It’s often associated in PoE that friction is what usually drives profits. Using a recent meta example, Graveyard crafting was extremely tedious while simultaneously being extremely lucrative. I am quite interested then to see what the implications on the economy are if adopted mainstream by the masses. People nowadays would rather pay 3x the prices of the craft rather than learning how to do it themselves, but if there was a convenient calculator that could derive the optimal algorithm I suspect we will see a different behavior emerge.

I think most experienced players are already pretty optimal at crafting. There might be some rare case where it might save you a couple div at best. It's usually obvious by design how to achieve something. Of course there is a market because some part of the playerbase can't do this (which might become lower) and some part of the playerbase still sees it as time efficient to just buy it precrafted. Likely there's less incentive to craft in bulk, large bulk currency trades become more expensive, making the crafted items more expensive for the unkowing new player who doesn't use this tool. Personally, I don't think it would change the economy that much.

Agreed, and I think my point around adoption by the masses was made a little too lightly - as you mentioned there will always be a part of the player base who prefer buying and playing the game rather than spending time crafting (regardless of how trivial the craft is).

It gets more interesting if you optimise for time instead of cost. If it takes you 15 minutes to craft something using 80c of currency, but you can instead run maps and average 300c an hour, then you still might prefer paying 100c for the guaranteed outcome (buying it already made) than going for "average" cost of 80c and having to craft it yourself.

Do it again, but optimise for fun instead of time and we've come full-circle :)

This might be an ignorant question but why can't Reddit "force" the blackouts the end? Is it because they risk losing a moderation team to manage the content? Because even if that's true, it seems far less consequential to replace the moderators than the potential of another competitor usurping their position.

Genuine question, why do most articles discussing PE seem to portray them in a malicious light? Fundamentally, PE investors have skin in the game - they do invest on behalf of their LP, but typically GPs contribute a portion of their own income into the fund as well, not to mention their compensation is tied to performance. The consequence of that gives them every incentive to help a company succeed, and not ruin it.

Sure there are failures as with every investments, but one can simply evaluate the overall returns within the asset class across a period of time to see that there is value being created (or at least allocated)

Because Private Equity is associated with squeezing every penny from the purchased business and making user experience a secondary concern.

For some examples, read some of the stories in other comments here and on the web.

Here's another perspective - I've seen PE firms do as you described, cut costs and fire employees, just as much as I've seen them inject more capital into a business and help them with further M&A. Having better user experience can lead to increased revenue (better product, improved branding - leading to increased market share for example) - which should equally be an incentive to PE firms as well.

None of the anecdotes you mention counteract the nature of the industry as whole: https://caia.org/blog/2022/07/20/long-term-private-equity-pe...

I've already caveated that bad investments may occur. My question is why the negatives are being focused versus the positives?

I’ve always been supportive and even excited about what the technology promises, but when I reconcile it with any use cases, I simply can’t get behind the valuations we see. Excluding it being the main payment vehicle for banks, institutions, and individuals (I strongly disagree with this prospect), all the other use cases become increasingly niche. BTC at it’s peak was at a 2 trillion dollar market cap. Gold at the same time was ~10-12 trillion. I respect lindyness and 3000+ years of gold being the best store of value, is enough confidence that BTC isn’t gonna be the next big thing - if it aims to replace it.

That would be an incredibly humorous-and stupid reaction to this silly and obvious bluff attempt.

True, but it wouldn't need to be someone coming clean entirely. Think along the lines of Elon and the masseuse/horse scandal - he gets asked about it by a journalist, then panics and goes onto twitter talking weirdly about how he's suddenly a republican and that he because of this he expects to be on the receiving end of fabricated hit-pieces. To many of us it's pretty clear how that went down, but people do dumb stuff sometimes to cover their tracks when they're caught and think they can get away with it :)

I dunno, I'm just guessing. The more likely thing is that it's just someone trolling, IMO