I put my money on the former. 4chan is... itself. But it is definitely a vibrant community. And Poole himself has some thoughtful, unique insight into what makes a community vibrant and what kills it.
Maybe. Creating successful online communities has a huge luck element to it. I don't think there's anyone who can reliably create new online communities out of nothing.
Indeed. That, and timing. It seems like Google with all its money and talent and unbeatable built in audience, pushed so hard and still couldn't get it done with Google+, it'll be interesting if they can get it done now.
It's interesting how this article conflicts the narrative (and indeed, Fitzgerald's own narrative) about his life. The narrative was that they lived fabulously until the simultaneous stresses of the the stock market crash and Zelda's mental breakdown in 1929. Turns out that at least from an income perspective, he was doing quite well up until the moment he died. But Zelda's healthcare costs ruined him anyway, and he cognitively backed himself in a corner in terms of making adjustments.
It reminds me of a quote from another famous author, one Charles Dickens:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
He gave that line to Mr. Micawber and of course was intimately acquainted with poverty, but by the time Dickens wrote that he was as rich as a 19th century rock star. Indeed he made piles of money by touring—writers used to moonlight as performing artists. Once movies came out, that dried up, so they wrote screenplays instead, like Fitzgerald.
There are many, many objectives for which the F1 rules need to account. Competitive balance is one of them. Providing interesting and relevant technical challenges for automakers and teams is another (and was a major driver behind the recent switch to hybrid engines). In addition to those, you have safety, spectacle, cost-containment, logistical considerations, and about a thousand other goals that need to be incorporated. The FIA takes incredible flak for whatever they do because there are myriad tradeoffs between these objectives, and it's impossible to balance them all in a way that makes everyone happy.
For those who need the context -- when Reddit had that big bust-up last week about banning subreddits like /r/fatepeoplehate, aggrieved commenters were recommending that others migrate to voat.co. That effectively means that voat.co recently absorbed the slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element.
Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.
Please don't misrepresent what happened. A lot of people, myself included, left Reddit because I don't agree with the way the CEO is handling things. My leaving Reddit had nothing to do with fatpeoplehate being banned. I just don't agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful- subreddits. I just don't visit them.
Reddit has become a marketing tool either way, so I that was just another drop in the bucket for me and I left.
They should have handled the /r/fatpeoplehate problem by hiding them from /r/all. Then nobody will see the subreddit unless they directly go to it and/or subscribe to it.
What they actually did reeks of incompetence. The reaction they got from banning the subreddit was entirely predictable, and because of this, gives the impression that they're pretty far disconnected from their users. It doesn't bode well for the long-term success of the site.
Totally agree. Whoever made that decision proved that they are absolutely not the right person or persons to be at the helm of reddit.
Not only that, apart from the decision, the way that it was implemented was so tone-deaf and juvenile that it went beyond mere incompetence.
For example, take a look at the announcement where they tried to outline the rationale for the decision and their methods. When they were bombarded with polite and sharp questions about their hypocrisy they avoided any response.
The thing is the people that are upset and claiming this is the end of reddit are actually the ones that are disconnected from what most users want as evidenced by the fact that almost no one but a small vocal minority in a few places on reddit care anymore and when they try to get support in more popular/general focus subreddits they are almost unanimously being downvoted or disagreed with.
I think you vastly misunderstand the size of reddit's userbase. Furthermore, it's been my experience that a small vocal minority produce significantly more content than the average user. And the single largest group of people with enough time to post all the time are children.
Most users don't care about most subreddits. That's the way any big forum with many sub-forums work.
It's true that you get downvoted on Reddit for posting anything even mildly politically incorrect which is another problem with it - it's not a place to have any sensible political/worldview discussion anymore.
> They should have handled the /r/fatpeoplehate problem by hiding them from /r/all. Then nobody will see the subreddit unless they directly go to it and/or subscribe to it.
FPH brigades. FPH brigades other subreddits, and also other forums.
Your personal reasons for not using reddit don't have any impact on the fact that most of the people switching over were either from the /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/kotakuinaction, and /r/conspiracy crowd. You can have whatever personal BS with the CEO you want, but the fact is that voat's ex-reddit userbase is all from what is essentially the worst parts of reddit.
