The Death of the Hobbyist
- Posted by mariteaux on December 18th, 2020 filed in Strong Opinions
- 8 Comments »
I tried writing this last night at 2am when I was too frustrated to sleep, but my words were getting muddled. It’s a big topic, and it’s hard to know which angle to attack it from, but I think I’ve got it.
Caby and I get on discussions a lot. One topic we always revisit is the “death of the small”, or how tiny hobbyist communities and projects have either vanished or centralized. It’s really difficult to find friends out in the wild; frankly, it seems like most internet people today would rather avoid making them. Everyone’s tense and usually trying to sell you something.
Nowhere is the death of the small more apparent than in art communities. There’s a jarringly different flavor to DeviantART uploads just 6-10 years old than ones now. Old-school fandom seems downright charming these days. There was by and large no mention of commissions, Ko-Fi, Patreons, or even any real attempt at gaining an audience.
Groups were a big part of the DeviantART experience. I remember hovering PMD-Explorers and PMD-Unity towards the end of both of their runs and seeing a lot of the same people participating in both. They were really what interested me in making OCs in the first place; before then, I knew characters were a thing, but making them myself and participating in a world of other people’s lads was (and still is) ridiculously appealing.
Where the people congregate now is where the money and followings happen. Tell me true: how many people have you seen asking the internet for a cool grand to go buy an iPad for “art” reasons? How many times have you seen people e-beg couched in warm fluffy “support an artist” rhetoric? How many people who habitually use Twitter to shill actually like it for community?
Far be it from me to tell people not to engage in capitalism, but I don’t think it says good things about the people doing the shilling or the state of the community at large if this is what people use it for. When money gets involved, people get animalistic, more vulnerable, and more easily abused. “Cancel culture” wouldn’t be nearly as effective if people were more spread out and livelihoods weren’t at stake.
A weird mentality seems to drive the internet these days: the moment something goes big, “growth” and “operating costs” are factored into the equation, and good things become tedious things. People get concerned about recouping “losses” for things they like doing, sites they run, and equipment they buy. What gets pitched as “helping me make more videos” is at best unnecessary (you’re talking over speedruns, this isn’t Waterworld) and at worst unscrupulous. It’s the death of the hobbyist.
I also think about the 13-year-olds coming up in this mess now. If you’re surrounded by hobbyists who just goof off and don’t care much if anyone’s watching, you’ll follow suit, most likely. If the people you look up to are there to make money, you’ll emulate that, except you won’t have the skills built up to make that work, nor the desire to have fun and improve yourself without that push.
Put it like this: what’s it say when kids are imitating streamers and YouTubers, of all people? What happens when money is just built into their hobby, when the reason to be isn’t to have fun and improve yourself, but to try and sell commissions and shitty wallets? What effects does it have on burgeoning minds when everything you say is on record forever and people are very happy to ruin your life for it?
Of course, the absolute state of DeviantART has given rise to alternatives, none of which have really stuck. FurAffinity has had similar issues over the years with mismanagement and broken functionality, and yet still none of the competitors have managed to grow. (The sole example to the contrary happens to be the one that allows blatant pedophilia like no other…)
Personally, I’ve always rooted for Weasyl; aside from my mustelid bias, the site functionality and design is infinitely more solid than either of the former two. Yet, outside of these token PostyBirb presences, I’ve never seen anyone using it. Why? It seems obvious; you hate DeviantART, you hate FurAffinity, you hate Twitter–it’s a perfectly good old-school art site, ripe for colonization.
And the answer is simple: no money to be made.
People get the internet they deserve, by and large, and moths flock to where the light is. On the surface, it makes sense; who wants to be on a dead site? Issue being, “dead” is relative. You don’t need a ton of movement to make a community sprout up, or do you? Can people still give a shit about a place where there’s no money to be made and no following to be artificially built up, but a few good interactions to be had and friends to be made? Can that still be worth their time?
All I’ll say is this much: Somnolescent is a drop in the bucket in price for the many, many hours of enjoyment I’ve gotten out of it, and I’ll take a loss on every damn penny of it. I’d happily buy XenForo on my own dime if it meant a tiny little Somnol forum where people chattered endlessly in good spirits. If I ever start trying to grift off what I’ve built here, feel free to murder me in cold blood.
