Why don’t you like that? It seems to work for Valve.

Yeah, I’m really curious about what he did there and how it influenced both him and Steam.

Ah, too bad.

Probably because “headcount” is a common HR term for the number of employees, and when people are talking “per capita” it might be more about the number of users or customers. The meaning is the same though.

Or they can choose not to focus on profit at all. Probably most people with an ownership stake in Valve are fabulously rich now. Maybe they just want to focus on interesting R&D now.

Theoretically there’s a benefit to a publicly traded company that since a lot of your financials are visible to everyone and people get to “vote” by buying and selling shares, there’s a sense in which you can get feedback on how well you’re running the company that you don’t get when it’s private. But, as Reddit’s “wall street bets” and “superstonk” subreddits show, a lot of investors are morons.

Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton

And their VR efforts. VR seems to have lost popularity lately, but I was really glad that someone out there was competing with Palmer Luckey, especially once he sold out to Facebook.

And… holy shit, I just found out he’s Matt Gaetz’ brother in law. That explains a lot.

There are other game marketplaces out there, but they’re bad.

This isn’t like the Apple App store where it’s the only option on the platform. In fact, they’ve competed with Microsoft’s store on some things. It’s not even like Amazon where they strong-arm people selling things on the platform. Amazon does things like forbid anybody who sells on Amazon from selling the item at a lower price anywhere, including on their own site. I don’t think Steam has any requirements like that. Steam’s store has a huge market share because people like using Steam. AFAIK, Steam doesn’t even do exclusivity deals, which suck for the consumer but are pretty standard for games, except with their own (Valve) games, and those are rare.

Not only does Steam have a user-friendly library and a user-friendly store, if you launch a game you bought on steam but that is published by a company with a shitty launcher / store / library (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar), Steam goes a long way to neuter the shittiness of that launcher / store / library.

Maybe a 30% cut is too big. I don’t know. It would be great if someone tried to compete with Steam while keeping the consumer-friendly approach Steam has. Maybe competition would reduce that 30% to something lower. But, most of the other game stores I know of have much less consumer-friendly approaches. The only one that’s at all similar that I know of is GOG, and I do occasionally use them, especially for old games.

My favourite factoid about that is that the minister of finance in Greece who was in charge during the Greek Debt Crisis was Yanis Varoufakis, the former economist-in-residence at Valve.

Probably something to do with a card game.

Or even better “Worthless or deceptive in character”. (Which, basically, has already made a comeback.)

It’s pretty interesting how Trump (“an excellent person”) and Trumpery (“Worthless or deceptive in character”) could both be in use at the same time, unless it was some kind of opposite-slang.

The one that is easier to develop for will likely get more features which leads to more users.

Not necessarily. It might get more developers at first when people think it’s going to be the Next Big Thing ™, but if nobody uses it, the devs might not feel their effort is worth it and might move on.

Why wouldn’t people use it, despite it having “more features”? Because social media is mostly driven by network effects. People go where other people go. All the people there create content which gives people a reason to go there. In the distant past, Facebook only grew because it was so easy to move from MySpace. And, it was easy to move from Friendster to MySpace, and so-on back to the origins of social media. Since then, the walls of the walled gardens have become much higher. Every social media company actively makes it difficult to move to other platforms because they want to keep any users they have. You might hate Facebook, but you like Aunt Jane, and she’s only on Facebook, so you stay on Facebook.

That’s like saying “Watch my new TV show, it’s better than the other shows because our scripts are printed on an Epson printer!”

It just feels disrespectful to contradict someone we don’t know about the reason she acts the way she does

Sure, if you have no other information, but we have other information. We know how much YouTubers obsess about their videos, and the ones that don’t are the ones who aren’t getting viral videos. We know how they pay attention to every aspect of their videos, from the titles to the thumbnails, to everything else. We also know that YouTube provides all kinds of tools to allow creators to see what part of their videos are most watched, etc. They also provide all kinds of information about who your audience is, including age and gender.

In Naomi Wu’s case, even without that analytics information, we know that one of her most popular videos is “See My Boob😜”, and if you open a typical video and look for the most replayed segments, it’s often a part of the video where she’s showing off the underside of her boobs for a second, or something.

So, it’s reasonable to assume that she’s aware of what her overwhelmingly male audience pays attention to in her videos. And it’s reasonable to assume that it plays a significant role in the decisions she makes. But, it seems to me that her explanation video tries to pretend that appealing to horny male viewers isn’t part of her goal at all. I believe her when she says that she’s into girls, and that her clothing choices are based on appearing feminine, and appealing to girls. But, I don’t believe that appealing to a male YouTube audience isn’t also part of the calculation.

the imagery of hyper masculine leather daddies

The point is, while they might dress up like that when going to a club, or while getting intimate with partners, they don’t tend to do that at their day jobs. And, if they did and their day job was presenting YouTube science / maker videos, I wouldn’t want to share their videos either.

She’s obviously free to do whatever she wants. Well… let me rephrase that. This article is about how she’s in China and has disappeared, so she’s obviously not free to do whatever she wants. But, as long as she’s within the margins of what’s acceptable on YouTube, she’s allowed to dress how she wants in her videos. Having said that, apparently she’s had videos demonetized for sexual content before. My point is just that as a potential consumer of her videos, I’d be more likely to watch and share them if what she wore wouldn’t result in HR violations in even the most freewheeling of tech startups.

It really doesn’t matter what her reasons for doing it are. Maybe it’s because she’s incredibly insecure about being seen as a boy. Maybe it’s because she’s a lesbian and part of a subculture that emphasizes a ridiculous take on the feminine form. Maybe she’s doing it because it attracts horny male viewers. It’s probably a mix of all those things, even if she doesn’t admit it. I wouldn’t want her kicked off YouTube, and don’t even think it’s reasonable to demonetize her content. But, personally, I’ll be watching and sharing other channels.

Project manager should be:

Lightbulb is not working.
Ticket says lightbulb is broken.
Breaks lightbulb so ticket is accurate.

I watched the video, it’s unconvincing. I don’t think she’s lying per se, just that her justification for doing all her videos wearing skimpy clothing is pretty thin. She says she’s doing it because she’s a “dee”, but in the videos she shows, she’s the only one who looks remotely like that. She shows herself walking her dog in fairly normal clothing, but claims she can’t do that on her videos. She thinks that unless she’s wearing absolutely skimpy clothing that someone’s going to mistake her for a boy. Sure…

Yes and?

She really doesn’t. She claims that because she’s a “dee” she has to look like that, but in her videos with other “dees”, she’s the only one who looks remotely like that.

That might explain the ridiculous boobs, but not why she still chooses to wear incredibly skimpy outfits in her videos.

The theory is that you can get away with a bit more in China if you have a big western audience. She had a fairly big one and that was protecting her, but the audience is fickle (made more fickle by Musk ruining Twitter) and once her audience declined, she lost that protection.

I guess the real lesson is that if you’re Chinese and develop a Western audience, us that to escape China. Don’t stay behind in China because your big audience is painting a target on your back, and eventually the Chinese authorities are going to ruin your life.

As an aside, did anybody else find her vibe really offputting? I liked her content, but her enormous fake boobs and skimpy outfits were a distraction from otherwise interesting content. If I found a video of hers interesting, it made me not want to share that with anybody because they’d think I was watching it because of her body. I’m all for women’s empowerment, if someone wants to look and feel sexy that’s great. But, with her stuff, it was so extreme that it felt like exploitation. Maybe she was exploiting herself, but it still felt icky.