You should not lump /r/kotakuinaction and /r/conspiracy in the same category as /r/fatpeoplehate. They aren't even mildly offensive - the only relationship here is that they tend to be zealous about freedom of speech, and therefore angry about the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate.
I would classify them strongly as "political speech", which /r/fatpeoplehate was not.
/r/conspiracy was harassing a daycare in Utah. I don't like to use that term lightly but yes, actual harassing. As in, the subreddit was obsessed with it because it had some records online that made them think it was secretly running some kind of malicious operation. people were going there and surrepititiously scouting the place and sending back photos and talking to neighbors. Admins were deleting posts, which is why it turned into a "free speech" issue for them and a bunch went to voat.
The difference between those subreddits and the ones banned where:
1) Magnitudes more users -and-
2) Mods were actively promoting harassment of individuals
Reddit admins had to step in because people were being bullied and receiving violent threats, in part due to actions taken by Mods of these large communities built on prejudice and harassment.
They are in the same category as far as SJWs are concerned because the are not "politically correct", or put simply they are not taking a knee and kissing the ring as SJWs demand.
This is why they have no problem simply telling lies about these subreddits (as they are lying about FPH). The entire point of KotakuInAction and GamerGate is to point out how dishonest this movement is... and what is the response? They lie about them!
Expecting dishonest people to respond with anything but more lies is a silly expectation.
The morally repugnant SJW movement is, at its core, a political movement. They succeeded in turning /r/politics into a monoculture around a single thought and the entire purpose of /r/SRS and all their activism on tumblr is to shame and harass anyone who thinks differently into submission.
They aren't the worst. They do say some pretty anti-semitic things at times however from what I've seen (some of them think the world is controlled by a Jewish conspiracy or some such).
/r/conspiracy has quite a diverse set of 'characters', the anti-semitic ones are merely one of the loudest. There's also the various 9/11-truthers, the flat earthers, UFOlogers, Christian/spiritual scientists, pro-gun/anti-federal government types, etc. It can be a pretty fun place to check out, actually, if you enter it with the right frame of mind.
Could you please cite the source on this? I've heard this asserted, but haven't seen the data yet. Would love to understand the dynamic that took place. Specifically, the data supporting the words "most" and "all" in your comment.
> I just don't agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful- subreddits. I just don't visit them.
Please don't misrepresent what happened.
FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year. Pictures of people out in public, Facebook profiles, other Redditors, the Imgur staff, brigading other subs (inc. weight loss subs), attacking popular bloggers, YouTubers, and people on Twitter. Often this was just for the "crime" of being overweight and the abuse was nasty.
I'm tired of people defending this behaviour as being "distasteful" or "offensive." Even the title of Reddit's announcement was "removing HARASSING subreddits." And if you don't believe that's what FPH was doing then you literally didn't spend even one minute on it.
Key Reddit staff quotes:
> subreddit as a platform to harass individuals
> We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
> based on their harassment of individuals
> When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site.
If this is what you support, please leave Reddit. I welcome you gone.
FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year
Yes, and /r/shitredditsays has been bullying, harassing and abusing individuals for several years. But that subreddit is allowed to exist because Ellen Pao (reddit CEO) and admins agree with their politics.
Any other subreddit is deathly afraid to directly link to other comments on the site because they don't want to be accused of "brigading" votes which is against the rules and will get the subreddit banned. /r/shitredditsays links directly and openly vote brigades dozens of times per day. Again, because their political speech is favored.
> Pictures of people out in public, Facebook profiles
But Reddit mostly does not give a shit about posting pictures of people without their consent. Even on bis subs like /r/pics or /r/funny you will see pictures of people in public, which obviously did not consent to have their images posted there. So that's a pretty big double standard to accuse FPH of that while completely ignoring it on default subs.
And /r/videos time after time results in people harassing and brigarding youtubers.
If they wanted to ban behavior, they should have banned the individuals from reddit site-wide. But that would have been hard, so instead, they go after the common banner that causes the behavior.
