[META] Why is the forum so boring these days?

Has the indie revolution kinda petered out at this point? This forum used to be interesting and kinda dynamic, but over the last year or so it's gotten really kind of...dull.

Are the more extreme hobbyists gone, either having their dreams crushed or having graduated to professional work?

For example, I haven't seen a "UE vs Unity" battle, or any real intense argument over lighting or whatever in ages.

Seems more likely to see some veiled political argument than an argument over best practices or automated testing.

What happened, is the excitement dead, or have the mods just gotten more efficient at running a tight ship?

 

Well I certainly wouldn't use the quantity of 'UE vs Unity' battles as a measuring stick for the indie revolution.

As for excitement, I tend to save mine for specific features being developed, eg improvements to HDRP, not the general forum.

 

The hordes of "I wanna be an indie!" from a couple of years ago realized it was hard and left. A lot to the people still hanging around are just folks who build games are too busy to spend their valuable time playing with engines and whining online about it. I have said it before, you can spend your time making games or spend your time talking about making games.

 

Fine, have some excitement.

 

I kinda lost interest in general topic last year...

"For example, I haven't seen a "UE vs Unity" battle, or any real intense argument over lighting or whatever in ages."

It was kinda settled... I still look at UE features though

They need to pull a Lithium board switch.. this place will blow up again

or just I dunno make some xenforo improvements...

 

There needs to be a 1 day amnesty on religios threads or UE vs Unity threads. It'll be 24 hours of mayhem but it should liven things up for those who are bored.

My God vs Your God vs His/her God vs their God vs that God vs all the Gods vs UE vs Unity.

 

I've found that message boards in general have seen a significant downturn in activity over the last few years. It's not just a Unity thing, it's everywhere. And I think social media is a big part of this. These days, no one really cares about posting on message boards. They're all off trying to groom their Facebook presence, or trying to drum up Twitter followers. That's where their on-line time goes to.

I've always preferred more long-form discussions, which is why I gravitate more toward message boards. But for a significant portion of the internet crowd, message boards seem to be done.

 

Yeah. Some places I go the 'critical mass' required to keep up discussions was no longer sustained, which only further accelerated the decline. Been ongoing for at least 15 years, with some places surviving and thriving against this trend, while others have only reached the loss of critical mass stage in the last few years.

There are parts of the Unity forum which are better than I have ever known them to be, in terms of timely and vital communication with specific Unity staff over specific areas of the engine or, more likely these days, a package. So its far from all doom and gloom from my point of view.

There is also the official (and various unofficial) Discord thing, although from what I've seen of the Unity one its hasnt exactly stolen a huge percentage of the traffic that used to go to the forum instead.

As for engine v engine things, some of the most frequent and sustaining debates have a mix of over simplicity and complexity to them. Some people need the low barrier of entry that the 'overly simplified' arguments offer in order to join in and sustain these arguments. A lot of the overly simplified comparisons between Unity and UE4, eg obvious strengths and weaknesses, dont exist now in the way they did in the past. Graphics comparisons are a lot harder to make for all manner of reasons, and we are still in the middle of an era where graphically sophisticated and/or pleasing video showcases shoot forth from Unity more than once a year. Shadergraph removed another obvious comparison and various discussions about having to rely on the asset store for this sort of feature that some consider a core essential tool. etc etc. And unlike some years back, we are not in a period where new engines & toolsets for public consumption are being freshly launched and touted by relatively large companies (eg Lumberyard, Stingray).

 

Oh man, I hate Discord and Slack and all those gimmicks. No one would have time for those. To quickly scan through the forums (topics which I'm interested in) and take notes where to answer is okay, sink in in real time chat is not. I have neither time nor patience to use Discord. And I think the async communication on these message boards is substantially better than what can you have on Discord.

 

I look into them because in middle age I am concious of a potential generation gap and I kind of want to avoid that chasm if I can, and I have an unusual amount of time available quite often. So I think its perhaps too easy to underestimate just how much time some people have for some things, I could be amazed ow much time people watch other people playing games or developing or going other things on twitch etc, but I suppose I'm really not.

