Good lord. So glad my country has strict animal welfare standards for livestock. Uncomfortable that we still import and slaughter pigs from countries without those standards. (And yes, we import-and-slaughter because we don’t import pork itself. We do however, allow the import/export of live animals, so international trade buys our sheep for ‘breeding’, and sell us their pigs for ‘NZ-made pork’. I suppose it at least enforces abattoir health standards…?)

Metaverse was such a weird pitch to me. It seemed to think the way we are living our lives in the way we want to live them, and just offered that in a sterile, miserable package of digital ennui.

Like I get it, our lives right now are built around work and material consumption. But we don’t enjoy work and material consumption! It doesn’t make us happy; it’s not what we’re excited about! We just can’t meet basic survival needs without money (work), and the stress kills us so much that we look to any shallow escape to recover juuuuust enough to keep doing it.

Why on earth would a working human - which is >90% of us - want to move into a space that has all the drudgery, tracking, oversight, micromanagement, and shallow pandering of the current world… and lose all the socialisation, birdsong, walking past a busker playing blues, the smell of a nearby cafe, the sound of passers-by laughing; life?

I want to wake up in the morning in a comfortable bed and open my curtains to clear skies without traffic smoke; you think waking up to traffic noise and grey skies and shuffling over to my laptop to do my economy-mandated 8 hours labour with a blue-skies backdrop is somehow appealing? If anything, it highlights just how incredibly dystopic the waking world is becoming in the name of productivity and efficiency. It makes the ennui even more visible than before, to see what life could have been and know most of us will never afford it.

How little does MZ understand about humanity, to think we want an existence devoid of nothing more than existing in a closed economy and 3D storefronts?

I’m not aware of what Discord has been doing that is causing people’s concern. What are people currently concerned about re: Discord?

I accepted that it would have to start doing something eventually - it can’t operate for free forever. But the only news I’ve heard recently is giving servers optional tools to monetise, and free users can continue to not use servers that do that. The few servers I’ve been in that do it are doing it ironically - donate to the sub to gain access to a channel with a giant 🍆 emoji and nothing else! Comments disabled! etc.

I wouldn’t blame Patreon for somebody moving all their content behind a $20/m sub, I just wouldn’t subscribe to them… so I’m not concerned with Discord until it enshittifies for users.

Absolutely. I hear Witcher 3 is good, and I believe that it is… but after playing it for 5 hours and feeling like I got nowhere, the next day I just genuinely didn’t feel like playing it as I’d felt very little character progress, and zero story progression.

Games are continuing to market towards younger people - especially kids - with spare time to burn. They consider their 120+ hour playtime to be a selling point, but at this point that’s the reason I avoid them. If I’m going to play for an hour or so at the end of my day, I want that game to feel like it meant something.

I prefer my games to feel dense, deliberately crafted, minimal sawdust padding. I’ve enjoyed open-world in the past but the every-increasing demand for bigger and bigger maps means that most open-world games are very empty and mostly traversal. Linear worlds aren’t bad - they can be crafted much more deliberately and with far more content because you can predict when the player will see them.

Open worlds that craft everything in it deliberately are very rare, and still rely on constraints to limit the player into somewhat-linear paths. Green Hell needs a grappling hook to leave the first basin, Fallout: New Vegas fills the map north of Tutorial Town with extreme enemies to funnel new players south-east.

And what really gets me is that with microtransactions, the number of games that make themselves so big and so slow that they’re boring on purpose, so that they can charge you to skip them! Imagine making a game so fucking awful that anybody buying a game will then buy the ability to not play it because 80% of the game is sawdust: timers, resource farming, daily rotations, exp grinding. Fucking nightmare, honestly.

Board games! I particularly like ‘party games’ that are almost activities, easier to get other people to try and they support banter/socialising.

Here are a couple suggestions for playing with friends/family indoors:

• Banangrams (2+ competitive scrabble race)
• Codenames (2+ word association, or image association if you get the pictures version)
• Gloom (2+ card game, good for story-tellers)
• Dixit (3+ image association)
• Telestrations (2 or 3+ ‘illustrations’/‘telephone game’ - basically Gartic Phone)
• Just One (3+ word association)

But maybe you want something that you can do solo…? I have a few I like doing for that.

