#Like people going ''subscription service is fine but they don't have to delete all their previous content'' they're literally not ??

[rompetrizas]

Very excited to see where the new Watcher service will go the way most people are literally just making things up to get mad at and spreading misinformation for fun just to have an argument against it. I remember literally the same reaction in the comments section of College Humor when they announced Dropout 🤷

[aurea-corde]

I've never seen a single episode of anything related to watcher but I am eating up all this drama. Also sorry to y'all going through this

i appreciate that anon 😭 i've seen several good nuanced takes on the situation thankfully. the company definitely did mess up how it introduced the streaming service to people: they said in the video they were going to paywall all existing and new content and then in the comments and in the variety article pretended like that was never their intent. the variety article reveals that they were in fact initially told watcher was going to delete all existing content. the CEO in particular but in general all the founders said that the amount they are charging is affordable - specifically that anyone could afford it - which no they can't obviously. As they are now finding out the hard way. The CEO Steven also made an instagram post insinuating people who wouldn't subscribe just no longer want to watch them, rather than the reality which is that a massive majority of the audience can't afford to. Because he is the CEO, people are blaming the entire thing on him, but it's also important to remember there are actually three founder-owners with decision-making abilities in the company. Shane and Ryan are adults, and the way people are acting like Steven is some kind of dictator, Ryan just went along with it but Shane is the people's anticapitalist hero who was simply outvoted is not a great look. Especially the posts that refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of racial biases here. Mistakes were made, poc are not immune to criticism, but let's consider why so many feel like Shane was forced into this by the evil Steven (and people in the comments have literally called him evil for this) and either lump Ryan in with him or give Ryan no agency in the situation whatsoever. Steven is the most likely to have made the proposal as the closest thing Watcher has to a business-minded founder, but the other two clearly agreed with him. They could have just decided not to be in the video. I also don't see a world where they contractually obligated themselves to every whim of Steven's like some people are suggesting.

Do I think they're a bit sheltered in their LA life? Yeah, probably. I'm pretty sheltered myself - I live a comfortable middle class life in Australia, have a good job and am studying law. I could definitely afford the subscription. But I don't want to atm, or at least until they respond to the situation. Are they the worst most evil capitalists because they want to charge money for the content they create? No, not inherently. People supported them on Patreon because of course creatives should be paid for their labour, and ideally paid well enough to live comfortably. But the combo of bad business decisions (e.g. hiring too many staff too quickly while also wanting to pay them above a living wage, not advertising the patreon, not utilising revenue streams that aren't a streaming service like youtube memberships, spending what Ryan has said is hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single season of a series they have called Ghost Files) and the fact the CEO is pretty open about his comfortable lifestyle (drives a tesla which btw folks isn't a luxury car it's just a more expensive one, has a $300 matcha machine, has a series based on fine dining vs more affordable restaurants), means people are understandably mad because they are struggling financially and the founders (from what we know) are not - but they're trying to tell people that 6 USD is affordable for everyone.

It's a lot less to do with the fact of them charging for content as much as the way they went about it and in particular how it's been phrased to people has come across really insensitive. There's other logistics with the streaming service itself that were not thought out at all for international viewers, but I won't get into that here. And the pretending they were always going to leave their content up and telling viewers not to spread misinformation is scummy to me - at least acknowledge that was a mistake you made and backtracked on. It's just a mess but I really loved their videos and hope they make Youtube's Greatest Apology Video Ever (unironically) and try to undo some of the damage.

edit: someone in the replies made a great point that teslas could actually be considered a luxury car in some countries outside of the US, and I fully agree that 6 USD is 1) too much for what they offer, esp in this economic climate and 2) wayyyyy too much when converted to other currencies. I've seen other Australians say the conversion is too much for them but I know viewers in other countries say it comes out to literally thousands for them - if they can even access the site at all from their country.

[dollarpuppet]

Moving part #3: web server

I decided to create an online video game. I didnt pick a game engine yet but I have a good idea of how the client side will work (Bootstrap + React).

The client-side stuff runs in the browser, of course, but it doesn't get there magically. The static assets (CSS, JavaScript, images, etc) have to be hosted on a web server somewhere. And to make the user experience as great as possible, that web server should probably be hiding behind a Content Delivery Network although it's not mandatory for the time being.

My video game will likely be a single-page web application, which means that the content of the page will be generated dynamically in the browser via JavaScript (like Gmail or YouTube) rather than be mostly generated on a server somewhere (like IMDB or Amazon.com).

This means that I can safely postpone decisions regarding the API (the interaction between the web page and the backend, like a central database or something similar); all I need to decide at this point is where to host the static assets, which doesn't shackle me to any given provider for the API part.

Choosing a domain name

Having a cool domain name is always great, but it's not as important as it used to be. A lot of people nowadays go directly to a search engine page rather than type a domain name for the first time; after that the URL is in the browser cache and possibly bookmarked, so it matters even less.

It doesn't mean that the domain name is not important. For instance, I can never remember the domain name for the webcomic Cyanide & Happiness, and I have to do a web search every time rather than start typing the address in the address bar; a small annoyance, of course, but an annoyance nonetheless, and with no apparent reason.

