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To be honest, your initial instinct of "only losers would spend so much effort at something that matters so little" was completely right. I myself don't spend all that effort on all my ideas to improve trivial things in games because the time and energy that would go into that is so much better spent improving other things in my life. I suppose you should have one, maybe two "useless" hobbies where you spend this much effort to improve things, but no more. Money matter a lot to a lot of people, so it's not surprising at all that you'd get crazy effort going into optimizing its generation, and it's also why there aren't many easy-to-think-about ideas for making lots of money, but there's loads of those for getting better at stuff nobody cares about.
Well, partly true. The instinct's not really connected to anyone being a loser. I mean, I've spent considerably more time playing those games casually since the time when some practice ideas had occurred to me than it would have taken to see them through. Assuming those efforts had paid off and future games become more satisfying, it would have probably been worth it. But that feeling of disbelief occurs all the time. Sometimes disbelief that Problem N really requires time-intensive Method C to solve. Sometimes disbelief someone "up high" would really seed a rumor somewhere in the blogosphere so that eventually tabloids quote it, then next tier up newspapers quote it, and then good ones talk about it until it looks legit to anyone not willing to do a deep dive to investigate the dependencies.
Everything I listed could make you money. Optimizing youtube views absolutely can get you paid loads, especially if you got in on it early. Getting really good at a game can get you paid as a streamer, booster, or coach. Getting super popular on reddit for what Unidan was doing definitely got him some job offers to be a vsauce type guy. feel like once something becomes a job you can't really perceive its basic weirdness anymore because it comes across as just so. You know, there just happen to be workplaces, located real close to stock exchanges, paying people millions to come up with more ways to act faster on price data from exchanges. There are also people who buy up a bunch of ASICs to have them calculate hashes all day for money. You can experience the weirdness and the conspiracy aspect only in the stage where you're not yet sure if you or anyone else could be making money doing [weird overly tryhard thing].
Like, maybe there's an unexploited niche of finding a bunch of cheap, unknown onlyfans models from whom you order videos to your specs that you dub over with your own male voice through a good voice changer and then you use those videos to legitimize multiple financial dominatrix accounts to the right people on twitter who then will pay you large amounts because you demanded it and even larger amounts when you berate them for being worthless paypig slime.
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The problem with making money, such as on drop-shipping on Alibaba or Amazon, is it's inherently adversarial and returns tend to be lopsided. Learning a skill or a hobby is not.
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