Readit Newssusam commented on Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media yle.fi/a/74-20207494... · Posted by u/Teever
Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.
Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.
> Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days
Indeed. I no longer call them social media. They have all become attention media platforms. I recently expressed my thoughts about this on my blog at <https://susam.net/attention-media-is-not-social-media.html>.
These days I typically resolve the domain names of these attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file, so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few true social media platforms remaining today, among which I visit only HN and Mastodon.
Nice, except, first game I clicked is now only pay-to-play on major platforms. I'm not against that, but it doesn't feel like a Show HN game anymore which I kind of expect to be a little rough and ready and certainly free to play. Perhaps this could be noted in the listing? I mean it's a success for the developer, not a downside. Game was Holedown.
Doesn't the 'paid' tag under the game description already address this concern?
Please show the game list in random order, or starting in a random position. Just to promote the discovery of the games later in the alphabet. (Or end up with games called ______11_roguexxx, lol)
Indeed. This is precisely what we did for the HN Personal Websites Directory at <https://hnpwd.github.io/>. The website info cards are shown in random order, with the ordering reshuffled every hour.
I am not a professional web developer but I have been using JavaScript since 2001 or so. It is only this month that I realised JavaScript does not have a way to seed the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). So there was no way to do something like:
srand(Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000 / 3600))
Submitted my only two rather humble attempts at games:
https://susam.net/invaders.html
Both were pretty well received here on HN. The second one is more popular one among the two with about 90 unique visitors per day on an average, as far as I can tell from the access logs after filtering out bots and scrapers. The first one has about 10 unique visitors per day. Really tiny numbers, but it's a delight that some people out there return to this game regularly. Thank you, whoever you are.
Playing computer games is how I was introduced to computers. I too wanted to develop my own invaders-like game when I was about 8 years old. Unfortunately, I neither had enough access to computers nor sufficient programming skills at the time. The first link (invaders.html) is the result of fulfilling that childhood dream 30 years later.
Inspired by a few computer games from the early 1980s, the first game also includes an autoplay algorithm. If you leave the game idle for 5 seconds after loading, the autoplayer kicks in and starts playing the game automatically.
Each game is implemented in plain HTML and JavaScript as a single, unminified, easily readable HTML page. Anyone can download the page, save it locally, play it offline as well as inspect or tweak the source code.
I am not a regular contributor to Wikipedia but the little time I have spent contributing there has exposed me to its very elaborate culture, with barnstars being one artefact of that culture, alongside policy acronyms everyone seems to know by heart, WikiProjects organised around every imaginable topic, userboxes that are little badges that say something about you, etc.
By the way, I added a few userboxes for the Logo programming language, in case there are any Wikipedians out here who happen to love Logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_logo