Hobbies ruined by other people thread - And corporations, and trends, and so forth.

[Nekoi.Inukuma.00]

Especially social media. That really put this process into maximum overdrive. The problem is... how do you even gatekeep people who have massive backing? I mean it's obvious in many cases who the bad people are... but they are organized and just invade your stuff because it's there for the taking.

Either make it too small and esoteric to take over or make it too toxic for them to want to take over. Those really are the only options in this day and age, and even that only forestalls the inevitable. Of course, this limits growth, limits economic opportunity... so much for making a living from your art/music/hobby/interest.

The N word. It is said to be the strongest word of the English language, capable of making others insane to the point where they'll burn cities to the ground. No amount of money can defeat the N word "No". Also make it "tahhxic" the modern sensibilities and use their complaints as free marketing

Immediately thought of the best Open Source License ever.

 

[Apustajan apustaja]

Stoners ruined growing weed.

 

[Anonitolia]

Webcomics were never great, but they used to be better. I particularly like reading and laughing at especially bad ones... which means that I should be thriving in this day and age (when only the most retarded or dedicated still make these things), but no. A lot of webcomics are bad now not due to some lack of skill or an autistic author and his overreactions, but because the author just forgoes story entirely to use their comic as a platform. Instead of endearing passion projects that look like ass or hollow piles of dogshit that are great introductions to morons throwing never-ending tantrums, it's just constant preaching. Of the usual type. Trans rights this, jumpscare gay shipping that, you know how it goes.
The most sickening part of it is that you can't even stick to the "very obviously made by a 10 year old on deviantart" demographic anymore because these very obviously young children do the exact same shit to fit in. I've seen perfectly normal comics clearly made by children open with a trans girl being comforted by his nonbinary mother and meeting up with (as well as being subsequently cheered on by) his gender-diverse friends to start an adventure that comes out of nowhere, it's fucking creepy.

Roleplay is another hobby that was never exactly respectful but has just been getting worse and worse and worse. I've been a staunchly SFW RPer practically my entire online life and I swear I've never had proper trouble finding a group until covid came along and made the already-overwhelming amount of ERP polluting the space into something fucking inescapable. The sheer amount of "SFW" kink/fetish groups run by pedos trying to trap kids has probably outnumbered the amount of actual SFW groups at this point, which hasn't been helped by the hobby's reputation as a solely sexual activity thanks to Discord-addicted grooming pedo faggots or the total death of forums.
The situation's gotten so dire that 4chan has become one of my go-to destinations for collaborative creative writing just because some of the autism in Jumpchain! or CYOA threads (as well as /qst/ in general) can sometimes compare to what I used to enjoy.

Basic web development can probably be done on your own just fine, but good luck trying to get any decent information on it from the web. Doesn't help that everyone who enjoys the type of website I do (and want to make) is absolutely fucking insane.
Similar situation happened with forums as a whole. They were killed off by social media, but any attempts at revival have also been completely infested by retarded trannies who just make every forum into the same communist alphabet communities they claim to be trying to escape and are just doing it for "the aesthetic" (or some retarded anti-corpo shit that's always plastered over a profile linking at least 3 separate social media accounts to it).

Art (online), video games (retro and not, as well as collection of both), and tabletop RPGs have been mentioned ad-nauseum in this thread and I'm sorry to add to the pile. +1 to all three, though. Might as well add board game collecting/playing to the pile since it's nothing but bugmen at this point and I'm getting very tired of it.

Thank god there are still plenty of hobbies I can do alone so I'm not stuck with these.

 

[Nique la mere de Macron]

Pole dance. Men are starting to show up. My belly dance class is still only ladies, though (and no huns, bc mlm is basically illegal here).

 

[glass_houses]

TikTok- or rather, booktok- has ruined book collecting. Every time someone mentions Litcrate I want to curl up in a corner and sob like a small child who's just watched their father deliberately run over their pet kitten on a ride on lawn mower.

I love books. I love reading them, I love talking about them, I love the sometimes decades long hunt for rare volumes, I love fondling them, sniffing them, hoarding them, setting them free, inflicting them on friends and acquaintances.

I'm a sucker for the pretty ones. If a much loved favourite comes out in an illustrated, annotated edition, I am all over that fucker like a rash. I prefer hardcovers and will exchange them for their soft cover versions if I get the chance. Some books I have multiple editions of. Some books I have multiple copies of, so I can give to people who I think will appreciate them. I follow multiple library porn accounts. I am a member of multiple book trading groups.

