The biggest part of this undoubtedly has to be the ability to use phones outside the Nexus/Pixel lines.
I've been a Project Fi customer for a few years now and love to wax poetic about it, but always have to add the caveat of "oh, but you can't use your current phone.". Which is a bigger deal when many of my friends are using iPhones and would never consider switching to Android.
Apple is 24% of the smartphone market so anything they do on their their systems only affects that minority portion and isn't denying competitors access to the market.
Android on the other hand has a 74% share of smartphone market so anything they do impacts a majority of the market and could limit others access to the market.
Not necessarily, several of my co-workers are big into Overwatch so when the Overwatch League started up in January I started watching matches with them. After a few weeks of asking questions as we went, I felt like I had a pretty handle on it and could start to contribute to the discussion.
You are absolutely correct though. Those first few weeks I had no idea what was happening aside from the occasional head-shot.
The popular FPS games like Overwatch, CS:GO, or Fortnite are easy to understand for someone who've never played them. Dota/LoL/Starcraft are completely different though -- you needs lots of hours of experience to even have any clue as to what's going on. Try watching it, and you'll see what I mean.
This is true of DotA and LoL, but not really Starcraft. Starcraft is fairly easy to pick up and almost all the relevant information to understand who is ahead, who is behind, and how the game is going is easily visible on the screen.
Games like DotA and LoL have too many mechanics built into them that are just debt from their origins as a Warcraft 3 mod. They're not really intuitive or sensical to the uninitiated.
Moreover, in Starcraft if lots of different things are happening at once, it's as technically challenging for the players to keep track of as it is for the viewers. With MOBAs the action is scattered across 3 to 6 areas of the map at the same time, so it's way more complicated to keep track of as a spectator.
The Blizzard MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, was kind of designed from the ground up to be a lot more watchable. They got rid of the item stuff and moved the complexity from being focused on the character builds to more strategic stuff that's visible on the map. But it doesn't seem to have taken off that much.
As someone who grew up in Columbus, went to school in Cincinnati, and moved back to Columbus for work, I think you're being a little dramatic here.
I don't know where you're from in the Midwest, but the vast majority of people I interact with around here are extremely live-and-let-live. In fact I can't remember the last time I came across someone or a situation that was actively hostile about beliefs or sexual orientation. Obviously these are just my anecdotes, but I run in a pretty sexually and racially diverse scene and they all love Columbus as well.
Your hyperbole and vindictive reactions to a diverse region of the country are certainly going to help close the divide.
That's the attitude that I like. I can't stand false liberals and progressives. Nobody gets to tell anyone how to live their lives. If I wanted that I'd move to a rural village in Pakistan.
Columbus native here. It varies wildly; my wife lived in an upper-class suburban area and reports an experience similar to yours, but I grew up in a poorer, slightly more rural-adjacent area. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I was called a “faggot” for things like wanting to recycle or not wanting to get in fistfights. I overheard racial epithets on a near-daily basis; telling racist jokes where the punchline was the death or maiming of a minority were widely socially acceptable.
Culture is the #1 reason that I have no desire to move back to Columbus.
I graduated from Ohio State in 2011 and moved away in 2012, so much more recently than that actually. A woman that I dated in high school is now a teacher at the school we graduated from, and she told me that she sees pretty vile behavior from her students (particularly after the election). So we are not talking about a long time ago, nor are we talking about one or two isolated incidents.
Motivation to get out and vote, probably. Remember Proposition 8 in California?
A Democrat just won in Alabama. It's about motivation for voting. The research triangle in NC is the most heavily populated area in NC, it should carry the state with 1/5 of the state's people living there and actually voting.
You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right.
I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
My daily mixes never flow correctly. I'll have a softer, technical indie track followed by a technical heavy metal song. It's bad enough that I can't use them at all.
My friends and I average over 20 hours a week as well and we're all pissed about their recent decisions.
The removal of messaging/direct sharing was the final straw for me.
Wait. They removed this feature? I unsubscribed over a year ago but this was one of the biggest things I missed after no longer having Spotify. What is the idea behind removing features? I do remember lyrics being removed and that was awful too.
They also ripped out messaging and the ability to share music directly after allowing it to die a slow death that involved it being completely hidden form the web client.
As a big fan of data analysis I've also noticed that they no longer accurately report or record user preferences and instead heavily weight popular artists.
They also only sent out the "Year in Review" to people that were subscribed to their spam emails.
Those two things are what brought me to them over Google Play Music. I'm currently in the process of switching back.
This is so frustrating hear. I'm going through the same thing right now as google music just wasn't doing the job for me and enjoyed my experience with Spotify much more.
