Good Posts 2025-08-10
Some links to posts and such I've enjoyed this week. I haven't done the best job keeping track this week, so it's a bit short.
I'm so tired of being advertised at, man - Lincoln Carpenter at PCGamer
It can be hard to remember, but it was once possible to know peace. There were ads, sure. The pop-up advertisement was a generational sin. But broadly, there was an understanding: The presence of ads was the price you paid to interact with an otherwise free service.
PCGamer's "Gripes Week" features have generally been a great read, this one in particular.
A really solid expression of the general sense of malaise I feel interacting with the modern internet. A constant skepticism that anything I'm seeing might be some kind of carefully crafted native advertisement.
Strictly Impersonal - Retro Heart
I've not been keeping up with the latest developments in Twitch's payout policies, but this combination of policy and messaging is nicely explored here - an exploitative and diminutising shift towards the general "platform" trend of squeezing the maximum value out of every willing participant and expecting to be thanked for it.
The people that made Twitch what it is now, or more accurately what it was at one point, are gone, replaced with people like Clancy who see money as a way of keeping score, who need a line to endlessly go up, who see people as prospects for financialization, and who I genuinely don't think knows what a community is because he either confuse the word "community" with "audience", or he knows the difference and deliberately wants to blur the lines of what makes them fundamentally different.
Valve Founder Gabe Newell Just Bought a Superyacht... - The Works of Egan
Got his ass.