... and I am seriously considering leaving them all. Endless photos of immaculate, colour matched shelves, books shelved backwards so that the tooling on the end papers is displayed. Absolutely gorgeous editions of... C grade fantasy romance series that will be completely forgotten two minutes after the series ends and TikTok stops talking about them. Books that are basically fashionable ornaments, internal content irrelevant.

All the joy of book collecting has been sucked dry and rendered into just another way to consoom. It feels so hollow now.

 

[Kalsarikännit]

TikTok- or rather, booktok- has ruined book collecting.

The YA boom ruined books in general for me, and particularly when I found out a lot of people just read to get horny over the romance in novels. I thought reading would be less… surface level or something. Of course I still read. But I don’t go out shouting it from the rooftops.

 

[Flatline]

Endless photos of immaculate, colour matched shelves, books shelved backwards so that the tooling on the end papers is displayed. Absolutely gorgeous editions of... C grade fantasy romance series that will be completely forgotten two minutes after the series ends and TikTok stops talking about them. Books that are basically fashionable ornaments, internal content irrelevant.

Take comfort in knowing that the many women who spend so much time "curating" their bookshelves for social media often don't read the books. They're for decoration; another step toward nailing the "aesthetic" to brag to their followers.

 

[Frogget-me-not]

I keep getting jumpscared on YouTube by trannies when trying to listen and learn about things I’m interested in Why do they look so unsettling?

Modular synth troon actually does sound like a woman (probably due to his audio engineering experience) but that hairline, jaw, and 5 o clock shadow are a dead giveaway.

Big Yellow is notorious for jump cutting back to his face every 5 seconds when he has perfectly good, informative graphics on screen. It’s infuriating.

Their faggotry isn’t leaking into information they’re providing, fortunately… at least not yet.

 

[Premium Gonzo]

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I keep getting jumpscared on YouTube by trannies when trying to listen and learn about things I’m interested in Why do they look so unsettling?

Modular synth troon actually does sound like a woman (probably due to his audio engineering experience) but that hairline, jaw, and 5 o clock shadow are a dead giveaway.

Big Yellow is notorious for jump cutting back to his face every 5 seconds when he has perfectly good, informative graphics on screen. It’s infuriating.

Their faggotry isn’t leaking into information they’re providing, fortunately… at least not yet.

It's getting worse in Synth community if you ever check out gearsluts it's just full of troons trying to get arsepats not even music.

 

[Not a Kiwi]

The YA boom ruined books in general for me, and particularly when I found out a lot of people just read to get horny over the romance in novels. I thought reading would be less… surface level or something. Of course I still read. But I don’t go out shouting it from the rooftops.

This actually did ruin reading for a while for me. When this happened online shopping was still new to me, so I only brought from brick and mortar. Unfortunately even to this day 90% of books at stores are just YA novels. It wasn't untill I started using online retailers that I started reading again cause I could finally get books that actually interested me. Before that I had to spend inordinate amounts of time and effort to find anything in second hand stores.

I don't think tiktok is really matters to book groups, I think peoples tendancy to stop reading after they leave their teens has far more of an impact..... That and the people who do read past their teen years tend to be man children who collect shit rather than actually take part in a hobby.

 

[internet friend]

It's not exactly ruining my interest in the hobby, but it's always pretty annoying whenever you mention to someone that you're into photography (proper photography, which specific camera and lens choices, framing, equipment, post processing, actually giving a shit, etc.) only for them to blurt out "Oh me too!", then spend the next 15 mins showing you terrible, mundane photos they took with their phone.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Troon having shit opinions on video game characters? Who would have guessed? Seriously I remember back when the og pokemon came out as a kid everyone fucking loved guys like magneton and dugtrio because it was like 3 of the weirdly simplistic yet really recognizable dudes that counted as one dude. Also in magneton's case it made perfect sense because Magnemite's the magnet pokemon.

 

[Sperghetti]

One of the biggest mistakes was for people to think the entire internet could be their community rather than a small group of like minded people within that hobby. Two regular people can despise each other for no reason even without a swarm of “uwu dress go spinny” types showing up.

