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Whoah, Small Spender! Steam Sets Limits For Users Who Spend Less Than $5
As GameSpot reports, Valve has implemented a policy that reduces the privileges of Steam users unless those users have spent $5 through the service. Along the same lines as suggestions to limit spam by imposing a small fee on emails, the move is intended to reduce resource abuse as a business model. From the article:
"Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do," Valve said. "One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam."
Restricted actions include sending invites, opening group chats, and taking part in the Steam marketplace.
Let's hope this spreads to Facebook, Twitter, and other antisocial networks. People would be forced to actually engage with real people in real life for a change.
Of course that won't happen - these companies are selling you, so they will do nothing that will reduce their user base, even if it makes it a higher quality.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Google+'s main problem was that it arrived to the party way too late. Late enough that "but how do I get all my friends to move with me?" and "how do I get all my old pictures and such moved over?" were significant hurdles. Had Google+ come along while Facebook was not yet open to the whole world and had a much smaller userbase then it might have stood a chance.
Their other problem is that circles, whilst an interesting idea, require far too much maintenance effort when adding new friends to be worthwhile for the majority of users. The extra step of adding a friend or post to all of the relevant circles upon creation is one that most people probably don't want. The more successful social networks seem to make posting and adding friends trivial with little administrative overhead. I could use Google+ in that way (i.e. one circle), but I'd feel obligated to do it the "correct" way... and that's too much effort for the perceived reward; the frequency with which I want to make a post limited to a particular subset of people on a social network is vanishingly small.