Easiest way to start hating your new hobby is visiting it’s subreddit.
It’s obvious for video games because you can assume anyone that wants to be active on a specific game sub is probably a try hard that talks about the meta, or max DPS builds, or other annoying stuff. But then you visit something like the carbon steel pan subreddit, or grilled cheese, and you’re continually assaulted with this idea that there are only specific pans and oils that are correct, or that your grilled cheese isn’t actually a grilled cheese because it was cooked too close to an open pack of salami.
Video game communities suck, and it makes playing them worse.
You play an FPS and everyone uses the meta gun at the time, then it gets nerfed and they use the new meta gun. Same with RTS and any other multiplayer game. Somehow StarCraft 1 pulled out a perfect rock paper scissors balance, but nothing else really has that so meta is what people do.
And because everyone is so busy grinding and min maxing, that’s what the game developers design for now, and it sucks the fun out of games because you just grind hours to get some new items to have the best items in the game.
Occasionally game communities are good. The Chivalry 2 subreddit had a bot that would use GPT to answer questions and then on every post go on about how the polehammer is the best weapon in the game, which was so over the top it made fun of the whole meta idea. The Breath of the Wild communities doing crazy rube Goldberg machines are always fun. And I’ll never not enjoy the weird hellscapes people create in the Sims.
then it gets nerfed and they use the new meta gun
OMG, this was what killed overwatch for me. I’m disabled and can’t play games that require fast paced precise and concise actions. So Symetra was my jam. I tried other characters like torbjorn but the all had the same problem. Some 13 yo genji prick would hop circles over my head while my health ticked away and I shot sporadically around at the sky before I inevitably die. But not Sym. All I had to do was backpedal and keep that grasshopper mf’er in my general view. And pop. Pulling him into a doorway with 6 kill lasers was the best feeling the in the world. But that enabled me to be useful to the rest of the team. I occasionally did good enough that I ranked in the top of the match, but I was almost never carried.
And then they nerfed sym because, “nOt EnOuGh PrO pLaYeRs PiCk HeR!!¡!!” No more walking shield. No more turret web. No more over shield for the team. No more wide lock on gun. They turned her into just another precision shooting player. She had a Halloween bag of tricks and they swapped it for a tooth brush.
You play an FPS and everyone uses the meta gun at the time
This is why I miss arena shooters (Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, etc.) being in vogue. There are no loadouts, no inherent differences between players, you’re all equal, and any weapons, ammo, grenades, powerups, vehicles, whatever, must be picked up from the map itself. This map doesn’t have a lightning gun/rocket launcher/banshee? Well tough shit, you’re going to have to do without.
These are games where you must fight with whatever comes to hand, no matter how much you dislike it, and that leaves almost no space for a meta. The closest thing that can exist is a general consensus of “for this situation, these are the weapons you want to have, and these are the weapons you really do not want to be in this situation with”.
Isn’t that largely just the case for competitive games?
Pet communities are horrible for this
Cute cat sneezes
Top comment: “This cat is gonna die Tomorrow from feline airborn disease, his left eye twitched 2.3ms longer than the norm which means…”
I just want occasional cat photos to roll into my feed, not to hear the virtues of a raw diet versus how crappy the one my vet told me to use!
Here is an actual thing that was sent to me
“If you don’t wash your guineas with unscented coconut oil once a week you don’t deserve to own them.” Like fuck off man
I can just imagine the person writing that with a smug grin on their face, nodding slowly as they finish with a “you don’t deserve to own them” and feeling all good about themselves.
Last time this happened to me was when I said I liked an experimental musician’s youtube channel cause he has a lot of content about his process etc. Got reamed in the comments by a salty user cause the musician once featured a product in a video made by a brand that it’s popular to hate, yet used by many musicians. One of the most reddit things ever.
The same subreddit heavily discouraged me, in classic reddit style, from getting a product once. I did anyway following my intuition. Then a year later it became the most recommended product for that purpose.
deleted by creator
Like I watched the Musical episode in Strange New Worlds, and really liked it. It was strange but fresh. I laughed out loud at the Klingon part. But then I got online and it was just hate. So stupid. And I’m a HUGE tng fan
deleted by creator
On Reddit I just read without logging in. It was nice. I’m trying to help build communities on Lemmy, so I’m posting and commenting.
Since doing that, I’ve been told I’m enjoying my hobby wrong, that my friends enjoy their hobby wrong, the links I researched for a comment thread are wrong (without references to correct info), and that I’m probably wrong about how I want to live.
I know I should have thicker skin, but the slow drip of unfriendliness is alienating.
Tell them to fuck off. This is the internet. Don’t let people do this to you.
Have you had positive experiences too, or are they primarily negative?
I’ve had positive experiences, mostly in the shit-posting and meme communities.
Maybe it’s just me, but the negative experiences are way more memorable than the positive ones.
