Why are recent Doomworld threads stupid?

[VICE]

Discuss in earnest.

Personally, I think it's a byproduct of ''GenZ'' and ''Gen Alpha'' discovering a highly moddable game, attracting the same types of crowds as something like minecraft or roblox or whatever.

 

Not gonna lie, some of this leads to hilarious discussions, but honestly General and Everything Else feel like I'm visiting a nursery.
I think a feature common in other forums, where new members must make an arbitrary number of posts before they can start their own topics, might help mitigate this phenomenon. Maybe add some kind of mod-approved element to that as well.
Just sayin'.

Edited May 21 by VICE

[xScavengerWolfx]

As someone who's been here for almost 4 years now, i can personally say that the recent doomworld threads are stupid yes but i think they make them because they want a reaction out of people and get the mods to close the threads.

 

But that's just my option on the matter, i just find it funny that some of the threads are really stupid stuff like "Why are the Cacodemons red?" or "i got perma banned off of reddit". It's just funny to me.

[Obsidian]

I mentioned this in another thread, but this sort of thing could be mitigated to some degree if people used their status updates: if you have errant thoughts you'd like to share that honestly don't deserve an entire thread, you can post on your profile and get responses from the people that actually follow you for your content. It's possible that their usage dropped off some once status updates were no longer visible on the forum homepage and I will admit that I don't use my own nearly as much as I should: maybe I should pop some game reviews on mine, I remember doing that a few years ago when I first played Dead Space.

 

But I digress. It'd be cool to see more folks use their status updates and get into the habit of blogging a little to alleviate the sorts of tendencies we're seeing expressed in forum threads these days.

[Lila Feuer]

20 minutes ago, xScavengerWolfx said:

or "i got perma banned off of reddit". It's just funny to me.

Not perma banned, parma banned.

[xScavengerWolfx]

4 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Not perma banned, parma banned.

Oh fuck! I didn't even notice the mis spelling of it *wheeze laughing*

[mrthejoshmon]

Been here for like 12 years, there has always been dumb shit posted (I was responsible for a fair bit of it)

 

Recently however it is quite, forgive the term, "brainrotted", more so than usual.

Edited May 21 by mrthejoshmon

[vyruss]

C'mon... aren't you at least a little excited to try counting down exactly when the next "i'm sad because there's no new doom game yet" thread will drop?  We need more "gameplay type bad"... and let's not forget the classical sign of no ability to think on one's own "what's your opinion on ?" and the extra special "should i [do things]?"

 

Too bad the state of the forum software is so difficult.  It would be hilarious to see if there is a mechanism to allow a combination of 5 status updates and 15 posts to existing topics without the ability to add links to anything before creation of a new topic.  I'm sure this could be abused by folks just putting out a bunch of dummy posts, but might at least save us from the sexy witch doctors we've been getting raided by lately.

 

LOL what is this blue link-like text? just used array notation brackets.

Edited May 21 by vyruss

[Zerofuchs]

I mean thinking back to the forums of yesteryear I don't really perceive all that greater a degree of dumbassery now than back on Gamespot in 2004, or your average 20 member PHP forum, or most IRC channels... although I'm talking more in general as most of my time around Doomworld has been that of a passive lurker.

 

What you perceive I think is a different flavour of stupid from what you are used to, which is what I think generational incredulity is all about in the end. Every generation seems to struggle a bit with it.

 

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households."
- (Socrates, supposedly, according to Plato, supposedly)

[Lucius Wooding]

I should point out that stupid threads have always existed. But I think the problem is that a lot of new posters don't really grasp how forums work and expect to be rewarded somehow, possibly with valuable prizes, for content that does little more than bump the forum. The types of posts that would be inoffensive and pass like a fart in the wind in a busy Discord channel or something tend to linger in a slower forum. We have threads that are a decade old and get responses daily because they are relevant. Even the ones that burn out after a couple days can still be worthwhile to engage with, or informative.

 

Stupid questions that don't have an answer, titles that don't have any follow up in the actual post, or threads where the OP doesn't contribute anything and just expects to crowdsource all the opinions and discussion are all fucking annoying. There are plenty of posts by new people with a good amount of thought put into them, or an actual question with an answer, or that provoke an interesting discussion. There are discernible characteristics that make a thread good or bad, it's not random or personal or generational bullying when OP gets backlash over things like this.

