I'd say that's just one
trend in the internet in general lately. A lot of small forums are dying out in favour of the big communities.
Relevant Video.
This was a surprisingly good talk.
Basically, since some folks won't watch the whole thing, Moot thinks that the rate that content consumers and shallow content like 9gag/reddit/cheezburger is growing so much that it outpaces the growth of content and posts that we would describe as deeper or more effort-driven. It's so easy for folks to get heard on Facebook or create content on a Meme Generator in order to find validation and success online since the ratio for quality to quantity is much smaller. He uses P-p-p-powerbook as an example of a meme that had some quality and community drive behind it as opposed to being repetitive nonsense (but this is in itself a discussion of what a meme actually
is).
Like, when I think back to when I started making threads or posting on GameFAQs, yeah, it was much harder to actually have that success and say, "yes, someone posted in a thread after me/responded to what I said/I didn't kill the thread!" or "people are actually
posting in a thread I made!" In that way, you're adapting more to the community and trying to increase your social capital, versus now trying to forge an identity on a forum yourself prior to adapting to the community. I like what Moot said, though. It used to be difficult to find your home on the internet, and when you actually did find it, you become slightly more emotionally-invested. It was much easier to do in smaller communities. Now that communities are growing larger with the Internet being accessible even on your phone and you can post from anywhere now, its a little harder to find your place or even
retain your place in the community you settled into. And for that, youd probably take to twitter or IRC or something like that to retain your place because its a much smaller space and you end up talking to or following the people you want to interact with (and thus you have a slight sense of community there).
Now everyone who uses a computer, a phone, a tablet, etc. gets somewhat immersed in Internet culture. I have an instructor who uses meme pics/cheezburger pics/tons of gifs of award ceremonies or BBT in her Powerpoints, and she's not incredibly internet-savvy. Yeah, it can be funny, but lordy, there is only so much you can take before you realize that it's repetitive. The way that some kids are roped into school events are through posters of memegenerator pics on campus, for example. Almost every school here has a meme page on Facebook and most of the memes are used incorrectly. So I guess there's this loss of meaningful semantic representation? When I was studying linguistics several years ago, the biggest focus for some of us was Internet memes because it was this cool phenomenon where almost every word had a story (sometimes fairly lengthy) behind it. I'm not sure if memes have that same function or meaning as they did before, but it doesn't mean that some of them
don't have that semantic attachment to them too. But with respect to that, you have to ask yourself, Why is this content and its popularity making deeper content harder to find, then? Is it because its like refined sugar?
I don't know if this necessarily means that a barrier of entry for a site or added rules for raising community standards will solve this issue, but who knows. We
seen that even with a barrier of entry on a site that this issue doesn't go away.
SomethingAwful is also shockingly more civil than I'd have expected it to be - at least, their retro-oriented threads are. LP to an extent. Obviously not GBS.
I don't know
what happened to GBS in recent years. I don't 'get' it, I guess. It's really stupid. Like FSLink said, nothing makes a whole lot of sense.
I mean, as I said to you on twitter, if SA closes the forums to lurkers again, I might just get membership to view the LP threads or games forum. Granted, you need a pretty thick skin on SA half the time, but I like peeking into the threads every now and then.
On-topic thing: apparently this happened on some Cartoon Network show (
Steven Universe, possibly):
At the same time, the internet is responsible for this sort of thing, so meme culture is not
completely bad. But it goes back to what I was saying. In this context, it works because it isnt something that everyone would get and it isnt necessarily thrown around everywhere outside of games fandom.
Also, lol. I'm so glad that Sonic interpretation stuck around.
and even though the gaming threads revolve a lot more around megathreads than GAF does now, I find that they tend to be less like an echo chamber than community threads or general threads here are
And thus the megathreads generally seem to have decent conversational flow over there. I guess the echo chamber sentiment is more amplified here because you sometimes have the same folks posting the same stuff and thus you can sometimes predict what a poster's going to say before even reading their post going by the thread of conversation. It's stuff you've seen before again and again, and it's disappointing.
That's why I sometimes make the joke that I'm keeping some posts I've previously made bookmarked so I can just quote what I said since the same thread of conversation comes up again and again.
Edit: Wonder what QCS on SA is like these days. I think it's a good idea in general.
, and only a fraction is on the listing they have (他 "and others"). Given that the tracks on Sonic soundtracks loop several times, I don't think that's a bad price for the ASRT soundtrack at all, especially taking other games in the series' soundtracks, other game series' soundtracks, etc. into consideration. Though, it depends on the packaging too. Some soundtracks have really cool packaging and extras, but other soundtracks are by-the-books. 
