Discussion Did something change in the community the last ...year or so?

I come back here once in a while, mostly with my bag of amateur questions. This time it feels à little different. I get nothing. The stages of activity for forum questions are

1. views
2. someone telling you you're wrong
3. any answers
   
4. actual helpful answers

And while a lack of helpful answers is mostly a sign of not posting the right question, usually bad questions lead to more of the "well, you're wrong and dumb"-answers, which i did not get and that irritates me.

Did people move on to discords or what happened?

 

Everything below is my personal opinion.

Yes. Something did change. I'm not quite sure what, though.

The thing is, around June or July t here was a thread about layoffs, I think falling unity stock, also possibly dissolution of Gigaya team (and laying off of Andy-Touch), and around this point forum atmosphere became tad gloomy. Or tad snarky and angry, depending on the user. Something changed around this point, I think.

This might be related to what you experience.

Another problem is that forums appear to be slowly going out of fashion in general at this period of time. Maybe in the near future we'll be all talking to machines (ChatGPT and its clones) and not to living people online.

 

There's definitely a strong trend towards Discord, and possibly other platforms. Social media and information dissolution is generally changing towards platforms that work better/best on mobiles. Classic forums isn't one of them.

 

These day, probably more likely to get a faster and better response on the official Discord; more people are shifting to that platform over the last few years (also likely lockdown was a multiplier)

Which is a big shame as Discord has absolutely no accessible SEO for common questions and solutions, so useful info disappears very quickly.

Having the info on Unity Answers and Forums atleast makes it much easier to find for others in same scenario months and years later!

Although, Unity wanted to completely kill Unity Answers with absolutely no public archive, and was only stopped because the community was very vocal against this on social media, so maybe it isn't entirely safe.

 

Change 'possibly' to 'definete' and 'Gigaya team' to 'Internal Games Production Team'

 

forums use is down everywhere. Same complaints at unreal forums. And other places too.

 

Yeah, I've noticed things trending this way, for sure.

I have nothing against people telling people (myself included!) that they're incorrect. Recognising mistakes is an important part of learning, and someone pointing them out can speed that up, which is a good thing. However, what I've been noticing is that people increasingly often just stop there, and don't follow up with items 3 and 4 or even a general pointer in the right direction.

So, attempting to jump straight to phase 4 here: if anyone wants to make this place a bit more helpful again, if you're replying to someone who's asked a question, please at least try to give them some actionable information about a next step to take, even if that's telling them to look into something you don't have time to explain.

I get the distinct feeling that there's an increasing level of bitterness on display in the forums. There are a few contributing causes to that, and Unity don't seem to be handling them effectively.

Indeed, and I have exactly the same feelings about this as @Andy-Touch shared.

On top of what Andy said, I think the community here often doesn't help itself in this regard. I often see responses to posts by new or even first time users which are... I'll say "not particularly welcoming". If we want the community to grow that means we need people to stick around. Most people come here for help, to learn, or for a bit of interest-related socialisation, none of which are served by being shot down in flames.

I, too, started by asking silly questions of people who knew way more than me. Props to anyone who was born perfect, but for all the people like me, lets lend a kind hand where we can.

 

its likely a handful of issues here . peoples attitudes have changed for sure, and there are a handful of people that just troll the forums to tell people they are wrong with no helpful response past that. also i have a feeling that the "old guard" of people that use to be very helpful have moved on at some point. with new people that may have the answers not really spending the time to help others here anymore. i usually only come to the forums to search for a specific problem having and rarely come here with the intent of helping where i could .i use to follow a handful of topics and chime in when i thought i could be helpful but thats been years now. and as others have said places like discord where devs can give near real time feed back have become popular.

 

Aside from the things everyone mentioned, communities are made up of individual people, and people come and go all the time.

 

People get brain trained to be inpatient with answers, and feel like they are entitled to quick answers on live chats, like discord. Sure there is lot of value there. But finding anything is just impossible, to follow any context.

Feeling generally lesser of people using forums. Which as mentioned few post above, has very valuable SEO. Something discord have not.

I just to be more active on scripting forums in the past, but I don't have time repeating same answers all the time.
I rather focus on more advanced problems. Or just chat more generic stuff. Also I spent more time in DOTS forums these days.

Unity discord in my opinion is the time sink. Participating and reading anything there, if you are not right now, when someone responding with an answer, information can be easiely buried, along with its knowledge. Questions get repeated and eventually people will get tired answering them.

It is OK, if there is new blood to fill answers. But once that stop coming flowing in, discord like chats will be loosing its knowledge base.

On the Unity forum I feel like more skilled people went away past few years, or become less active. Lesser of such empty gaps is filled by new comers.