December 18th, 2020 at 1:40 pm
I’m happy I mostly had luck with communities I was in – people were focused on making stuff for their enjoyment and nothing was perfect and they had a lot of fun with their small close-knit groups. Now? Kids are scared of hobbies since pushing that it has to make money. Costs too big? Not worth for them I guess. This is supposed to be for your fun, not this.
Death of old-school communities is really sad thing. Most of people prefer to be stuck with possible worst that social media are, instead of community which actually helps you grow you are constatly exposed to people who usually are hostile because of frivolous reasons.
December 18th, 2020 at 9:10 pm
I think our generation was the last to get lucky with old-school communities. Even if I never participated in any DeviantART groups, I was aware of a bunch and peeked at them frequently. That’s really where the inspiration for a little kid comes in, because they imitate what they see that they think looks cool. Problem is, social media is so all-encompassing that they never get exposed to much else.
I remember being really hype in finding that the girl who ran this old Bubsy fansite I liked when I was little had set up shop on a new domain, and I made sure to let her know. Gotta appreciate people like that when you find ’em.
December 18th, 2020 at 5:39 pm
This is like some of the things I’ve been thinking about while looking at so many archived GeoCities sites. So many people used it, to build not an “audience” but to build connections with other people who were into similar things. Take all the community centers (yep, they existed– https://geocities.restorativland.org/EnchantedForest/1004/ and https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2158/ to name a couple), web rings, guestbooks, message boards, and whatnot. They weren’t even necessarily tech-savvy individuals, either.
The focus wasn’t even about hit counts. People on GeoCities did like hit counts, for sure, but it was much less about the numbers and more about connections (like how freely they gave out their email addresses, and the chatrooms they hung out in!) They didn’t expect many hits because their sites were extensions of themselves, little havens from the outside world, not their livelihood. A “follower” count had no importance to them, and neither could they be discouraged by it, because they were involved with their own communities that were all on level ground. I doubt anyone could claim to view their social profiles that way, especially now.
Humans are naturally attracted to numbers going up; it’s one of our weaknesses. And that means the site that will always win the masses in the short term is the one with the most instant gratification. It’s a sad thing, really. Why else would the likes of TikTok among our generation be so popular? It’s addicting and feels rewarding for a minute or two, even when it’s ultimately unearned and fruitless. From the platform’s perspective it’s ingenious, keeping people on it for as long as possible so they keep the content mill going. Social media’s engineered in this way by design, and it makes everyone on it cutthroat and miserable in the process. It makes things go from “I want to do this, because it’s fun and I want to grow in doing so” to “I guess I ought to do this to increase my following”.
Not to stray too off-topic, I feel like Neocities’ main shortcoming was that it attempted to take these antonymic paradigms and mush them together. Like tags replacing neighborhoods, site comments replacing guestbooks and personal email, ranked views replacing hit counters, followers replacing bookmarking the sites you actually like, and of course the activity feed that automatically gets posted to every time you make a change. It became the setup of a social media site, no better than the rest of them. Survival of the fittest, that’s just how it goes.
(I’ll have to note that as far as I can tell Kyle Drake might be running that archive I just linked, since his MySpace music archive is under the same domain. Not entirely clear. If so I can’t knock him for it though, to be fair, it’s better organized and presented than Oocities and Geocities.ws’s archive. I believe he was at least getting towards the right sentiment in the article he launched Neocities with, before the subsequent redesign when those things came along. Godspeed Kyle, enjoy the fat head pizza crust. We can’t be 100% all the time.)
December 18th, 2020 at 9:04 pm
There’s multiple interviews on record from former engineers at these various social media sites where they’ll freely admit they built it to be as unrelentingly addictive as possible. Facebook cheerfully throws notifications at you because it makes you feel important. When everything is a competitive numbers game, it tends to…suck out the feeling, as someone once put it.
Neocities sucked because it tried to turn sitebuilding into a competition for who can update the most. If you weren’t updating, you weren’t being put in the global activity feed, meaning your only visibility was if someone else linked to you (so be popular) or if were high in Most Followed (so be popular). All the interactivity happened off-site. If he had the best of intentions and is still trying to preserve the old internet, more power to him, but damn, does Neocities look like a shitty grift when he’ll casually take people’s money and then never update anything.