• Illustration. I do it digitally on PC with a drawing tablet, Krita is free art software.
• Jigsaws. I have a special jigsaw holder I can slide under the bed so I can take as long as I want and not block the dinner table.
• Sleight of hand. Depends on space. I wouldn’t twirl my staves inside, but things like poi, fans, card magic, yoyo tricks etc will work in a larger room.
• Origami. I recommend getting dedicated origami paper as its not only prettier, its already perfectly square and its a thinner stock designed for folding.

Curated communities would likely choose to defederate from instances like that since they have no barrier for entry, and may be bots, spam, or bad actors.

If you’re joining an established instance (or work with people to create a new one), then you’ll at least get a local community, which will both give a instance content if defederated, and legitimise it so it’s less likely to be.

Thank you for your kind words.

I believe things will change as gaming becomes the norm. It already has changed in younger generations; its just that OP is old enough that most people his age don’t play. All hobbies and lifestyles come with superficial assumptions when viewed by the people who don’t have personal experience with them.

Say, a person who drinks wines is considered distinguished, but a person who drinks beers is not. Yet a wine-drinker might just like getting efficiently drunk, and the beer-drinker likes crafting IPAs in their garage.

We are rapidly moving to gaming being the norm. I still believe that if somebody asks ‘what do you do’ your answer should be something that prompts a conversation, but that’s because that’s how dating works, not because gaming is wrong. Gaming at all no longer has stigma among the majority of younger people. It’s the ones who grew up in a time that they were toys who still see them that way.

I just want to appreciate the autocorrect ‘Frost Pink’, it sounds so pleasant. I want to turn it into a name for something. My next DnD character, perhaps? Coconut ice? …should I start a pop metal band? :P

I’m so excited to feel perpetually exhausted and like every single gameplay choice I make is wrong, lol. I used to dislike games that had me perpetually feeling on the brink of failure, but Frostpunk made it feel almost… cathartic.

I hope they keep the radial city design. Not just thematic, but intuitive, clean, and more interesting than rectangle grids. Looking forward to the great art and music, too.

I agree, but you’re asking people to stop being people - and also removing the context of ‘dating’ from the equation.

Dating is work. First dates in particular are very much about first impressions - they’re not getting to know you on a deep level yet, they’re trying to build a quick profile to decide if doing so is even worth it. Such a process is all about assumptions, and anybody that claims it isn’t is not being honest with themselves.

I agree that as a couple get to know each other more, both of them should share their genuine interests with each other. It’s not about games being wrong or having to pretend you don’t like them (authenticity is important for building anything long-term).

But it’s recognising that they don’t look good in an interpersonal resumé, which is what the dating process is.

Add in OP’s demographic (47y man, seeking women), and gender roles in dating (men are initiators and women are selectors), which are still very entrenched in older generations. Men are expected to approach, escalate, and demonstrate what they offer her; women are expected to select from the many who approach them and assess if their intentions are positive or negative, if he’d make her life easier or harder.

Both genders have harmful expectations in dating: he is thirsty in the desert, she is drowning in the lake; they struggle to relate to each other’s roles or even covet them.

I bring this up because men in particular have additional pressure to have a really good resumé because it will be the make-or-break that decides if somebody with options will return interest. Video games have a stigma that make them a bad choice to put in a highlighted position on your proverbial resumé. You want your most impressive, relevant, or interesting answers at the forefront, and it looks bad if you don’t have any.

(It’s also entirely possible that ‘liking video games’ is not the real reason he is struggling with dating, but because the initial reaction he receives is often dismissive, he believes that it is.)

Maybe - certainly generations always assume anything that younger people do is somehow worse than what they did, and the digital landscape is a part of that. When writing slates became accessible, the old guard complained it was ‘lazy’ because they didn’t have to remember it anymore. Any music popular among teenagers (especially teenage girls) is mocked as foolish, cringe, etc.

