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I don’t really play games at all and the only system I own is a Nintendo Switch. I played the new Zelda and am really enjoying it. When I get stuck or have a qu

I don’t really play games at all and the only system I own is a Nintendo Switch. I played the new Zelda and am really enjoying it. When I get stuck or have a question I google it. When I google it, I note that the top say 10 sites that answer my question all have similarly-formatted articles and also have the same mistakes in the answer to the question. I expect nearly all the sites pointing to Zelda tips or FAQs are not original in any way and are instead just regurgitated from one another through AI to form a webring of shit. At least I use ad blockers and block JavaScript so they don’t get some ad revenue.

RGamma 3y ago
On Kagi I just block that shit since it's relatively obvious. Some trustworthy sites in this space are gamefaqs(!) and IGN (and game magazines and others I can't recall now).
- monkpit 3y ago
  GameFaqs is an absolute gem. Load everything at once as text, no interstitial ads, no auto playing videos, no bs.
ehnto 3y ago
Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I find it hard to believe Google doesn't have the data required to figure out which sites should be getting domain authority, but I understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines.
- theoriginaldog 3y ago
  That is the main reason why I fall back to good old book guides. They are actually quite fun and make me nostalgic, because in my childhood we used them too. Piggyback is a publisher that makes great ones, they publish only one per year and put a lot of effort and work in their guides. They made the offical Tears of the Kingdom guide too, can recommend.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  Google get paid for the SEO spam though as those sites always run Google Ads.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  >… understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines On the other hand, those Stack Overflow clones get top billing all the time. I do not think this is a data problem, but an incentives issue. More ads=good
  - DistractionRect 3y ago
    Indeed. And if you have to click through a couple of results to find an actual answer, they get ad revenue X times over answering your question with the first result. There was a time when Google Search would nearly always nail it with the first result, but now it feels like you have to wade through several results and be a prompt engineer to find relevant results.
    - dekervin 3y ago
      I use google out of habit. Bing is better and always find the exact result I was searching on google.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  Recipes sites too. Recently I was looking at recipes for a dish I wanted to try and noticed that two blogs had identical recipes for "Grandma's X". I scrolled back up to the obligatory five page essay and those were almost identical too--one of them had clearly stolen the story from the other and run it through one of those AI "paraphrase" tools to change words here and there. It was pretty easy to tell which was the original and which the copycat based on some strange word choices in the paraphrased version.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    That's the old pre-AI tools. They just thesaurus substitute.
    - ehnto 3y ago
      Yep, article spinners were the thing as early as 2010, probably earlier. Even more surprising that they are back in search results as I remember them being absent for a while.
      - _delirium 3y ago
        Back when I used to do Mechanical Turk now and then, I would see rewording tasks show up pretty often there too. I assume they were for this kind of purpose. Typically they were just one sentence out of context that you were supposed to reword. I guess they pasted the article back together out of the reworded sentences?
  - liveoneggs 3y ago
    Recipes have been one application that OpenAI/ChatGPT is actually really good at. No ads, interactive substitutions/scaling/conversions.
    - Baeocystin 3y ago
      "hey bot, I have {foodstuffs} available, I need to make dinner for n people. Give me some options in the x style" Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000. Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  But they do know. They are incentiviswd to send you to the sites with the most ads, not the site which is most relevant, because they make a ton money off those spam sites and less of dedicated fan sites. At some point I'm gonna say fuck it and simply maintain my own list of searchable links, which score each ad with a single negative point, and each relevant keyword or phrase with a single positive point.
- derriz 3y ago
  Yeah I don’t get it - without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. Why have they allowed search quality to stagnate while pouring billions into random tech areas where they have little competitive advantage? Nobody wants to see a page of copies/duplicates by SEO rank. I recall years ago there was, for a while, a similar issue with Wikipedia clones but that problem was addressed. Not just games, recipes, but music lyrics, chords, etc - googling almost evert niche interest is rife with it.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. I think the massive amounts of data collected by android devices while we're not using the internet and all the data collected by chrome while we are browsing means that Google no longer needs to mine our internet searches to collect the most intimate details of our daily lives. That's why Google no longer cares about investing time and money into making their search useful for us. In fact, it's better for Google if a company's customers can't find their website due to all the spam because it means that company now has to pay Google to place an ad at the top of search results in order to be seen at all.
  - skywhopper 3y ago
    Google earns money on all the ads on all those trash websites. So their immediate incentive is to drive traffic to them regardless of the longer-term reputation cost.
- itscrush 3y ago
  It does get deeper than just your mentioned surface level of served ads. Many of those wiki ecosystems are used to view-pump twitch channels with embedded players, such as Fextralife's webring of wikis being bought up and built up, and don't forget those "1-feature VIP memberships".
