effective advertising strategy. Many of these game companies are very successful so it's not because they're stupid. It's because these ads aren't advertising campaigns.

These ads are market research. The point isn't to get you to download their game. At all. The point is to figure out what people will engage with.

These ads are all game ideas. Mobile game ideas are a dime a dozen million. They're easy to come up with, cost a lot to build, and many don't monetize well and therefore aren't profitable. Because of that, it's very expensive and unsustainable to build games and test them and see what succeeds.

Instead, companies come up with ideas, build a simple video demonstrating the idea, and put up ads with those videos. They then see how many people engage with the ads to determine how many people would even visit the download page for that game. Building a quick video is much much much cheaper than building a game. This is the first step in fast failing their ideas and weeding out bad ones.

Essentially the companies have lots of ideas, build lots of simple videos, advertise them all, and see which ones get enough engagement to be worth pursuing further, while the rest get dropped entirely.

But those ads need to link somewhere. So they link to the companies existing games. Because they're already paying for it. So why not.

But building a whole new game is also expensive. Dynamics in mobile gaming are very odd because of the way "the algorithm" works. It is actually extremely expensive to get advertising in front of enough people that enough download it that you have any meaningfully large player base to analyze at all.

So the next trick is these companies will take the successful videos, build "mini games" of those ads as a prototype, and then put that in their existing game. This means they can leverage their existing user base to test how much people will engage with the game, and more importantly, eventually test how well it monetizes. Their existing users have already accepted permissions, likely already get push notifications, and often already have their payment info linked to the app. It also means they don't have to pay for and build up a new store presence to get eyeballs on it. Many of the hurdles of the mobile space have already been crossed by their existing players, and the new ones who clicked the ads have demonstrated interest in the test subject. This is why many of the ads link to seemingly different games that have a small snippet of what you actually clicked on.

If these mini games then become successful enough, they will be made into their own standalone game. But this is extremely rare in mobile. The way the store algorithms and ads work make it pretty fucking expensive to get new games moving, so they really have to prove it to be worthwhile in the long run.

So yeah, most people look at this the wrong way - it does actually go against common sense advertising, but that's because it's not actually advertising. It's essentially the cheapest way for companies to get feedback from people that actually play mobile games about what kinds of games they would play.

It's not advertising. It's market analysis.

This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.

As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he's making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they're doing it and redeploys the same thing.

This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn't stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he's repeatedly flaunting credentials that don't change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.

Provided that a Third Party User is followed by or following a Threads account, Meta will ingest these pieces of data specifically:

Username

Profile Picture

IP Address

Name of Third Party Service

Posts from profile

Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)

So if you follow a threads user or even if a threads user just follows you, they pull all this data?

IMO this seems like reason to defederate across the board. Someone else can leak your info to Meta.

Yes.... And?

Slave labor would be much more profitable, but we have values beyond just your profits.

I'm actually shocked to find how many people agree with the OPs sentiment, but maybe there's something about the demographics of who's using a FOSS Reddit alternative or something. I'm not saying everyone is wrong or has something wrong with them or whatever, but I entirely agree with people finding this valuable, so maybe I can answer the OPs question here.

I've been working remotely long since before the pandemic. I've worked remotely for multiple companies and in different environments. I am extremely introverted and arguably anti social. I tend to want to hang out with many of my friends online over in person. But that doesn't mean I think there's no advantage at all. To be honest, when I first started remote work, I thought the in person thing was total bullshit. After a few meetings my opinions drastically changed.

I've pushed (with other employees, of course) to get remote employees flown in at least a few times a year at multiple companies. There are vastly different social dynamics in person than over video. Honestly, I don't understand how people feel otherwise, especially if they've experienced it. I've worked with many remote employees over the years and asked about this, and most people have agreed with me. Many of these people are also introverted.

I think one of the big things here is people harping on the "face" thing. Humans communicate in large part through body language - it's not just faces. There's also a lot of communication in microexpressions that aren't always captured by compressed, badly lit video. So much of communication just isn't captured in video.

Secondly, in my experience, online meetings are extremely transactional. You meet at the scheduled time, you talk about the thing, then you close the meeting and move on. In person, people slowly mosy over to meetings. And after the meeting ends, they tend to hang around a bit and chat. When you're working in an office, you tend to grab lunch with people. Or bump into them by the kitchen. There's a TON more socializing happening in person where you actually bump into other people and talk them as people and not just cogs in the machine to get your work done.

I find in person interactions drastically change my relationships with people. Some people come off entirely different online and it's not until meeting them in person that I really feel like I know them. And then I understand their issues and blockers or miscommunications better and feel more understanding of their experiences.

Maybe things are different if you work jobs with less interdepencies or are more solo. I've always worked jobs that take a lot of cooperation between multiple different people in different roles. And those relationships are just way more functional with people I've met and have a real relationship with. And that comes from things that just don't happen online.

Im honestly really curious how anyone could feel differently. The other comments just seem mad at being required to and stating the same stuff happens online, but it just doesn't. I do wonder if maybe it has to do with being younger and entering the workplace more online or something. But I've worked with hundreds of remote employees and never heard a single one say the in person stuff to be useless. And I've heard many say exactly the opposite.

or other expensive setups

As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That's how you know the priorities are backwards.