But I suspect like most hobbies, it’s mostly the following that determine our assumptions:

• history of the media and its primary audience (digital mediums are mostly embraced by youth; video games initially marketed to young children)
• accessibility; scarcity associated with prestige (eg: vital labour jobs are not considered ‘real jobs’ if they don’t require a degree)
• the kind of people we visibly see enjoying it (we mostly see children, teenagers, and directionless adults as gaming hobbyists)

You’re right, reading is not somehow more or less moral than video games. Many modern games have powerful narrative structure that is more impactful for being an interactive medium. Spec Ops: The Line embraces the players actions as the fundamentals of its message. Gamers are hugely diverse; more than half the US population actually plays games at this point, and platforms are rapidly approaching an almost even gender split. (Women may choose to play less or different games, and hide their identity online, but they still own ~40% of consoles.)

Games as a medium is also extremely broad. I don’t think you could compare games to ‘watching anime’ for example, so much as ‘the concept of watching moving pictures’, because they can range from puzzles on your phone, to narrative epics, to grand strategies, to interactive narratives.

So a better comparison for video games isn’t ‘reading books’ so much as reading in general, and are you reading Reddit, the news, fiction, or classic lit? What does your choice of reading mean?

So for your suggested hobby of ‘reading books’, one might assume any (or all) of the following:

• they are intelligent and introspective (or pretentious),
• they are educated (or think they’re better than you),
• they are patient and deliberate (or boring),
• they’d be interesting to discuss ideas with (or irrelevant blatherers).

Assuming everybody who reads is ‘smart’ is as much an assumption as assuming everybody who games is ‘lazy’, and the assumptions you make about the hobby are really assumptions you make about the typical person who chooses it. It may not be a guarantee, but its a common enough pattern.

TLDR: Ultimately? I think books have inflated status because it’s seen as a hobby for thinkers; people picture you reading Agatha Christie (but you could be reading Chuck Tingle, or comic books). Games have deflated status because it’s seen as a hobby for people who consume mindlessly - the people who know what games are capable of are the ones playing them, too.

I think the distinction is that reading books implies you might have interesting discussions about ideas or themes. Video games do not imply that.

The reality is that there is a lot of excellent discussion in video game themes - Spec Ops: The Line, or dystopias like Cyberpunk 2077. Games have been political for as long as they’ve had any narrative structure at all. But video games have a reputation (and history) of being children’s toys, and the only people who understand their narrative power are also gamers.

Compare somebody who claims their hobby is watching arthouse films, versus somebody whose hobby is watching TikTok. They’re both watching videos play in front of them, but the assumption is that the former is consuming the content with a critical eye and learning from it; the latter is merely consuming it for shallow entertainment. The reductionist conclusion is that ‘Arthouse viewer’ can hold a conversation; ‘TikTok viewer’ cannot.

Nothing makes me enjoy games like moderation. But moderation isn’t just how often you choose to play - it’s also how much you’re expected to play.

I’m going to discuss both, because I think people underestimate personal moderation. But I suspect gameplay moderation is your struggle.

Personal moderation:

Games mimic psychological fulfilment (problem-solving, self-actualisation, etc). But it’s not in a lasting way, they’re just more attainable.

It’s like buying a chocolate bar vs cooking yourself a roast meal. It’s easier, it’s pleasant, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying it - but if it’s the only thing I’m doing, and I never put in the work for something more satisfying, I feel unsatisfied - even emotionally ‘sick’ (bored, restless, ennui). When they are a treat at the end of a day, they feel great. But when they are my day, I struggle to enjoy them.

This is the trap that often catches directionless people (eg: depressed, NEET, lonely). They don’t play games for games, they play them to avoid the anxiety or stress of cooking a roast meal. They eat chocolate until they feel sick, and then feel too sick to cook.

Gameplay moderation:

Games are designed for people who have time to burn. Teenagers, kids, some young adults. When you were younger, you could afford to burn that time, and it felt good, because each session meant you felt that hit of dopamine for problem-solving, achievement, and progression.

But now, you can’t. You’re an adult, you don’t have that time. And yet games aren’t being designed for you anymore, but the new kids and teens. They brag about dozens or even hundreds of hours of playtime, and bloat their content with grind. (if anything, the latter has gotten even worse.)

You only have an hour to play a game, and after that hour, there’s no feeling of progression or advancement - the game expects you to give it more time than that. And without the feeling of progression and advancement, games don’t feel as engaging.

That is why they feel like chores, like jobs; it’s why you choose things that give immediate feedback like the internet. Games are asking you to put in too much time and then not giving you enough back.

