Goodbye

Although this is a response to you, since you said you're not coming back, I'll also just state my general thoughts on this matter.

The world changed compared to 20 years ago. The golden age is over, and the leftover optimism from the 80s and 90s and early 2000s is gone. Society has changed and destabilised to a great degree, and people have a generally pessimistic outlook for their own lives and for the world as a whole. You can't expect to have the same energy in a community today as you found 20 years ago.

I don't think it's an issue for you when I and JoeJ have a 100-post discussion thread. It's not something you have to be part of or even read. If we like talking, we are allowed to talk, even if it's mostly just restating our points over and over.

Also, when two people with convictions meet, there's bound to be clashes of opinion where people will try their best to defend their viewpoint, and also try to destroy the other's viewpoint. That's just human nature. It shouldn't devolve into insults and personal attacks, but that's just how it goes sometimes.

Downvoting people gets you reddit-tier mob mentality where it's just majority rule and censorship of anything that isn't a mainstream opinion (even if it is the truth). And I'm not talking about conspiracy theories or politics here. I'm talking about even stuff like technical opinions. And it also incentivises people to become bootlickers who say the popular thing just to get upvotes.

My experience with this forum has been quite positive, as at least I myself have been able to engage in meaningful and earnest discussions about game development here. Though there are tons of different clashing viewpoints here, for examples on matters like approaches to optimisation and when it is appropriate or not to think about performance, OOP vs data-oriented, whether to use U-engines or not, etc., what is good code or bad code, etc..

There are also a view people here as you can find them anywhere, who are deranged to some degree, but that's just life. You don't have to talk to them, and you don't have to read their opinions.

If it affects you so much if you come into contact with people who strongly believe different things from you, and who voice their beliefs, then I think that's not their fault, but rather misplaced expectations. As a serious Christian, I feel pained by almost everyone I have contact with, because their atheism always shines through at least a little bit in almost every conversation. I learned to deal with that pain and enduring it, rather than running away.

As a piece of personal advice: I don't think you'll find a place that you can tolerate. You either deal with it, or you have to isolate yourself and live a hermit's life. You won't be able to return to the good times of 20 years ago ever again in this life.

My apologies, if I led you to your decision.

I have no dog in this game, as I haven't been an active GDnet user for years, and just sort of popped back on recently. I have no idea what the scene is like lately, or what's being discussed in these 100-reply posts. I will say, if it's two people going back and forth, I don't see a reason to perpetuate it within a thread; take it to DMs. Hell, call each other and have a respectful discussion...at that point, you're practically roommates haha

I will say that I also started here as a total beginner, probably over 15 years ago; I was a dumb idiot kid who wanted to make an MMORPG as his first project. Folks here spent their time to tell me how it is, and it led to me dumping a ton of time into programming and indie game dev projects that not only just made my brain work better by virtue of doing them, but taught me skills that I use to this day.

This is the value in forums that I recognize, and I think it's awesome. I'm grateful that my stupid li'l kid self got the sage advice that he got. Some very talented and accredited people took time to steer my course, and it happened on this website.

That said, I think forums have been bleeding out for a while now. I wish they weren't, but the Internet is different nowadays than it was before, and I think RmbRT touched on that a bit. Most people, when they want a human opinion, go to Reddit (or tack "site:reddit.com" at the end of their search), but Reddit is known for having moderation heavily influenced by some random arbiter of justice who happened to become the Lord of that Subreddit. Reddit is sort of replacing forums, but it's also kind of a shitshow.
X posts on indie game dev get hundreds of thousands of views daily; GDnet posts get about 100-1000 on a good day. Again, I don't like that it's happening, but I think forums have been slowly dying for a long time. Most people interact over Discord, X, and other such platforms.

You probably won't read this, but I'll say it anyway, because I think it's an important distinction to make when you're participating in the world wide web. The Internet is a rough place; it has been since its conception. People say shit, just because they can. There may be people floundering about in threads on this website, but you don't have to read those threads.