- Arrath 3y ago
  I mourn the lost era of GameFAQs and rad ASCII art at the head of pure text walkthroughs. Now we have 45 minute youtube videos of "100 new player tips and tricks for Red Dead 2!"
  - jcpst 3y ago
    There are people I know where I try to remember how we met, and it’d be because of some obscure corner of the gamefaqs forum.
  - 16bitvoid 3y ago
    I just checked to see if GameFAQs was still active and thought that Tears of the Kingdom would be a good game to see if there were any active users still making guides. There's only one...for horse upgrade recipes. I also didn't know that GameSpot acquired them. I too mourn the lost era of GameFAQs.
    - ohdannyboy 3y ago
      I was an active member when GameSpot merged then took over (my account missed the LUE cutoff by less than a year, if you know you know). It was something the owner promised would never happen, and then he repeatedly said it would never go farther then it did. GameFAQers hated GameSpoters. Merging was the beginning of the end IMO, it hurt the community and that was the main thing they had.
- botulidze 3y ago
  > I guess there's money in the ads. I owned a basic wordpress site with some guides written during COVID for a couple of popular (at that time) mobile games. It appeared in top 3 searches for the <game name> + <guide/event/best ...> combination. Ad revenue was around ~$100 per month peaking around ~$150 at the new content drops. I have abandoned the website since, but it still is generating $100 here and there without me actively working on it for the past 2 years. To the point - yes, there's lot of money if you own a network of similar websites. My competitors were paying $10-30 per guide submitted on their website because a few guides could easily get paid off in a couple of months from ad revenue and keep generating it years afer. I could write more detailed story if someone's interested.
  - iamawacko 3y ago
    I'd be interested in something like a blog post about this
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Perhaps a guide? Might make $100/mo!
      - Fatnino 3y ago
        Get paid to make the internet a shittier place and fleece some advertisers at the same time!
    - botulidze 3y ago
      Here you go: https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gaming-websites/ https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gamin...
      - Shocka1 3y ago
        This was extremely well written and full of information I've always wondered about. Thanks a lot for sharing.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Oh Google certainly could moderate their search results or augment them with human knowledge. They'd need a dozen people per country, at most, for such a task. The problem is, Google is already threading a very fine line regarding anti-competition and bias especially in Europe... and say, they would choose "Computer BILD" (a German tabloid) over Heise or Golem (actually respectable media), or the other way around - the outcry would be massive and so would the coming lawsuits. Instead, it's better for Google to let the search go to utter dog shit, blame issues on "algorithms" and get sites to pay to play with ads.
- p3rls 3y ago
  I have a platform for kpop at kpopping.com The top domain for almost every result in my niche is a shitty wordpress with centered text on a purple background. It makes about $10-15k a month even with its lackluster content. It's had spyware ads and porn ads. Still #1 for every query. The funny part is, bing, ddg are even worse. Welcome to webapps in 2023.
  - sizzle 3y ago
    $10-15k a month holy shiz how much traffic are you seeing? Any funny stories? Congrats on your success!
- Akronymus 3y ago
  > Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I absolutely loathe to use fandom for that very reason. They game the system to appear first, even when another, better, wiki exists.And it is nigh on unusable. Sadly one game that really depends on the wiki, that I play only has a fandom site (warframe)
  - morjom 3y ago
    I think the top of the crop wikis are the ones for Runescape, OldSchool Runescape and Guild Wars 1 & 2. Wowhead is kind of in a league of its own though.
BasedAnon 3y ago
The only system I own is a PS2, the greatest console of all time is still going strong in 2023
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  Undoubtedly it had many hits, but a lot of the greats have also since been remastered and can be enjoyed on newer platforms with HD graphics and modernized controls.
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    There's a certain point where I just stop caring about further improvements honestly. My belly is full and I am satisfied.
  - stevenwoo 3y ago
    I broke mine out a few years ago and the load times are kind of irritating, and repeated unskippable cutscenes in some games cooled my retro enthusiasm.
- dqh 3y ago
  I keep one set up with a CRT TV just for “We Love Katamari” :) When you say it’s still going strong, are you referring to homebrew dev or something?
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    I mean that in between them being solid machines, the amount of content that still gets put out around it, the custom hardware people are designing for it and homebrew software the scene is still very much alive.
ericmcer 3y ago
It’s identical to cooking websites. Take the actual ~100 words of relevant info and stretch it into a 10000 word article with 20 ads on it
nancyhn 3y ago
[flagged]
- nekoashide 3y ago
  Or pay to buy a trusty AI to help you
- sushid 3y ago
  Absolutely, 'content spinning' in gaming is an issue, but it can still aid players. Encouraging original content and source acknowledgement is critical. Balancing user experience and ad revenue is tough for gaming sites. For unique discussions, try platforms like Reddit or game-specific forums. Your insights could greatly enrich Zelda content creation
- n42 3y ago
  Why is this comment so obviously written by ChatGPT?
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Satire right? They’re doing what the game strategy sites are accused of? I don’t know.
    - n42 3y ago
      Probably — it’s just weird how much of an identifiable “voice” ChatGPT has
      - booleandilemma 3y ago