Portal 2 is considered a masterful game at five hours long, because each hour is rewarding. Is Destiny? Is Halo? Froza?

If this is your concern, my suggestion would be to step back from the bigger scale games that want to monopolise time, and embrace smaller games from indie devs.

You’ll get far more variety, they tend to be much denser. They’re also cheap enough that it’s worth it to try a bunch of things you might not have tried if they were AAA.

If somebody says a game is ‘only 6 hours of gameplay’, see that as a positive, not a negative. It probably means each hour is going to mean something.

Be 80 and play FIFA, it’s fine. There’s no age where you are obliged to put down your controller for the last time. But it shouldn’t be your first answer while you’re dating, and definitely not your only one.

Being a gamer, as an identity, has a lot of baggage.

Having gaming be your only interest or hobby is associated with being an unambitious self-interested person who intends to do as a little as possible, as long as possible. The recognisable games are marketed towards kids/teens with time to burn.

Imagine your date’s interest was “moderating Reddit”, “watching TikTok”, or “reading Instagram”. That’s what ‘gaming’ sounds like: your hobby is media consumption.

There’s no age where you aren’t allowed to consume media; but it’s worrying if that consumption is your identity, if consumption makes up your routine.

So it’s not actually about age - it’s about maturity and goal-setting.

When we’re younger, most of us live moment-by-moment. Media consumption offers no future, but it has a pleasurable present.

But as people age, people develop goals and interests that require more investment and focus, and they’re looking for people that are doing the same. A cutthroat economy demands people develop goals for financial stability, even if they still otherwise like games.

As we age, we stop looking for somebody to hang out with, but to build a life with.

So once the people you’re talking to have interests for the future, “I enjoy my present doing my own thing” doesn’t offer them anything. If they don’t play games, they don’t even know what games are capable of. Maybe one day they’d enjoy playing Ultimate Chicken Horse with you.

But right now, they just see the recognisable titles that want to monopolise children’s time, and assume you’re doing that. They picture you spending 20+ hours a week playing Fortnite. And there is an age cut-off where it’s no longer socially-acceptable to be a child.

It’s not that video games are bad, but they’re a non-answer. They want to know what you do that’s good, and a non-answer implies you don’t have a good answer at all, and that makes video games ‘bad’.

Only if you define mods winning as ‘things go back to what they were’.

The CEO is only ‘winning’ in the sense that things will never return to what they are. He will undermine the protest at every turn, and then he will release his changes as intended.

His contributing users however, are leaving in droves. His ‘victory’ will be pyrrhic at beast.

Users were working for free in mutual trust; now they are expected to produce and moderate for free, and then buy back their own product. Moderators are booted because they’re locking subs as private, and then subs stay private anyway because nobody wants to moderate for free. Even those who would see moderating as a grab for power (the expected scabs) are less inclined to moderate while admins are proving they actually have little power at all (just unpaid labour).

We are his livestock. We thought we were meeting in a community hall to socialise, and then Huffman revealed we were congregated in his barn. The content we produced is to be sold off for his gain; it’s not ours. The space isn’t in any way ours, it merely shelters us while we produce his product: content.

Well, what’s happening right now is that the people who produce the content are leaving. Reddit will still have a ton of users, but they’ll mostly be the 90% lurkers and low-effort users that went there to consume that content contributing users aggregated for them.

Contributors are readily welcomed in almost any community; they don’t need to stay. It is the consuming users that are addicted, that Huffman (correctly) predicts will accept it.

Huffman will still have most of Reddit’s chickens, and that’s why he thinks it’s worth it. But the hens are leaving the barn, and Huffman will be left with the confused roosters who’ll produce nothing for him other than noise.

Mods are losing… but so is he.

Thanks for sharing your perspective with me, I really enjoyed reading it!

You raised an interesting point, the polarising of r/AITA, and its something I’ve noticed a few times… I now have a theory:

Personal experiences are far more likely to move towards emotional extremes.

Emotionally-invested people reach points of ‘black and white morality’ as they get larger, labelled as moral or immoral based on each viewer’s personal perspective.

