Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by saghm 265 days ago
If your goal is to be viral and not care about the quality, then maybe following Mr. Beast's advice might make sense. If you'd rather risk popularity by trying to what you think will actually be better without knowing whether it will end up being viral, it makes sense probably to take anything he says with a grain of salt.
1 comments

I guess my point is, writing 3,000 words on social media choices isn't going to make the game engine any better. But I can see how it is really important to the community and developers, which is to say, it's really important if the product is not a game engine but An Open Source (Esoteric) Game Engine Hosted On GitHub. Do you see what I am saying? That is the difference between making the best videos and making the best YOUTUBE videos. Mr. Beast isn't confusing, he's capitalizing the important part of what he is trying to say!
I fully understand what you're saying; I just don't agree with it. For starters, people can be complex and have more than one goal. The effect of making an open source project isn't necessarily just the utility of the project itself, and if some of those other potential effects are desired, the best way to do things won't necessarily be the same as if there's only one output that someone cares about.

For another thing, even if there aren't any other specific effects that are desired, there still might be some that are specifically not wanted, and avoiding those might be important. Mr. Beast is a exactly the type of example that demonstrates this point; by focusing on making the "best" YouTube content as measured purely by popularity, he's done all sort of things that someone might very understandably want to avoid. I agree that he's not confusing, but that's not the issue with him. He's extremely transparent in how little he cares about whether what he does actually helps anyone other than himself (or if he hurts other people in the process of helping himself). I suspect this is quite different from the mentality of most open source developers, who are putting in personal time and effort towards contributing to something that realistically has little likelihood of direct personal benefits for those involved. What you're perceiving as a lack of focus comes across to me as having the humility and thoughtfulness to try to look at the big picture and understand one's actions in the context of a larger environment that isn't improved in the long term by pursuing a single narrow goal to the exclusion of literally everything else.

Okay… Unity and Unreal have a lot less focus than Bevy, but are much better game engines. They will be shipping more great games every day than Bevy will in the next year, including beloved meaningful ones, like Silksong and Indiecute and Cuddlygame or whatever. And hardly anyone there, like most big corpo employees, is directly benefitted from the better games, they get paid the same amount of money, but the rub is also, everyone I know working at Unity and Epic is really sincere and loves games.

Of course I understand these are different things. Bevy is not at all competing with Unity.

Because Bevy is trying to be best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine. I’m just trying to be a little jocular about how… you know, I didn’t say unfocused, but surely it seems a little silly to write 3000 words in response to a community worried about which open source social media federation protocols to adopt. That giant thread IS the product, it makes perfect sense from the POV that Bevy is trying to be the best OPEN SOURCE GITHUB GAME ENGINE, in the same way that Mr Beast is making the best YOUTUBE videos or Egyptology professors are making the best EGYPTOLOGY writing or painters are making the best PERSONALLY MEANINGFUL FINE ART or whatever. I like Bevy!

> Bevy is trying to be best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine

You're the only one saying this. No one else, including the person working on the project that you originally responded to, have claimed this is their sole goal to the inclusion of everything else. It's hard to tell if you think they literally don't care about anything else but are choosing their actions poorly, or if you think that they have the wrong priorities and should change them, or if you just didn't really stop to consider that maybe your assumption about what you're saying they're trying to do is incorrect and haven't read what I'm saying closely enough to understand that no number of examples of other things that happen to fit what you're saying is relevant if you aren't able to establish why anyone else should agree that it applies here in the first place.

> Okay… Unity and Unreal have a lot less focus than Bevy

Unity and Unreal also have billions of dollars in funding

One could argue the opposite, let's take bevy as an example: more popularity could bring in more contributors or more funding which would hopefully result in making a better engine. The same could apply to Mr. Beast videos (more views translate to more money which translate to better production and staff which translate to more or better videos) but the goals are inherently different (maximizing profit which rewards quantity over quality)