That IS banning an idea. They have essentially said "We're banning FPH for harassment, but if you participated in that harassment, feel free to browse our other subreddits."
>>We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day
I was reading /r/FPH on regular basis for few weeks before it was closed as I've found it entertaining even if distasteful. I think you have very skewed view of what it was:
-posting identifying personal info was forbidden/removed by the mods
-linking to other parts of Reddit was a no-no
-I can't remember seeing anything threatening on it there was no discussion about threats or doing bad things to specific people; just over the top venting
That is unless you understand "safety" as it is too often interpreted today: hearing not politically correct opinions.
If you think the decision has anything to do with removing harassing subreddit try visiting /r/coontown and think why it's still online.
You completely missed their point - those other subreddits are distasteful, but they weren't abusing people or leaking over into other mediums to make threats or bully.
SRS and many other subreddits like that are abusing people and leaking out into other mediums and making threats and bullying people. Doxxing is the primary method of war of SJWs.
No SJW reddit were censored.
So, clearly it is a politically motivated censorship and the excuses are not standing up to scrutiny.
Those are prime examples of shitty, distasteful communities, but are they examples of leaking over into other mediums to make threats or bully?
- Were the parents of the deceased ever raided and harassed on facebook?
- Was the husband of the dead wife bullied on twitter because the mods posted their handle?
- Did the black man receive PMs threatening violence?
Reddit admins banned these subreddits because they said they had clearly identifiable instances and patterns of person to person abuse. That's the point you're missing.
Edit: I'm not sure why bhayden deleted their comments
The thing is there were many readers of FPH (150k subscribers and probably way more readers as people were afraid to subscribe/comment as it could get you automatically banned from other subreddits) so naturally they participated in different subreddits as well.
I remember there was no (at least for a short time I was reading it) calls for brigading and linking to other parts of reddit was prohibited.
For example, I think that health minister shouldn't be fat and fat health minister calling for cigarette ban is comedy in the making and mockery of the position.
With views like that I am likely to read r/fatlogic or r/FPH from time to time and even subscribe to them. I will make comments expressing my views in other subreddits as well and as such views are rare enough it's natural to link me with above mentioned communities or say that I am "coming from them to comment".
The problem is if it's then treated as brigadding. It isn't, there are just many people with politically incorrect views and they tend to gravitate to subreddits where they can express them without being automatically downvoted to death as is the case in popular subreddits. Once such subreddit becomes popular (and FPH was one of the most active subreddit on the whole site during the week it was banned) eveything can be labelled brigadding.
I don't know why you're vociferously defending FPH against the charge of brigading.
A sub being mentioned (but not linked) in FPH would result in massive traffic spikes. Smaller subs with a couple of hundred subscribers and a couple of thousand visits per week would suddenly get thousands of visits per hour. The increased traffic is fine, but some of those people would comment.
You've mentioned the huge numbers of subs to FPH. Even if it's only a small proportion of those people causing problems it's still a lot of people.
And you use, yet again, trivial examples that no-one (certainly not Reddit) cares about. No-one cares if you call some minister fat and stupid. What they do care about is getting people fired from their jobs; having child protection social workers called; huge amounts of brigading; hate mail to real life addresses.
Unfortunately as is always the case with every popular social network/forum in the history of the internet when the "slimy runoff" says they are leaving what they actually mean is they are going to spend all day on in the same place talking above leaving and how shit the current site now is.
Reddit would be a much nicer place if everyone who threatened to leave over last weeks bans actually left.
Tell that to the ghost town that is slashdot or Kuro5hin. To be honest, I see the same thing happening here already. So many posts on the front page with no comments, so much less comment activity than before. Feels like HN is emptying out.
Slashdot lost its userbase because new sites like Digg offered more frequent stories/variety and a better experience than the curated and infrequently updating /.
I was never a user at Kuro5hin and only checked it infrequently but I thought it was more due to lack of management than over management that led to the initial decline.
Digg changed the way the site worked.