What does my head in about Discord etc isnt the realtime aspect, its the lack of threading, no matter how many specific narrow 'channels' there are, the lack of specific topic threading makes my head hurt. And thats why I've always loved messageboards.

 

Yeah, I don't understand the point of large discord servers at all. By the time you type your response the conversation has moved on to something else. I'm a member of 2 or 3 and they're all useless to me.

 

Another factor that may influence forums eventually is that Unity increasingly sees and markets itself as a realtime development platform, where games development is just one of the segments.

However, I have a feeling that questions relating to what percentage of Unity users are working in these other areas, how this will or wont change over time, and whether many of them will be attracted to the idea of posting in the general forum wont be answered quickly.

Some of that might be influenced by whether Unity evolves the forum to reflect any of that other segment stuff. For example right now this general forum is described specifically as a place to 'Discuss Unity and game development'. I believe the intent so far with regards other sengments has been to try to fit them into technology-specific forums where appropriate. For example the Cinemachine forum is described as 'Join discussions on Cinemachine and using Unity for Film.' I usually find such forums to be completely dominated by technical talk, which is understandable and good in itself, but perhaps one day there may be room for more generalised, abstract, philosophical etc talk relating to Unity for Film to blossom elsewhere on the forum?

 

And yes I should acknowledge the fact that although Unity only started overtly drawing much attention to their non-gaming uses in recent years, there will always have been people on these forums who were not using Unity for games. I have at various stages been one of those people myself although unfortunately I've not had that much I can say about it on these forums, most of my posts have been technical or spouting my opinion about something that would apply equally to games and every other segment.

 

damn right.. can't stand discord or slack etc for the same reasons... its not that they aren't useful for quick questions or discussions over things or just general chat..... its going back to those topics of discussion ... its all just realtime and flowing, nothing that good redesign on how those things worked couldn't improve things.. but I think it will be a while before something better is out to use.

It does just make more sense to ask questions and have conversations on a forum, its archived and searchable better, its easier for others to come in and add to the topics... its just running your own forum is something most can't even be arsed to do... while setting up a server on discord etc or using social media is a piece of piss....

..indeed

 

I use discord fine but it's really *not* a replacement for forums, in fact Unity's own staff often tell people to make a forum post on their own discord because it's a sticky and better medium for examining facts where discord is more of a skype replacement. Slack has it's own place in business as if you had office rooms.

So it's not about liking or disliking really but tool for job.

 

What is an "extreme hobbyist"? Sounds way cooler than just "hobbyist"...

I still miss ShadowK, his steadfast optimism really was something else.

 

Indeed. I like the forums (and used to like answers) for the same reason. When you first learn Unity, or something new comes out, likely many people will have the exact same questions. I don't have a lot of time (because I am making games). It is way more effective to just read responses to the others who have asked before. I learned most of what I needed to know about unity from the forums and answers and pretty much never had to ask anything. It was all there. Then started answering questions. Big public discord/slack channels are just pointless. They aren't effectively searchable and 99% people asking stupid questions that could be answered with a simple google search or rtfming. Those people will be gone eventually because they don't have any of what it takes to be a game developer. There are are several people whose opinions and knowledge I value, and I generally chat with them directly or in much smaller channels. Forums allow that.

 

Mostly because those are stupid. We try to shut them down before they get started. If you are a game developer, you can easily test and research and pick the tool that suits your needs. If you then feel the need to defend or argue your choice online with others (instead of just getting on with creating), then you aren't a game developer, you are a moron. I literally give zero craps what tool anyone chooses to use. I have little enough time discussed actual issues/ideas with friends and peers, let alone read the rantings of internet morons. (yes, I recognize the irony in accepting a mod role in an online forum)

 

I'm interested too. I think I might have what it takes!

 

Yeah, engine vs. engine battles were always dumb and pointless. Especially these days, where the constant competition has honed most engines to being far better than they've ever been. It's a good problem to have, needing to choose between a bunch of great options.

 

Unless it's forum software known as Lithium.

 

The indie revolution was a fluke and the forums aren't more boring, you're just getting older.

