The onward march toward no thoughts.

[sammich]

Jam and I were watching an excellent video by Mother's Basement about how bad Crunchyroll's subtitles have become and since it's basically supposed to be the main GOOD SOURCE of anime in English, it needs to correct the issues and not just shovel it out to the masses. I know I don't even subscribe to them anymore because I can't, in good conscience, support a monopoly. But it's further proof that large companies do not care about quality. They only care about shoveling out more product to the masses.

The absence of forums for anime and video games means people nowadays are relegated to screaming in game reviews on Steam or small enclaves. Gone are the large and more fun forums of yesteryear that used to thrive and promote discourse. Perhaps with the death of forums and discourse we've lost something. We're now algorithmically pointed toward specific videos where the comments are just huge echo-chambers. Reading comprehension is abysmal nowadays. I quite literally would make friends on forums in the old days. I don't know if there's much of us left. There are people who remember and know that it doesn't have to be a 120 character limit on your speech. You can have entire conversations on the internet if you so choose to.

I've been very interested in going back to the "old ways" lately. I feel the urge to sharpen my skills at writing and reading again. I want to use words for more than a brief cold emote/emoji response or reaction. I want to talk again and let people know that I genuinely care about what they had to say. We're not just faceless robots. It's something that we're being groomed into becoming but we have the power to stop it and become human again.

That's what I'd like to think, anyway.

Comments

[jammerlea]

I really miss the old communities too. Obvs that's how we met lol It really was just a better way to connect with people I think. Like every platform had it's problems, but idk. There's just so much disconnect now. It was great when we had dedicated fandom communities. Now it's just a struggle. Especially topped with the current purity culture bs. It makes me hesitate to interact with certain things and people.

[sammich]

Nowadays, despite having phones that are better at computing than our old cellphones of those days, it's the rise of social media, micro-blogging and the quick fix of "shorts" and tiktok-styled content.

We don't have conversations anymore. It's more of a constant stream of updates and the only real interactions we get are likes, favorites and reposts. I remember the amount of interaction I would get started to drop even in DeviantArt when social media became the norm. People really stopped commenting on art and started to just favorite and move on. Collect the item or give kudos and then move on to the next thing. Never stop to learn more or interact with that person.

We are all insulated now in tiny lonely bubbles curated by faceless companies and algorithms.