Yeah, I definitely feel that way. Positive experiences just feel ambient, and negative experiences feel like distinct events.
Still, I have the sense that Lemmy is mostly positive, even though there are jerks. I have alot of comments with, like… 7 upvotes and 1 downvote, and of course the downvote sticks out in my mind… But then again, way more people were supportive than negative, and that’s kinda cool.
They always are.
People need to adhere to “if you have nothing nice to say, it’s better to say nothing at all” if we want Lenny to succeed.
I wish I was better at my hobbies (I plan to invest more in them next year) so I could submit more content and help get communities rolling. I see you have posted a fair few things which I appreciate.
I think you’re using lemmy wrong if you’re encountering that much resistance. /s
But seriously what is this hobby that’s so dividing? Are you looking through telescopes backwards or something?
It’s D&D. A game played with friends who have their own likes and dislikes. But sometimes they like the wrong thing.
Haha is this the classic minmaxer vs storyteller divide? Or maybe the serious campaign is being ruined by murderhobos?
There’s got to be infinite ways to enjoy d&d and so infinite disagreements to be had.
That’s just how “real” fans are.
There’s nothing real about them though, except their malice.
I am the kind of guy who will make fun of you for watching and enjoying the first few seasons of Disco and Picard because I think they suck, but I’ve stopped trying to tell people how to enjoy their media. The world is already a miserable enough place without trying to make people feel bad about their content watching habits.
At the same time, Picard mostly sucked… But it was good enough for me to watch through
I feel like half the problem is that not all of us are on the same page. If I say “I think this sucked”, I want to talk about it, and if anything I hope someone will recontextualize it for me and make it more enjoyable.
I want to hash it out, because anyone who does that in good faith sharpens their own opinion. Maybe I’m wrong and they convince me to give it a second chance, maybe I’m wrong and realize I only liked it for nostalgia. Or maybe we realize our opinions differ, and narrow down the reason why
I don’t think I’d like Picard aside from nostalgia…I don’t think it was fun or artistically valuable, but I didn’t stop watching. I don’t think it’s good-If you like it, I’m not going to say you’re wrong, but I will argue no one should watch it if they don’t love Patrick Stuart already. Not even TNG, the rest of the crew was pretty hollow cameos - his character was badly written, but I watched it through because it was more of his character
The world is already a miserable enough place without trying to make people feel bad about their content watching habits.
Exactly this.
I am the kind of guy who will make fun of you for watching and enjoying the first few seasons of Disco and Picard because I think they suck
If someone can be friendly while they’re joking around like that, I’m all for it. But it’s hard to get that subtlety into a comment.
There’s kind of two modes with that. If you’re in a bad mood it’s easy to just become a bulldozer of anger and malice and just shit on every single aspect of the first seasons. Otherwise, it’s just a discussion where we disagree on what things we enjoy.
I find it easier to have a simple discussion here on Lemmy. On reddit you’re about 50/50 going to encounter somebody angry and malicious, but here it’s probably more like 70/30 towards a good conversation.
… If you’re in a bad mood it’s easy to just become a bulldozer of anger and malice and just shit on every single aspect …
This is a part of speaking with people online that I think a lot of us miss. Sometimes we’re just cranky and not thinking at our best and sometimes it’s the other person. But we too often assume we’re dealing with the essential person
Looking at VTuber fandom out there. Two weeks ago, a famous female VTuber called Ironmouse (who, BTW, has an immune disease and cannot leave her house) won an award, and you know what the fans of other candidates did? They sent her death threats.
Oh boy 😬
VTuber fandom has the extreme opposites. By just being in the Hololive community I’ve seen people being absolute gems and creating content that everyone loves (Kay Yu, Kanauru, 2ManySnacks)… and on the other side people gatekeeping everything, way too parasocial fans, thirst everywhere and extreme tribalism.
If you stop at top comments/posts it’s usually a great experience, you just have to learn to stop scrolling when the toxicity begins.
I only saw hate from people outside the vtuber community, specially on tiktok since people over there already went through a hate wave of vtubers after a popular male one made a concert without having a 3D model. Several people going “who?” afther she won in the live comments.
I betcha if she is a normal showface kind of streamer and not a Vtuber, her fate may be much worse
It just the edgy wannabe being toxic, which has already been a thing on the Internet since the dawn of time
This is precisely why I don’t give a shit about “weekly episode discussions” and refuse to watch any show until it’s available in its entirety.
I prefer watching at a trickle, but only discuss it face to face. People are generally much more civil when in striking distance
plus the dreaded mid-plot ax
That’s how I’ve been consuming the marvel TV shows, it’s so much nicer to be able to binge the series.
Oh man, I really like One Punch Man, and I’ve always been a fan of the whole “poking fun at anime tropes thing”, but if you spend 30 mins on the subreddit for that subject you find a lot of people that don’t really see that the “child that’s actually much older than they look” thing isn’t a justifiable excuse for filling your sub with subjective images of a child.