 

I actually prefer Discord over a forum because in general there is faster feedback and it's easier to get into interesting debates. I pop in the forums every now and then, but for the vast majority of my questions I feel like Discord got me covered. I can hop from server to server and have an answer within minutes instead of maybe days.

 

Me too! I prefer to spend more time on Discord than forums. I wouldn't say that I think it's better, it just satisfies a different need. It's nice to just hop on whenever and have a chat about game dev or whatever you want with people that share your interests. It's more casual (at least in the servers I'm on - I don't know about Unity's).

But I do come to Unity's forums from time to time to search for answers to problems or questions that have already been asked or check out other people's completed projects and wips.

 

We both know you answered your own question

Hey man, some of us are still around

Yeah, I think that's true. People's attention spans are getting more fragmented. I think Reddit is more or less just replacing all the micro communities of most forums, which is really a shame. Cuz it's basically just a forum system for short attention spans.

... I mean, I would take a good ol' "the lighting just doesn't 'feel' right" argument over the karma wh*ring and posts under false pretense at r/Unity3d.

 

Well, they serve different needs.

I've been a member of a bunch of chat servers for a while now, but have only recently become active in one of them. That provides something pretty different to forums. I don't really have long discussions there. It's more like office chat stuff, which is of value to me when I'm working from home. If I'm at my office then it's of little use. I do stuff like post early stuff for initial feedback, and ask/answer in-the-moment type questions, and generally just interact with my local community.

Forums are cool because of their asynchronous nature. You don't miss a conversation if you're away for a bit, it's easy to quote stuff, replies aren't flashing by at several responses per minute so it's easier to have more in-depth discussions. Being threadded also allows discussions to be far more focused, which is something that a chat service simply doesn't help with.

I generally agree with @RichardKain that it's probably a matter of people tending towards other types of social media.

 

I guess for me I just have other priorities that are more important to me now and the forum isn't a big deal anymore. It's a social space to discuss Unity related things but most posts are beginners asking questions or alpha/niche features I don't care about yet. I refer to docs if I have questions and don't see much value in posting anymore.

I suppose, off the top of my head, that's seems like why I'm not around as much.

 

Because people would rather wait for the world to end (and talk about it) than put a game out into a market that is not chasing them around and begging for it.

The exponential curve sunk a bit lower. There's still plenty of money and success to be had, and there always will. The forums mostly reflect the belly of that curve, not the tail.

The best thing you can do is make games and show people what's possible.

 

people spending all their time on discord servers don't get nowhere. I watch a few discord servers cause i wanna know the crowd (i don't know any game people in real life) and all i see is people dicking aroudn getting nowhere. Day after day.

Forums are where the smart people hang out. People who do research, read books, that sort of thing. Discord and other chat services are for people who wanna talk and believe but not do. (talking about the discord servers which act to replace forums. like 'learnign communities')

This assumes the goal a person has in using the services is to get better at their craft. I think what a lot of people want is to make connections, which is fine. I've seen a few people get good jobs by spending 90% of their time blabbing on social media and 4% making art. Just gotta know what your goals are I guess.

Just speculating, but I think a lot of younger generation people might feel intimated by forums. Cause it puts your words "in stone." they are afraid of either saying something that might work against in job search or they are just afraid of looking stupid. I see all manner of idiotic questions that are a 3 second search away on discord servers, and i see groups of people discussing these dumb queries for hours on end. You see dumb questions on forums but not nearly as much.

Every oncec in awhile, i answer some basic question on a forum, and the person i answered will DM me with furhter questions. I tell them, "no i don't do DM, i want everybody to be able to see the answer." This way, its searchable, and also this way if i give a bad answer its subject to peer review.

But the people don't go and put their question up then. THey jsut dissappear. How lame. So, TLR, if forums are dying in lieu of realtime chat services, it's the idiocracy.

 

The smart ones. Some of us realized it was hard, gave up, and then still hang around messing up the place.

 

To be fair, I don't think this is necessarily as silly as it may appear.

If you assume that the purpose of the communication is solely to get an answer to the specific question asked then yes, asking Google is probably far more effective than asking a human. But if the purpose is also for the sake of the interaction then it's a different story.