        I wonder if it's the textual equivalent of looking at an "average face"? Is ChatGPT just blending all its sources together into a wall of text that always looks the same? https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-average-face-images-created-using-a-composite-of-100-individual-male-faces_fig1_259071326 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-average-face-...
hinkley 3y ago
The other problem with static sites is that it's trivial for some jerkface to copy your content and repost it. The first case of that I heard about was almost 20 years ago when it happened to a friend. The social circle of the subject matter was small enough that she could name and shame to get it taken down. Today I don't know what you could do.
- autoexec 3y ago
  It happened to me about that long ago too and I was just flattered, but it also wasn't done by some crappy scammer ripping random content to stuff it full of ads and SEO it to death hoping make a quick buck off of my writing. I have no desire to stop people from copying and sharing whatever they can, but when it's being done with a profit motive it feels a lot more exploitative and dirty.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    I would love to see a federated hosting solution where person A can write content and persons B and C can help host it. That gives you the upsides of someone copying your stuff without the downside of them misrepresenting it as their own work. But yeah, SEO has so ruined the internet I expect some sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon solution to spring up to fix it.
duxup 3y ago
What I find amusing is that even when ChatGPT responds to my gaming questions I find the response to be unusually wordy with a surprisingly heavy into paragraph before it answers my simple question. Very similar to those few advertisement sites with a huge block of wonky into text taking forever to get to the answer.
- int_19h 3y ago
  This is the default behavior from the way it is fine-tuned and from its system prompt. But you can always tell it to give you answers that are short and to the point.
- jerf 3y ago
  Moderating on a subreddit where people are definitely trying to spam their way in with LLMs, that's becoming on of my big tells. At least the way they are tuned now they are really prone to wordy and pointless intros and outros. (At least in my personal opinion, while intros and outros are fine they should do something more than just summarise again, especially the outro, even if it's just trying to end on a joke.) I recognise there's no reason to believe that is fundamental to the tech, but right now it's a tell. (Though "subtle errors of the type humans don't make" is both a stronger signal and more relevant one.)
  - callalex 3y ago
    What motivates you to continue volunteering your time to moderate a Reddit forum when the host has demonstrated a clear and repeated lack of respect or care for the time and concerns of moderation staff?
    - jerf 3y ago
      First, it's my decision, not yours. Secondly, I was helped by a lot of people when I was a young developer and this is how I give back. Since it's a sum of maybe 10 minutes a day, which I was largely already using for this anyhow, it's nearly free. If it ever became a job I'd stop.
    - 3y ago
yieldcrv 3y ago
add reddit to the end of your search query
omeze 3y ago
Yea, its tragic. When I was a kid I would often just go to GameFAQs because that was the only real source, and the guides would be surfaced in google. Its still around but Google gives me 20 crappy ad riddled sites that require a new page click, listicle-style, to get through a 5 minute area
Nexxxeh 3y ago
Slightly off-topic, but sorta related. ToTK straight up sucks for accessibility, cognitive and sensory stuff especially. I find myself using the ZD TotK map more often than I'd like: https://www.zeldadungeon.net/tears-of-the-kingdom-interactive-map/ https://www.zeldadungeon.net/tears-of-the-kingdom-interactiv... And trying to remember what specific enemies are where is not fun for me. Is it fun for anyone? The Compendium doesn't keep track of them when you fight, despite the fact they respawn every blood moon. I want another Savage Lynel Bow. Where did I see that Silver Lynel? I can't remember, but I'm not hunting it all across the map hoping for the vague ping of my Purah Pad sensor when I'm already on top of one. Should I be making my own notes as well? The log is a great idea, but there's lots of stuff it doesn't capture. The quest descriptions often aren't sufficient and markers are often the person that started the quest. Great(!) I appreciate the subtitles, but why is so much of the game unvoiced? Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping? Even with internal FSR and AA disabled so it doesn't occasionally dip to smeared potato quality, it can be hard to spot things if you don't know explicitly where to look, even for hawkish eyesight. The Ultrahand glow can help, but it's a rubbish solution. No colour blind settings. WTAF. There are so many missed opportunities to make this amazing game vastly more accessible. Nintendo has made it clear they don't care about accessibility. It's a real shame, because accessibility makes things better for everyone.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  Do you not use the map stamps?
  - Nexxxeh 3y ago
    I do. But there are only ten different ones and they don't tell you what thing you've stamped. So if you're stamping enemies, which one is "skull"? Why doesn't the game do this, it obviously knows what enemies are where? If you've already encountered them, why not just let you filter that enemy on the map? Even if it made you take a photo like it does for the compendium, that'd be better than the "sometimes vague locations" we have now. Why not list map locations of that enemy for all enemies in the compendium? Or at least the special ones like Lynels, Hinox, Talus etc?
greggsy 3y ago
I noticed the same thing with Zelda. The marketability of game FAQs was realised up to a decade ago, but AI content generators, optimised by time-honoured SEO, has evidently accelerated the time to market for new platforms. The success of TOTK, and the availability of articles and Reddit posts has made it ripe for the picking.
SimbaOnSteroids 3y ago
Unrelated, but YouTube is less vague when it comes to walk-throughs
sizzle 3y ago
“Webring of shit” is simply an amazing description for this phenomenon. I hope this term catches on.

