37637598 on 27/5/2011 at 17:54
If I were to come up with a reason why you should continue to post, it's that when I read your posts they always make me think. You have a talent for translating your thoughts into a perspective that can easily be absorbed and I've never skipped a word when reading your responses, and generally your arguments are founded by intelligence and agrued by other intelligence so I feel intelligent whilst analyzing your thread wars. So in a sense, if you're gone I have to say thank you for sharing views that have opened my mind on many occasions.
Cheers.
Bluegrime on 27/5/2011 at 19:19
Alas Kolya, it saddens me to see you go. I don't think we've ever had much of a conversation in the entirety of our time here but I enjoyed your posts quite a bit, especially the ones pertaining to the real world. If you have links to your blog I'll probably take to reading it, though it will be less fun without getting to see you argue with the hysterical and self important.
Also as someone who used to post quite a bit (here and elsewhere) and now rarely bothers signing in to anything other then messenger services I think its part of an overall trend. More or less I know everyone I really want to online and if I find someone I enjoy talking to on a forum I'll swap emails or IMs with them rather then use the board as a meeting ground. However as someone who's made a habit of meeting people I know online I may also just think differently then I used to. Meeting and getting to know the people behind the screen names makes me think of everyone I meet on the internet as an actual person rather then "USER123" and leaves me more interested in actually knowing them rather then whatever public posturing they do on forums.
To me, now, most public forums are rather like riding on a metro bus. If everyone on that bus had a fake name and the worst of their personality to hide behind and were constantly frothing with rage. Granted I used to be in that category but now I take a much more "meh" approach to the internet. I'm not terribly interested in arguing petty facts with strangers or entertaining them so I just as often don't bother posting anywhere since being inoffensive is almost the same thing. The mood strikes me sometimes to go and whack the beehive but very rarely these days.
It could also be that after twenty years people have begun to realize that most of the internet is quite unimportant once you step out of your front door and don't dedicate as much energy to it. While there is the occasional Dethtoll who has the posting control of a tourettes sufferer there seems to be less "ILL FUCKING KILL YOU YOU FUCKING COCKSHITTER FUCK" real life rage going between users then I saw ten years ago. I know the number of people threatening to kill me over disagreeing with them on the internet has steadily declined over the years. If I had to venture to guess I would say the average age of internet users has been going up ever since the first batch of America Online retards showed up and the (somewhat) increased level of maturity has fostered less of an environment for that. As people get older, get out of high school and start leading their lives some ass on the internet disagreeing with you becomes quite a bit less important. The need to maintain your e-machismo in front of a group of people is certainly not much of a priority for me now and neither is going out of my way to do it in real life. I used to do both on a wide scale but maturity has evened me out on that and I suspect the same goes for the internet as a whole.
I'll stop typing now before I lose more of what I was trying to say then I already have. I've got Fosters to drink, steak to BBQ and guns to shoot in the air while doing both of the above. :cool:
SubJeff on 27/5/2011 at 21:46
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
I'm pretty much done, I'm afraid. :(
:(:(
Harvester on 27/5/2011 at 23:53
Kolya leaving, and now Queue and Scots Taffer too? Damn, that sucks... :( I know I mostly lurk here, but I enjoyed reading you guys' posts.
Goldmoon Dawn on 28/5/2011 at 00:10
Quote Posted by 37637598
If I were to come up with a reason why you should continue to post, it's that when I read your posts they always make me think. You have a talent for translating your thoughts into a perspective that can easily be absorbed and I've never skipped a word when reading your responses, and generally your arguments are founded by intelligence and agrued by other intelligence so I feel intelligent whilst analyzing your thread wars. So in a sense, if you're gone I have to say thank you for sharing views that have opened my mind on many occasions.
Cheers.
Yeah, its a bummer to see Queue go. You have made me laugh on many occasions! Yet, after reading your final post, I understand where you are coming from and am quite surprised. You dont know what youve got till its gone I guess.
june gloom on 28/5/2011 at 03:09
But see here, this phenomenon is not limited to TTLG alone. I've seen a very large number of platforms- Livejournal and various fora here and there, for starters- basically dry up in activity. It can be partially blamed on stuff like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but I think it's also to do with a lot of the old-timers across the internet stepping out.
Think about it. We were the guys who were around before we had all this web 2.0, social media nonsense. All that's second nature for the younger kids who were raised on that stuff, but most of us original internauts can't be bothered. I only got Facebook, like, back in October, after resisting for years. (I'm actually kind of glad I did, ironically enough.)
We're old. We're tired. And a lot of us long-timers, we lose interest, get jobs, lives, spouses, prison time, whatever. We simply don't have the time or inclination. We've grown disinterested in the fascinating new world of the internet, and we're also disillusioned- we all thought it'd be like Gibson's cyberspace or the Matrix or some damn shit, and it turned out to be cat torture videos and bloodninja.
Once we had plenty of time, to stay up late reading some godawful webcomic and argue with people on the internet, but we can't take that as much anymore as we get older. So we emerge from our darkened basement rooms into groups of family and friends that barely recognize us anymore, shave off our Saddam spider hole beards, and go out and do stuff.
In a way, this is just a side effect of the passage of time. Lots of forums have died quiet deaths as people lose interest in the forum's raison d'etre and simply run out of things to discuss. It happens all the time, and has for years, since the days of Usenet. TTLG has just been delaying the inevitable for a very long time; the apparent die-down of activity in recent years can be blamed on the Thiefgenners staying in Thiefgen and everyone else no longer giving a damn.
