Thanks, I get how barter would help in that case, but without running your software or seeing a demo of what it does, it’s not clear to me how it works, or why it’s better than alternatives. You said this elsewhere:

what about the software determining the value of the products, can you answer that.

Now that sounds interesting, how does it determine the value of products? And in the absence of money, how does it even represent value?

I’m asking this because I’m curious, but I’m also trying to give you tips on how to make a more engaging post. I’m not super interested in actually switching to bartering instead of using money right now, but I’d read about how your project works for a few minutes if you want to write about it. I suspect others might feel the same way. I looked at your github repo README and it’s all just technical instructions on how to run it.

After reading an explanation for how it works and why it’s more useful than other alternatives, then I might consider actually downloading the source and trying to use it.

Especially if you make bold claims like “is this the future of commerce” … you have to at least explain what you did if you’re going to say something like that.

ah, interesting! I might have heard that this was misquoted before (and forgot), but I didn’t know it was from the bible.

“… of all kinds of evil” is interesting too. To me this implies that loving money isn’t necessarily always a problem, if it means say being frugal to save money/food to survive the winter or something, or saving for your children’s future.

Do you have a demo video or something to watch? Or could you provide a bit more detail about the problem you’re trying to solve, what a typical use case might be? I rarely clone a github repo and try running it. Not just because it takes time and I’m often browsing on my phone, but because I don’t want to let potentially malicious code run on my computer.

I agree that money can seem like the cause of a lot of problems, but ultimately isn’t it a pretty good intermediary for trade? Maybe skipping money entirely would be great in the event of some sort of global currency collapse, but even then, maybe we would just use bottle caps or something?

And even if someone can prove that money is indeed a bad thing, even if we abolished it and resorted to barter… wouldn’t some people just hoard some other in-demand commodity and become powerful through that?

I feel like money isn’t the root of all evil, it’s just a representation of wealth and people hoarding wealth is probably the real issue.

It is fairly difficult, but there are a few reasons why I found the difficulty more pleasant:

• pacing: the most difficult parts you’ll first encounter are optional bonus objectives (strawberries) that you can skip and come back to later. So you can take your time and get them as you go when you feel like it, and if you get frustrated you can continue with the main storyline for a bit (this happened to me a few times when I was playing, so it was basically continuous enjoyment)
• very forgiving: in Hollow Knight, it’s like Dark Souls where if you die, you lose your in-game currency and need to make your way back to your corpse to recover it, and if you die again then you lose it completely. But in Celeste, you get a checkpoint at every “screen”, so it’s very forgiving to experiment new techniques and just keep trying over and over again. There are some longer patches so that it doesn’t feel too easy, but overall I really liked it
• most of the storyline is accessible without having to do much extra. There are some more challenging levels at the end that require finding some hidden unlocks earlier in the game, and beating some tougher challenges that I’m going through now.

But fair point, even the base storyline is quite challenging, especially if you don’t love this genre. I’ll edit my comment to be more clear. They do add some “assist mode” to make it easier if you want to enjoy the story, but I’m not sure if it’s still fun to play it that way.

I recently discovered Celeste and love it so far. It’s a skilled platformer that doesn’t seem as punishing (edit) compared to other platformers that I’ve played, but still challenging enough to be satisfying. (edit: And the base story difficulty is not as bad as some other platformer games). The story is also really nice (overcoming depression and mental health stuff), not something I usually play but I was really engaged with it, and communicated in a nice simple way (not a ton of cutscenes like story-heavy games). edit: Celeste is similar to Hollow Knight, though I got stuck at a part of Hollow Knight and haven’t picked it back up in a while. Celeste is much easier than N++ and Super Meat Boy, IMO.

(I had intended to play it on my 4k TV, but I found that it has a significant delay that makes it hard, and I somehow didn’t notice it in other games. It’s much easier to play on my PC).

Also RE the OP’s mention of simple phone games, I really like “Simon Tatham’s Puzzles”: iOS, Android on Google Play and F-Droid. It’s a collection of simple puzzle games that I enjoy idly playing for a few minutes at a time.

I’ve been interested in that! How do you like it compare to games like OpenTTD, Cities: Skylines, and Factorio (sort of)?

I love the trains in Factorio, and I enjoyed trying out OpenTTD for a bit, but I eventually got bored with it because airlines were easy money, and it was too easy to lose money when building a train network, and it took too long to expand. In Cities: Skylines I could never really figure out how to fix traffic, I felt like silly little things were causing it to back up. I don’t think I ever really got seriously into rail traffic in it, though.