It seems like maybe there are some new features that weren't in the previous release candidate? I don't remember default values for objects being a thing. Maybe just me though?
cacheson
joined 2 years ago
In fact, if you look at many of the descriptions they say things like "reddit mods contact me if you want to take this over."
That's a decent indicator that the person didn't intend to be a powermod at least, but the other concerns I raised still apply. Regardless of what the original intent was, people are going to be hesitant to make significant contributions to ghost magazines.
So yes, post to them.
No. If I come across an empty magazine on a topic that I'm interested in, whose owner hasn't had activity in over a month, I may subscribe to it and see if any activity happens. However, I will not contribute to it, for the reasons I've outlined. I do want to contribute to kbin and the threadiverse in general, but I'll do so in other ways.
The person contributing the content needs to have some kind of confidence that their effort is going to be worthwhile.
On an empty magazine, not only do they have to start from scratch with no help, but there's also a nontrivial risk that the owner is going to end up being a tyrannical powermod (if they've claimed lots of names), or just abandon the magazine and let trolls and spammers have free reign. Given those risks, it makes more sense for a potential contributor to just create their own magazine under an alternate (though possibly less ideal) name, or just put their effort into some other topic entirely.
I feel like the microblog feature would be more useful if we could get a separate feed/filter that doesn't include the tags of magazines that you're subscribed to. For example, I'm subscribed to /m/fediverse because I want to see the threads that people post here. I don't necessarily want to see every mastodon post tagged #fediverse, though.
It also looks like we can't subscribe to a tag by itself, without subscribing to a magazine that includes that tag. So yeah, some more separation there would be nice.
but as failed experiments go, this one hasn’t cost anyone $44bn
Zing
Magazines for niche topics don't generally become self-sustaining through organic participation alone. A magazine needs users to add content to it, but it also needs content to attract users in the first place. Overcoming this chicken-and-egg problem usually requires at least one person to deliberately and regularly post interesting material, even if they wouldn't otherwise "want" to post.
Completely empty magazines could probably be automatically deleted after a month. Anything with actual posts should probably be reviewed by an actual human, and only deleted manually. Even if there's only one post, it could be a very useful post that shouldn't be deleted. Or maybe the magazine is being used as a "signpost" to direct people elsewhere, like r/traa pointing to r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns.
The process of flagging magazines for review could still be automated. Maybe each post made delays the review flag by a week, that way active magazines won't come up. Admins could also "snooze" the flag for a set amount of time, or disable it permanently for some magazines.
Magazines that are abandoned but still have useful content should be actively advertised somewhere as "available for adoption". The same goes for magazines that are reported by users as unmoderated.
then post
That's an option, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence when someone creates a magazine (or several) and then just leaves it empty. Why would people want to invest time and effort into building up a magazine that's under control of a name squatter? Even if they don't abandon their account, they're signalling that they probably won't put much care into moderating or selecting good moderators.
however, making an empty mag expire makes 0 sense, recreating it doesn't guarantee it will have content if no one posts, same as the first time
An empty magazine under control of a name squatter isn't desirable to post to, and ownership can't be transferred without admin intervention. This means there's an extra hurdle in the way of anyone who actually wants to take ownership of the magazine and put it to good use. If dead magazines are periodically culled, those names are made available again without the hassle of getting an admin (who may be very busy) to transfer them.
Seems like this may be more about bad reporting from the Financial Times, as both Coinbase and the SEC are denying the claim.
The hero we needed. T_T
Before I get into curmudgeon mode, I want to plug my two favorite roguelikes:
- Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - Zombie/sci-fi apocalypse survival roguelike with a bonkers level of depth to it. It's very actively developed, and the devs are constantly adding more stuff to it. They also have their own lemmy instance at cdda.social.
- Doom Roguelike - Perfectly encapsulates the early Doom games in roguelike form. This one is on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum from CDDA. Much simpler gameplay, though still highly tactical and challenging when you crank the difficulty up. The same author has created a spiritual successor, Jupiter Hell. I haven't logged enough hours for it to supplant DoomRL's position yet, but I do have to say that the atmosphere of it is fucking amazing.
With that out of the way, let's move on to "old man yells at Rogue Legacy":
The term "roguelike" has been stretched to the point of uselessness, often for marketing purposes. This necessitated the introduction of the term "traditional roguelike" for those of us that still want to discuss actual roguelikes. Binding of Isaac, Dwarf Fortess (fortress mode), Dead Cells, and Slay the Spire are all excellent games, but they're not roguelikes in any useful sense. If I'm looking for games that are "like Rogue", none of those are good suggestions. Moria, Nethack, Pixel Dungeon, DCSS, and DoomRL are.
Cataclysm: DDA occupies a bit of a weird space here. It fits within the technical definition of a traditional roguelike, but the overall experience is more of a departure from Rogue than other traditional roguelikes are. It's almost more akin to Minecraft or Terraria, in that you face dangers to gather resources to create items to face bigger dangers to gather more exotic resources to create more powerful items... and so on. I sometimes refer to this type of roguelike as "neotraditional", in order to acknowledge this departure.
Before anyone accuses me of being prescriptivist, sometimes prescriptivism is important. I'm not for haranguing people over every terminological deviation, but some terms are unique and useful, and we should try not to muddy them. "Begs the question" and "reactionary" come to mind. "Roguelike" was one, but it's pretty far gone at this point.
Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong, I like the change. I just figured the difference between a release candidate and the actual release would just be bug fixes and such.