TL;DR: Employees say his actions led to a lot of direction changing that forced management to scramble, and the lower workers had to bear the brunt of this. They also complained that OW2 needed more work or would be review bombed on Steam and his leadership refused. Shareholders are still happy to fellate him though because he made them a lot of money.

So, no actual news here.

YouTube purchases also don't work beyond 480p on any desktop except for Mac Safari. These companies are fucking insane.

This is the most asinine approach IMO.

"Let's release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let's spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let's try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason."

They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that's how you're getting your customers, you're going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you're just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.

This model is not sustainable. You're not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That's not a business.

What's especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they've invested in temporary stats. They're essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.

Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven't seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than "well I couldn't buy this game anywhere else"

Same shit in my area. I've asked landlords why they're increasing rents and they say things like "well based on local prices and value of the property...." I've asked multiple what makes them think that and it's always "we have software that estimates what our units are worth". So now any landlord raises rent and they all raise rent in unison. No renovations or new perks to the property. It's just "well someone else hiked rent this year so now your new lease does too".

I bet if such a law existed in less than a month all those AI developers would very quickly abandon the "oh no you see it's impossible to completely avoid hallucinations for you see the math is just too complex tee hee" and would actually fix this.

Nah, this problem is actually too hard to solve with LLMs. They don't have any structure or understanding of what they're saying so there's no way to write better guardrails.... Unless you build some other system that tries to make sense of what the LLM says, but that approaches the difficulty of just building an intelligent agent in the first place.

So no, if this law came into effect, people would just stop using AI. It's too cavalier. And imo, they probably should stop for cases like this unless it has direct human oversight of everything coming out of it. Which also, probably just wouldn't happen.

I don't know if this makes me "a redditor" somehow or what, but....

As a dev, I am deeply troubled by the gaming industry so calmly walking into kernel anti cheats. It's insane and being tossed around like it's nothing.

Helldivers especially, since they picked one of the sketchiest ones and it's a game that entirely doesn't need it.

I have no idea if Reddit has suddenly picked up on this, but I've been pissed since at least Valorants release, but have seen more YT videos talking about it recently.

Musk said he made the decision fearing that Moscow would retaliate with nuclear weapons.

I feel like this part is even worse. His opinion sucks and is fucking stupid, but he's literally saying he's making decisions (which have an impact on thousands of lives) because of his speculation on the Russian response.

He's not a fucking general, this shit shouldn't be his decision. He is not informed or educated on these decisions and he's playing with people's literal lives. He's literally trying to play god with his space toys.

where it won't obscure passwords. But, surprise, it will obscure DRM content

Yeah, we all know where the priorities really are.

How have our consumer protections gone so fucking far.

I'm a software dev and have worked with some of these companies. It's kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains. I dreamt of making cool little games based on fun and unique ideas and quickly learned it's all a huge well oiled machine chugging through market data to find the most effective money extracting methods they can come up with.

For every bit you think these companies are grimey money chasers, I promise you it's at least 5 times worse.

ITC: Someone not understanding the difference between not understanding and not agreeing.

Yeah I don't understand how there's a whole article of "no one is using it" and the author then states "it's OK, there's nothing wrong with it".

If there's nothing wrong with it, why is no one using it?

Maybe because 11 is fucking awful. Maybe it's the ads. Maybe it's removing fuck tons of features for no apparent reason. Maybe it's the fucking awful design choices.

But no, the author just says "every decision has haters, people just hate it because it's different"

Yeah... How the fuck is Google action here "monopolistic" and Apple literally refusing to let anyone in at all somehow isn't? What a joke.

To make sure millenials can't read your password, 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓲𝓽 𝓲𝓷 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮.

How would this mess with millennials? I think you mean gen z.

This is entirely fabricated and opinionated bullshit from Forbes. There is no evidence that this is actually happening and the headline is extremely clickbait. Many other sites have covered this and I can't find any other than Forbes that take it this way. This is an opinion piece based on a response from a fucking chat bot despite that response semi conflicting with Google's official outline of the feature.

Google has announced an AI chat bot function for Bard. You can open a new conversation directly with Bard and in that conversation data is not encrypted and will be sent to Google. There is no evidence of it "reading through your history" or that future chats you have with actual humans are going to be collected or unencrypted.

If you read past all the "breaks" and such, the author themself even falls back on this:

For its part, Bard says “Google has assured that all Bard analysis would happen on your device, meaning your messages wouldn't be sent to any servers. Additionally, you would have complete control over what data Bard analyzes and how it uses it.”

Let me rephrase that. The author is quoting a fucking response from the BARD CHATBOT and then further extrapolating what the fucking chat bot said. This is not Google. This is A CHAT BOT.

All of the privacy changes posted by Google themselves do not outline anything more than your conversations with Bard being uploaded. But the author tries to then argue about bards own response he got.

But I suspect we’ll see that on-device assurance watered down in practice. It will make sense to provide a more seamless interface between a smartphone and the cloud.

The author is saying he's scared. And that Google will dance around a loophole its chat bot mentioned. But this is his own opinion about what he thinks will happen because of a response he got from an AI.

This is fucking ludicrous fear mongering.