Roblox. Easiet pick of my life, Gods save us all
When I was smaller, I was in a group that larped as nations, generally ww2 to copy hoi4 in Roblox
The issue was that it was extremely toxic and competitive when it was literally played as if it was multiplayer DND roleplaying
Because it was Roblox, it had a fuck load of underage people, racists, pedophiles, man children, doxxers, script kiddies and an extremely toxic community
I never interacted too close to it and instead stuck around the more educational parts where people discussed history itself, and I eventually got into discord nation roleplaying by creating my own server with people I knew
If you are curious, look up World Conquest in Roblox and browse the discord
An invitation for a free lunch that turned out to be a multi level marketing presentation for timeshares.
I got way way too into fantasy football. I didn't have a dangerous amount of money invested in it (this was before DraftKings and the rise of addictive gambling apps), but I had like 5 teams and spent endless amounts of time trying to predict who would score points every week, reading stats and articles, and would watch football all day Sunday, and Monday and Thursday nights, as well as highlight shows and analysis.
At some point I just said "What am I doing?" and reclaimed my time. It felt great. No regerts. I don't even watch football anymore.
Doctor Who. It's a television show, you dorks. Stop making television shows part of your personality.
League of Legends. A little proud to say that it took a lot of time to remember I used to dump hours into that hellscape of a game.
Don't get me wrong, League can be fun and some champ designs are just chef's kiss. But at some point I just felt like I wasn't improving any more and got far less.endorphins And ofc, the community is salty and unable to understand that flaming=lower win chances. And I have to admit, I was easily irritated, too, writing messages to support faster than Karen can call the cops.
After quitting I realized it was either a way to distract myself from my problems or actually a form of punishing myself. I wouldn't be surprised if many other players were stuck with it for that reason, perpatuating the toxicity further.
i used to be a republican so
Honest curious question: what made you change your mind?
Honest answer? When trump said “Take the guns away first, due process later.” I was a pretty big gun nut at the time and it felt like a slap in the face. Shortly afterwards I encountered a YouTube video that actually explained the science behind climate change in a way that made it obviously true and that I hadn’t encountered before. The conservative worldview is a house of cards, once you take out a couple the whole thing falls apart pretty quickly.
Now I’m a very progressive atheist and more than a little ashamed of my former self. Still like guns, but I keep that to myself
🔥
Gaming. I've seen it get progressively worse and worse over time. Gamers are some of the most entitled and whiney people I've met.
Game puts out 58fps instead of 60? Trash. Throw it out. Start a media campaign about how shit the devs are at their jobs
Game is only just "fun" and isn't an absolute masterpiece like RDR2? It doesn't matter, since it isn't better than the literal best game ever made it's trash. There is zero middle ground. Burn an effigy!
Game sequel changes anything from the previous? Burn down their offices! Games shouldn't take risks! What do you mean all we have now are boring games from companies afraid to take risks?!
And we haven't even started with the freaking gatekeeping
Now I'm not defending game companies, god knows there's blame over there, but ffs I'm tired of gamers. I've been flamed over having opinions like enjoying a game.
For example. I liked Veilguard. I honestly did. It wasn't a perfect game, it wasn't a RDR2, but I enjoyed it and I found it a good value for the money, and I don't care that it wasn't like Origins. Watch the hate roll in folks.
You've obviously never been a part of the stardew valley community. It's incredibly wholesome.
Gamers have become total suckers as well, and on the whole are not very good with their money. From always pre-ordering to season passes to oceans of memorabilia.
Hardware has especially suffered. There used to be a time when gaming attracted technical people and there were brilliant forums and in depth review sites for hardware. Now most of those are dead with only a couple good ones left because everyone figured out you can just slap RGB lights on your product and call it a day. Gamers will buy it.
Prices go up and up, quality goes down, control over the product goes down, improvements per generation go down. But man there's never been more flashy marketing and lights.
I crank up the graphics settings as high as I can get them while getting at least 20fps consistently. I do think some games are just badly optimized though.
I also liked the original state of Minecraft dungeons and even got the first DLC when it was on sale but then they turned it into a grindy season based thing with subscriptions, yet another program ruined by Microsoft.
Apart from this I don't really have any strong opinions about games and don't really get why people behave like that.
100% This.
