Gerrit Giezen

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GPU shortages are not new, as many graphics cards like the top-end NVIDIA cards often immediately sell out. However, due to the extremely fast increasing cryptocurrency prices, demand for PC components has skyrocketed with the rise of cryptocurrency mining. As a result, graphics cards are going to disappear even faster and this could be a disaster for anyone looking to buy a graphics card for gaming. And it’s not only graphics cards, good processors (CPUs) are also very hard to buy at the moment as they can also be used to make a profit mining crypto. Most of the (financial) gains are made with GPUs, however. To make this even worse, prices of many components have more than doubled and there is no sign of this slowing down (Esteves, 2018; Walton, 2021).

Because of the problems I mentioned above, gamers now have to fight both bots and miners when they want to buy components for their PC. You could thus say that crypto and the technologies related to it are giving normal PC-gamers a hard time enjoying the things they like to do: play video games. My own experience with this problem, as someone who likes to play video games in his free time, is that you either have to pay a very high price or have to get extremely lucky. I have bought my current GPU 3 years ago for about €350 and at the moment it is going for about €700. Usually, I would be tempted to sell and make a profit. The problem, however, is that it will probably be near impossible to buy an upgrade, leaving me with no GPU at all (Esteves, 2018; Walton, 2021).

It is expected that crypto prices and effort needed to mine them will become balanced again. When that will happen and what price will come out of it is hard to guess, but for gamers the future is not looking very bright. Overall, it is difficult to find a solution to this problem. NVDIA could, for example, introduce buying limits of X products per person, but I assume this would be extremely complex and costly to implement for them and in the end NVIDIA’s main goal is to make money (Walton, 2021).

References:
Esteves, R. (2018, April 14). Bitcoin Mining Pressures Hardware Prices. Retrieved 6 October 2021, from https://www.newsbtc.com/all/bitcoin-mining-pressures-hardware-prices/

Walton, J. (2021, January 4). GPU Shortages Will Worsen Thanks to Coin Miners. Retrieved 6 October 2021, from https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-shortages-worsen-cryptocurrency-coin-miners-ethereum

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Online, many of us are surrounded by views and opinions we agree with. Websites use algorithms that look at things like browsing history and age to offer personalized content and ensure the content shown supports the visitor’s views. These algorithms decide what we view and read online and often exclude opposing perspectives. Because of this, we live in so called ‘filter bubbles’.

Initially, an algorithm that ensures we see content we like and agree with does not sound that bad. However, when we do not see opposing views or opinions we disagree with online, these filter bubbles create echo chambers and we forget that what we see is actually being filtered. In my opinion this is a huge flaw to these otherwise valuable algorithms, because the filter bubbles that arise are distorting our ideas of the world. People are using Facebook as their main news source for example and a significant portion of those people is probably not mindful about what Facebook’s algorithms do. This lack of awareness increases the negative impact of filter bubbles, because the people who are consuming the news do not know that what they see is constantly being filtered to match their opinions and perspectives (FS, 2017; Pariser, 2011). Furthermore, we limit our own experiences and learning possibilities by only viewing filtered content. In my opinion, this extreme content filtering problem is perfectly summed up by Pariser (2011): “A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there’s nothing to learn.”

Social media platform Tiktok is trying to combat this problem by sporadically adding videos to your feed that are not relevant to your expressed interests. They do this to let their users experience new perspectives or ideas and to increase the diversity of content shown to the users. This is something that other platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube could improve on, as their algorithms still keep users in their own echo chambers (Perez, 2020).

Can we, the content consumers, pop the bubble ourselves? There are some ways we can ‘bypass’ the filter or find less filtered content. First of all, visiting websites that offer a wide range of content is a good start. Websites that show you multiple perspectives help you create a more complete view yourself. Other things that content consumers can do are using Incognito mode and deleting cookies. Both methods will de-personalize your content, because you are giving the algorithms less information. If we become more aware and actively try to find unfiltered, completer content, the filter bubble can be popped (FS, 2017; Pariser, 2011).

References:
FS. (2017, July 3). How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://fs.blog/2017/07/filter-bubbles/

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin UK.

Perez, S. (2020, June 18). TikTok explains how the recommendation system behind its ‘For You’ feed works. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/18/tiktok-explains-how-the-recommendation-system-behind-its-for-you-feed-works/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAG37494luglqH9K2xpIfdbz7eMt1NslKsRggWOCjkDR55sH_D_pgWizSYt0N0ERfhD9dlwTrrv1QQbymNfFwkw8L-10oJ-Gy3WSI-Y3Ag0dodCEyWWgPP-f0j03gMdDGv2vw2wqE4F7V_YCDmUuhkq0hZoRiwbugjPAXgI5wrTzH

‘Miners’ vs ‘Gamers’

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