For my video game, I already picked a name: the dollar puppet (for reasons that will become more clear later). Registering a domain name is easy and there are many providers, but this is one element for which I always pick AWS. Prices are low, privacy is included, there's a lot of TLD available, and I can choose to either host the DNS records on AWS Route 53 or point the DNS somewhere else.

Since I don't know yet if I'll use AWS a lot for this video game, I'll keep the zone that gets created by default on Route 53 when registering a domain name. I can delete it later, in the meantime it will cost me $0.50 / month, and while I find it expensive for what I get out of it, I can live with it.

Why do I find $0.50 / month expensive? Because I have, at the moment, about 45 registered domains (for no good reasons); that's about $500 in domain registration fees per year (unavoidable) and the Route 53 hosting would cost me another $250 / year while I can get that hosting for free with my $2/month Zoho email subscription.

(BTW - I love Zoho for email, it's a breeze to get a really really good setup for multiple domains)

As a Linode customer I can also get free DNS hosting there and the UI is really easy to use.

Back to the fundamental question

To cloud or not to cloud? There's no really bad decision possible here, because even if I pick a terrible provider for the web server, the stuff will be cached on a CDN so it will not impact end users that much.

The scenarios that make sense:

run nginx on a Linode VM, and use Cloudflare if I want a CDN

store the assets in AWS S3 (which can be configured to run as a web server) and use AWS CloudFront for the CDN

use Linode object storage (similar to S3) and again use Cloudflare for the CDN

Instead of AWS I could use Azure (they're as reliable and secure as AWS), and instead of Linode I could use DigitalOcean, but I'm used to AWS and Linode and I don't care enough to consider other providers at the moment.

The plot thickens: SSL certificates

In this day and age it makes no sense to use plain HTTP (or plain WebSocket, for that matter) so it's clear I'll have to deal with SSL certificates (more accurately: TLS certificates, but who cares).

There are two easy ways to get SSL certificates for free: letsencrypt, AWS certificates. On AWS, the certificates are only available for specific services (ex: CloudFront); when used for VMs, they cannot be assigned to a single instance, only to a load-balancer (which cannot be turned off to save money).

Pricing

Whether I'm using AWS or Linode, I'm looking at most at $5/month price tag for this part, so it doesn't matter much to me.

Deployment on Linode

Provisioning a web server on Linode is not a lot of work:

Provision a VM

Add my SSH keys

Configure the firewall

Install nginx

Install certbot (to allocate and renew SSL certificates)

Upload my code

In terms of Linux distro, I'm a huge fan of Fedora on the desktop, but for a server it's not ideal given that the release schedule is fast-paced and I don't have time to deal with updates. If I was to do this right, I would probably pick Arch Linux since it's a rolling release and is the easiest distro for server hardening, but it's too much work so this time I'd probably go with CentOS 8, which comes with the added benefit of working smoothly with podman for rootless containers.

Ubuntu would work fine too, but if I'm going to expose a server to the evil people of the interwebs, I don't see SELinux as optional so it's an extra step; I also don't see why I have to manually enable firewalld, or why I have to suffer through the traumatic experience of using nano when running visudo, or why I have to use adduser because the default options for useradd suck, so this time I'll pass on Ubuntu.

Deployment on AWS

Running a static website on AWS is very easy:

Create S3 buckets in 2 or 3 regions (the name is not really important) and configure them to allow static hosting (it's just a checkbox and a policy on the bucket). In theory it works with a single region but might as well get the belt & suspenders setup since the cost is more or less the same; also the multi-region setup allows for cool A/B testing and other fun deployment scenarios later.

Provision a SSL certificate matching the domain name

Create a CloudFront distribution and configure it to use the S3 buckets as origin servers

That's it. High availability and all that, in just a few clicks, although for some reason it does take a while for the CloudFront distribution to be online (sometimes 30 minutes).

Another cool thing with this setup is that I can put my static assets in CodeCommit (the dirt cheap AWS git service) and use CodeBuild to update the S3 buckets whenever the code changes. There are some shenanigans involved because of the multi-region setup but nothing difficult.

Some people prefer Github to CodeCommit because of additional features, and this can work too, but I'm not a git maniac and I don't want to deal with oauth to connect github to AWS so I'll pass on Github. And to be honest, if I was unable to use CodeCommit for some reason, I'd probably deploy a Gitea server somewhere rather than use Github which I find too opinionated.

Operations on Linode

Running my own web server is not a lot of work. Once nginx is configured, the only thing I would have to do would be a bit of monitoring and dealing with the occasional reboot when the Linode engineers have to update the hypervisor (they send notifications ahead of time and also once it's done). As long as I configure nginx (or the podman container) for autostart I don't have to do anything other than make sure it's still working after the reboot.

If I go with the object storage solution, it's even easier since there's no VM to deal with.

Operations on AWS

When using S3 and CloudFront, there's nothing else to do on AWS, except keeping an eye on certificate renewals and the occasional change in how the platform works (which doesn't happen a lot and comes with heads up long before it happens).

And the winner is...

All things considered, for the website hosting I'm going to use AWS S3 and CloudFront. If at some point Linode offers a CDN service I will probably revisit this, but for now I don't want to deal with origin servers hosted somewhere and the CDN hosted somewhere else.