I remember waiting a month at a time hoping to see a hint for whatever game I was stuck on, only for it not to be featured - or perhaps even worse; to see a hint for that very game but one I’d already figured out myself! Urgh! Gaming in the 80s / 90s was a challenging affair!

This article also skips over the other option we had back then - premium rate phone numbers that…slowly… read …out …some …barely …relevant …facts …about …the … game …at …£1 …a …minute …with …maybe …the …hint …you …wanted …after …costing …your …parents …a …£12 …phonebill.

Cool, thanks for the valuable insights.

You can’t replicate the cinema experience at home, regardless of how big your TV is or how impressive your audio setup is.

Watching some epic sci-fi on the big screen, or communally experiencing some creepy horror movie, or a whole crowd of 100s laughing along together at a ludicrous comedy is something I don’t want to give up.

Sure, a lot of films are fine to watch at home but with a decent audience the cinema experience can’t be beaten.

I honestly doubt he’ll do something this stupid - spend a year making everyone hate a service they used to like and then charge them to use it.

But then again I didn’t think he’d rename Twitter to X, so who knows what that boner will do.

Which is why RT scores were usually good. Because a RT percentage is just the percentage of critics that thought the film was good or better.

Too many people treat RT scores as a single “this is a film that has a quality rating of 90%” whereas it’s “90% of critics think it’s not shit”.

Really, this is RTs fault for picking a metric so often used in a different way.

It’s a movie about a theoretical physicist who became a project manager.

Not quite, but nice try. Better luck next time!

I swapped over to https://www.themoviedb.org years ago and have never looked back.

Trakt is great because there’s loads of apps that use the API for it but your history is stored on Trakt so even if you swap to a different app you can still access that history.

It was invite-only for quite a long time, if memory serves.

Early numbers aren’t everything.

While a tech solution to replace Twitter is possible, the tech is only about 5% of what makes Twitter Twitter - the other 95% is the userbase. Which again counts in Threads favour because they already have a huge Instagram userbase. They could release any old hastily put together system and still get 30m users… Hmm.

It’s more different than people expect it do be, I think. So once people have gotten past the ‘what is an instance/ server, how do I actually join Mastodon…’ stuff that puts people off, they’re then in the infrastructure that kind of looks and acts like Twitter but in different ways that you don’t realise until you’ve delved into things. It’s just more barriers really.

There is Bluesky as an alternative, but that’s not ActivityPub, it’s it’s own protocol. Personally I think that’s the best option - it’s open source and decentralised - but I think some people have reservations because Jack Dorsey is / was involved. Plus it’s still on beta so is invite-only for the time being.

Mastodon is very good for following topics. But it’s a pain trying to find and follow people. And even when you do have a good selection of people, the culture there is very Boost-heavy (because that’s how you discover people, not really via search) so your timeline ends up being full of boosted posts written by people you don’t follow, often about things you aren’t interested in.

Yeah, the privacy, tech, scalability etc is great. But it’s not a direct replacement for Twitter. And that’s what a lot of folks are looking for. Which is sadly why Threads will do so well.