Deimos's recent activity

  1. Comment on Humble Bundle creator brings antitrust lawsuit against Valve over Steam in ~games

    Deimos
    Link
    David Rosen of Wolfire made a blog post yesterday to explain more about their motivation for the case: Regarding the Valve class action

    David Rosen of Wolfire made a blog post yesterday to explain more about their motivation for the case: Regarding the Valve class action

    5 votes

  6. Comment on The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you in ~tech

    Deimos
    Link
    There's been some strange additional claims and developments happening with this story. From Ryan Broderick's newsletter yesterday:

    There's been some strange additional claims and developments happening with this story. From Ryan Broderick's newsletter yesterday:

    Their ad account was disabled when they tried to run the ads, Signal said.

    Well, Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications director, tweeted that Signal never actually tried to run the ads. Facebook then put out a full statement saying that if Signal had tried to run the ads, a few of them would have been rejected because that “assert that you have a specific medical condition or sexual orientation.” Though, advertisers can use that to target you?

    But wait! There’s more. Signal then fired back, saying, no, the screenshots were real and their account was disabled. Then, finally, Joe Osborne, who does corporate communications at Facebook, tweeted that the ads were not what was rejected, but that Signal’s account was “briefly disabled” for an unrelated payments issue.

    Anyways, at no point in all of this back and forth did anyone from Facebook say that any of the targeting options Signal focused their ads on were untrue or not real.

    11 votes

  9. Comment on Twitter has acquired Scroll, a subscription for news sites, and intends to integrate it into their own upcoming subscription service in ~tech

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    I haven't seen anything specific. The company only had 13 employees, and it sounds like they'll all be working for Twitter now. They had $10M in funding, and the last $7M of that was about two and...

    I haven't seen anything specific. The company only had 13 employees, and it sounds like they'll all be working for Twitter now. They had $10M in funding, and the last $7M of that was about two and a half years ago. So I don't imagine it was a very large deal overall.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on Twitter has acquired Scroll, a subscription for news sites, and intends to integrate it into their own upcoming subscription service in ~tech

    Deimos
    Link
    Here's Twitter's blog post about the acquisition as well: A better way to publish and read on Twitter I posted about Scroll over a year ago, and was interested in the concept (but lost a lot of...

    Here's Twitter's blog post about the acquisition as well: A better way to publish and read on Twitter

    I posted about Scroll over a year ago, and was interested in the concept (but lost a lot of that interest when I realized it didn't actually replace paying for the individual sites' paywalls). Integrating it into an overall Twitter subscription definitely has some potential, since a lot of people use Twitter as their gateway for finding content. I still don't think it's very clear what a Twitter subscription will do overall, but getting a better reading experience on (some) linked sites seems like an appealing feature, at least.

    8 votes

  12. Comment on Building a galaxy: the story of the Star Wars Expanded Universe in ~books

  14. Comment on The plan to kill Osama bin Laden—from the spycraft to the assault to its bizarre political backdrop—as told by the people in the room in ~misc

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    Thanks, changed it from about 300 to almost 17,000. The method I used to get that was a little sloppy, so it's probably not correct, but definitely a lot closer.

    Thanks, changed it from about 300 to almost 17,000. The method I used to get that was a little sloppy, so it's probably not correct, but definitely a lot closer.

    5 votes

  15. Comment on Epic Games paid developers about $11.7 million for the games they gave away for free on the Epic Store from December 2018 to September 2019 in ~games

    Deimos
    Link
    Make sure to click into the tweet and look at the actual chart taken from the document. There's a lot of interesting info to notice in there (my favorite: Celeste being the "worst" in terms of...

    Make sure to click into the tweet and look at the actual chart taken from the document. There's a lot of interesting info to notice in there (my favorite: Celeste being the "worst" in terms of cost for new user acquisition).

    A couple notes for the chart:

    • "Entitlements" should be the total number of accounts that claimed the free game.
    • "New Epic Accounts" should be accounts that registered inside the game's availability period and claimed the game, a reasonable way of estimating how many new registrations the game motivated.
    • "Epic UA Cost" is User Acquisition cost: the price they paid divided by the number of new accounts, effectively the amount they paid for each new account.
    5 votes

  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    Searched my comments, and it looks like I suggested it as a potential little-known "hidden gem" almost two years ago. I've only ever put a little bit of time into it myself, but it's good to hear...

    Searched my comments, and it looks like I suggested it as a potential little-known "hidden gem" almost two years ago.

    I've only ever put a little bit of time into it myself, but it's good to hear that you enjoyed it! I usually like those "try repeatedly until you finally manage to execute a good run" style of games, so I should give it some more playtime at some point. It's also nice to see that it's picked up a decent number more reviews on Steam than when I posted that originally.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Humble Bundle creator brings antitrust lawsuit against Valve over Steam in ~games

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    Wolfire Games created Humble originally, but they haven't been involved in it any more for years, as far as I know.

    Wolfire Games created Humble originally, but they haven't been involved in it any more for years, as far as I know.

    5 votes