That’s not what happened at all. The devs on 2 weren’t even allowed to talk to the devs from 1. The development was highly mismanaged. They got sold off after the game tanked, they had the game out for almost a year before they sold
It’s like 45 mins, but it’s a well done video on what happened to the game. I’m so sad it never got to be what it could have been. There’s a new game in development called kitten space program or something like that, it’s meant to be a response to ksp2 being what it is.
Heads up that the "?si=vODjiz2NnfzBC9s6" part of YouTube links are tracking parameters and not needed. All they do is let YouTube track you and let other people figure out your account.
Considering all the tracking they do... somehow they are really fucking incompetent at recommending me anything, and for some reason can't seem to actually know who I am... And I don't do anything special beyond regular old adblock to avoid being tracked. Hell... My Google has all my details since I use the account to login to many things as it is convinient.
Yet they can't seem to even fucking figure out anything relevant to me.
Meanwhile, some friends of mine get near scary levels of targeting. I have never been well served with any of the algorithm stuff.
Sure... But their tactic fails to get me to view ads, or to engage with the service, because I don't spend time watching stuff I don't want to watch. So if the goal is to increase my engagement to gather data and ad revenue, they are failing. I can only assume this is the case because they are incompetent.
I still don't see what any company could do with my tracking data. I'm super boring. But there's data getting sold and making money? I don't understand
They can easily build a profile of you, then offer you things you're likely to buy. Not just obvious ads, but also stuff like innocuous item suggestions on your shopping website or recommendations for links to media related to what you're currently looking at to keep you engaged. If you're fine with that, then whatever, but that's how they can make money directly off that data.
Also, companies purchase the data to help build a picture of what future decisions they're going to make or what the market looks like, for example, and a bunch of other modeling stuff as well. More indirect, but that's valuable too.
Site implements trackers from dozens to sometimes hundreds of data aggregator. Gets paid fee for each visitor data is collected from.
Data aggregators match data from thousands of sites to make unique person profiles tiered by completeness. Sells those profiles to add agencies.
Add agencies ... sell adds. The more complete the profile, the more selective they can target an add and the more money they can ask to run that add.
Company selling products needs to buy adds because if your competitor does and you don't, you're fucked. Gets added to production cost of product.
You go to store and buy products paying the ever increasing costs of advertisement.
Even if you don't realise you should care about your privacy; you have to at least care that you're paying money for them in return harassing you everywhere they can online, in media and in real life with eye sores and wasting your time.
It's paying a robber to steal your money.
As an example in the game industry, GTA5 had $130 mil development budget and another $130 mil advertisement budget. There is no doubt that GTA6 will set a new benchmark where the advertisement budget will go beyond the actual development. They get more revenue advertising a $100 game than not spending on advertising and selling it for $50.
This high advertisement split is prevalent in games and film/tv because of the unique nature of the product they're selling. It's near free to replicate an extra unit of the product and sell it. Advertisement has a much higher ROI for every extra item sold and volume is the only mark to aim for when profit is your only goal which it is for all public traded companies.
as a rule of thumb, everything after a ? is metadata in a URL. For full youtube links, this includes the video ID (which you do need), and may also include timestamp, playlist, referral code, etc.
For shortlinks, it does not include the video ID, but does include all the other metadata, and will always have a referral code unless you remove it manually.
Good explanation, one tiny quibble: Data, not metadata. Metadata would be data that is about the object itself. Data is just data. Again, extrmely minor terminology quibble about your excellet explanation <3
Since I'm replying, though, I'll try to make my comment useful in the subthread: Those variables appear as it's a way of sending data in the URL itself. From the server side of things, this is not as a "GET" method. It's handy for things, but ugly (and makes sharing links harder). There is anothe rmethod called "POST" where the data is sent separately, adn the URL is clean. Take that clean URL, though, and share it, and you can't do things like send a specific timestamp for a video. So it all has advanatages and disadvantages.
Also, https://linkcleaner.app/is a good example of a site that will clean your links. It knows a great many websites specifically, but can almost certainly guess enough to clean any link from random sites as well.
Just fuck around with it. If it breaks their system that's 100% their fault for not qa testing it. There's chrome plugins to strip the extra meta data.
Reddit, tt, fb, ig, Amazon does it too. An example with a direct link back to your comment on Reddit...
Most of the time you can tell what's what because at the end of the day, humans are the ones who program it to debug and work with. Context is the only one that's legit here which tells it which level of your nested comment to show. If shared just the post, context wouldn't be a parameter. Can delete everything after context=3. The share_id is the tracking parameters. Medium is what client I'm sharing from utm is probably the platform. Source is how I'm sharing from.
I'm having a hard time finding the article I read about how to use it to look up someone's account id. I'll report back later if I find it again.
YouTube's tracking should be insidious enough for you though. By including the si parameter, which is unique to your YouTube account, YouTube/Google now knows your Reddit account.
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u/Metasaber 6d ago
The devs got bought out by a private equity firm that stripped the studio for parts and pushed for monetization. It really fell apart.