The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it’s a terrible design for people that aren’t the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.

Defederation works against that though. When I first joined a few weeks ago, a lot of the discussion was taking place on Beehaw. I joined a few communities over there and started to enjoy the experience but in an instant, all of that was blocked because Beehaw decided to defederate from Lemmy.World (and others). That sort of thing will happen more and more in the future. I don’t want to have to create a dozen different accounts on a dozen different instances to view the content I want to see: I want a simple interface with everything in one spot.

Reddit offers the “everything in one spot” piece, but they killed the simple interface possible via apps like RIF and replaced it with an abysmal official app.

Lemmy offers the “simple interface” piece with apps like Jerboa, but the federation aspect of it makes it hard to get everything in one spot.

The second a competitor offers both features with a large enough community to allow for meaningful discussion, I’d be happy to make the switch.

So far, yes, but I don’t really have any allegiances to this site and will jump ship to a competitor in a heartbeat if something better comes along. I know some people like the decentralized federation approach here, but I actually see that as the biggest downside to using this site. The value proposition of Reddit in its heyday was that it offered a single landing point for all sorts of discussions that used to be scattered across hundreds of different forums. The decentralized federation approach moves away from that, and while that offers some advantages, it also comes with a lot of disadvantages too.

In what context?

In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.

Doubt it. It’s just dumb low effort posting over here trying to force inside jokes on Lemmy. I blocked all of that sort of stuff back in the day on Reddit, and I blocked it here too.

Just as a quick FYI, on the PS4 (and presumably the PS5 too), if you click on any of the hidden trophies, you can press square (I think) to show the description of how to earn it. This wasn’t possible in the PS3 era, but it’s one of the upgrades they implemented in PS4. That’ll save you a Google search.

As for why, as others have mentioned, it’s mostly for spoilers or hiding easter eggs that are more fun if you find them naturally rather than going out of your way looking to earn a trophy.

I agree, though hopefully this will pass with time as people default to Lemmy rather than Reddit for their downtime. That said, when the Titan submersible craft story broke a week or two ago, there was decent discussion on here. For the most part, comment threads are a ghost town aside from threads bitching about Reddit, but there are occasional exceptions to the rule that should become more common as people get adjusted here.

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It’s mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.