Any sort of hypebeast scam. Labubu, pop up clothing companies with no real design or quality, beanie babies, most crypto, specific vinyl collections. It's only worth something if you know some deep dark lore about it which requires effort to research and understand, then you're hooked. It's post capitalism cult energy.
Cult leadership
Linux
Warhammer
Crossfit
Competitive Super Smash Bros Melee, we won't ever die. And Nintendo has been trying to rub us out since 2008.
. And Nintendo has been trying to rub us out since 2008.
dedication like that... phew. impressive.
At this point, trading card collecting and grading. Oh, a new series of trading cards for pokemon or yu-gi-oh or whatever dropped? Time for all the adults to buy out every single card in the store and then run home in hopes that their scam leaders like PSA will encourage their behavior by gracing them with a card they claim is worth money despite only being out for less than a week.
Card grading ain't nothing but a scam, cult, and great way to encourage the worst in people, while simultaneously gatekeeping trading cards from everyone with more than 2 braincells. Ain't nothing gonna change my mind about it.
Religion. 🤌🏼
People who play Call of Chuthulu every single day
Cycling. They go from 'this is fun', to full blown road dictators, in about 2 weeks.
Edit: just watch. The downvotes will likely display their cult rage.
Please explain exactly what you mean by "full blown road dictators", and clearly detail how it is different from "use the road in a completely legal manner in ways trying to keep yourself and others from getting run over by the many car drivers with a sense of entitlement to the road".
I feel like it would be easier to list the hobbies that aren't, based on the answers so far.
Feel free to post this question.
Nix and NixOS
Pickleball.
Seriously what is the deal with it? I remembered playing it in gym decades ago and everyone hated it. Now I see people lobbying for new freaking complexes for it. Let's see if the fad lasts more than a year before dedicating public land space to it
It kinda looks like tennis for the unathletic, which means I should fit right in, but I have zero interest.
CrossFit.
Religion. All of them are cults. Every single fucking one.
Nothing. No other hobby even comes close to the death, genocide, rape, murder, and hate generated by that type of religious cult. It's every single year, too. Every single year religion tops its hate, greed, and pain inflicted on everyone.
I don't think anyone would call their religion a hobby, though.
They said hobbies not belief systems.
Edgelord atheist mad at christianity and islam: "every religion is genocide and hate, and I hate them."
Buddhists , jains, pagans, etc: "hey excuse you buddy."
I mean, Buddhists just did a genocide in Myanmar. They have a cleaner track record than Abrahamic faiths for sure, but if you spend serious time in actual Buddhist places it fills the exact same societal roles.
Neopaganism is a bit of an odd one out in that list, because it's a newly invented thing.
Baha'is would as well, but nobody ever remembers them. The one time I saw a question about TBF on Jeopardy, it was the Final Jeopardy question, and no one got it right.
Your particular brand of invisible sky wizard is different from my particular brand of invisible sky wizard. Die heretic!
I'm pretty sure that religion was mostly used as a kind of motivational tool for the masses, but without religion there probably would have been another excuse why the enemy needs to die
It's always about resources and shit anyway
What a fun answer!
Yeah seriously. It's pretty severely missed the point of this thread.
Ironic that it looks like someone came through and downvotes every answer in this thread other than this one, considering. It'd be pretty great if the mods banned whoever that was.
Arch Linux
I wouldn't know, I've never met a person in real life professing to using arch BTW. I see it everywhere online though, but that might just be eight guys with a ton of sock puppet accounts for all I know.
Is arch linux even a thing, like Hanna Montana and Justin Bieber Linux is a thing?
I would say NixOS might be even more cultish. I am a part of that cult.
Only to people who haven't been inducted to the cult of gentoo
Unironically a neat clean system
If I knew how to get it
Can’t spell anarchy without arch 🏴
Gunpla, pop/labubu, liquid-cooing/overclocking, 3D printing, drones/RC
There is a bit of a threshold between an innocent hobby and a cult, but once crossed, it's.... yeah...
If you're into liquid cooling cause it gives "better performance" then that's cope and a cult, but if you just do it to make your PC look cool asf then there's nothing wrong with that
Can you still overclock tf out of a liquid cooled cpu or has that changed?
Internet personalities/"influencers"
Are they fundamentally different from celebs and TV personalities of the past, or is it the scale and presentation that has changed?
There will always be grifters and those who are led in to loyalty follow them. It's bizarre.
One way money transfers, controlling people's time and career aspirations, dividing families, rape, and murder.
Not all "Influencers", but some notable cases.
I second DnD and Warhammer, and i'll add Magic the Gathering to this list
First intro to MtG was in college I walked past a room with the lights out and only candles lit, the four people were wearing robes and playing... MtG. Decided right then that nah, that's too far for me.
Yeah, anything that has you speaking in game jargon in public should qualify.
One of my friends at a pizza place a few years ago: "I can't believe I didn't get to poison anyone last night."
Me: "Dude, context! We are in public!"
Kpop-Stans, Warhammer, Disney - Adults, Harry Potter.
Society for Creative Anachronism
Oh damn. I came here to answer this too, but was definitely not expecting someone else already to have said it.
I do HEMA, which has a healthy overlap with the SCA, but from what I've heard, the SCA has a pretty rigid structure and hierarchy with ranks and titles. I've heard about people winning bouts in SCA fencing against someone who is supposedly ranked higher than them, and getting shunned because of it. That's not healthy.
Dagorhir also overlapped with SCA a bit, and surely had a weird social scene, but I wouldn't consider it cult-like. People seemed well integrated with the rest of society when they weren't battling.
They seem so positive and bubbly from the outside!
Definitely a cult.
Warhammer.
Honestly, I don't think very many of them could really be described as such, as at the very least most hobbies either don't have a person or group that could be called it's leader, or if they do, it's generally some business that owns some relevant IP that very much isn't considered unquestionable and above criticism. You could get cults that emerge within some hobby group instead of taking up the whole subculture, but given even things as mundane as exercise groups have had this happen before, I'd guess that can technically happen in just about any of them.
Kirby.
Knitting. It's part witchcraft, part voodoo.
Dungeons and Dragons
But the cultists are the bad guys!
Shar?
Triathletes
Huh? How? There's no leadership structure to it to provide that cultish vibe, it's mostly just individuals are small groups of friends doing their thing together.
Nah just kidding, the joke is participants of either individual sport (swimming, running, cycling) dislike the other disciplines ergo triathletes are nuts. But getting Ironman tattoos is kind of groupthink-y.
DnD
"Do not Disturb"-mode is criminally underrated, I advocate for it to anybody willing to listen.
Most of them...
The cult of..origami?
Oh, man, the serious origami people are SERIOUS!
Also candle making, don't sniff the Kool Aid scented wax.