 

Personally the firing of the internal games team made me want to interact with the community a lot less as it really opened my eyes up to just how little the discourse on these forums is listened to, and how little point there is in trying to contribute feedback to unity on these forums.

I now only come rarely to ask questions, sometimes give an answer to a newbie, otherwise I mostly just browse the DOTS forums now.

I think large potions of the community are feeling low morale right now due to similar reasons and that will influence the type and quality of responses you get unfortunately.

 

Honestly I am most active while developing a project and waiting for it to build. When the shader compiles were taking 30 minutes to build for AR testing, I spent a ton of time on these forums. They fixed that, so it could be that generally making builds faster has hurt forum participation!

I pretty much can't stand Discord for the reasons everyone mentioned already. I don't mind waiting a day or two for a response, it gives me more time to figure it out on my own. I also much prefer the longer threads on a topic to the quick, disjointed snippets I experience on Discord. Probably because I was raised on newspapers and not texting though, showing my age!

 

To encourage forum participation and because regular breaks are healthy ( drink water ), i will put that in the next feedback form i encounter ;-)

 

I'm mostly active in the HDRP forums, not so much elsewhere ):
I also try to help out a bit on discord, but as others mentioned, it's not as good as the forums. You tend to answer the same questions over and over.

Gigaya's cancelation will never be forgotten by me
Maybe If I stop posting here it'll be because of that.

 

Yes, I have seen a pattern emerge mostly in General Discussion. A new user joins the forum and asks an innocuous question. They are asking a beginner question because they are a beginner! Instead of a warm welcome the user is often confronted with immediate hostility. Sometimes the hostility is reinforced by a certain moderator here.

The hostile responses tend to be the same "offences" --

• You necro'd an old post, therefore your question today is not worthy of a dignified response.
• You should read documentation or engage in a tutorial instead of wasting our time. Don't come here with 'wrong' questions. This could be a reasonable response ("do your homework") but the accompanying hostility isn't warranted.
• Don't complain. If you think a particular aspect of Unity isn't working, why don't you use Unreal engine instead?

I feel bad for beginners. I am continually learning and far from perfect. Are new users likely to stick around if they receive a hostile response on first contact?

 

Unity's userbase is also becoming increasingly fragmented between many packages that can also highly differ based on the version you're on. A new user is likely on completely different version of URP than a long time Unity user who's locked in the engine version for years or still devs on Built-in. So asking and answering questions has become more difficult by default.

And a lot of issues also seem out of the hands of users these days. URP camera stacking has been broken for years. And there's apparently no way to skip applying URP post processing on world space UGUI Canvas. These issues have been reported on the relevant forums for two years or longer so engaging on the forums seems meaningless as far as achieving any real change goes. I spent the evening downgrading to built in so I can have per camera/layer post processing.

 

Yes, because they could just ask the question themselves instead of going "did you ever solve this" to a post from 2015 from a user who hasn't been online since 2016. That is what the majority of necro posts are. They typically add nothing, ask questions that can't be answered, are in the wrong forum entirely because they didn't read the pinned posts at all, or some combination of the three.

This is literally true though and when this is met with hostility it's typically because the poster didn't do any research at all. On top of that, there's literally a subforum for these sorts of questions and it's literally the second one in the forum listing.

Yeah, because there's a stark difference between a new user complaining about something an an experienced one complaining about something. When a new user complains about something, this is basically how it goes down every time:

1. User encounters something they don't understand
2. User does nothing to try and figure out why it's happening. No google, often doesn't even read the error if one comes up
3. User posts "UNITY IS A PIECE OF S*** ENGINE I'M SWITCHING TO UNREAL" in the forums and alludes to their problem, which is typically related to something easily solved
4. If the user gets things explained to them calmly, it doesn't matter because they've made up their mind. Unity already sucks to them and they'll never use it again
5. If the user gets shouted down for throwing a tantrum on the forum, they'll complain about how toxic the community is despite leading off with a tantrum

Aside from all this, however, this has been how things have always been here. This is nothing new.

 

There is definitely be a sliding, 4 years ago question about how to do aspirational idea was met with warning but potential solution, everyone coming together to figure out. Now they ask you what are you even doing that and are hostile to new ideas even when they work *cough* nanites and lumen *cough* because they don't fit an impossible ideal.

But it's at large, there is an atmosphere of increasingly broken promise, it's not just unity, the whole gaming culture and dev.

 

General Discussion has a label directly below the link stating that this is not a support section. Barring the very rare case where they don't know what category it fits under anyone that posts a thread asking for help in this section is basically saying "I can't be bothered to read what's being shoved right under my nose but I expect you to read my thread and give me a response". We still often do but those threads shouldn't be there.

