Author | Lightnews

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Melo @letitmelo.bsky.social · 2d

I legitimately didn't know they were competing with Steam and it's crazy to me that they burnt so much money on what sounds like something with very little (or wildly misguided) market research.

Ethan Evans, former Amazon VP

As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam. We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost. Here's why:

The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code. Not under my leadership or anyone else's.

The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition. We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere.

Then, after buying Twitch, we created our own PC games store. Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong.

Finally, we built "Luna," a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their
product "Stadia." Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).

The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam

It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.

At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems and they weren't going to switch platforms just because a new one was available

We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.

Just because you are big enough to build something doesn't mean people will use it

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The Zack(s) of the Killer Handlen @zhandlen.bsky.social · 22h

One of the best self-criticisms I’ve ever read was Gary Larson analyzing this gag and saying that making one of the tools look too much like a real tool was the reason people were baffled by it… and he’s right. Changed how I thought about visual jokes.

cow tools daily @cowtoolsdaily.bsky.social · 2d

43 years ago today, readers the world over opened their newspapers and gazed upon cow tools for the first time. happy birthday cow tools. you look great.

The original Far Side Cow Tools Cartoon by Gary Larson. A cow stands on its hind legs behind a table, staring blankly at the viewer from behind its heavy brow ridge. On the table are four crudely made tools: a lump, a lump with an offset crooked handle, a long stick with hooked prongs at the end, and a crude handsaw with irregular teeth. In the background a barn sits on a hill. Caption reads, "Cow tools."

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pablo @morepablo.com · 1d

the funny thing is you could build way better foundations — RPC frameworks do client/server code generation that works way, way better than Swagger (or is it OpenAPI?) on REST — but this would require engineers in industry to slow down, think, take risks, which we seem constitutionally unable to do

pablo @morepablo.com · 1d

"vibe coding at scale" feels a lot like "UML diagrams will autogenerate the code," idk

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The Ass is the father of the legs @internethippo.bsky.social · 2d

I think any story about Trump's autocracy should be mostly about the people and institutions who failed to stop it. This guy isn't a political genius, everything else just happens to be rotten. 'Toddler Consolidates Power In Household' is a story about incompetent parents, not shrewd maneuvering

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pablo @morepablo.com · 2d

(legit a banger though)

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pablo @morepablo.com · 2d

two men are sitting on a couch talking to each other . one of the men is wearing a sweater .

Alt: Seinfeld frame where the hack comedian is impressed with Jerry's throwaway joke, and says "this is GOLD, Jerry! Gold!!"

media.tenor.com

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pablo @morepablo.com · 2d

but just as we've lost both "shared popular culture" (Weird Al saying parodies don't land anymore because you can't count on everyone knowing Sabrina Carpenter) *and* paradoxically, major generational differences (Gen Xers listen to Lil Nas X, as do Zoomers), centrists don't have a constituency

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pablo @morepablo.com · 2d

It's a little more complicated than this ofc: they were taken to the crazy zone kicking and screaming; Biden eked out a win (though unclear if he'd win without COVID)

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pablo @morepablo.com · 2d

It's funny because R's had the same thing earlier this century but actually learned their lesson: after McCain and Romney, they went to tHe CrAzY zOnE and started winning

Thor Benson @thorbenson.bsky.social · 3d

*Democrats run centrists three elections in a row*

Centrists: We need to run a centrist. That's the solution

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cow tools daily @cowtoolsdaily.bsky.social · 2d

43 years ago today, readers the world over opened their newspapers and gazed upon cow tools for the first time. happy birthday cow tools. you look great.

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Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social · 2d

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 3d

the best part is all the effort and money and time in the world spent buying CBS or creating knock off wikipedias still won't make them popular, interesting, or correct, and I know, at some level, they know this deep in their little ratfucker hearts

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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 3d

reality is very upsetting to the right wing so they are spending a ton of time and money building an alternate reality safe space to delude themselves into believing they aren't unpopular assholes

Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 3d

New: Elon Musk appears to have just launched "Grokipedia," billed as a more right-leaning rival to Wikipedia: grokipedia.com

Story to come. If you try it out, I'd be interested to hear what you find.

Grokipedia

grokipedia.com

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 3d

Part of how you know the left-wing media is primarily focused on winning factional fights *within* the Democratic coalition is that while they all credulously reported that Project 2025 wasn't Trump policy, when it clearly was, they'll report these are Democratic policies, when they mostly are not.

John Carl Baker @johncarlbaker.bsky.social · 3d

Incredible to claim that “abolish the police” is in any way a Democratic policy

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Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 3d

ed zitron aside, it’s incredibly funny for some tech newsletter guy to call some other tech newsletter guy “temu kara swisher” as an insult when they apparently only mean “temu” to be the insulting part

☠️deadward niedermurder☠️ @niedermeyer.online · 3d

casey newton calling ed zitron "temu kara swisher" is the maddest I have seen anyone be in a while

www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI

He’s one of the loudest voices of the AI haters—even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention.

www.wired.com

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Ben Hutchison @aldaviva.com · 3d

The best Wirecutter reviewers for most people are Lauren Dragan, Lesley Stockton, Brent Butterworth, Doug Mahoney, and Kimber Streams.
Why should you trust me? Over 12 years, I've bought 54 things recommended by 35 different Wirecutter reviewers, from tweezers to a television.

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Luke Plunkett @lukeplunkett.com · 3d

your regular reminder that this company can get straight in the fuckin bin

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 3d

And I would like to challenge this person to get a real job

Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 3d

Gaines: I want to challenge AOC to a debate.

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 3d

They should simply surgically attach Olivia Nuzzi and Olivia Reingold together to make one single Olivia, the worst possible Olivia.

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WobblyPython: 🐍 @wobblypython.bsky.social · 3d

I entirely forgot that I made this anti-ASMR video (Sound warning headphones users)

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Rine @rine.bsky.social · 3d

A grocery store calling the cops to keep people from pulling food out of a dumpster is permanently etched in my brain as people with money and power deciding if they can't profit, they would rather see food rot and people starve.

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 4d

the american financial elite, all at once, had abandoned capitalism in an attempt to purchase the power of the state.

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 4d

the last few years of my job at google were surreal -- watching the executives talk in increasingly positive terms about Elon Musk's management style while objective metrics at his companies were becoming dangerously unstable. it wasn't until 2023 that i realized that they didn't care about profits.

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Abigail Larson @abigaillarson.com · 3d

Guillermo del Toro on wealth: "a wealthy man is a man who has enough, not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite someone for a beer? You're rich. If you have a yacht, planes, islands, and you still need more? You're not rich."

Guillermo del Toro quote "...think about wealth for me for example. A wealthy man that has enough..."

"not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite somebody to beer..."

"...you're rich. If you have, whatever-"

"- yachts and planes and islands and you STILL need more? You're not rich."

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