> 95% of the work done can be automated and the competition is primarily marketing guys who can't code shit.
What exactly would you try to automate? (Having done some coding) I see very little room for automation. Social media marketing is all about strategy and content. Or is it not?
Social media management isn't only about posting content. It's also about analyzing competition. You can build tools that process posts from competitive pages and start making correlations to draw conclusions. A lot of social media analytics shops do that.
Some things you can do in bulk (economies of scale), outsource, schedule, or otherwise automate.
You can create pipelines that save labor - like clients for platforms that make answering common questions / interacting with users way more comfortable and suited to your targeted workflow than the default clients.
On the creativity front, you can also generate random, semi-plausible stuff to inspire you when you're in a rut.
It's not quite about making everything automated, but about leveraging code, systems thinking, and collaborators in such a way that your performance is incredible. It's really feasible.
Nowadays I can't come up with any good reason to use XMPP since there's Matrix and https://riot.im/
XMPP has adapted over time to support various chat and instant messaging features that we today take for granted. These adaptions come in the form of Extensions/XEP. I remember spending two hours with a geek friend to configure something that resembles what we get from any other instant messenger today (working across multiple devices).
Meanwhile, Matrix just works. Granted, UX involved with the key management associated with E2EE was not what it should have been. But, that has largely been fixed in v1.0.
Wouldn't spend the time to get into XMPP, if I didn't already have a decent network of friends there. And yeah, there's a XMPP/Matrix bridge available if you decide to go Matrix. https://matrix.org/docs/projects/as/matrix-xmpp-bridge.html
It's interesting that you compare Riot with Conversations as Conversations feels and looks much better to me (native UI) while Riot for Android always gave me the webapp feel. But Riot works consistently on all OSes while Conversations (in my opinion the best free/federated messenger to date) is available only on Android.
Riot/Android is a completely native app, but it grew pretty organically and is far from perfect. We're in the final stages of replacing it with a rewrite in Kotlin nicknamed RiotX, which should be unrecognisably better: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android.
And any plans of design overhaul in a way that it appeals to the end user too (something people could use as an alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram) along with it being used as an IRC/Discord/Slack alternative?
Riot/iOS is already native, and works pretty well, so will likely evolve to behave more like RiotX as time goes on rather than getting rewritten.
RiotX is trying to be something that starts off feeling like WhatsApp or Telegram, but can expand into IRC/Discord/Slack for powerusers. Who knows if it'll work.
This looked really good when I tried last but it was really unstable and lacking features. Will check again. PS. That link isn't working - this one does https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass
Logging in with @cyphar:cyphar.com works for me. I host my own homeserver so I did have to set it up, but if you are using someone else's homeserver that is all you need to do. The homeserver and identity server information is all provided with the new .well-known/matrix/client support.
if you're not a matrix.org user, you either enter your full mxid to discover your server, or manually enter your homeserver's URL in Advanced. if this isn't working, please yell...
Matrix just about replaces my need for other services like IRC and XMPP too, helped in part by the various bridges available. Plus Matrix doesn’t suffer from problems with client state like IRC and XMPP do, which is very beneficial on mobile devices or unreliable networks.
You can download freedombox and put it on an rpi to get matrix-synapse on it. Took me an hour to get a Matrix server running which then you can use with Riot and it works perfectly.
Now if you mean to get your own local riot frontend for it, I thought there were some docker scripts that would let you do that quickly but I haven't tried those.
Are you going to elaborate in the specific nature of your issues or leave some bait like that? Riot.im should be trivially installable on most Linux systems, including the raspberry pi.
The specific nature of my issue is that there are a finite number of hours in a day.
If you go to the trouble of working on multi-year open source project it shows a lack of foresight to not include a quick install guide for one of the mostly widely sold hobbyist hardware platforms in the world.
Are you talking about the riot-web client? There are Debian packages for it, but even if you don't use those the client is all client-side JavaScript so you can statically host it. I will submit a bug report to add a quick-install guide to the README but it's quite trivial (untar into /var/www/html).
matrix-synapse does have quick install guides but a RPi is probably a bit too low spec to run a matrix server that will federate with matrix.org (though it depends strongly on what rooms you join and how many users you have).
>I remember spending two hours with a geek friend to configure something that resembles what we get from any other instant messenger today (working across multiple devices).
Kind of like complaining that email is too complicated because it took a long time to set someone up. XMPP is a protocol. You would have to provide more context to let us understand why the use of XMPP extensions was a pain.
The matrix.org infrastructure was hacked. Yes, this is obviously a problem (though their recent blog post does help restore some confidence).
But saying we shouldn't use Matrix because of this event is like saying we shouldn't use IRC because Freenode was hacked. Or we shouldn't use XMPP because HipChat was hacked. Not to mention that Matrix has sane E2EE support so folks who were using it didn't have to worry about their conversations being broken (and E2EE-by-default for Matrix is on the horizon).
the CI server that was compromised was used (mainly) for running tests rather than builds. we don't believe that any builds were compromised. https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... has the full details, but yes: just because the project's infrastructure got breached doesn't mean that the protocol or wider network was affected: it wasn't.
Had a really hard time watching that trailer. Makes me question if the developers have researched what level of gore their audience finds acceptable in an age of near photo realistic gaming.
To each its own, maybe. But I didn't find the trailer that gory and certainly not realistic. MK has always looked like a silly US fighting game to me.