Speaking of which one of the things directly below the link is the rules of the forum which includes a statement about not necroposting.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-community-code-of-conduct.743180/

 

This is so true. I usually know the approximate answer to a question, but once I realize the answer relies on X, Y and Z it's just too much typing and thinking about the specific configuration required to give a complete answer. The added complexity of multiple UI, render and input systems have really made picking up the engine more difficult to learn and explain to others.

DOTS is going to add to this unless it is implemented in such a way that it 'just works'. It's an insanely good piece of tech, which makes it tempting but I for one cannot really wrap my head around it. Good luck to a newbie!

 

The things you write are true, but do they justify hostility?

There are human beings on the receiving end. What good is meant to come of hostility?

 

It works both ways.

Forum is full of humans, and humans have feelings, their circumstances and unique personalities. So due to combination of factors even the most innocent question can make someone blow up. In fact it happens routinely.

So your very idea "but what good" is not really right one, because "what good" does not matter. As you're dealing with beings that, despite holding useful knowledge can frequently act irrationally due to the most ridiculous reasons. Likewise, from position of a human being it is very easy to justify hostility in specific system of values, especially when said system of values is routinely being skewed by person's emotional state. For a person having a particulary bad day "I'll explode in this conversation and that'll make me feel better" can look like a much more reasonable and attractive/desirable option than "I'll maintain civil atmosphere".

And basically the only way to fix that would be to replace humans with machines which do not give a damn about anything and just focus on information at all times. Alternatively I guess you could use psychopaths (no fear, no empathy, muted emotional response - they'd be perfect for tech support and knowledge), but I'd assume it would be hard to find so many high-functioning psychopaths with technical expertise.

 

This topic didn't come up because a person had a particularly bad day. As you say, it happens routinely.

I dearly hope that nobody here is having such bad days so routinely that it has essentially become normal for them. I had a period like that, once, thankfully a short one, and hope never to repeat anything like it again.

I didn't ask that question because I think the answer itself matters.

 

I'm of opinion that this is actually happening for real at this very moment.

Basically, low or poor community mood means more people will be blowing up on strangers.

Many people had a very "fun" year in 2022, before this fun year there was another fun year with pandemic and so on. and those sort of things can pile up and severely affect you and your mental state without you noticing their effect for a long time (see the "boiling frog" metaphor).

 

I'm gonna say "yes" actually. The idea that all hostility is bad is an inherently more harmful viewpoint than going "actually we should bend over backwards and approach people who show up with their own hostility or disregard with total kindness." One of the examples I mentioned is literally about how new users who complain have already made up their minds. This is something we see routinely. The others are about users who show up and ask everyone to do the work for them or users who ignore things they've already been told.

Also, this is about how these things are not new in response to a post about things that have changed in the last year or so.

 

Nobody is suggesting this. Things do not always need to be one extreme or the other, and the implication that they do is also harmful.

What I am suggesting is that hostility in the contexts being discussed here is an overreaction which has the potential to harm. Not just the people it's directed at, but also the reputation of the individuals displaying hostility, and of the community in general.

New users who do desirable things, such as read the rules and find the right section to post in, are likely to see typical responses along the way. And I wonder, after that, if what they see encourages them to go elsewhere?

That may very well be the case. I still hope (wish) that it is not, for the sake of the people involved.

 

I don't think forums are on the way out, maybe some trends of people adopting the short attention span approach of minimalist lines of words that form a sentence, rather than thought out paragraphs, which other platforms are better for. I think the real reasons are more to do with the last year probably being a challenging one for a lot of people, maybe also including Unity which is also made up of people too.

 

For me (and all of Ukrainians) - war happened.
So the year was if simply put - brutally tough to get through & survive.
Less direct threats to life now, but non-zero still.

Plus, lack of spare time available due to:
- Work projects; (job)
- Supporting of colleagues with their issues; (as part of the job)
- Hobby projects;
- Electricity blackouts;
- Other minor nuisances (alike getting air raid alerts etc);
- Trying to stay sane in a completely mad world we all live in;


With that context in mind, back to the topic. So the [General] forum right.
Most people come here either for:
- Support (which is not the goal of the sub-forum) that can be obtained by simply searching web.
Most of the issues [probably above 90%+] related to the legacy engine parts (see anything that is not SRP or DOTS) are already solved by someone, people are just lazy.
- Ranting & venting (I mean, probably the only valid reason to);
- Speculations & new tech (most of the time completely unrelated to the Unity);
- Arowx threads;

The only place nowadays I read often is ECS sub-forum. There's a lot of value in there.
DOTS overall is a gem worth looking into.

So reading or writing in "General" forum seems like a complete waste of time.