@LiquidOxygen80 Here's how things were in the good old days:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic/E7q27JJGvJ4 And like you say, nothing has changed with the people who post. What has changed is that we've made it possible for internet communities to push their circle-jerking as a trend. This is what you're seeing on reddit. Some of us see 100 people happening to agree on or laugh about something insane for a couple of minutes before the attention is drawn to something else. Marketers see a trend forming that has general application and describes a new demography target for sex-toys for goats.
Just to be a little bit serious for a moment - what the trend-type ranking sites will do is to insert themselves into a general traffic pool. And sometimes, for all kinds of strange reasons that might not have much to do with anything, something trends on several sites at once. Like.. Ylvis' "What does the Fox say". If you look at this from the ranking and exposure, you might end up concluding that Ylvis can sell about 9000 million records, and that anything they do is going to sprout money. But the reason why it shot up on the rankings on multiple sites at once had very little to do with people actually looking for music in the first place, will not watch their show, and absolutely won't buy their records.
Gaming sites with "wider appeal" are similar to that. You insert some narrative into a whirpool, and hope that you'll float up for an instant so people will see you. And then you claim that a small part of the whole world and a broad audience is looking for you. How long you can then exploit seo to stay on the rankings then increases your value to advertisers, which is the whole and total point with any of this.
Gaming fora and gaming communities are a worse offshoot of that, where people sit around and argue that all of the people there are worth money, in that they're already in the right demographic (of that hard to reach male 18-35 yeras old bracket, for example). And then there's a competition between the products in that category to win out over the other ones. Or else we're talking about sharing exposure to give everyone a good share of the attention that.. is somehow worth a lot of loot. And advertisement money goes into certain products based on the attention certain products generate in these specialist circle-jerk fora.
In reality, none of this makes sense. It's one thing to choose a type of yarn to aim for based on the feedback from very talkative sewing clubs, if you had to choose a specific type of yarn to begin with that will replace all other types of yarn and thread in general.
But what we're doing in gaming is to say that the product that appeals to about 10 people on a forum - automatically has to also be the product that has the broadest appeal in the general population. We're creating this out of thin air, and the whole design based around being a channel for this sale is always doomed to the same type of pointless noise we are seeing way too much of in the gaming community now.
Honestly, it's like everyone is Derek Smart now.
Regals: See what you demented sick child rapists do not understand is circle jerking in your echo chamber doesn't make any of your horse shit true.
Which really summed up my entire problem with the whole debate from the beginning. People amicably agreeing in a group that everything is fine, or agreeing to something by osmotic pressure, is not something you really want to see anywhere. And this is a completely different thing from having a "civilized tone".
Other than that - who taught you guys to swear? You're horrible at it. Regals is on the right track, though - more like a story, than just invectives one after another.
dtgreene: Anyway, can anyone decipher the following C code and tell me what it does?
int main(void)
{
int x = x;
printf(x);
return 0;
}
Fail to compile?