Draw traffic to this site

[bvanevery]

YouTube happened to send me updated Terms Of Service today.  This bit is rubbing me the wrong way:

Right to Monetize

You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties.  If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.

Searching the web, I'm seeing it has rubbed many content creators the wrong way as well.  It's a recent change.  Went into effect March of this year.  I think this will probably cause me to kick these surveillance capitalist pigs to the curb and completely forget about them.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh, I've got a YouTube [fuddle-duddle]ery story - and a really long one about Wikipedia editor politics, and about a million -mostly minor, but constant- ones about Facebook sucking in a million ways.  But, you know, that's just the price of doing business; and no use dwelling on that, because it doesn't change that they're the Triple Crown of free internet promotion.  The idea was never to make money directly off YouTube, anyway.

[bvanevery]

The terms of the business are bad enough for me to consider other ways of doing business.  Including lobbying Congress to break Google up.  And Amazon.   But in the meantime, I'll probably up my conversations on r/SocialistProgrammers.  I'm sure someone has thought about the video streaming problem before, but I don't know what people have managed.

Epic Games Store's 12% cut starts to look positively benign compared to Google's recent "we'll monetize you, dilute you, and not pay you" stance.

[bvanevery]

What the hell is up with Twitch?  I'm pretty clueless about it, but it's a gamer centric video outlet.

I'm more familiar with Discord.  I really don't like it.  I think it's badly organized, and basically I dislike all things "chat".  But again, a gamer-centric venue.  I think I'm even nominally subscribed to some SMAC stuff there, or at least I used to be.  I was way too bored to keep up with it.

I know that Discord very recently is trying to rebrand itself as not exclusively about gaming.  But its gaming roots are still very much apparent in the art direction of its web layout.

Another major venue I have no experience with is Twitter.  My historical prejudice was, I don't want to hear about the minutiae of Ozzy Ozbourne's day, as he takes a dump.  Then at one point I was mildly interested in the ongoing opinions of a few game developers.  But they had a bad habit IMO of not sticking to anything important or relevant, just yabbering on about whatever was going on in their life and came into their minds.  So I quickly ditched them.  I couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to a stream of mostly drivel, even if there was some higher quality signal in there somewhere.  Too much noise.

[Buster's Uncle]

Chat channels of all sorts couldn't be a lot more useless for promotional purposes, and I share ignorance of all the other venues you mention here.



Anyone interested in actually collaborating on some variant SMACX backgrounds?  Potentially marketable and otherwise useful content, and we could do more than one.  Start a thread in Modding and we'll talk.

[bvanevery]

By reading wikipedia articles, I've also learned that Twitch and Discord chat have been vehicles for alt-right hate speech and cyberbullying.  I forgot how difficult it is to control how people communicate when they want to express hostility.  Haven't worried about those problems since the text-based MUD days.

What's a SMACX "background" ?

[Buster's Uncle]

Fungus and ground textures/colors are specifically in mind - but I've a vague-ish notion that the look -not arrangement/positioning, but the boxes/borders the buttons and displays are in- of the user interface could be modded.

[bvanevery]

I thought the display elements stuff was the stronger stuff, art asset wise.  It's the map colors that are really bothersome.  Without the long term appreciation that is.

[Buster's Uncle]

Terrain textures could definitely be made brighter, though I think the mini-map being so low-contrast with too many faction colors would take some .exe coding.