If you feel there is no one left in this community that is not poisoned to the point where you do not value their opinion, then I respect your decision to leave.

If not, I think you should just stop ingesting content that frustrates you. Filter what you view; if you cannot effect change in something that annoys you, do not engage with it. There is a community of developers here – people who share some of your skillsets, people who may be able to offer valuable insight. If you know the sorts of conversations you want to have, I recommend you ignore the aspects that irritate you, and retain your presence in case you ever want to bend the ear of some like-minded individuals.

Nothing on the Internet forces you to read it, after all.

I apologize if I'm out of line for even offering my two cents, since I don't have the full context of this situation.

At any rate, cheers; I reckon the community will be lesser for not having you. Best of luck.

Juliean wrote:

mostly a place for certain individuals to rant, rage and post their moronic ideologies.

Hi, I don't think we've crossed paths much. I know my own "knives out" battle with someone recently, you weren't a part of it. I would have remembered.

I have a very old account. I never made much use of GDNet back in the day because it was always heavy on the technical, light on game design. AFAIAC that's still true. I was dormant for a long time, but surprised the other month that my account still existed, and I could still log in. So I did.

I got nuked on Reddit. Their system is not hacker safe and my account got hacked. Reddit doesn't care that that has happened and has turned 15+ years of my posts and comments invisible. I've gone through appropriate channels a number of times and they never respond. I'm just treated as a problem, not any kind of content asset. I think it's about their scaling up as they contemplate their IPO. Anyways it seems they're done, and it says a lot about how large internet forums have become.

I've retreated back to smaller forums like GDNet, one per topic area. Some are more pleasant, like a coffee forum I'm now on. Some are more dead, at least the section I'm interested in. Some have waaaaay more drama than even I've seen here, like an art forum. But someone quit that one too and things will probably calm down after that. It's variable, and I find myself very much dealing with "small peer group" dynamics.

I guess you'll be picking your poison. Good luck with that. You have to exert effort on the internet nowadays to get actual human contact.

bvanevery wrote:

I got nuked on Reddit. Their system is not hacker safe and my account got hacked. Reddit doesn't care that that has happened and has turned 15+ years of my posts and comments invisible. I've gone through appropriate channels a number of times and they never respond. I'm just treated as a problem, not any kind of content asset.

Exactly. When you feel as though you are no longer having a conversation, you have lost all reason to even engage with the other party. Reddit does not have conversations; it has people who agree with each other, agreeing with each other in a group. It isn't really a forum.

I'd go so far as to say it has nothing to do with "scaling up" or anything of the sort. It's just an attempt to shove an ideology; it's been obviously so for a long time.

Your final comment rings true with me: "You have to exert effort on the internet nowadays to get actual human contact."

I don't like it, but I can't deny it, either. I think you're right.

CaseyHardman wrote:

Reddit does not have conversations; it has people who agree with each other, agreeing with each other in a group. It isn't really a forum.

I had actual community in a small group called r/birdfeeding, but at the end, that was it. The only thing that made me feel a loss, the only thing I missed. I had already "downsized" after the moderator walkout a few years ago. Any group that wasn't critical to my life, or pushing my serious goals balls forwards, I ditched as noise and distraction. Some were worthy causes like r/union, but I realized I'm too old to end up in a union. Indie or bust.

Community is possible on the small scale, but we do end up having to do the work.

The Internet has certainly changed many times, going back to my first exposure in 1990.

The heyday of forums has come and gone. What helped bring them together is gone, and these days there's massive pressure to consolidate, coupled with the commercialization and exploitation draw. Certainly it's far easier to create websites these days, but the broad society is quite different. It has almost nothing to do with the web, a tremendous amount to do with the psychology of Gen X and the psychology of Xennials that created that era. Gen Z and Generation Alpha will not experience it, neither the traumas and collective difficulties like a broad generation of latchkey kids -- the least-parented, least-nurtured cohort group known -- nor the benefits that flowed from it. Online forums were an outgrowth of it, and societally they're unlikely to return.

It isn't that it's harder to bring people together, it's that the people with the traits and with the inclination are far fewer these days. There is no longer critical mass, and it shows up not just in internet forums, but in all kinds of real life groups and organization as well. The type of community still has pockets where they exist, but they're costly to maintain with so small number of participants.

I agree with many of Julieans' points around accountability and consequences, but they're not in a vacuum, culturally it's visible in everything. You don't have to look farther than tenured professors describing the change in university freshmen over the past quarter century. You can see it not just in sports and organized activities, but also in simple activities. The world has changed fundamentally in diverse ways. Web forums are only a small sign.

bvanevery wrote:

I had actual community in a small group called r/birdfeeding, but at the end, that was it. The only thing that made me feel a loss, the only thing I missed.

That sucks. Those sort of niche hobbyist groups seem to be some of the only reasons to participate with Reddit nowadays.

Unless you're a zealot farming virtue points, that is.

frob wrote:

You don't have to look farther than tenured professors describing the change in university freshmen over the past quarter century.

I thought to touch on this myself, but decided against it haha

I've definitely seen some worrying clips of kids nearing the end of high school who can barely comprehend a sentence, and plenty of teachers lamenting the lack of reading comprehension in the younger generations. A right proper paragraph is too much to read, for most of them – let alone a sentence. It's no wonder forums are a dying breed.

CaseyHardman wrote:

plenty of teachers lamenting the lack of reading comprehension in the younger generations. A right proper paragraph is too much to read, for most of them – let alone a sentence. It's no wonder forums are a dying breed.

I dunno, is it really all that different? As early as the 8th grade in the early 1980s, one of my English teachers recognized that I was a "good writer". It wasn't cool to hear praise like that from that old teacher at the time, but she wasn't wrong. Fast forward to being a junior in high school, and I'm getting a "5" on my AP English exam. Had the expository writing chops. My grandpa was a newspaper editor for The Milwaukee Journal, so some of these traits were probably inherited.

I clearly wasn't everybody, although obviously there were others in my classes that did well at it too. I think we should refrain from selective observation about people on the internet. Back in the day, all forums were smaller. Since then, Facebook came into existence, other kinds of social media took off, iPhones were invented, broadband in the household became commonplace, YouTube happened, and millions of people got on the internet. Yeah, many of 'em are illiterate, they want videos... but is it really that different from the past? I never expected everyone to be good at writing.

Chat ala Twitter is probably responsible for much of the short attention span dumbing down of the internet though. Along with the mobile phones that short stuff was typed in on. So many people resist typing with a full keyboard.

I'm old enough to have learned on a manual typewriter as a middle school elective. In the early 1980s, an electric typewriter was still state of the art and home word processing wasn't really a thing yet.

bvanevery wrote:

I dunno, is it really all that different? As early as the 8th grade in the early 1980s, one of my English teachers recognized that I was a "good writer". It wasn't cool to hear praise like that from that old teacher at the time, but she wasn't wrong. Fast forward to being a junior in high school, and I'm getting a "5" on my AP English exam. Had the expository writing chops. My grandpa was a newspaper editor for The Milwaukee Journal, so some of these traits were probably inherited.

I'm not sure what point you're making. I think it's pretty obvious that most kids nowadays have lesser reading comprehension skills than was standard before.

You sound like someone whose opinion I'd immediately give credit. Your grandpa sounds cool.

There are, all in all, people who just think better than others. Sounds like your teacher wasn't one of those people, but you were. "Having the expository writing chops" is just another word for being a bit better than your peers.

It sounds like you had a right proper working brain. Your teachers recognized that, even if they couldn't guide it. Have you seen kids trying to comprehend a sentence? They slur "silhouette" because not only do they not know the word, they can't conceptualize what the sentence might mean. It's easy to put the sentence in other words, for you and I. They can't do it, because they can't even comprehend the meaning of the sentence.

There are plenty of words whose meanings I don't know, but can guess at. When asked to conceptualize the intent, they completely draw a blank. It's kind of pathetic, as a countryman. I wish my kin were better than this.

Every online community goes through this phase - the people who built it leave quietly, the loudest voices stay, and new arrivals assume the loud voices represent the place. Sad to watch it happen to GD.net specifically. It used to be one of the few genuinely useful gamedev forums.

While it is easy to get sidetracked into generations and age cohorts -- I had typed up a long reply for it -- I think that's too much of a distraction here.

It's sufficient in the thread for me to say over my decades I've seen clear generational divides in how people socialize and gather. The Greatest Generation, Silent Generation, and Boomers consistently behaved in one set of ways, the GenX-ers and Xennials another, Gen Y was a transition, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are yet another. Both online communities and offline communities, the defining features of Gen X and Xennials have some historically unique, and likely unique to human history and unrepeatable conditions. Those conditions were what allowed these communities, but aging of the cohort means the communities will vanish.

It's been hard to see the site fade, but it's not the only community I've seen fade, both in real life and online. They'll likely never return, and the community will be missed.

GD.net in its heyday was amazing, and active, and helped bring several hundred aspiring game developers from students through to industry professionals. The resources on the site, and the discussions, helped launch new technologies, and were even incorporated into systems that are ubiquitous today including in game engine design, game networking design, and graphics hardware design as I have firsthand knowledge of conversations on the site that were referenced in designing what is today's modern hardware.

For those who move on, as we all must, Godspeed in whatever adventure comes next.

CaseyHardman wrote:

I think it's pretty obvious that most kids nowadays have lesser reading comprehension skills than was standard before.

You may think that, but I'm pushing back on that and questioning it. I propose it is a case of selective observation on your part, and on the part of educators. But in the latter case, I'm prepared to be wrong. I'd want the claim to be evidence based and not anecdotal cranky teacher based.

A discussion of educational tracks would be relevant. Some programs are for better students, and they feed better universities in the USA with stricter requirements. Other countries do things a bit differently. All this gets a bit off-topic.

What's topical? People's written literacy nowadays, their propensity to engage in "long form" sentence and paragraph discussions, that pretty much require full keyboards and typing skills. No question we're in the minority, as to how we communicate.

But there's also just the strategic factor of bigger sites, like Reddit, sucking the air out of the internet and gobbling everyone up. Aside from written literacy, there needs to be an awareness that internet life is empty, that it it lacks community, that large numbers of people shoved into a topic heading is not a community. Reddit for instance inevitably grows towards larger groups and it ruins communities.

They also make deliberate choices that anonymize you in practice. You can probably easily remember the forum participants you see here, because they have a big icon and sidebar. A lot of screen real estate is devoted to their existence as individuals. Some have made distinctive icons; I should probably cough up one of those. On Reddit, you get almost nothing. No screen real estate for you. You can have a variation on the Reddit mascot, that's it. It's not branding you, it's branding Reddit.

Anyways, for people nowadays to come to a web forum, they need to 1) become disgruntled with one of the bigger more anonymous sites, 2) realize this is a community formation problem, by comparison to genuine community they've experienced elsewhere in their lives, and 3) be favorably disposed to sentences and paragraphs. That's a lot of requirements.

In the early days of the internet, in the 1990s to early 2000s, mailing lists and forums were composed primarily of academics and professionals. These people could write. You might occasionally see clashes between "academic writing culture" where people were very long winded, and "business writing culture" where 1 sentence is delivered, theoretically to maximize clarity, intent, and focus of message. Both are skills.

frob wrote:

but aging of the cohort means the communities will vanish.

No, it means that the community must recognize itself as an extant culture, and take seriously the problem of its cultural reproduction.

Real life face-to-face communities also vanish. It's important to have an ongoing mechanism that gets "new blood" into a community. Old farts flat out die, I've seen it happen in some of my Asheville NC groups.

Young people move away because there aren't enough high paying jobs in a region. You can predict that any young person joining a group is gonna be gone in 2..3 years, because their economic life survival requirements are gonna change and they're gonna be outta there. Not enough jobs in Asheville to sustain young career-minded people, they can't really settle down there. It's an expensive area driven by tourists and retirees.

I've seen it all through the lens of a homeless indie game dev living out of his car, working on a laptop at picnic tables. That was my dodge regarding the expense, and I used to have a dog that needed a milder summer. My own community participation and leadership problem is I can't be in town all year, I gotta follow the weather. Much easier for me to try to participate in online communities. The problem is, they can't replace face-to-face communities.

frob wrote:

GD.net in its heyday was amazing, and active, and helped bring several hundred aspiring game developers from students through to industry professionals. The resources on the site, and the discussions...

Right? I've learned an incredible amount about several disciplines from this site, specifically from the forums. Honestly, more than I've ever learned from (horrible) places like Reddit.

I was so glad to see the site have a bit of a makeover. But honestly, I spend next to no time on the forums because there's not a lot there that interests me, and quite frankly, some folks just stomp on my last nerve and I'd rather not have to deal with them at all for the sake of my mental health (seriously, can we not have a "block user" function?). So, all I do now is look at the news feed for articles that interest me and that's it. It's a shame really.

I'd love to see focused forums make a small comeback, but given how the world is, I'm not seeing that happen any time soon.

I think the problem isn't forums, Reddit, or social media. It's that people now expect every online space to match their preferences. The moment a community contains opinions we dislike, it starts feeling "toxic'' .Sometimes the issue is the community, but sometimes it's our own expectations.

sophie-talks wrote:

I think the problem isn't forums, Reddit, or social media.

Unmoderated internet communities have predictable toxic behaviors in them. Unlike real life where someone might punch you in the nose or even kill you for what you say, the internet is mostly consequence free. Sometimes internet shouting matches do cross over into real life violence, either directly by 2 hotheads meeting each other in person and fighting, or indirectly by one "SWATting" or doxxing another. But most internet interactions, there are no consequences for socially bad behavior, things that would get you in trouble in real life. Anonymous internet cowards revel in it and very much enjoy it, the possibility of doing verbal violence to someone who really can't or won't do anything about it.

Hence, most of us need moderated communities. But, not all communities are well moderated. Good moderators / community managers are unusual. I take the view that forums live and die by their moderators and moderation policies.

bvanevery wrote:

sophie-talks wrote:

I think the problem isn't forums, Reddit, or social media.

Unmoderated internet communities have predictable toxic behaviors in them. Unlike real life where someone might punch you in the nose or even kill you for what you say, the internet is mostly consequence free. Sometimes internet shouting matches do cross over into real life violence, either directly by 2 hotheads meeting each other in person and fighting, or indirectly by one "SWATting" or doxxing another. But most ...

I agree that moderation is important. My point is that there's a difference between actual toxic behavior and simply encountering opinions we don't like. Communities need moderation, but they also need room for disagreement.

To be fair, this forum has no problem with outright vitriol or anything like it. OP's concerns about “toxicity” are directed at what he considers obnoxious viewpoints or opinions. Although there might have been rare instances of people actually insulting each other, but certainly not frequently enough for this to drag the entire forum down.

I assume he's talking about me, but I don't know since he wouldn't say. Anyway, considering how everyone is spouting the mantra of freedom & democracy & plurality and multi-culturalism and all that, people are surprisingly fragile when they come in contact with opinions that stem from fundamentally different worldviews or opposing viewpoints. Guess what, plurality & multiculturalism means people with different cultural backgrounds and values come together, and will have wildly different ideas. So it's time to either stop paying lip service to those ideals and actually live them, or to step up and honestly admit you only want people with your values and opinions to surround you.

If this forum were a place with only one opinion & viewpoint allowed, it should explicitly state that, and then if that didn't match mine, I'd leave. But I assume it isn't, so anyone who wants such a community simply isn't the target audience of this forum, and can't fit in.

Again, nobody here got doxxed or swatted, no death threats were made and maybe a few times a year actual insults might occur here. That's pretty civilised and tame, all things considered. After all, this is a place where people with a strong attachment to the topic at hand gather, so there's bound to be clashes of strong opinions.