I’m also not a fan of the DLC and change to video game design based on such payouts.
But even then, even with fake reviews, young gamers are completely spoiled with information compared to the black hole that existed in the 80s and 90s. I’m not sure how people argue otherwise.
The fact that I can go on my phone, jump on YouTube, and watch a play through is incredible. When I was young, I had to make decisions based on what the box art looked like ffs.
On the flip side, back in the day, a lot of people bought a lot of crappy games based on nothing more than what the cover art on the box showed. The only source of info was video game magazines, and that applied only to new releases and only certain games.
Now upon release you can look up dozens of detailed reviews, even video reviews. You can watch full play through a on YouTube. You can ask for opinions in social media.
The amount of information you have to figure out if this game is for you is insane compared to before.
I originally felt that option 2 would be the best since it would give us the most freedom and power.
However there is another important perspective. If there was a spammer in a community, then a solution isn’t just to “not look”, since it negatively affects other members of the community who might look. It’s our responsibility to make the community better (obviously there is some subjectivity to that).
Another point is that bandwidth is not free. This is a choice that clutters up the community and lessens the ability for others to communicate.
Finally there is no loss of information. If people want Reddit posts they can go there.
For a lot of academics, the preservation of knowledge is super fascinating.
That said I don’t think there is anything exceptional about video games in the larger scheme of things. Media, like cassettes and VHS will also suffer from this issue. If you’re a Star Wars fan here’s a random example. There is apparently a stockpile of Star Wars books turned into audiobooks accessible only for the disabled and blind. This stock is stored in some Congress library. That fact always interested me.
The situation for scientific research is similar. A lot of computational work done in the 60s-80s is lost because the media was not backed up or preserved. So thousands of scientific papers are not easily reproducible. I remember looking into a famous paper about climate change models published in the 70s. They recently asked the author if he still had the codes that generated that model and he basically said “heck no”. So all that knowledge is lost. We’ll never have an exact duplication of that important work from the 70s.
Same goes for a lot of the internet in the 90s. Some of it was backed up but a surprising amount is lost. Projects like the Internet Archive are so important for humanity’s preservation of data.
So yeah, the video game situation is interesting but in the grand scheme of things in the early tech era, it’s normal. A lot has been preserved via roms.
When browsing a community, it would be useful to be able to tap the community name at the top centre to go to a drop-down menu of other communities you’ve subscribed. This was default on Apollo. Obviously we have the traverse button now and that’s useful.
When searching communities it would be really useful to see number of users. This is especially important as there can be many communities named after a similar topic, say, “photography”.
Seconded Memmy here. I was originally using mlem and Memmy but I’m afraid Memmy has taken the league in my books. Honestly already at this point, it supersedes Apollo in some ways (like customisation of themes).
One of the biggest issues I had with BI4L was how annoying US-Centric it was. I’m not sure how you can address this issue in the Wiki but you should be aware it does reek of American arrogance :)
I guess at a minimum maybe make some kind of tag or filter for the country?
Is there some intention to eventually open editing up to others? I assume you don’t want to maintain this kind of list to perpetuity.
Wait this image I’ve seen before…when I was a kid? Where is it from?