exgamedev

This was an enjoyable read. Are there any sites where credentialed experts could participate in software that is designed to help simulate a group mind? Kind of curious what would happen if you put a bunch of scientists in a server, guided them into group mind structures, and hit play.

Discord has greater roles & permission control than Slack, I wonder if it can improve on the outcome in the article.

I wonder if amazon is struggling with fake reviews and would rather have false positives on the negative side of the spectrum. To a seller there's no diff btwn their product getting a positive review and all their competitors getting negative reviews. A bot can just as easily do one or the other. But forcing the bots to be positive review bots benefits amazon in two ways. It makes all the products on their site look purchase-worthy and it contains all a product's review-warfare onto the product page itself, so they can clean it up later if they want.

I used to work for f2p game companies and they also used this as a standard trick. On top of suppressing negative reviews they would only ask you to rate the game immediately after something good happened in the game. You leveled up, or got a good prize, or whatever. They would craft these entire on-rails onboarding experiences where you seem to win a jackpot early on, then ask you for a review. They'd build out these flows and user test them and iterate until it psychologically produced the intended ratings

Yeah I'm planning to cover a bunch more sites like twitter, Reddit, imgur, etc. Time waster sites. But I'm def worried about how all these sites are adopting frameworks, cuz it makes the DOM more dynamic. I think the number of sites the plugin can cover will be a function of popularity and contributors.

Thanks for the data, if I estimate 1 breakage per site per year (plan for the worst) that helps me get a picture of what I think I can support myself

I'm working on a similar plugin!

https://github.com/a13o/disengaged

May I ask if scripts like this require a lot of upkeep to stay on top of site changes? I already noticed YouTube has a lot of different layouts based on platform and browser

It all moved to mobile. The audience, the devs, the marketing money, all of it. There's 100x more lotto ticket buyers on mobile than there ever were Flash devs which obscures it; but every Flash dev moved on to mobile or simply moved on from games. You could release the perfect canvas game engine tomorrow and if Unity didn't port to it not a single game dev would build a company around it

Thank you to everyone preserving these games. I made over 40 flash games in my career and I'd like to see at least 3 of them preserved indefinitely

Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters.

You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better.

The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you trap and release them into a competitive arena for cheaters. It's actually fun for them to compete with each other at who can cheat the hardest and no one else gets hurt. We hooked them up with a community rep. They found bugs and generally improved our security. Everyone won.

There's no way to win with an adversarial approach to cheating IMO, not when you let the client run on their machine