RGamma 3y ago

On Kagi I just block that shit since it's relatively obvious. Some trustworthy sites in this space are gamefaqs(!) and IGN (and game magazines and others I can't recall now).

monkpit 3y ago
GameFaqs is an absolute gem. Load everything at once as text, no interstitial ads, no auto playing videos, no bs.

ehnto 3y ago

Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I find it hard to believe Google doesn't have the data required to figure out which sites should be getting domain authority, but I understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines.

theoriginaldog 3y ago
That is the main reason why I fall back to good old book guides. They are actually quite fun and make me nostalgic, because in my childhood we used them too. Piggyback is a publisher that makes great ones, they publish only one per year and put a lot of effort and work in their guides. They made the offical Tears of the Kingdom guide too, can recommend.
iamacyborg 3y ago
Google get paid for the SEO spam though as those sites always run Google Ads.
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
>… understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines On the other hand, those Stack Overflow clones get top billing all the time. I do not think this is a data problem, but an incentives issue. More ads=good
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  Indeed. And if you have to click through a couple of results to find an actual answer, they get ad revenue X times over answering your question with the first result. There was a time when Google Search would nearly always nail it with the first result, but now it feels like you have to wade through several results and be a prompt engineer to find relevant results.
  - dekervin 3y ago
    I use google out of habit. Bing is better and always find the exact result I was searching on google.
CrazyStat 3y ago
Recipes sites too. Recently I was looking at recipes for a dish I wanted to try and noticed that two blogs had identical recipes for "Grandma's X". I scrolled back up to the obligatory five page essay and those were almost identical too--one of them had clearly stolen the story from the other and run it through one of those AI "paraphrase" tools to change words here and there. It was pretty easy to tell which was the original and which the copycat based on some strange word choices in the paraphrased version.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  That's the old pre-AI tools. They just thesaurus substitute.
  - ehnto 3y ago
    Yep, article spinners were the thing as early as 2010, probably earlier. Even more surprising that they are back in search results as I remember them being absent for a while.
    - _delirium 3y ago
      Back when I used to do Mechanical Turk now and then, I would see rewording tasks show up pretty often there too. I assume they were for this kind of purpose. Typically they were just one sentence out of context that you were supposed to reword. I guess they pasted the article back together out of the reworded sentences?
- liveoneggs 3y ago
  Recipes have been one application that OpenAI/ChatGPT is actually really good at. No ads, interactive substitutions/scaling/conversions.
  - Baeocystin 3y ago
    "hey bot, I have {foodstuffs} available, I need to make dinner for n people. Give me some options in the x style" Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000. Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.
lelanthran 3y ago
But they do know. They are incentiviswd to send you to the sites with the most ads, not the site which is most relevant, because they make a ton money off those spam sites and less of dedicated fan sites. At some point I'm gonna say fuck it and simply maintain my own list of searchable links, which score each ad with a single negative point, and each relevant keyword or phrase with a single positive point.
derriz 3y ago
Yeah I don’t get it - without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. Why have they allowed search quality to stagnate while pouring billions into random tech areas where they have little competitive advantage? Nobody wants to see a page of copies/duplicates by SEO rank. I recall years ago there was, for a while, a similar issue with Wikipedia clones but that problem was addressed. Not just games, recipes, but music lyrics, chords, etc - googling almost evert niche interest is rife with it.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. I think the massive amounts of data collected by android devices while we're not using the internet and all the data collected by chrome while we are browsing means that Google no longer needs to mine our internet searches to collect the most intimate details of our daily lives. That's why Google no longer cares about investing time and money into making their search useful for us. In fact, it's better for Google if a company's customers can't find their website due to all the spam because it means that company now has to pay Google to place an ad at the top of search results in order to be seen at all.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  Google earns money on all the ads on all those trash websites. So their immediate incentive is to drive traffic to them regardless of the longer-term reputation cost.