 

To use the example of the red cacodemon thread, it lacked any content aside from the title and there is no real answer to that question. It could have been a joke thread but OP didn't make an attempt to frame it or offer one themselves. There's a not so low chance it was intentional rage bait but it wasn't exactly well crafted either. It could have been more of a general "What was the inspiration/lore behind cacodemons" thread that had more diverse topics to go into, or one that talked about custom monsters based on the cacodemon, or speculated on various aspects of them with some kind of basis in canon. The only saving grace is that the thread has (so far) lacked any mention of cacodemon buttholes.

 

Yes, it's a boomer forum for a 30 year old game. It's going to be a lot more dead than reddit or other more widely exposed platforms, and that's okay. And yes, almost everything has been made and discussed before at some point. But if you make a post that makes you seem like a thoughtful or interesting person, someone might actually have a discussion. 

[Jayextee]

Zoomers think this shit's Discord.

[Gothic]

I agree, Doom General has been very braindead recently, take a look at this shit:

[Trigsy]

I'm just not convinced that a person can decide a discussion is stupid without having had it. Zoomers are some eclectic little fuckers, and they often say things that give me pause for one reason or another. Just engage with them. Teach them better if you can, because they'll certainly do the same for you. Those low-effort threads are kind of vanilla for internet forums, even if Doomworld is somewhat insulated from it.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying every thread is a winner, just not to judge a book by its cover.

 

Although the more I think about it, why aren't they just playing Doom?

Edited May 21 by Trigsy

[Milkeno]

3 hours ago, VICE said:

Discuss in earnest.

Personally, I think it's a byproduct of ''GenZ'' and ''Gen Alpha'' discovering a highly moddable game, attracting the same types of crowds as something like minecraft or roblox or whatever.

 

Not gonna lie, some of this leads to hilarious discussions, but honestly General and Everything Else feel like I'm visiting a nursery.
I think a feature common in other forums, where new members must make an arbitrary number of posts before they can start their own topics, might help mitigate this phenomenon. Maybe add some kind of mod-approved element to that as well.
Just sayin'.

I think this is a byproduct of forum legends like esco and sephiroth leaving so the posting quality declines

[Cilian]

16 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

Zoomers think this shit's Discord.

Nice practice to break my habit of posting things that 99% of the time nobody needs

[Murdoch]

46 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Not perma banned, parma banned.

 

Heh yeah i noticed that too. 

[Xaser]

I've been around long enough to observe multiple cycles of this. Couple of observations here, as bullet points because I'm a NERD:

 

• This isn't a "Gen Alpha" / "Zoomer" thing, it's a "young people*" thing. It's very important to realize the distinction here, for a bunch of reasons:
  • Any healthy community will always have a stream of new posters coming in.
  • If new posters frequently include younger folks, that's a good sign since that means the artform isn't dying out.
  • People (sometimes) grow up, so that awful spammy poster might eventually turn into a semi-productive member of society. :P
  • Most critically, this isn't some sort of permanent generational divide, i.e. "oh no Zoomers are all Weird(tm) and they're never gonna get it!" or whatnot. Ten years ago, everyone was saying that about millennials, before that it was Gen X, and so on. Same story.
• We're at a "local minimum" right now, i.e. posting quality is lower than it was ~5 years ago, but much better than it was ~15 years ago.
• Doomworld sucked back then, and then _got better_. If it can recover from that, it can certainly recover from where we are now.

 

[*and even then, it's not so clear cut, 'cause sometimes you have younger folks with excellent "internet etiquette" and older folks who are dogshit at it. It's more a general "internet maturity" thing that somewhat, but not completely, correlates with age.]

 

To be clear, it's good to be critical of the amount of crap being posted right now, 'cause yeah, there's a lot of it. My main takeaway here is that this problem is far from unfixable.

Edited May 21 by Xaser

[Noiser]

I think it's important to not stereotype newer generations. All of us had our silly phases on the internet and that's definitely not exclusive to one group or another. I had tons of interesting conversations with gen z people - on the other hand, I can count on my hands the amount of people of my age who wasn't a cynical, ignorant a-hole. So there's that.

Edited May 21 by Noiser

[ALilGrayBoi]

People just bored I guess

[LadyMistDragon]

It comes and goes but this sort of thing has always existed in every forum.

 

I think the reason it might seem more noticeable than the days when far more people were blatantly braindead though iks that society has moved on from forums into things like reddit and Facebook groups and thusly when someone posts something on Doomworld, it's to ask a question that most people who've been around them for a long time would not care if it was answered or else something that could be found with a simple search.

 

I get the impression a lot of people would rather just focus on creating content and while people seem to know this is a decent place to post maps, they have a hard time reading the rules on that unless somebody specifically pushes them toward it like a teacher. Is that a generational thing? Perhaps, but I view generation wars as being overhyped for 'the clicks' anyway. 