That collective atmosphere is one of the biggest downside of social media, and yet I feel like barely anybody ever recognizes it.

The forum era was great because it allowed people stay the hell out of each other’s face. Even within the same “community” you’d usually have multiple forums with wildly different attitudes. Just about every community I lurked in prior to the 2010’s had its version of Weenie Hut Jr. and/or The Salty Spittoon.

People wonder why everyone seems so hostile online anymore, well, it’s because everyone’s trying to occupy the same space and they’re all fighting over who gets to run it.

Unfortunately, most people want to have One Big Website that contains all activity regarding all of their interests, and now we have a sizable amount of people who have never known anything else and probably couldn’t even comprehend the idea of having two separate places that catered to two different kinds of people.

 

[Cornfed]

I'm starting to see V tubers talk about 40k. I have been playing for more than 15 years, and the coffin is quickly having nails put into it for my interest in anything other than collecting.

 

[Space Police]

Consoomers ruined toy collecting. Most of the stuff I collect (Lego and Transformers) feels like they aren't made with the intent of being fun toys but rather collectibles (albeit poorly-engineered ones) to photograph for social media. We will never get Armada-style Transformers again, where they used bright toyetic colours and dared to put a siginificant new spin on the G1 designs, because the majority of Transformers buyers are slaves to nostalgia who will settle for medicrity. Nowadays we can't even get character bios or stat sheets with Transformers. Lego, meanwhile, has been pumping out lots of boring display pieces and outrageously-overpriced licensecrap to appeal to consoomers who will buy anything with a mouse logo on it. However, the sets that aren't in those categories are very good (like the new space sets), but even still it feels like creativity died at Lego. The one time they make a new original theme in the current year, they base it off the doctrine of "boys like cars girls like purple" and don't try to have any consistent motifs when it comes to lore and worldbuilding.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I am something of a 78 collector, after rescuing an old hmv gramophone from a house contents sale. Old duffer had lived in the same house for 90 years, from birth, and still listened to it to the day he died. It needs some superficial repair, but it works magnificently.

There has been a healthy collectors market for shellac for a long time, that was mostly unmolested because of the niche appeal
It's fun, buying a new record every month or so and getting the whole experience of listening to it for the first time. Takes me back to when I would buy vinyl and tapes as teen.

I've noticed, recently, that new collectors have started to move in. The collector-consumers, who collect to "preserve" and never actually listen; and speculators, who buy in bulk to flip on eBay, or other more specialist sites and don't care about the history of the discs they're selling. They're starting price things out of my comfortable range. I just want to listen to old music. I had to stop buying old vinyls because of these people.

And don't get me started on audiophiles. Blegh!

 

[Cave Fisher]

The situation's gotten so dire that 4chan has become one of my go-to destinations for collaborative creative writing just because some of the autism in Jumpchain! or CYOA threads (as well as /qst/ in general) can sometimes compare to what I used to enjoy.

Damn, not often I see Jumpchain brought up outside of its circles. I very much enjoy it, as powergamey as it might get, because there's really not many other places these days for me to scratch that RP itch anymore aside from some shitty discord servers that either die, or become grooming hotspots.
The old guard is gone, and I think all the new shit that replaced it got greatly exacerbated once Covid hit, and people started sliding into horniness just to pass the time.

Man, I miss forums.

 

[Mega Black]

I guess enjoying fantasy as a whole, I mean the literary genre more than the medium. People shit on Tolkien and his imitators for unoriginality but I genuinely miss when you could pick up a book about traditional heroes going on a massive adventure, confronting evil, getting bitches, swinging swords, the works.

Now, whether it is books, games, movies or tabletop, what was once a genre that people sneered at me for enjoying has become the stomping ground of faggots and foids to entertain their skin deep power fantasies.

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

I may be saying things that have been said already, yet some few:

As an enthusiast of technology & programming, it's a sad state of affairs how something like "programming socks" is associated with crossdressing and sodomy. Also gate keeping, mentally unstable men who pretend they are women wanting to establish "rules". And of course, male dominated spaces that had the presence of women (that in particular I'm willing to agree to disagree)

Art in general, with ridiculous fetish art and smut taking over spaces and people with profile that have "They/Them" on their handles. Sad!

I don't know, it feels like the enthusiasts have become "strange" lately. I don't know how to define (ESL).

 

[ForgedBlades]

All of them.