itscrush 3y ago
It does get deeper than just your mentioned surface level of served ads. Many of those wiki ecosystems are used to view-pump twitch channels with embedded players, such as Fextralife's webring of wikis being bought up and built up, and don't forget those "1-feature VIP memberships".
Arrath 3y ago
I mourn the lost era of GameFAQs and rad ASCII art at the head of pure text walkthroughs. Now we have 45 minute youtube videos of "100 new player tips and tricks for Red Dead 2!"
- jcpst 3y ago
  There are people I know where I try to remember how we met, and it’d be because of some obscure corner of the gamefaqs forum.
- 16bitvoid 3y ago
  I just checked to see if GameFAQs was still active and thought that Tears of the Kingdom would be a good game to see if there were any active users still making guides. There's only one...for horse upgrade recipes. I also didn't know that GameSpot acquired them. I too mourn the lost era of GameFAQs.
  - ohdannyboy 3y ago
    I was an active member when GameSpot merged then took over (my account missed the LUE cutoff by less than a year, if you know you know). It was something the owner promised would never happen, and then he repeatedly said it would never go farther then it did. GameFAQers hated GameSpoters. Merging was the beginning of the end IMO, it hurt the community and that was the main thing they had.
botulidze 3y ago
> I guess there's money in the ads. I owned a basic wordpress site with some guides written during COVID for a couple of popular (at that time) mobile games. It appeared in top 3 searches for the <game name> + <guide/event/best ...> combination. Ad revenue was around ~$100 per month peaking around ~$150 at the new content drops. I have abandoned the website since, but it still is generating $100 here and there without me actively working on it for the past 2 years. To the point - yes, there's lot of money if you own a network of similar websites. My competitors were paying $10-30 per guide submitted on their website because a few guides could easily get paid off in a couple of months from ad revenue and keep generating it years afer. I could write more detailed story if someone's interested.
- iamawacko 3y ago
  I'd be interested in something like a blog post about this
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Perhaps a guide? Might make $100/mo!
    - Fatnino 3y ago
      Get paid to make the internet a shittier place and fleece some advertisers at the same time!
  - botulidze 3y ago
    Here you go: https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gaming-websites/ https://cubinskyi.club/games/the-economy-behind-mobile-gamin...
    - Shocka1 3y ago
      This was extremely well written and full of information I've always wondered about. Thanks a lot for sharing.
mschuster91 3y ago
Oh Google certainly could moderate their search results or augment them with human knowledge. They'd need a dozen people per country, at most, for such a task. The problem is, Google is already threading a very fine line regarding anti-competition and bias especially in Europe... and say, they would choose "Computer BILD" (a German tabloid) over Heise or Golem (actually respectable media), or the other way around - the outcry would be massive and so would the coming lawsuits. Instead, it's better for Google to let the search go to utter dog shit, blame issues on "algorithms" and get sites to pay to play with ads.
p3rls 3y ago
I have a platform for kpop at kpopping.com The top domain for almost every result in my niche is a shitty wordpress with centered text on a purple background. It makes about $10-15k a month even with its lackluster content. It's had spyware ads and porn ads. Still #1 for every query. The funny part is, bing, ddg are even worse. Welcome to webapps in 2023.
- sizzle 3y ago
  $10-15k a month holy shiz how much traffic are you seeing? Any funny stories? Congrats on your success!
Akronymus 3y ago
> Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I absolutely loathe to use fandom for that very reason. They game the system to appear first, even when another, better, wiki exists.And it is nigh on unusable. Sadly one game that really depends on the wiki, that I play only has a fandom site (warframe)
- morjom 3y ago
  I think the top of the crop wikis are the ones for Runescape, OldSchool Runescape and Guild Wars 1 & 2. Wowhead is kind of in a league of its own though.

