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Notes -
Has discussion died out in the web at large?
I'm on X, Instagram, Threads, reddit, discord, 4chan, literally anywhere I can go, and people just don't seem to chat much anymore. Or rather, what I mean is that people rarely have long conversations about the things they love. I know that passionate people still exist because they make fascinating Youtube videos, Substack articles, and Twitter threads, and I've had conversations of deep interest with friends in private, but I can't get these to occur in public spaces anymore despite my attempts. Even joining communities for the things I like doesn't work -- all the discords are dead.
It's all so strange, considering the internet I grew up with had a very opposite mindset. If you browsed GameFAQs for example, you'd constantly run into people who had a very deep knowledge of whatever game was being talked about, and they'd casually list off stuff like enemy drops and spawn rates because they had it memorized, to the point it was hard not to passively learn things. You could start a thread with any random question, and it would get at least 2 random nerds together to discuss the game in detail for several posts and deepen your knowledge. This just doesn't seem to happen anymore. Back in the day, even if a person didn't like a game they'd usually give you the reasons WHY they didn't like it, such as "the battle system is too easy to exploit" or the level scaling is bad. Nowadays you rarely get that.
Does anyone know what I mean? Broaching a topic like this is awkward because there's always the sense of, "Nah you're just nostalgic! You're old! You're looking in the wrong places!" But the more I explore, the more it seems things really have changed. Like maybe even the concept of "fanbases" and "fandoms" is actually outdated, as the number of people who care enough to talk about a piece of art once they've finished it is a tiny minority. Like we're all familiar with how bored adults binge watch Netflix shows while zoned out, and forget all about them soon after, but is this actually happening with games, movies, anime, etc. now too? Could this be why nobody's eager to talk about things? I really struggle to make sense of all this.
There is a lot more incentive to produce now. Back in the day, high effort video essay style content was not a good idea because your odds of being rewarded were essentially nothing. It made more sense to post it on a forum. Now it's the opposite. The only way to have people engage with your ideas is by content-ifying it. And you can get money out of it now, too, as with algorithms that improve discovery of small creators, everyone has reason to follow this path
Lots of confounding issues - forums have died, CONTENT has risen, people hate interacting with strangers without derailing everything over Palestine or whatever.
The current ecosystem means the same thoughts will be rewarded better if packaged as CONTENT.
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