If your basket has a big fuck off hole in it stop putting eggs in...
For me grind is when the gameplay loop is motivated by reward not exploration and plays out the same every time.
Good gameplay can come from a feeling of freshness because there are lots of possibilities, because rng or because player options (say, slay the spire), or from lots of genuinely novel content (say, elden ring).
It doesn't feel like a balancing act at all. I just want more of the latter and less of the former, but maybe some people really do play for repetition?
That's a really interesting hypothetical. They always had ads but obviously the early scale and scope was smaller, so revenue was piddling early on. They had pretty limited costs though and were a super hot ticket to give capital to. I mean they needed some kind of financing for their trajectory, which maybe anyway would have pushed them to monetize aggressively any which way.
Ultimately I don't think we'll ever know and the examples of people choosing not to get filthy rich off the back of these innovations are extremely rare. Even when e.g. openAI gets set up explicitly as non profit it gets bastardised, so what chance does a regular joint stock company have of operating in the interests of consumers.
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I'm not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
Merry Christmas to you!
Precisely. If you train by lifting stones you can still use the lever later, but you'll be able to lift even heavier things by using both your new strength AND the leaver's mechanical advantage.
By analogy, if you're using LLMs to do the easy bits in order to spend more time with harder problems fuckin a. But the idea you can just replace actual coding work with copy paste is a shitty one. Again by analogy with rock lifting: now you have noodle arms and can't lift shit if your lever breaks or doesn't fit under a particular rock or whatever.