
Originally Posted by
Kilee25
Bit of a necro, but I haven't checked these forums in ages.
I did find a community of gamers on Discord recently, about a game that I really enjoyed for a week or two. I tried joining in on the discussion in Discord, but it is not compatible with long-form thoughts and discussion at all. If you type what feels like even a moderate sized "post", on the discord channel it looks like you are "flooding" the channel with text, which everyone then ignores at best or gets annoyed at worst...
I do "peruse" the priest discord every now and then, but I only see one person on there who I used to know, and I tried messaging them a while back and got no response. I've tried reading a few of the channels, but I can't really follow a coherent thread of discussion in any of them. A lot of off-topic chatter or one-off questions about items.
It all has a bit of a "youtube comments" vibe to it. Make your point in 100 characters or less, and leave.
I'm raising 3 children now, and as one does, I have been watching an analyzing the differences in their childhoods and mine, and how that might lead to discussion forums "dying" as they have in my lifetime. The biggest thing that I see is that for the most part everything in their life seems to be very "on demand", and very "pick up and throw away". I remember geting 2-3 video games for an entire year when i was a kid, and just playing the hell out of them... in truth I think I may have played 15-20 games total throughout my entire childhood. But between the Apple store and free demo games and cheap $2-3 games on the game stores, my kids in a year or two have access to more games than I had my entire life. In addition to this, for the most part they don't have to watch commercials anymore, on anything. So if we do watch "normal TV", as soon as a commercial comes on, they get sincerely "angry" at them. Normal TV gets turned off immediately...
With Youtube and other streaming options, the need to read, even to do something like Cooking, is largely un-necessary. There's how to videos on almost everything, and there's a show, cartoon, or movie in almost every genre that's as good as almost any book or comic book you could find. In general, books/comics just don't have anything to offer anymore that you can't get constantly from some sort of visual media.
When I think back to my childhood and young adulthood, making a transition to a "reader" was this big, life-changing revelation. For me it was Tolkien's The Hobbit. It was the first book that I read, which made me realise how amazing reading could be. I went from that straight into the Lord of the Rings, and read all 4 of those books within a couple of months. After that I read everything I could find that was in the fantasy genre, for 5-6 years.
During college, I had another "Epiphany" moment when the Internet was becoming a thing, and I had all of these hobbies that I loved, but I had no one to share them with. E-mail chat groups, and online forums were the first time in my life where I could find people who loved video games and fantasy literature like me. I finally found a space where I could connect with people and "share" my love of various nerd hobbies.
These days however... you don't need to discover the magic of reading to find amazing fantasy stories and movies. And you don't need to learn to write and type in order to find groups of friends who love the same things you do. That whole journey of discovery just doesn't exist anymore, at least, not in the form that it did for me.
I'm watching my kids grow up, and they certain have found games and movies and things that inspire them and "blow their minds", but then they go to YouTube (or discord in some cases), and they immediately "burn" through their passion in a few minutes, without being forced to "engage" in the ways that my generation had to. I think once you become an adult, and have a lifetime of this... at a certain point you just pass a point of no return. You've passed that age in life where you could learn to read or type for hours just to get a few thoughts out or absorb a new story. I think that people still read and "consume" and share their love of hobbies just as much as I did, but I just think they do it in different ways now. It's never "coming back" because if anything newer generations will work even harder to avoid the tediousness than the generation before them.
I'm reminded in some ways of the movie "idiocracy". It feels like we're sort of slowly marching towards that sort of future, but it will be even more weird and strange than we imagine.....
Edit: Damn I'm rusty... I just read back over this and marveled at the typos and grammar errors. What a mess.