reminds me of the path Minecraft could have taken - they also had a massive amount of community developers building servers, but instead of encouraging monetization and taking a cut, they banned it and cracked down aggressively
Of course, unlike Roblox, Minecraft was profitable
This is talked about a lot in Einstein's Walter Isaacson biography, so people have been observing this trend for a long time (e.g the Germans accusing Einstein of doing self promotion, the US having celebrity culture in contrast), maybe it's cyclical
So, I've created a tool (originally for myself) that scans specific RSS feeds (for instance, HN has an RSS feed at https://hnrss.org/newest), compares articles to a natural language filter (e.g. "New Social Network Release") and sends me an email alert whenever a matching article is published to the feed. I've decided it's possible other people would have use for this, since Google Alerts is used and this is strictly better (Google Alerts has a ton of false positives). I want to check if there's interest before I bother creating a front end since I hate coding front ends, so behold a Google Form. It's free!
Any feedback is welcome. I'll clean it up soon, but I decided to just publish it for now and see the response. Tomorrow there should be more than one giant Python file, and the ability to use files other than .txt.
This is the new iteration of my chrome extension, intended to help people avoid low-quality gpt-like content on the web, pivoting the extension to focus more on the search aspect (though of course, you can still see likes/dislikes on the pages themselves, and that's the only way to rate pages, so people don't rate pages they haven't visited).
Also, the client-side code of the extension is now available on GitHub (minus the extension key / oauth2 client key / firebase key, of course), so you can see exactly what data is being written to the Firebase database (basically authentication information and the likes + dislikes, not searches or any user analytics).
I'm actually working on an alternative to Google (though the goal being improved search, not improved privacy), I made this extension during one of the breaks from working on that
And it was more fun to run the server than play the game