reminds me of the path Minecraft could have taken - they also had a massive amount of community developers building servers, but instead of encouraging monetization and taking a cut, they banned it and cracked down aggressively
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
That ship has sailed. People can and will just play on old versions if it comes to this. They already do for older versions that have better mod support.
What is the Minecraft online experience like these days? I only ever hear about people playing self hosted servers with friends. Are there still big servers with unique game modes kicking? Seems like it would be hard to keep sustainable
I've been running my own (not-for-profit, for people over the age of 21) server for the past 5 years.
We're basically just a Vanilla+ server, we have no problems finding new people to join (thanks to /r/MinecraftBuddies)
My kids love Minecraft. They often run a curseforge mod (create?) and then open a port so they can play together inside the home LAN.
But, I don't really understand how this works, and I would love to host it in a way that their cousins in another state could join. Do you know how I research this?
I get a bit confused between the curseforge mods, the java edition. Should I start by downloading a JAR of the server and host it on a cloud server somewhere, and then firewall it off to only permit my NAT IP and the cousin's NAT IPs? At some point maybe I can run it all within a wireguard/tailscale network.
How do I get started in my reading? I'm worried I'll get overwhelmed by reading /r/MinecraftBuddies, but perhaps that is a better place to ask?
First off, it's generally a good idea not to port-forward your own home router outside of defaults (Even if it's just 25565; I created a nightmare scenario for the ISP guy back at my parent's house when I was around 13 doing this).
If they're interested in learning the nitty-gritty on cloud computing and hosting (they probably do if they're already learning Curseforge), then get them into the AWS method. If you want something one-and-done, opt for Minehut.
The last one occasionally fails to show ads due to some javascript error (visible in the console). The same error was also observed on a few other pages with the "you may also like" footer, so my guess is that some ads were supposed to be visible on many pages, but were accidentally hidden due to some configuration issue.
It boggles my mind how valuable advertising is. Who is clicking on that shit and presumably buying those products? I just cannot believe that there were actually $100k/day worth of actual ad conversions, no matter the player count. Yet the money flows so I guess people really do click on that shit and then buy that shit.
When I say love, I mean genuinely seek them out. When I was younger, there was no internet in my house, and adverts were the opportunity to step away from the TV and do something else. But I worked as a babysitter in December a few years ago and things have certainly changed a lot.
They would turn on the TV just to watch ads to "find out what I want for Christmas" then turn it off again when the advertising finished and ask for Netflix. When playing games on an iPad or laptop, they would click every ad to open it in a new tab, meaning they could browse products after they were done playing.
The first couple of times I told the kids not to do that, and reported back to the parents after. But turns out most parents liked this behaviour...it made Christmas shopping easier, because their kids would make a list of cheaper things aimed at them, rather than all asking for expensive iPads and PlayStations.
I have to agree $100k/day seems close to unbelievably high, so I had to do some napkin math. In short, it seems it may be possible.
If the avg player dies 10 times, and the ads shown had $.5 CPM, then to make a dollar you'd need only 200 players. So to make $100k/day you'd need 20M daily actives, which is very high but it was really popular around those days.
Is 20M daily actives possible? Yes, because if the average play session is 15 minutes, with that many players you'd have ~200k concurrent players. There's currently a game on Steam called "banana" where you just click on bananas, and that one has 292k concurrents. There are also several Roblox games with that many concurrents, so it checks out.
This is talked about a lot in Einstein's Walter Isaacson biography, so people have been observing this trend for a long time (e.g the Germans accusing Einstein of doing self promotion, the US having celebrity culture in contrast), maybe it's cyclical
So, I've created a tool (originally for myself) that scans specific RSS feeds (for instance, HN has an RSS feed at https://hnrss.org/newest), compares articles to a natural language filter (e.g. "New Social Network Release") and sends me an email alert whenever a matching article is published to the feed. I've decided it's possible other people would have use for this, since Google Alerts is used and this is strictly better (Google Alerts has a ton of false positives). I want to check if there's interest before I bother creating a front end since I hate coding front ends, so behold a Google Form. It's free!
Any feedback is welcome. I'll clean it up soon, but I decided to just publish it for now and see the response. Tomorrow there should be more than one giant Python file, and the ability to use files other than .txt.
Is it like "Given preference for A, B and C, suggest more"? One would like to understand what makes (specifically to this task) such box a good engine.
This is the new iteration of my chrome extension, intended to help people avoid low-quality gpt-like content on the web, pivoting the extension to focus more on the search aspect (though of course, you can still see likes/dislikes on the pages themselves, and that's the only way to rate pages, so people don't rate pages they haven't visited).
Also, the client-side code of the extension is now available on GitHub (minus the extension key / oauth2 client key / firebase key, of course), so you can see exactly what data is being written to the Firebase database (basically authentication information and the likes + dislikes, not searches or any user analytics).
I'm actually working on an alternative to Google (though the goal being improved search, not improved privacy), I made this extension during one of the breaks from working on that
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable