I don't like it as much either. (Destiny)

by Funkmon , Thursday, December 17, 2015, 21:19 (3359 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I agree with you, Cody.

I also think a benefit of a place like Bungie.org is permanence and history. For example, a friend of mine is super into Top Gear. She follows some Tumblrs and the Top Gear subreddit...and yet on a regular basis, she sends me a GIF of an event that happened on Top Gear and asks me what episode it was. She hasn't seen all the episodes, despite spending tons of time in Top Gear communities online. The problem? She got into it after Final Gear went down.

A friend of mine is into Avril. She regularly finds out new things about her, stuff shared on Avrilbandaids.com that I found out about in like my first two weeks there. But Bandaids is gone. New fans who start becoming obsessive with subjects are now often limited to the zeitgeist.

The real loss, in my opinion, is personal interactions with the people who aren't creators. Yes, people follow Hedge. Yes, people follow people on Tumblr who make Sherlock GIFs. But, on HBO, Wu put a news article up, linked to a thread, and there you have a couple dozen dudes. You get to know them as people, even if they don't create things.

Case in point: me. I'm about 98% shitposter. I don't add much to any conversation I take part in here, and I barely create threads that are worthwhile. And yet, you all know me. I've made lots of friends here. With the exception of only a few old timers who may remember me from 10 years ago, everyone here is new since I took time off games. I take part in the Destiny subreddit fairly frequently, and I've made ZERO friends there in the same time.

Potential creators also lose motivation easily in our current community. Let's say I want to draw some cool stuff or make a cool video, or do some crazy Mike Miller Legend shit. I do it once, and probably nobody cares. Why do it again? I don't know the name of the guy who soloed Oryx hard mode, for example. I can name literally 4 Destiny players of renown, 75% of whom I know only because Bungie had them in a video reveal. What do they create? Nothing, really. They just make gameplay videos that are pretty much thrown away immediately. They aren't created to be works of art themselves or to have any relevance beyond the moment. Literally 100% of us could do that (although guys like TripleWreck are really good). How many big deal Halo players could we name from 2002 or 2003? And for what reasons are they famous? In general, it's for actually doing something.

Then you have some guys who are stupid talented doing great stuff on the subreddit and nobody gives two shits, and nobody knows who they are. Unfortunately, fame is a huge motivator for people. Using Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook, it's often content first, people second. People don't make 4 minute long Destiny videos of their best moments, because nobody will care. They make 21 second long clips with no sound of a particular funny thing. Why put in the effort if nobody cares?

That said, if the content is inextricably linked to the person, Twitter and Facebook cannot be beaten. For example, artwork, or personal writing. Good luck exploring the subject though.

Twitter is great if you want people to bring you things to look at. Websites like HBO are great if you want to discover things to look at on your own.