[Gifty]

1 hour ago, Obsidian said:

I mentioned this in another thread, but this sort of thing could be mitigated to some degree if people used their status updates: if you have errant thoughts you'd like to share that honestly don't deserve an entire thread, you can post on your profile and get responses from the people that actually follow you for your content. It's possible that their usage dropped off some once status updates were no longer visible on the forum homepage and I will admit that I don't use my own nearly as much as I should: maybe I should pop some game reviews on mine, I remember doing that a few years ago when I first played Dead Space.

 

But I digress. It'd be cool to see more folks use their status updates and get into the habit of blogging a little to alleviate the sorts of tendencies we're seeing expressed in forum threads these days.

This is it, thread done!

 

I don't think anyone is actually positing that zoomers are essentially different from any previous generational cohort. Just that there's a wave of young newbies posting dumb shit in every generational cycle, zoomers happen to be the ones of age this time around, and yeah, it's annoying. I remember posting annoying shit when I was that age, too. Encourage them to get their shower thoughts/clickbait questions out of the way in status updates or on discord!

Edited May 21 by Gifty

[DiavoJinx]

I like it here and stopped lurking after all these years because I hate reddit pop culture, and Doomworld feels more like classic forums with my kind of classic people. =)  In general!

 

Doomworld to my observation is the opposite of r/Doom, and that's perfect.

Edited May 21 by DiavoJinx

[Desfar]

unfortunate downside of some highquality mods getting attention on youtube.
MyHouse brought many people here, some good some shitposters.

I came here after playing Hedon, but got stuck in the asset zone.

[Hebonky]

I feel this site has some issues being more "modern" I feel if there was a tab/subforum where the status updates could be seen without having to either already follow or go into each persons profile it would go a long way to stem the tide of "dum-dum" threads.

 

Also there are clearly rules that go unstated that should be. Like no negative threads for a start.

[Maximum Matt]

Well, go and post some 'quality' threads then, if you're so upset about it.  

[8088mph]

2 hours ago, VICE said:

''GenZ'' and ''Gen Alpha''

Nobody is going to take you serious, quit blaming whole groups of people for your problems.

[Obsidian]

1 hour ago, Maximum Matt said:

Well, go and post some 'quality' threads then, if you're so upset about it.  

 

This rings true to a certain degree (be the change you want to see in the world and all that), but there is also a conversation to be had about general forum etiquette and the ways in which certain behaviours are fed on social media. You can pour all your effort into making high-quality threads and then just watch them sink while a thread where some poor sod gets relentlessly dunked on for their conduct stays at the top of the forum and maintains increased visibility as a result. It's a problem that's a lot bigger than a single forum or a single generation.

 

Also for those wondering, I hid some posts that had the chance to derail the thread. Keep things civil! 👍

[mrthejoshmon]

I'ma hypothesise real quick (and possibly make shit up).

 

Trying to not sound pretentious (yet doomed to fail) but everything is mainstream, your wierd niche hobby is no longer wierd and niche and instead is now heavily populated with people who like it too.

 

This is great, however, the individual can be smart, but usually the crowd is unfortunately very capable of being stupid, a bigger crowd is even dumber.

 

As I've seen with many of once niche interests, the rise in traffic and participants will be grand and great but almost always will be followed with quality decline and abundant dumbassery (for egregious examples, see: SCP/Creepypasta). It's not always the case but it's remarkably common, especially when children catch on. When the fad (discovery/rediscovery) dies everything returns to normal and becomes the odd little niche thing again.

 

Ultimately it just kinda happens in flux when something is discovered or rediscovered. At least from the live examples I watched happen in real time.

Edited May 21 by mrthejoshmon

[vanilla_d00m]

“I touch myself”

 

Thats a good way to contribute to doomworld, what a old thread!  No one is perfect, so you can’t have the threads you wan’t all the time.

 

Edited May 21 by vanilla_d00m

[Kinsie]

Things generally take a bit of a dive around this time of year. Likely coinciding with summer school holidays in the US or something? I'm not really sure how the timetables work out. Just one of those recurring storms we must all weather.

 

Personally, I'd prefer if moderation got a bit stricter to make Being A Bad Poster a bit less viable, but I'm sure the people in charge have their reasons.

Edited May 21 by Kinsie

[DNSKILL5]

I made a tutorial a while back about how to use status updates but it isn’t going to help the ones that can’t be bothered to learn how to use a forum in the first place. I do think some people act too harshly though. Not everyone is old enough to understand forum etiquette, and just bitching and talking down to them isn’t going to fix anything.