BasedAnon 3y ago

The only system I own is a PS2, the greatest console of all time is still going strong in 2023

mikepurvis 3y ago
Undoubtedly it had many hits, but a lot of the greats have also since been remastered and can be enjoyed on newer platforms with HD graphics and modernized controls.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  There's a certain point where I just stop caring about further improvements honestly. My belly is full and I am satisfied.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  I broke mine out a few years ago and the load times are kind of irritating, and repeated unskippable cutscenes in some games cooled my retro enthusiasm.
dqh 3y ago
I keep one set up with a CRT TV just for “We Love Katamari” :) When you say it’s still going strong, are you referring to homebrew dev or something?
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  I mean that in between them being solid machines, the amount of content that still gets put out around it, the custom hardware people are designing for it and homebrew software the scene is still very much alive.

ericmcer 3y ago

It’s identical to cooking websites. Take the actual ~100 words of relevant info and stretch it into a 10000 word article with 20 ads on it

nancyhn 3y ago

[flagged]

nekoashide 3y ago
Or pay to buy a trusty AI to help you
sushid 3y ago
Absolutely, 'content spinning' in gaming is an issue, but it can still aid players. Encouraging original content and source acknowledgement is critical. Balancing user experience and ad revenue is tough for gaming sites. For unique discussions, try platforms like Reddit or game-specific forums. Your insights could greatly enrich Zelda content creation
n42 3y ago
Why is this comment so obviously written by ChatGPT?
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Satire right? They’re doing what the game strategy sites are accused of? I don’t know.
  - n42 3y ago
    Probably — it’s just weird how much of an identifiable “voice” ChatGPT has
    - booleandilemma 3y ago
      I wonder if it's the textual equivalent of looking at an "average face"? Is ChatGPT just blending all its sources together into a wall of text that always looks the same? https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-average-face-images-created-using-a-composite-of-100-individual-male-faces_fig1_259071326 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-average-face-...

hinkley 3y ago

The other problem with static sites is that it's trivial for some jerkface to copy your content and repost it. The first case of that I heard about was almost 20 years ago when it happened to a friend. The social circle of the subject matter was small enough that she could name and shame to get it taken down. Today I don't know what you could do.

autoexec 3y ago
It happened to me about that long ago too and I was just flattered, but it also wasn't done by some crappy scammer ripping random content to stuff it full of ads and SEO it to death hoping make a quick buck off of my writing. I have no desire to stop people from copying and sharing whatever they can, but when it's being done with a profit motive it feels a lot more exploitative and dirty.
- hinkley 3y ago
  I would love to see a federated hosting solution where person A can write content and persons B and C can help host it. That gives you the upsides of someone copying your stuff without the downside of them misrepresenting it as their own work. But yeah, SEO has so ruined the internet I expect some sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon solution to spring up to fix it.

