Thanks for this comment. I have personal experience with all of these frustrations and agree very strongly. I can see someone writing off this comment as just another rant but it really isn’t - you’re hitting the nail right on the head over and over.
The way Apple and Google have wedged themselves in as an interface and then gatekeeper to our customers is deeply pernicious. I respect what they have achieved but it’s deeply saddening to wonder if the freedom we had decades ago online was anomalous and not intrinsic to the medium.
Before you start in on it identify a milestone you want to hit, write down objectively assessable success criteria, then work on it until you check those boxes. It will be hard but it will feel good and reinforce the behavior. Rinse and repeat. Don’t set yourself up for failure - start with easy milestones and give yourself some wins.
On Killing by Dave Grossman explores the research backing up your friend's assertion in depth. I highly recommend that book to anyone whose interest is piqued by your comment.
This is not a first world problem it is the universal human problem of finding meaning in life. This question is the fuel that keeps religions running. There are myriad supposed answers and even more practitioners that would like you as a client and will promise the answers you seek. Use the motivation, time, and resources you have today to search for your own answers. Your mind and body should be as sharp as possible to allow you to take a path of strength rather than weakness, and to put it more simply, to be capable of resisting being taken advantage of. You'd be prudent to dial in your sleep, nutrition, and physical activity while you're in this phase. This won't last forever and you will end up with beliefs about the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life, so my advice is to put your thumb on the scale - by ensuring your body and mind are in good condition - and make it more likely you land on a personally empowered outlook.
You know if your content is good because over time you are able to build an audience that engages through whatever mechanisms you provide, and they pay you if you ask for money. Feedback can be one proxy for your heading, speed, and mass... but it's often inaccurate and always incomplete. Good luck and enjoy the journey - no one cares as much as you so you will need a base load of internally sourced motivation to stay committed for any meaningful duration.
> Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments
> are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive
> associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge.
Ok, that's why people are Googling for "xyz reddit"...
> However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that
> there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity,
> people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are
> now. SEO stuffed websites.
There's nothing in this article explaining how the existence of better search on Reddit would provide different incentives than the very popular search engine for Reddit that is being used today (Google). What is this "financial opportunity" that doesn't already exist that will spell doom?
Batteries aren’t just about using the generated energy in a useful way, they are about making renewables more profitable by giving them a buyer for all the energy they can produce. Miners are money batteries in this way - they can be fired up on demand to soak up energy the grid doesn’t need, and instead of finding a buyer they can just directly convert excess energy into income.
Systematizing and optimizing every detail of operations to create as large of a pool as possible of positions requiring the least possible skill, reducing the cost of turnover, training, and management complexity... seems to be externalizing a heavy toll on mental health. Regulation can tackle many cases of "socialized losses, privatized gains" but I am at a loss to understand how we can mitigate this one.
Have you considered changing companies? Instead of taking a step down, you could evaluate a new employer entirely on the basis of the likelihood that your issues will be sufficiently mitigated.
This is a significant escalation, likely to embarrass China in an arena they care about… but I can’t help wonder if it’s just as likely to embarrass the US by showing the diminished state of our soft power if it doesn’t remain a leading story throughout the games.
Does anyone have a good understanding of how this narrative got started and took off? We've always had narratives outpacing facts (in hopes that the facts could be nudged into catching up), but I wonder to what extent social media plays a role in driving these stories now.
People can talk about it whenever they want, I'm only speaking in support of the very narrow point that it is unprofessional. People reading the post will use its contents to form (or modify) their opinions of the author, and I believe it will generally be in the negative direction. Publishing something that has a net-negative impact on your professional reputation strikes me as unprofessional in a very basic way.
Can he do it? Sure. Should he? Maybe, depends on his values. Hopefully he understood how the message would be received and is OK with the possible consequences, and valued self-expression and making an authoritative critique of MySQL more highly than the negative impacts of rubbing a few readers the wrong way as they perceive a breach of generally accepted professional decorum.
Because he is stirring things up over there right after he walked away so it won’t be affecting him. The post is a big warning sign to anyone considering working with him.
If you have a habit of seeing yourself as capable of more than you typically (or ever) do, you’re likely to continue at that lower level of performance because you can take comfort in your elevated self image. By believing that your best isn’t a hypothetical, but just an observation of what you’re doing, you have to accept the lower performance or actually try harder and achieve what you believe you can.
This mindset helps me both push myself in all areas, and be more humble as well.
I get that - it’s not like traditional payment processors never shut anyone off. Reality is all in the squishy gray area, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a meaningful difference between what it’s like selling a service on a website vs. with an app.
This seems like a significant milestone in what I really hope is the path toward the app ecosystem opening up to the level of freedom we’ve enjoyed in the web and desktop software space for decades now. Needing the recurring approval from two mega-corps scrutinizing whatever details of your business and customer relationships they wish, forcing their way in between… feels terrible compared to hooking up to a standard payment processor and doing your thing on the open web. I don’t want your help marketing and distributing my app, I just want to be able to serve my customers and I’d prefer if you mostly ignored us. The phone calls with Apple begging for them to see our point of view and interpretation of their deliberately vague requirements, the stories about companies hiring someone whose personal Google account activities become toxic for the company’s Play Store account, it all just sucks. I didn’t dedicate my life to doing business in software and the internet to be this directly under any one thumb. Crossing my fingers for more moves in the right direction.
The way Apple and Google have wedged themselves in as an interface and then gatekeeper to our customers is deeply pernicious. I respect what they have achieved but it’s deeply saddening to wonder if the freedom we had decades ago online was anomalous and not intrinsic to the medium.