Thanks to the rise of social media, forums are experiencing mass die-offs. Plainly speaking, forums and the like are an old-school method of communicating that is disappearing as we enter a transition phase- social media. The internet of ten years from now will probably be very different from what it is at this moment in time; and I've been an internaut long enough that the internet of today is no longer recognizable as what I spent the last decade and a half on.
The truth is, this phenomenon has been building up steam for a very long time. I guess you could say it started with Livejournal, but that's only sort of true. LJ actually ended up being a forum service for various fandoms and the associated crazy people who want to see Optimus Prime plowing Gandalf. It had huge, huge activity, but it didn't have the inherent inanity to it that later social media platforms do. (It was merely a different kind of inanity, but hell, we're on a forum dedicated to a company that hasn't existed in longer than some of our children have been alive, so who are we to judge?) The real culprit, I think, is Myspace. That started the trend. Hell, even the word 'trend' is a trend these days.
But I'm getting a bit off-track. My main point is, the internet has changed, and so have we. We have different priorities, now.
That's not to say we're all leaving. Sure, I'm sad to see Queue et al. go, but I'm staying right here. This has been the only place I've consistently spent my time at for the last 5 years (not counting those initial couple years where I merely lurked) and I've grown to love you miserable sods, even the whiny entitled bananapants with terrible opinions, because I enjoy being angry as a form of recreation. I like it here, and it's a good place to spend half an hour or so. You want me gone you gotta ban me.
Whoof, that was a heavy post. I'm gonna eat a sandwich now.
Muzman on 28/5/2011 at 07:06
dethtoll's saved me a bit of long winded sociology. That's definitely what I see as well.
Ten or fifteen years ago it was the thing to set up a forum around some interest and people would come and talk about that and then when it grew and people became regulars you'd have to set up an off topic forum and all the extra stuff would go there and that would become the core of it.
It doesn't have to be heart to heart stuff or talking about your life. Just all the general horseplay that used to go on is a big part of it. Arguing about the same old politics arguments and what not. Queue, you're pretty much the same as me as far as the approach to mixing life and internet goes. So don't worry about that.
TTLG has always been a little schismatic for one reason or another. The thing is that as people move on you'd think that community core would merely shift to the newer people, slowly but surely. I mean, TTLG hasn't shrunk significantly. Sure there's nothing like when a big game comes along, but there's still a reasonably steady influx of new members (which is more remarkable that there's any at all in between big game releases). Some people might find the community sections alienating for whatever reason, but the sheer weight of posting and people ought to be enough to create this generation shift (it's what got me and anyone who wasn't an original member to take the plunge in the first place).
It would seem like the various schisms are to blame for this if, like dt, I hadn't seen this elsewhere as well. Not in relatively niche game forums either, but movie forums, skepticism forums. Places where there's always something new to talk about and lots of regulars to do it.
Obviously the old guard are moving on, but the question is why aren't the new ones taking their place? The best explanation I can come up with is 'net communities don't form the way they used to, people don't surf and converse on the 'net the way they used to. So we might bitch and moan about each other but at the same time it's kinda the end of an era everywhere.
Azaran on 28/5/2011 at 07:38
Quote Posted by dethtoll
But see here, this phenomenon is not limited to TTLG alone. I've seen a very large number of platforms- Livejournal and various fora here and there, for starters- basically dry up in activity. It can be partially blamed on stuff like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but I think it's also to do with a lot of the old-timers across the internet stepping out.
Strangely enough, I'm a member of some 50 Facebook groups, and most of them are dead, as are most FB groups I've seen. The fan pages are pretty active, but most FB groups are dead. Yahoo groups on the other hand are pretty active.
Quote Posted by Bluegrime
While there is the occasional Dethtoll who has the posting control of a tourettes sufferer there seems to be less "ILL FUCKING KILL YOU YOU FUCKING COCKSHITTER FUCK" real life rage going between users then I saw ten years ago.
On the contrary, it's actually much worse, but now it's moved over to Youtube video comments, and it gets pretty vicious. Just have a look at any popular video with lots of comments, and you'll see plenty of that stuff e.g. "your a piece of shit, get the fuck out of this country. You should have been shot and tossed in the sea" and other gems of that nature. Sometimes as much as
half the comments on videos are just people hurling shit at each other.
Scots Taffer on 28/5/2011 at 07:38
Quote Posted by Muzman
Obviously the old guard are moving on, but the question is why aren't the new ones taking their place?
Because the new ones are used to rapid-fire status updates and micro-discussions that fade quickly from the memory and don't lead to anything but simply wither and die after a half dozen responses have been tossed out.
People have their turn to speak, then walk on by.
Sulphur on 28/5/2011 at 07:40
The new guard aren't taking their place, Muz, because it's obvious: the reasons for this site, the franchises themselves, have been dead for a while now. How many new users have we had who regularly sign up and participate in active discussion/FM creation?
The mainstream doesn't generally go trawling through gaming history's back catalogue, they're always after the latest new and shiny. We will always have the odd wanderer who discovers the old greats by serendipitous happenstance, but those are few and far between.
Of course, Thief and Deus Ex are being resurrected now, so we will see an influx of new people - probably not as many as the Eidos forums will, but regardless, a new breed's coming. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on who cares, and how they decide to show it.