There are hints of really gruesome things regarding joint dislocation in the trailer but it doesn't come anywhere to the discomfort I have experienced watching certain movies.
I am not talking about over the top, blood everywhere, fake and grossly exaggerated gore movies. Think of scenes involving cutting tendons in one, eye gouging and the eye hanging in another one... That kind of things, which were only glimpsed at in those movies, upping the discomfort level way higher than a 2 minutes brawl between an electric god and a razor man throwing each other 12 feet up in the air.
edit: Now, I am not saying setting up and producing these scenes has no impact on the people working on it for months but spectators experience something different: the end result, not the process.
Meh. I watched the trailer, it seemed desperate for attention.
When the first two or three MK games came out they were indeed a big part of a culture of its time, being both controversial and a kind of (trashy, commercial) statement against the puritanical/hypocritical mores of the time. The limits of videogames as media were being tested. That side of the controversy won.
Nowadays? Meh. They dialed up the stupid gore in an attempt to remain relevant. Nobody cares. I only hear about Mortal Kombat once in a while when someone writes some piece about its violence when a new game comes out. A couple of weeks later they are selling it at some budget price. Nobody cares anymore. Never heard from anyone I know actually playing the new games. Who knows what were the innovations in Mortal Kombat 8? Me neither.
What is photorealistic changes every decade. Doom used to be photorealistic, then Unreal, then Crysis, now modern games are photorealistic. And yet they don't look realistic at all.
It doesn't 'change every decade' since it's a style rather than just a function of technology. Doom was never 'photorealistic'. The original 90s MK is, Smash Bros Ultimate isn't.
I was about to suggest Myst 2 onwards as exceptions, but then I looked at some gameplay videos on YouTube and even those don’t look very realistic any more.
Your comment made me watch the trailer, though I don't like MK games. The gore is so unrealistic (there's like, 1/50th that amount of blood in the whole human body!) that it didn't bother me. The closest thing it reminds me of is Kill Bill.
True I guess. "Acceptable" was probably the wrong word. "Most enjoyable"? Still, do gamers think it's a great game while coping (and would have preferred less gore) or is more gore always preferred?
There's a huge difference between silly gore (e.g. DOOM) and disgusting/frightening gore (e.g. Resident Evil). I, for myself, certainly know that I finished RE5 despite its gore, not because of it, and I realize I will never play certain games (e.g. Alien Isolation); if I could go back I'd probably stop myself from watching the Alien movies and a bunch of other gore / psycho movies, too.
Mortal Kobat's niche is largely people who really like the over the top gore for whatever reason, in the same way some people are horror movie gore fans. MK is also one of the few Western fighting games left which have a different play style to other fighters like Street Fighter, UNIST, or Tekken which probably makes up the most of the playerbase that might fall in the less gore category.
Couldn't disagree more. We should stop worrying about what other people are doing for entertainment. Totally fine if you don't want to play or watch violent media but judging others and calling their enjoyment unacceptable is a pretty far departure from an open and free society.
I disagree with your dismissal as some form of 'free society' bs. Free society is all well and good but we have reasonable laws for a reason. There are some people who find torture amusing and end up serial killers....no offence but their opinion is not equal to every one else's and should be removed from society imo. Just because someone is entertained doesn't not make it acceptable. That's a farce
"There are some people who find torture amusing and end up serial killers..."
You've described maybe what, 100 people in the country at this moment? Vs. the 11 million sales of the previous version of Mortal Kombat, and will likely buy this one. So sure, 100 folks remove from the equation, but you do NOT get to take the 11 million who found it entertaining out of the equation.
Huge crowds watched people kill each other in Colloseums.
Huge crowds cheered as people were executed, as a matter of course. It was entertainment.
So, were all those societies of the past being harmed and corrupted by their entertainment in a broad-sce way? In a way we can see in retrospect, that caused them to become worse than they already were?
Those societies were worse off because they valued human life less and this was reflected in their entertainment. Seems like a reasonably unobjectionable no-brainer.
As a very fair skinned person, this suggestion is laughable. Clothes and a hat are not an alternative to sunscreen, you just can't get the protection coverage that you can with lotion.
There are clothes marketed as 45 or 60 UPF and even blue denim jeans supposedly are equivalent to 166 SPF.
Wearing long sleeves, long pants, and a wide-brimmed hat and shoes it seems like sunscreen would only be needed for hands and neck. https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/1238
Not practical for swimming unless you’re wearing a wetsuit of course but depending on weather conditions I do find long sleeves, pants, and a good hat can be practical for outdoor activity like hiking instead of sunscreen everywhere.
Also won't work well to protect your face from the UV reflection while skiing. Spring skiing in particular is often too warm to comfortable wear a full face mask.
As the same type of person, I don't think it's laughable ;-) I rock my Ex Officio and Coolibar gear every summer. It's a heck of a lot easier than putting on sunscreen all the time!
My very fair-skinned twins were slathered with sunscreen by nursery school staff and both developed an allergy to it. They use a shirt and hat. Works fine.
That and mineral sunscreens with just zinc oxide which doesn't penetrate the skin (it does look like white paint so not the most photogenic, but that's kind of the point)
I've gotten forever accounts with shodan and a very popular vpn service, I was half expecting the service quality to at least diminish after a year or two around the positive return mark but didn't happen. They've outperformed my expectations dramatically.
What exactly would you try to automate? (Having done some coding) I see very little room for automation. Social media marketing is all about strategy and content. Or is it not?