I've been here a fairly long time and it seems busier than ever to me. I think a lot of the shitty pointlessly mean comments are gone now which just improved s2n even if it means less comments in total.
> Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.
It is very surprising, the hosting company should be concerned with providing hosting... not moderating content. that's the job of the government and the legal system.
And the German government, like all governments, (although Germany's laws are slightly stricter than most western governments) puts limits on free speech. Reddit has a tendency to demonstrate Godwin's law pretty quickly. For example, it is common practice to upvote a post with a link to a Nazi flag and a headline about some hated group in attempt to get that to be the default image for Google searches of that group. I imagine with Voat being a Reddit clone, similar things have popped up on it. Something like that could run afoul of Germany's laws regarding how to portray Nazi history and iconography. I could imagine Voat's hosting provider wanted to wash their hands of the site before the government actually tries to come after them.
Private companies should serve their shareholders. They should draft a policy saying that they don't get involved in content moderation issues as a matter of policy. That's good business and good for speech. If disgruntled people want to do something about it, they can take it up with the legal system.
> Is it good business? Or is it better business to have a clear policy over what is and is not allowed, and then enforce that?
It is not possible to have a clear policy when moderating content because the world is a diverse place with diverse opinions. Where would you begin? Are Muhammad cartoons banned?
Let's note that it's perfectly fine for a private company to limit their terms of service and reserve a right to stop hosting "distasteful content". It just needs to be declared openly in TOS. If it were so, probably voat won't choose them.
Usually doesn't do shit. The people voting, just like the people who are disgruntled, are usually a small minority. They have no material impact on anything other than the propaganda value of their actions.
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but you can certainly argue that hosting companies shouldn't censor or moderate their customers without rising to the level of a legal requirement.
It's not just the worst. Its people that disagree with the current fad of "politically correctness." There were very few people that were sad to see most of those subs go, but those subs weren't well known.
The FPH was a response to the silly "body positive" movement that has been encouraging non-healthy behaviors. (The execution wasn't popular, but the idea of it is well supported)
Additionally: Another big reason for the migration is that the ban came out of nowhere. There was no interaction with the Admins, and there has been a threat that has been expressed by Pao. ["We're going to make it safe" (for who and what political adgenda has scared the users quite a bit)]
Its people that disagree with the current fad of "politically correctness."
Given that the subs which were removed were not removed for offensive speech but rather for encouraging and tolerating criminal harassment off-site, these "people" are either extremely misinformed or are using free speech/political correctness as red herrings to conceal their desire to harass and abuse.
Was it that they posted a picture of the staff of Imgur that hatemail was sent, or was hatemail sent because Imgur just decided to wipe them out?
----
Did FPH cross the line with the pic. Mostly yes... But they didn't put personal information on it. Nor was it an drive to attack them. (It was done in satire [even "the dog is fat"]
Imgur is a private website that can moderate content as it sees fit. They didn't want to be associated with a hateful community, imgur generally tries to encourage positivity from what I've seen.
The appropriate response is not to harass people. It's amazing how difficult that concept is. What might seem like "satire" to you is pretty messed up behavior, and in others contexts would be an outright threat
They are free to choose not to host the content anymore. I believe that any hate mail that they recieved, that was the reaction due to their decision. (Not endorsed by the subreddit it's self)
Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.
Which means, by their own judgment, since voat.co isn't "correct" they deserve no warning, no refund, and no negotiation in good faith - only termination. How can you say that isn't surprising?
The motivation for deleting r/fatpeoplehate was because the admins asserted there were clear and identifiable patterns and instances of person-to-person harassment. Whatever you think about how moderation/censorship should be done...I don't think it's obvious that Reddit admins were trying to go the route of sanitization based merely on content...if that were their intention, they would've wiped out the many other subreddits that have much more controversial content and fewer subscribers (i.e. fewer people to raise a fuss about).
The motivation for deleting r/fatpeoplehate was because the admins asserted there were clear and identifiable patterns and instances of person-to-person harassment.
Honestly, I think that's just the excuse they used to pull the trigger on removing a popular but undesirable subreddit from the site. They claim it was about "behavior not content" but immediately banned any subreddits that popped up to replace /r/fatpeoplehate.