Also, quality use of “antonymic”. I see what you did there.
December 20th, 2020 at 5:47 am
The reason why people seem to make content exclusively in function of money today is because the public has for the most part changed, and consumes content in a different way because there is so much of it, but also because the social paradigm has shifted over the years. Dotcomboom is right when he says that people sought engagement in the past, but the intent was creating connections. Sure, but creating genuine connections on “social” media is almost impossible, not just because of the platforms but because of how people see each other, which is mostly a service or a product, so relationships will default to something intrinsically business-like. The monetization craze is not the cause of the state of things, and people do not take that initiative out of emulation. This is all a symptom of a disrupted social fabric.
December 20th, 2020 at 10:28 am
Suppose that’s what I get for trying to be so terse…I had an earlier draft of this that focused more on bloat and size in a population as the issue, which is what I think it is. In a small group or on a cult platform for a specific interest, everyone involved is expected to take part in it to some degree and care about the health of the platform, which pulls people closer together. If you’re in a group of indie filmmakers, that’s what pulls you together, your passion for making them, plus in general your background and that you’re likely to get the same references, the same humor, and so forth.
When something grows to a sufficient size, there’s no possibility of group cohesion because there’s too many people from too many disparate backgrounds. Every community that gets that big ends up shedding its original flavor and in-jokes for the sake of not confusing newcomers, and at that point, likely, the owner’s thinking of recouping his losses on that VPS he’s renting. Size makes the average user feel faceless, and size makes the people at the helm get greedy. In the case of YouTube, there very much was a community there once upon a time. I remember PMing and annoying people constantly when I was little, holding entire conversations in my inbox. It’s simply too big for that now though.
I think “too big” also applies to towns and populations of people too; there’s a whole lot of people out there who just do not care about where they’re living. At least in my little shithole town, people largely just want to get out of here, and things sprawl way too much for there to be that neighborly connection. Seriously, I’ve seen many, many houses, including my own, with the nearest houses hundreds of feet away. In that case, you kinda just fall back into whatever’s easiest, hence people’s obsession with weed and media these days. Hung around kids in high school who smoked it daily and in some cases dealt it. Wasn’t uncommon at all.
December 20th, 2020 at 4:17 pm
You talk about size, but if this were just about size you would have pockets outside of the mainstream surviving just fine. Instead they die off of get absorbed at a crazy rate. If you look at whatever looks like a pocket within the public sphere, you will see that it is a small-scale mirror of the mainstream. It’s usually just a branch of it. The truth is that people have, for the most part, simply changed. The attitude has changed, the relationship with other people, as far as the online world is concerned but also in life to a degree, has changed. The internet, namely anonymity or pseudonymity, have this dehumanizing property. Without the chance to break through this veil, which was in the past mostly just ignorance about the risks of online interaction, it’s almost impossible to form real relationship.
Sadly technology, or at least this brand of technology, is poison to social relationship. Train a whole generation on it, raise another on it, and you get this predicament where all that you can do if you care about someone is send him money. What else matters on the internet? That you push a button so that you get +1 hearts or thumbs ups?
December 20th, 2020 at 8:30 pm
There are pockets outside the mainstream that survive just fine. I’d argue Somnol is one such pocket! We’re not massive by any stretch, but we get plenty of attention for being a bunch of doofs with no marketing or advertising to speak of. The few sites I do follow on the regular are by no means huge, but they’re there, and they’ve got communities outside the mainstream.
People haven’t changed because human psychology doesn’t evolve that fast. They act different because their surroundings are different and the stimuli they’re bombarded with is different. I’ve felt it and I’ve recommended it successfully to other people: you’re stressed and anxious? Tune out the world for a bit and just go back to having fun. It works! It works as well as it always did.
If you want real relationship, it has to go offline anyway. Certainly the goal for my girlfriend or my friends is to one day see them in person. The internet was always gonna be poison without the IRL component to it. Go look for some old-school profiles on Web 1.0 sites. Those people happily gave out their real names and regularly met in person, hence what sprouted the modern convention or the modern meetup.
I wrote this little ramble because it’s disheartening to see what happened to the places online I like and some of the people I used to follow, and I don’t know how you fix it on a grand scale. Humans don’t work on grand scales though. As long as you find connection around you and you’re happy in that, the rest is just noise.