So steam has the little update ribbon for games in your library, and recently one popped up for The Outer Worlds in my feed. I thought it was odd since it's not a new game anymore so I checked it out and it was for some reason just the announcement for Outer Worlds 2. Thought that was odd too since that also happened awhile ago so I went to the discussion thread to see if there was an update to the announcement or something and I got to reading the comments. It was just the most toxic and vile cesspool of comments. Literal mud brained comments like "no woke game, no DEI this time, this game bad because I can't fuck the asexual brown girl and she should be white anyway because that doesn't make sense in outer space" and other vile bigoted shit. Like seriously guys? You hated the game so much that you have to spew your ignorant garbage brained thoughts on an announcement thread for the sequel? Fuck me these people are just the absolute sludge at the bottom of the barrel.
I'm all for protesting a game because the company is evil (you know which ones are) but holy hell people, the vast majority of the comments were not that at all. Just fucking go play something else. There are a hundred thousand other choices for any respective genre of game. Please just all of you fuck off.
I assume they updated the game with an advert banner for the sequel in game if you're curious why it's an update and not announcement.
It's just absolute vile, and even if you put aside the pure racism and sexism they have, they still bitch. It leaves me wondering, do they even really like gaming anymore? Really, just truly maybe they don't enjoy it anymore. Then hey, just move on and find a different hobby
Game puts out 58fps instead of 60? Trash. Throw it out. Start a media campaign about how shit the devs are at their jobs
To be fair, they're not entirely wrong about this one when it comes to current-gen games. They're wrong for their dickish entitled opinions, but they're not about how modern titles are requiring far more resources to run compared to the gains in visual quality.
And I'm not complaining about that because I think people are entitled to games meeting some bullshit metric like zero-latency with better-than-life quality on 8 year old hardware. For accessibility reasons, I legitimately can't play modern "AAA" games targeting 30 frames per second. It makes me suffer from severe motion sickness, and there's something about newer games that make them a lot worse (frame blending? Bad frame pacing?). The only thing that seems to help is running at a higher framerate, and it's getting increasingly difficult to find big-budget games that don't either rely on using upscaling and frame generation and/or a $1600 graphics card to achieve that.
That's not to say the developers are bad at their jobs. Rather, the industry trend seems to be that publishers are demanding more content in less time, and games aren't being given the time and budget needed for optimizing them before release.
I used to play DotA2. Some lobbies were fine. The memorable ones were incredibly toxic. I played for a couple of years, so it must have been fun, but all I remember was the racism, cruelty, and bitchiness in voice chat.
Starting with games like Rad Racer and RC Pro Am on the NES, I must have put 10s of thousands of hours into hundreds of different racing games over the years. But try to talk to anyone about it, and it's all gatekeeping all the time.
"Your favorite is too arcade-y for a real fan, noob." "You turn on anti-lock braking? You aren't sophisticated enough to join my clan, peasant." Shit like that. I'm sure lots of other genres have similar fuckwads that think they are the gods of the gaming world.
Capital G Gamers are the worst! It's fine to not enjoy something, but Gamers seem to spend more time getting upset over literally everything than actually playing video games. They also don't acknowledge that indie games exist. They'll complain every game now has microtransactions but pretend not to see the thousands of indie games that don't have any.
If an indie game can't rival the best AAA experience for a cost of no greater than free to $5, it's garbage. It also needs to be lengthy to keep me entertaned for an indefinite period but also not too long. And there can't be any DLC or microtransactions, but I need free content updates for at least 10 years.
If I don't get all of these, I'll give a review of "zero stars, trash game, do not recommend (550 hours played)"
All the Dragon Age games have their own charm, but ultimately it's EA so.. ew.
Probably Anarchy. Like, the political philosophy.
Andrewism on YouTube is doing so much to make a compelling case for it. But it's a real bummer when you get a group of anarchists together and go, 'Damn, hanging out with these people makes me want to implement some rules and structure so we can get things done. This group is totally leaderless and directionless. I'm gonna go see what the socialists are up to.'
It's sad. In my experience, no one ruins anarchism more than anarchists.
I feel like most self-proclaimed anarchists have very little interest in the political philosophy aspect of it. Which is a shame, because it's really far better than its reputation.
Warhammer 40k. I'm still a part of it. There are some cool and smart people in it.
But there are also a large group of raceist, misogynist, jerks. Then there are the people who are incredibly annoying to play against because of poor social skills. There is always at least one guy who really needs a shower.
Star Wars. No one hates Star Wars more than a Star Wars fan. I actively avoid other Star Wars fans.
I'd consider myself a Star Wars fan, and one of the things that gets me about the current state of fandom is how opposed to nuance it is. Having measured opinions about things is right out; you need to decide if you're going to LOVE or HATE a thing, and if you don't then you're not welcome.