At a certain point, it basically became trolling to raise that these people needed their hard drives checked by law enforcement professionals, and less to do with the thing that I actually enjoyed.
Child that’s older than they look? Tatsumaki? Not exactly a child she’s just short…
Me and the Apex Legends community
Me: This seems like a cool game, and it’s free, and it’s made by the Titanfall people.
Apex Legends community: Autistic screeching
Homestuck
Oh yeah. I did not hang out in Star Trek groups for many years despite being a fan - I didn’t near to hear a million times why Enterprise sucked or Discovery sucks or whatever. I enjoyed both and don’t need to listen to someone screeching about continuity errors or whatever in a fictional TV show.
And they can’t help themselves, more than once I’ve made a comment like this only to have someone reply, “Well, Discovery sucks because blah blah blah!”, and it’s like, “THANKS FOR DEMONSTRATING THE POINT I WAS MAKING. YOU’RE THE PROBLEM. YOU.”
No one hates Star Trek more than Star Trek fans.
I joined a group on facebook that is called “Wholesomeposting” and that kind of shit is not allowed. It’s much nicer that way. The noise level on Lemmy hasn’t been too bad, fortunately…so far.
This rings especially true for Rick and Morty, and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Both are good shows ruined by obnoxious fandoms
I wouldn’t say either are ruined. They just attract some fucked up people. I don’t think any media should be judged based on what kind of person obsesses with it and how they express that obsession.
With those two, you can even laugh knowing the people who make/made those shows don’t think highly of those fans.
I got that sense from the new Star Wars trilogy, too, especially ep 7 where Kylo is an obsessive Darth Vader fan who wore a helmet for no reason and wasn’t nearly as effective as his hero was (he loses a lightsaber duel to someone who hadn’t ever used a lightsaber before and his most destructive action in that movie is throwing a temper tantrum and destroying one of his own rooms).
deleted by creator
I never really got the hype, but I knew a lot of people in the early/mid 2010s that were into it.
Arrested Development (was cancelled at the time)
Star Wars fans spending days dissecting the intricacies of a fantasy space opera is highly amusing.
Shit, that’s what they USED to do, back in the good old days. Now, it’s just “WAAAAAH, WAAAAH, WAAAAHHHHH, THERE ARE TOO MANY ASIANS AND LESBIANS AND BLACKS!”
You realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen grown men get to the point of threatening each other’s safety, over whether or not the hyperspace drives in Star Wars are more realistic than the warp drive from Star Trek?
I never thought I’d miss that shit, but I miss it.
Also, like, can I remind everyone of the cantina scene, from the first fucking movie? NOTHING about that scene says “these producers and writers don’t really buy into the whole concept of diversity,”
Motherfuckers, there were two different kinds of blue alien, aliens with actual butt-faces, a WEREWOLF, some guys with insectoid multi-faceted eyeballs, and a guy with an ultramodernist chair for a fucking head. And the biggest asshole in the place was the fat white guy who didn’t like a specific group (droids) and wouldn’t let them in his bar.
But now, some of y’all think “wokeness” in Star Wars is some kind of NEW thing?
Motherfuckers, there were two different kinds of blue alien, aliens with actual butt-faces, a WEREWOLF, some guys with insectoid multi-faceted eyeballs, and a guy with an ultramodernist chair for a fucking head.
I kinda hate that I immediately pictured each of those as I read that.
Me too! I did just watch the movie yesterday, but still…
I think, honestly, the worst thing about Star Wars fans discussing the intricacies of Star Wars is that there are no intricacies and it’s concerning how many people still missed the points.
Light Side Good Dark Side Bad Shut The Fuck Up About Gray Jedi And The Empire Doing Nothing Wrong
EC Henry is my favorite in that regard, analyzing and making fan lore on ships that are a couple of pixels in the side of the frame for one shot.
deleted by creator
There was a canon. Then Disney bought the franchise and has chosen to ignore the set canon.
“No one should have to meet their hero.”, and even less so: fellow fans.
Think of the poor heroes that have to meet their fans.
Solution: nobody meets anyone. Done.
Firefly. Only because I’ve never met anyone that wasn’t someone I had to introduce to it. Let alone the comics, novels, board/card games, etc.
But for real, if I ever got anyone enough of a base around me becoming such fans as I; I would also happen to have enough of the old school Mage:tAs books to equate Technocracy with the Alliance and equate the Trads to Pirates.
It exists but is dormant. I’ve enjoyed the TV show and movie, but haven’t consumed any other content. Anything you would recommend?
Fanbases and fandoms are poison, thanks to social media. You know exactly what I mean.
I’ve had the opposite experience. But then again I don’t really watch media without interacting and falling in love with the fandom first.
I wouldn’t have watched Star Trek without Trekkies being awesome.
I’m still a fan of Kingdom Hearts because of this.