They should have just been up front about the reasons for the ban "It was a highly visible subreddit with content we don't agree with."
...if that were their intention, they would've wiped out the many other subreddits that have much more controversial content and fewer subscribers
The difference is that /r/fatpeoplehate was growing fast and regularly appearing on /r/all.
For content bans obviously. We don't want you to post porn here. Banned. Creates new account and posts porn. Banned.
But if I get banned for harassment on Reddit, make a new account and don't harass anybody would I get banned? Probably not.
In addition they banned /r/thinpeoplehate which obviously was satire and did not result in harassing thin people and neither fat people as that content didn't even exist there.
>But if I get banned for harassment on Reddit, make a new account and don't harass anybody would I get banned? Probably not.
Probably not since it's easy to fly under the radar due to the size of the user base. But if you do you can't really complain since you were ban evading.
Ban evasion is a pretty standard reason for getting banned across just about all social networks/forums.
What makes that "ban evasion" though? Specifically I mean. Who is evading what in the case of separate subreddits being created? Is it that anyone that was apart of /r/fatpeoplehate is now never allowed to create a subreddit (because, again, it was claimed the ban was nothing to do with content, only the behavior of the community)?
If I ban you and you create a new account called Goronmon2 would you not accept that you are trying to evade a ban? Pretty obvious right? That is exactly what you did only instead of an account it was with subreddits.
>Is it that anyone that was apart of /r/fatpeoplehate is now never allowed to create a subreddit
No, but they aren't allowed to try and recreate fatpeoplehate because that would be ban evasion.
Ellen Pao, the new (interim) CEO of Reddit, Inc. is trying to make reddit into a "Safe Space", which seems to mean safe from ideas that might offend anyone. This is a big issue because reddit has historically been possibly one of the largest, most popular forums where free expression was allowed/encouraged, and they would generally try to protect their users and fight takedown requests.
Typo in GP: it's fatpeoplehate that was banned. They posted pictures of fat people or food and made fun of people that were fat. You can't get to it anymore, because it's banned.
Ellen Pao is CEO of Reddit and has said she does not believe in "free speech" (when referring to the site) and plans to clean it up, which basically means, removing everything that isn't politically correct. FPH is the poster child to try and justify the censorship but it goes far wider.
- Posts about Ellen Pao's legal problems and rulings are repeatedly deleted
- Subbreddits have been removed from showing up in /r/all so that popular posts (often critical of Pao) are not seen by the wider community
- Brigading and betting are going wild on the side of the "politically correct" factions such as SRS, while reddits that don't do it are demonized.
It's pretty much a civil war as much as a civil war can happen on a discussion forum.
From the little I understand, they were harassing people, and then comparing their subreddit to talking behind someone's back. Unpleasant enough, and conveniently ignoring the hate overflowing elsewhere.
The posting was slimy(for example posting other reddit users progress shots to make fun of them is slimy). Harassment across subreddits by a lot of the users is what got them banned.
I don't like you labeling those people "slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element". I think this kind of labeling is commonly used these days (and especially on Reddit) to shut down unpopular ideas.
There were 150k subsribers to fph and probably several times more readers. It was one of the most active subreddits at the time of the ban. How is it "slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element"? Maybe you know, there were many reasonable, frustrated with PC culture in there who just wanted to vent sometimes.
To be clear here, it's not a single thumb drive (as the title implies) but a network of thumb drives distributed through an ad-hoc parcel service. Frankly, it doesn't sound that different than the old shareware and disc-based multimedia subscription services that used to exist in the US in the early-to-mid-90s (such as LAUNCH and SoftDisk). The biggest difference I can see is that (a) it's largely pirated content and (b) there's seems to be some user generated content as well.
Exactly. One could easily come up with a corollary: "The worst startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas and really are." Which is a truism that probably applies to most startup ideas.
""The worst startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas and really are."
Based on the original thought "The best startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas but are good ideas."
