I remember the first time I came in contact with DLC, coincidentally it was my first Steam game: Supreme Commander 2.
My first thought was: “What the fuck is this? Why isn’t this in the game?”. Later on, when DLC were getting more substantial, my thoughts changed to; ”Are they just rebranding Expansion Packs?”.
As other people noted, I don’t care about cosmetics. Even for Dota 2, which I’ve put over a thousand hours in and have played it 10 years, I just sell them on the marketplace to fund my next summer sale. The only time I buy stuff is when I want to support the game’s development.
My gaming time is too limited to worry about battle passes and shit like that. I just wanna click heads and farm creeps.
Edit: the one thing that does bum me out though is that back before item shops and shit, skins and unlocks used to mean something. Like, you’d see some dude in your Halo 3 lobby with a dope-ass helmet and you knew that he earned that from getting a Killtacular with only deagle headshots. Now it’s just, dude’s level 150. He must’ve swiped for the ultimate edition, XP boosters, or has too much free time.
Reddit also had an aggressive recommendation system, where posts from your most recently interacted subs would show up more often. I would literally only open one sub via a post on the front page and the next time my /all would be filled with trash for that sub.
That’s one trend I hope doesn’t spring up over here. I hated the fact that 95% of the subs on /r/all were literally the same thing. Like, what was the difference between MadeMeSmile, DamnThatsInteresting, NextFuckingLevel? Just all the same clickbait trash, and then, as you say, some “organic” marketing campaign for the latest Marvel movie.
Edit:
Mastodon handles this by not having an algorithm. In order for a toot to gain traction, it actually needs to be boosted around so that people can see it. A great example of how this prevented “organic” marketing was with @Raspberry_Pi.
When they first joined, their SNS team tried the same easy brand tactics that they used on Twitter, trying to force engagement. It had the opposite effect, and the community backlash was fierce. They have since changed their messaging and become more genuine.
Since link aggregators usually need some kind of algorithm for a “front page,” I think the most important thing is to have it be transparent and static. No changing it every 4 months to increase engagement.
Most importantly, the community should also have a shared opinion on what kind of stuff they are okay with, and this can be more localized per instance.
I only use it for my #Nextcloud instance. #Snap does make it easy to upgrade or rollback and configure. That said I wouldn’t use it for anything else and would probably use the #docker image next time.
I might have to look into it again. I’ve been primarily saving links using Obsidian synced to an S3 bucket. There’s a nice plugin that converts links to pretty markdown. I even made an iOS shortcut to automate the saving of pages. It’s nice and minimalist, but it does require Obsidian to view the pages (excluding just opening the bucket directly), so I can’t see my links on my work computer.