I’m not saying our emotions are bad - if anything, many people are martyrs from their own emotional neglect - rather that many of us have not learned how to feel emotion authentically without treating them as objective judgements that justify action. (eg: this happened, I feel angry, therefore you wronged me, therefore I can defend myself, etc)

Humans are empathetic, which is truly wonderful. But we have two types of empathy:

• affective empathy is our brain’s mirror neurons, feeling emotion in response to others’ visible feelings. I see you feel sad, so I feel sad for you. It’s innate.
• cognitive empathy is a social skill, one facet of emotional maturity. I recognise that if this were to happen, then somebody in your situation may feel sad, and I understand why. It’s learned, primarily in childhood as modelled by our parents.

So, back to your example of r/AITA - the NAH and ESH ratings are likely only being used by those engaging with cognitive empathy, (hopefully) recognising possible biases and advocating for communication that will satisfy both, as if they are a third party observing.

But for those who engage with their affective empathy, they project themselves into the story - if the story is evocative, they’ll readily side with OP. If the other’s experience angers them, they’ll readily call them out. They’re not here to offer perspective - only judgement.

So what does that mean for communities that want to prevent polarisation?

Haha, fuck if I know, I mostly just find the topic interesting and enjoy having a space to explore it. But I have a couple ideas, and would be curious to hear yours?

On Reddit, we see this black/white emotional judgement in upvotes/downvotes - though they are intended for whether a comment contributes something, they’re often used to define whether a comment is moral according to the voter’s values. Without downvotes, a comment that is bigoted can still be blocked/reported; but with them, a comment that says I think Witcher 3 is boring because- can be buried.

r/AITA also encourages a degree of absolutism by boiling down rulings to three letters, and groupthink by drawing an ultimate conclusion based on which one is most popular rather than presenting a table graph. Users can feel just and righteous - standing up for victim OP, or standing up for their victim.

So I don’t know if the problem is preventable, it’s a humanities issue; but I would consider some of the following:

• no downvoting system. It’s rarely used in good faith; comments that don’t contribute that be reported instead. Comments that are engaging will still rise over comments that are not.
• active diverse moderation. Hopefully with a diverse enough mod team it will slow homogenisation. eg: a mod that likes children will push for rules that discourage/ban anti-child language; a mod that doesn’t like children will push for a platform that encourages/allows those struggling to vent. Together they may find guidelines that emotionally validates struggle without perpetuating hate.
• smaller communities, like you said. Subs like r/childfree are trying to be resource communities (the list of doctors, advice, etc) and have good reason for being large, but social communities are probably better off kept smaller. eg: if they made a r/childfreesupport for venting and emotional validation.

Also, for those of you who read to the end, I really appreciate it. I know I ramble about stuff I find interesting, and despite editing out a bunch of waffle I know this is still really long. Would enjoy reading your equally long responses lol

That seems like a good idea for users in your situation. What do you choose to replace them with? Are they simply removed, text-descriptions…? Do you know why you dislike emojis (I’m curious!), or is it simply something to you know to be true of yourself?

I personally like them as tone indicators, because so little of communication is technically the words we say (~4%). I know my writing looks quite formal and so it’s easy for people to think I’m ‘cold’ or unapproachable; I don’t know how to make it read more casually while still being accurate. But I can put little emojis next to some of the sentences if it helps 👍

I’m curious about it, yes. I think it’s easy for older users to claim their version was somehow ‘superior’ but all humans have their own perspective; it’s when we cease sharing those perspectives as respectful equals that I think we lose something.

To clarify I don’t equate being smug with being knowledgeable. I know people can struggle with feeling self-conscious in that respect and feel that they are somehow being judged if somebody talks about information as though they ‘should’ know it, and that’s not what I’m talking about.

No, I’m talking about when the discussion of ideas stops being about shared perspectives, and starts being about winning. When you don’t share knowledge because you love learning and want to share what you’ve learned, but because knowledge gives you status over the person you’re ‘teaching’.

So many questions that aren’t asked for fear we’d ‘look dumb’, so many ideas resistant to new evidence for fear we’d seem foolish, discussions not had because ‘they’ll assume I think they’re stupid’.

Learning is so wonderful! There’s so much to learn, a human is not capable of learning everything. There should never be shame in somebody knowing something you don’t know, and therefore there should never be superiority in sharing something you do know!