From what I can tell, you have to love the b Mandolorian and Andor unconditionally, and hate everything else from Disney.
I personally have enjoyed everything, some more than others. But it was all good.
I’m a Star Wars fan and enjoy it all. The most disappointing watch for me was Book of Boba Fett because it wasn’t how I thought his character would do things. However, it still entertained me.
It was different from what I imagined too, but I still enjoyed it a lot.
I love Rick and Morty. And to be fair the whole Justin Roland schism got rid of a lot of toxic fans. Just not all.
This is mine too.
I disconnected from R&M after the toxic fans went psycho over Schezwan sauce. There was some news blip that happened not long before that intelligent people tend to have a dark sense of humor, and it's like it made the worst of the worst decide that they must be super geniuses if they teabag someone in CS:GO after they kill them.
Reddit
Everyone here is talking about fandoms they left because the fans were toxic, but the worst fandom I've been in is that because I can't even think about it anymore without cringing: Channel Awesome. Just knowing what was going on behind the scenes makes me I wish I could refund the hours I spent watching the Nostalgia Critic.
Do you have a tl;Dr?
Channel Awesome was run by a guy named Mike Michaud, who was a really shit boss. Pretty much anything you expect HR to do is something he neglects. Harassment was rampant, contributors were scripted into situations that they weren't comfortable with, nobody was notified about massive changes to the site, the works. Some stayed quiet because they feared retribution from man child Mike, others were either fired or quit in protest. This all bubbled up for years until a 70 Google doc detailing every single instance of neglect and hostility that went on behind the scenes was published, at which point CA collapsed like cheap cardboard. The document is freely available online, but since you're looking for a short version, I'll just summarize thusly:
Mike Michaud is a parasite that feeds on content creators and gives nothing in return. Also, his stench attracts roaches.
I hadn't thought about fandom's based around people rather than properties (ex. Movie/game series). I imagine a lot of people feel that way about late Rooster Teeth.
Don't worry. He remembers it, so you don't have to.
Capitalism.
Anything Anime. Used to watch a lot of it. Every now and then, when I get a recommendation, I still check some out. But holy hell, I will never again engage with any community. Never seen anything so toxic, standoffish and whiny at the same time.
The borderline pedophilia in so much anime is what turns me off. So many popular series are lolicon degeneracy but heavens forbid you try to call it out, or the anime fans come out in droves to tell you that you're an unappreciative normie who just doesn't get the themes and how profound they are.
I still watch some series, but I simply cannot engage with an anime community ever again.
The casual pedophilia is fucked, but I never saw it much unless I was exposed by sheer damn chance from new titles
I am very critical according to the average weeb, and far too lenient if we go by the standards of average folk
All the over sexualized characters, regardless of age, makes it damn near impossible to recommended much to any one. Even the "clean" shows suffer due to the bad rep. I get Japan is more open about it (ironic considering the censor laws), but some shows definitely cross the wrong side of the "adult" line and need to be publicly rediculed for it.
Its also good to remember pretty much every western TV show has borderline porn scenes now too. Ever since they moved away from cable regulations, they've been getting bolder.
If we're gonna normalize one (too late, both are), I'll take the animated one that doesn't involve real people (well the voices actors have to act that shit out, but at least their whole body isn't on full display, ever watch GoT?).
The Haruhi fandom forums back when season 2 premiered were a shitshow, even before Endless Eight. I tend to avoid anime fans on the internet after that. However, when the new Spice & Wolf season was airing, I ventured into some fan spaces and was surprised at how pleasant it was. Probably helps that the books and show are both pretty wholesome. Didn't even see much lusting after Holo. So it might just depend on the show.
It also depends on the community a lot. The anime community on lemmy (!anime@ani.social, shameless plug) has been super chill overall. I think it's in large part due to the lemmy userbase skewing older than your average social media user.
Ohio State football fans are notoriously whiny, spoiled assholes.
Anime.
The office stans are bat shit annoying same with Harry potter
Online Manchester United fans. I’ve never seen such a set of ignorant, fickle, judgmental pricks anywhere else.
I'd want to say Gay Creepypasta fanfiction, but that one was surprisingly chill in hindsight. So I'll go with my current problematic fave, dunking on Amberlynn Reid Fandom. It's... not much better than the Chris Chan Fandom, but it's very entertaining.
Pro wrestling
/r/opieandanthony
It was a comedic toxic shithole. RIP
I was peripheral to it as a Ron and Fez fan. Good lord that place was awful. Rest in piss.
Take your pick. All of them have been pretty bad. Worst though might go to Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix fandoms.
All of them.