That one for sure is culled from a list of outsized successes (because they didn't make sense or had a large amount of barriers to success) but doesn't provide balance in the sense that bad ideas are more typically bad ideas. VC's like to hide behind this type of thinking often but they get around it by making bets on many companies whereas the person starting their own company has more of a reason to worry about the downside of a stupid idea.
I don't think for a second that it makes any sense that "best startup ideas are ones that seem like bad ideas but are good ideas".
Facebook wasn't a bad idea
Linkedin wasn't a bad idea
Amazon wasn't a bad idea (selling books to start)
So how do you define "bad idea"?
Is airbnb a bad idea because "who would want to rent out their apartment to strangers"? Or is it a bad idea because "you will never get regulatory clearance" (ditto for Uber).
Facebook was a bad idea because MySpace had already won.
LinkedIn was a mediocre idea b/c it would be very difficult to get enough user adoption to be valuable.
Amazon was a mediocre idea b/c people want to go to a bookstore and look at a book before they buy it (usually). Also, that business has no moat (anyone could sell books online).
You're right though - ideas that seem bad are more typically bad ideas. I still think Twitter is a bad idea. :-P
Really the corollary to this is that all the obviously good ideas are already being executed by huge corporations with massive resources and its very hard to compete when you are severely outgunned.
Also, it seems like it's important to have an understanding of the domain that is somewhat counterintuitive and contradicts the common understanding that people have about it.
Also, be lucky. Your "understanding" might be insanity.
1) The public, reading about the idea doesn't know the full idea or the future plans.
2) The bad idea can allow a pivot into a good idea, once you have money and resources.
3) Impossible to predict the future and what will happen. Twitter is a good example of this (celebrity mention, mainstream media mention, civil uprisings, etc.)
IMHO, the worst startup ideas are the ones that seem like GOOD ideas, but turn out to be bad. A horrible idea that's clearly bad will never go anywhere. Ideas that seem good end up getting funded, offices are rented, people are hired...
Perestroika is the era in Soviet history when the USSR began to 'thaw' in its relationship to the West and reform its economic policy to be less collectivized and more capitalistic.
In this case, Microsoft would be the USSR and its policy of closed-source Windows/.NET domination would be the old Communist Party hegemonic philosophy. That would make Satya Nadella Microsoft's Mikhail Gorbachev.
And it was the perfect choice, precisely for what it said about his character at the beginning of the show. Walter White, the put-upon high school chemistry teacher living in quiet desperation, driving around in a car generally perceived to be a big, swinging two-ton white flag to the world.
I think that's what he was driving at with the following quote:
"Many people in the car business do not understand that a vehicle has an image. To them, a vehicle is a collection of attributes. If your attributes are better than the other guy’s attributes, you’re gonna win. It’s engineer thinking, along totally rational lines. Their advice to an alcoholic is “stop drinking—is there something about that you don’t understand?” That’s not how people actually think."
If you add up an Aztec as a collection of attributes, it was a damn fine vehicle. If you engage with it from the perspective of an actual consumer -- a sometimes irrational, emotionally-influenced person whose sense of self is in some small way defined by the vehicle they drive -- the Aztec is a fiasco. Part of the function of a car is how the driver feels to own it, so form is part of the function. And the Aztec was a complete failure at providing that part of the function.
But the actual customers loved it. If anything it was too innovative. It was panned by people who weren't customers and weren't intended to be. If anything it is a fiasco of market demographics in that the company assumed the market for the Aztek was bigger than it was. For those whom they got the demographic right they nailed it.
If you look a few years later, the entire car industry was racing to get "Azteky" cars into the market. Honda Element, Scion xB, Nissan? Cube are all cars that have similar design/feature goals.
Amusingly, the "Azteky" cars you list were also failures of market demographics (and have all since been discontinued).
Of them the best seller, the Element, enjoyed mild success only because it missed its target market entirely. Instead of the "young urban males" it was targeted at, it was instead popular with older people who wanted an economical vehicle with easy cargo access, and dog owners, who wanted a n interior that was easy to clean.
The Scion xB isn't discontinued; it's expected to see a redesign for the 2015 model. Also, the Kia Soul is a very "azteky" car introduced more recently with some success.
