Notices by cthos 🐱 (cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev), page 2

@xgranade Maybe I'm reading into it, but this seems desperate? Like, "shit, we can't get enough people to pay for this thing so let's burn more cash to try and get more users to try and onboard them to the paid tier. I'm sure once they see the value they'll......"

@xgranade Kill god?

@aud @xgranade Yes, I'm still pissed at Proton.

@aud @xgranade Relatedly: "We designed a survey that proves our point because we designed the questions to prove our point".

@xgranade @aud From what I've observed, it's just a lot of "we put the utm_campaign variable on the thing and it's getting a lot of clickthrus so it's gotta be working well".

But for stuff like buying TV ad spots....... it's like zero data.

@aud I think this is pretty common knowledge yes.

@aud Part of the reason it's literal shinies is because putting phone-home telemetry in an offline game is generally a bad call (and IIRC wasn't allowed on most platforms besides mobile) and you do really want to be able to infer things about how people are playing the game, and the dopamine popups are handy for that.

They're also fun to program, cause you can put in achievements that are just for funsies.

Related inverse operation: "Gameifying" more traditional web experiences.

@aud Well yeah, that's the ad-network effect for hyper targeting which is a whooole other thing than video game statistics correlating to one another. Like, "what other kinds of games do people who buy my game also buy" (note, this is a thing that DTRPG tells me) can be useful to make a better game as you note.

As a related thought point, that hypertargeting also kinda sucks and is why once you buy that bra you keep seeing ads for *more of the same bra* immediately afterward.

@aud Yeah, it's a fun thing to think about because that's all directly related to how people spend money on ad buys and what the ad networks are set up to maximize their own profits.

@aud Oh even measuring the effectiveness of an ad buy is a lot of "vibes" anyhow so they might not even know.

@xgranade I'm having trouble with Pichai v. Nadella; Both all in on "AI", Pichai fired workers for the mildest protest, Nadella blatantly gives zero cares about labor; both shoving llms in places they don't belong....

@aud @hipsterelectron seems like a good use of time to take that horse shit down tho.