duxup 3y ago

What I find amusing is that even when ChatGPT responds to my gaming questions I find the response to be unusually wordy with a surprisingly heavy into paragraph before it answers my simple question. Very similar to those few advertisement sites with a huge block of wonky into text taking forever to get to the answer.

int_19h 3y ago
This is the default behavior from the way it is fine-tuned and from its system prompt. But you can always tell it to give you answers that are short and to the point.
jerf 3y ago
Moderating on a subreddit where people are definitely trying to spam their way in with LLMs, that's becoming on of my big tells. At least the way they are tuned now they are really prone to wordy and pointless intros and outros. (At least in my personal opinion, while intros and outros are fine they should do something more than just summarise again, especially the outro, even if it's just trying to end on a joke.) I recognise there's no reason to believe that is fundamental to the tech, but right now it's a tell. (Though "subtle errors of the type humans don't make" is both a stronger signal and more relevant one.)
- callalex 3y ago
  What motivates you to continue volunteering your time to moderate a Reddit forum when the host has demonstrated a clear and repeated lack of respect or care for the time and concerns of moderation staff?
  - jerf 3y ago
    First, it's my decision, not yours. Secondly, I was helped by a lot of people when I was a young developer and this is how I give back. Since it's a sum of maybe 10 minutes a day, which I was largely already using for this anyhow, it's nearly free. If it ever became a job I'd stop.
  - 3y ago

yieldcrv 3y ago

add reddit to the end of your search query

omeze 3y ago

Yea, its tragic. When I was a kid I would often just go to GameFAQs because that was the only real source, and the guides would be surfaced in google. Its still around but Google gives me 20 crappy ad riddled sites that require a new page click, listicle-style, to get through a 5 minute area

Nexxxeh 3y ago

Slightly off-topic, but sorta related. ToTK straight up sucks for accessibility, cognitive and sensory stuff especially. I find myself using the ZD TotK map more often than I'd like: https://www.zeldadungeon.net/tears-of-the-kingdom-interactive-map/ https://www.zeldadungeon.net/tears-of-the-kingdom-interactiv... And trying to remember what specific enemies are where is not fun for me. Is it fun for anyone? The Compendium doesn't keep track of them when you fight, despite the fact they respawn every blood moon. I want another Savage Lynel Bow. Where did I see that Silver Lynel? I can't remember, but I'm not hunting it all across the map hoping for the vague ping of my Purah Pad sensor when I'm already on top of one. Should I be making my own notes as well? The log is a great idea, but there's lots of stuff it doesn't capture. The quest descriptions often aren't sufficient and markers are often the person that started the quest. Great(!) I appreciate the subtitles, but why is so much of the game unvoiced? Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping? Even with internal FSR and AA disabled so it doesn't occasionally dip to smeared potato quality, it can be hard to spot things if you don't know explicitly where to look, even for hawkish eyesight. The Ultrahand glow can help, but it's a rubbish solution. No colour blind settings. WTAF. There are so many missed opportunities to make this amazing game vastly more accessible. Nintendo has made it clear they don't care about accessibility. It's a real shame, because accessibility makes things better for everyone.

jabroni_salad 3y ago
Do you not use the map stamps?
- Nexxxeh 3y ago
  I do. But there are only ten different ones and they don't tell you what thing you've stamped. So if you're stamping enemies, which one is "skull"? Why doesn't the game do this, it obviously knows what enemies are where? If you've already encountered them, why not just let you filter that enemy on the map? Even if it made you take a photo like it does for the compendium, that'd be better than the "sometimes vague locations" we have now. Why not list map locations of that enemy for all enemies in the compendium? Or at least the special ones like Lynels, Hinox, Talus etc?

greggsy 3y ago

I noticed the same thing with Zelda. The marketability of game FAQs was realised up to a decade ago, but AI content generators, optimised by time-honoured SEO, has evidently accelerated the time to market for new platforms. The success of TOTK, and the availability of articles and Reddit posts has made it ripe for the picking.

SimbaOnSteroids 3y ago

Unrelated, but YouTube is less vague when it comes to walk-throughs

sizzle 3y ago

“Webring of shit” is simply an amazing description for this phenomenon. I hope this term catches on.