I celebrate a system that includes specialised people sharing their specialisations. My interest is in sociology and psychology; but I know very little about gardening or machinery for example, I would enjoy a person in those fields to share what they know about them.

Let me share with you what I’m thinking of when I talk about ‘true’ subs, as I understand it’s a broad statement. I can offer a perspective that is more nuanced, if longer to read. I’ll bold the key statements.

I understand that when subs get large enough, groupthink emerges; people voting up/down not based on whether a comment contributes meaningfully, but whether or not they agree or feel good about it. Thus even constructive minority voices are drowned out.

The reason the splintered subs could be a problem is that it often left the disruptive people to represent entire ideas, for better or for worse. It fractures movements that should otherwise have common goals into smaller and smaller slices that are unwilling to co-operate towards otherwise shared goals.

The one that comes to mind for me is r/childfree. It started out as a resource for those who’d chosen a child-free life to find support, collate a list of recommended doctors that recognised body autonomy (its often very difficult to get sterilised, especially if you’re younger and/or don’t already have several children), how the workforce treated them differently for being child-free (such as expecting them to cancel their plans and sacrifice their time off for parents on short notice), impact on their social lives, etc.’

However, over time it stopped being pro childfree lifestyle choices, and support for a group that is often seen as ‘selfish’; and started becoming anti child lifestyle choices. The frontpage became mostly rants, filled with terms like ‘crotchfruit’, ‘breeder’, etc. What was once a community of a minority lifestyle trying to find support and legitimacy gave way to anger and tribalism.

Eventually enough of the users that consider choosing to have children to be an equally valid lifestyle choice - merely one they’d chosen not to live - slowly started lurking, unsubbing, or otherwise becoming invisible. Anti-child/‘breeder’ rhetoric became more and more prevalent. Eventually, r/truechildfree was founded to do what r/childfree used to - collate resources and support for those who have chosen a child-free life in a world where children are considered ‘opt out’. Thus childfree users split into pro-child and anti-child tribes.

Which is lovely for r/truechildfree and its users (I am child-free, but I like children; I just recognise I am not equipped to raise them). But it meant that the largest and most visible sub, r/childfree, became almost only child-haters, and an already maligned community often considered ‘selfish’ is now represented by absolutists that are no longer willing to respect people who disagree.

I understand that it is the nature of humanity, once pushed, to push back. I understand why those who see mistreatment in the workplace or socially for their choice to be child free would be upset, same as anything we hold close to our hearts. That pain is why the r/childfree support group came to exist in the first place.

But it is diversity of opinion that makes discussion so interesting, that allows us opportunity for growth, that has us looking at the ways we are similar instead of fighting over the ways we are different.

I think the anger of those in the new r/childfree is real, valid, legitimate.
I think the users of r/truechildfree’s discomfort with how that anger was displayed is also real, valid, legitimate.

I wish we’d looked for a better way to handle it than for letting communities devolve into absolutism, though. Whatever your reasons for not choosing to have children, you still deal with the same stigma; it’s a shame to have people who are struggling against the same chains to schism over the metal they’re made of.

This is why I’m hoping Lemmy can resist against some of the Reddit-specific culture that I think would dampen the experience here. Animosity towards emojis, creating echo-chamber communities/subreddits, the air of smug self-righteousness, discussion as something one can ‘win’ etc.

Redditors in general aren’t bad, but a lot of vocal users had it in their heads that they were somehow better than people who used other platforms, and staked lines to maintain that cultural divide. Some of them concluded they were better than other redditors; turning communities into Us vs Them tribalism, until they would fracture into r/subreddit and r/truesubreddit.

Lemmy is not Reddit. It had a culture and it had users before the API shuffle; it’s an opportunity to start fresh. It’s not appropriate to expect Lemmy turn into Reddit, with all the unpleasantness that entails, and at the expense of the lemmings that were already here.

I’m quite honest about it; I spent years on Reddit too. I’m a redditor. But being here on Lemmy has been such a wonderful breath of fresh air, the ‘I disagree but I’ll respectfully explain why’ that Reddit was missing for years. I can feel how miserable modern Reddit is in comparison and I really hope we don’t recreate it.