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Is Beehaw federating with Threads?
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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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You don't see/experience Beehaw as more argumentative than Reddit? I've had a hard time staying with Lemmy/Beehaw because people seem to pop out of the woodwork to have exhaustive arguments. If I could share two experiences.
One was me asking a popular game developer how they wrote a shader for Unity so I could port it to Godot. I got a nice reply on how they did it and even a link to the Godot version someone else did. I even got other people thanking me for that comment and opening the conversation up. Another time I was explaining what that Starfield designer said on Twitter recently wasn't terrible. I explained calmly and clearly the point of view of a game developer and got responses that either people didn't see it that way or that they thought the designer still shouldn't have said those words because of the marketing timing. Overall the exchanges were great and not only gave me a new perspective but made me feel like I opened other people's eyes.
The other experience of someone telling me because I plan to vote for Biden that I support genocide and they won't hear anything about how I don't. Another great example is how people are defending pirating games from any level of game developer. Even in threads where I comment and explain that pirating hurts employees, people don't even have a decent conversation about it. They just want to keep excusing their behavior without discussion.
Overall, it's made me wonder how people are experiencing Beehaw and Lemmy. If for some reason I am the odd one out. With my two experiences, one on Reddit and one on Beehaw, I question if I am the problem because of the experiences on Beehaw/Lemmy but it's still me at the root of the experience. So, I feel like I've done the leg work to rule myself out.
I think that Beehaw/Lemmy just attract a certain type of person that typically agrees with each other but Reddit is a mixing pot of a bunch of opinions that have interesting conversations. Reddit feels like what Beehaw was supposed to be. I wish we could ensure our culture on Beehaw reflects our ideals but it's starting to feel like they don't and won't.
Hmm, maybe it's because I joined in 2012 where the default subs were very different. On top of that, I dropped most of them for that sort of behavior. A lot of subreddits I'm in are small enough to filter out the cesspool of default Reddit. I just personally haven't found that on Lemmy because there isn't a ton of content here. Overall as I think about it, Lemmy and Reddit and probably social media in general is what you make it. Who you willingly subscribe/follow/etc.
You're not the first person I've heard who said that so there must be something there. That's not my experience however, I find that Reddit makes me angry these days, getting annoyed at all the low-effort, inconsiderate posting. Having a debate on Reddit is impossible I find because saying something that goes slightly against the hive-mind you'll you'll be passive-aggressively downvoted, which has a chilling effect on what people say. I like that Beehaw doesn't have downvotes, especially on local communities. On Beehaw/Lemmy someone might argue with you but that's at least better I think than the knee-jerk downvote-to-oblivion you get on Reddit.
It's true that a lot of people are more similar here than on Reddit. I'd argue that's not necessarily a bad thing. The one-size-fits-all social network for everybody approach I think doesn't work, it's more natural to choose a group you fit in to and feel comfortable with (which is how things were on old style forums and message boards). What ever happens to Lemmy/Beehaw in the future, the main thing I hope for is to have plenty of choice of smaller forums which is what's been lacking in the last decade or so.
I've been experiencing more argumentation from non-beehaw users. I think they treat our communities (Politics, LGBTQ, News, etc.) as defaults and they don't realize that they're on beehaw. I've reminded people of the rules before and had responses telling me they didn't realize they had posted on beehaw.
Unfortunately this is one of the downsides of federation. Without better mod tools for now we just ask that it report anyone who's not being nice and we'll do our best to manage it.
I was on Reddit for a very long time and a few Lemmy instances when everyone moved. While it’s not perfect, Beehaw is by far the place where I can read comments that are original, less hateful, and less pedantic. I chose Behhaw because everything else is just exhausting to me
Yeah, I've heard this argument but the numbers don't match up. Word of mouth from pirates just really doesn't seem to amount to that much. It seems in general that pirates pirate popular games that already have that word of mouth and they don't play unpopular games. If you search for a random 10-year-old less than 100 reviews game on Pirate Bay, it won't pop up.
Pirate Bay is not representative of the pirating scene, it only has the "tip of the iceberg" most popular stuff, and even then missing a lot of it. For a better view, check BTDigg... but even that is missing data from all the private trackers where more dedicated people are keeping the more obscure stuff, not to mention the not-torrent networks, which is where most of the scene is. Then you have private datahoarders who keep their stash off-line, but can make a copy available if you ask nicely.
You could probably find any game ever published, even multiple version releases, if you contacted the right people.
We are talking about the average pirate though. Which would use Pirate Bay.
What is "the average pirate"? Someone who goes to places like this, with tons of file sharing resources listed on the sidebar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing
TPB is only a tiny slice of what's listed for everyone to find.
I did not mention that the games were unpopular. In fact, I stated that they hurt any level of game developer.
No, I am saying word of mouth from pirates isn't effective because, on the whole, pirates typically pirate popular games. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square.
People do give away their games for a limited amount of time to boost word-of-mouth effectiveness but they aren't free all the time and typically have a request to buy a game. Overall the argument that piracy helps indies is silly because if those indies thought it helped, they would do a free weekend or a giveaway. Piracy in itself is removing a tool and options from the creator of the game. I have a standing policy that if people email me a reason they can't pay for my games then they can get a Steam key.
None of the things you've said are backed by fact. I only have my actual industry experience to go on, countless studies, articles, and posts from game developers stating piracy hurts them. Giveaways aren't less useful, they spread more word of mouth and you can cite psychology all day but the fact is that in practice, it doesn't work like that. I have 10 years in the industry as an indie game developer. Pirates hurt my business more than help, I have tangible numbers on multiple titles that back that up. Steam Free Weekends brought in millions of dollars for a few titles I've worked on. Piracy hasn't tangibly brought anything in and we've seen revenue increases when DRM is enacted. Thus, the only real conclusion you can come to is piracy hurts developers. To twist it in your mind that it could possibly, maybe help is you excusing the behavior.
Lastly, these are the silly arguments I have been talking about. This entire conversation just proves my point and wears me out. Because I've never met anyone at GDC or any convention that would say that piracy helped their business. Your perspective is clearly that of someone who pirates and thinks it helps. It doesn't and it hurts game developers on all levels. It's a worthless argument to even have because if it helped, game developers would encourage it. Realistically, there are only a few game developers that do and they typically don't do so for their next title. Meaning they found it didn't work.