Surely that's tautological. Of course the people who actually bought the car liked it. Why would you by a $20,000 car you didn't like?
You get no points for nailing your demographic to the tune of 27,000 cars a year at peak sales, when you need to sell 30,000 cars a year just to break even.
I meant in comparison to lots of cars that come out and are panned by both the general public and the people that bought them. The Aztec (and to a large extent the subsequent cars it inspired) were adored by their owners.
Full disclosure: I was until very recently an owner of a Honda Element and loved it.
I suppose people could like a car when they buy it and then get disgusted with it over time.
I wonder if there's a paradoxical filter effect at play. If a car is really obviously bad (for most people) then they won't buy it. But if a car is bad in a more subtle way, maybe people are more likely to buy it and then hate it later. Thus, one might expect overall terrible cars (in the eyes of the general population, at least) to have a fanatical following, since they're the only ones who would buy it.
What's interesting is that the more successful later cars you mention are much boxier and utilitarian-looking. I recall the reaction to the Element being outright revulsion, but plenty of people bought it and other cars like it.
These days, I'd honestly rather look at (or be in) one of those boxy models than the ubiquitous "melted soap bar" of the late '90s/early '00s. At the very least, those cars are clear about the owner's interest in prioritizing function over perceived form. It's possible that the Aztek's "neither hot nor cold" aesthetic is part of what doomed it.
Read the article. He mentions that "someone suggested to them to audit and they found 'Millions and millions of dollars of error not in our favor.'" Shady accounting practices were used to intentionally mask earnings that would've contributed to a real royalty payout.
This is a common practice in Hollywood as well. It's the reason why royalties as a percentage of net profits are called 'monkey points'. It's because you'd have to be a monkey to believe that the studio's accountants would ever allow that film to turn a profit in its official books.
Indeed the publisher model for games was copied straight from Hollywood's playbook, so this link is right on the money.
In general, the accounting system works great if the distributor is also the developer (because tax) but really badly if the developer is external (because "net" is a fiction).
This is also why powerful people negotiate for a percentage of gross vs. net.
It's also how record labels do their accounting (and why most musicians make more money from touring than LP/CD/... sales).
Based on my experience (I was involved in several contract negotiations with major game publishers), of the $40 that the publisher is paid by the retailer for a $60 AAA title before it starts getting discounted, at most $14* goes to the developer (and that assumes you deliver boxed media with instructions, etc.) -- if not the publisher will be happy to deduct those costs from your $14. This is assuming the developer created the entire product on their own dime. If the publisher does QA and packaging, that's coming out of your $14.
* Probably more if you're a Brand Name. I imagine that if you've got brand recognition then, like Alec Guinness in Star Wars, you can negotiate a percentage of gross, and it's a whole different ballgame.
David Prowse has apparently been told that Return of The Jedi has still not made a profit, so he has yet to see any residual payments from it.
“I get these occasional letters from Lucasfilm saying that we regret to inform you that as Return of the Jedi has never gone into profit, we’ve got nothing to send you. Now here we’re talking about one of the biggest releases of all time,” said Prowse. “I don’t want to look like I’m bitching about it,” he said, “but on the other hand, if there’s a pot of gold somewhere that I ought to be having a share of, I would like to see it.”
This is pretty horrific given that we're talking about a guaranteed money-making threequel.
I imagine that, as someone whose face is never visible, Prowse was in an unusually poor negotiating positionand that the more recognizable leads got better deals. Alec Guinness (who got 2% of the gross of the first movie, claimed to have argued in favor of killing off his character to avoid speaking any more terrible lines, and only agreed to do the sequels if he didn't have to promote them) reportedly bought his own island with part of the proceeds (probably in an effort to avoid Star Wars fans).
I did read the article. It didn't mention if they were owed 20 bucks or 2 million. It said EA gave them their company back but there hasn't been a major use of their IP since they went under so obviously EA doesn't think it is worth much. Giving back the company but no cash could be EA saying "yawn we didn't really want it anyway thanks for taking out the trash" or "OMG! we just avoided a serious day in court". I am curious which it is.