Also, sometimes when asking a person you'll get asked useful questions in response. Humans can sometimes tell that you might be asking the wrong question. Google won't.

 

Well, yeah, kind of in theory. But when you search the vast cosmos of the web you get answers that:

1. come from a vast amount of sources
2. have by nature of pre-existing gone through some amount of peer review
3. can be as thorough or brief as you need.

When you ask a closed, small group of people because you are lazy and impatient and you just want someone with some street cred to tell you what to do and how to think, you get nowhere. Unless you make a consistent effort to parrot back the things people like to hear and stroke all the ego's just the right way -- and you really make a full time job of this -- then you get yourself a job without having to actually improve the craft (much). That's a legit tactic and far as I can tell the only real practical use of a chat service/social media.


Anyway, live chat communities are distracting and mostly what I see on them is people procrastinating and wanting low-effort gimme answers, not serious effort in improvement of the craft. What I see over and over is people who are frustrated with trouble-shooting/figuring out somethign new, so they want somebody to just tell them what to do. And then you get like three people who suffer from Dunning Kruger giving questionable or at best incomplete answers, and then.... kaka. Nobodies really learned nothing, and if somebody did learn something useful it's immediately lost.

And how selfish is it to go and ask for freebie answers and horde the goods all to yourself? You get something for free, it's only right to give it away for free. You ask on a forum and you are asking for everybody because there is a history of it.

Not saying anything new here, just ranting.

 

I dunno, sometimes it's REALLY simple stuff I see too. Things like people asking what certain things in the API do, but fairly well documented things like what a raycast is. I'm sure some of it is because of interaction, but oftentimes it feels like there's an aversion to using search engines, or at least disinterest. Maybe part of that is because it's becoming more and more difficult to get technical results out of google as they change how the parser works.

 

I agree with all of what you're saying, too, if it's from the perspective of information gathering. For contrast, though, when I'm on a chat server it's not for info gathering. It's for the interaction. Tech questions are a side thing.

That said, I'm only active in one chat community, haven't been for long, and it's specifically a local community with almost entirely people I directly know. Context definitely plays a role, here.

 

Yeah I am not saying these things have no value. Just they certainly don't replace a forum and I can see no good reason why forums should lose favor because of them. Isolation and segregation are not good things. Think about the etymology of the word "forum".

 

And humans can also give moronic, uninformed nonsense responses that you have to wade through or explain yourself. They do it in forums, they do in big public chats. The core problem here is humans. Ugh... humans.

I get when you are new you are going to go where the people are. You will get terrible advice and tons of nonsense. Sometimes one of the good ones (we all know who they are here), will help you out. But if you are new its hard to tell as the asshats tend be louder and back bs credentials. (and we know how they are too.)

I rarely have actual "questions". When I do, there is a pool of folks I go to here for sage advice. (and yea, some of them are hobbyists... just really smart hobbyists.) . For legit serious, timely issues, I contact Unity, or industry chat channels that have broad generic ndas in place that let us talk freely. But mostly the docs cover it.

 

You need to be on the right chat server.

 

I think they have great value... they attract the riff-raff away from the forums.

 

You mean extreme hobbyists?

I guess you're right

 

To OP, is this interesting thread btw?

There is plenty of ranting and comparisons on the internet,if you like. Just type x vs y vs z. Plus you can jump on video channels and quickly realizing (or not), you moved to watching cats

There are GDC interesting talks. Maybe worth to watch some of them. Then participate in relevant forum section, rather than be looking in general forum.

There is plenty going on on Unity by its own. You are also welcome, to open relevant "interesting" threads. Unfortunately, same thing may not necessary interest me, you, or other person.

However, we had some interesting in my feeling threads, but being ruined, by some angry forum trolls, which don't know where/when to stop.

 

That's super irrelevant. Those threads weren't about learning anything or good content (and most videos aren't good content either).

It's more just about the intensity, and the passion.

I interacted with a lot of those threads, and I'm sure that most smart people thought they were garbage (and they kinda were) but they were fun, and they sometimes helped build a bit of community.

Like, if the switch to lithium happened tomorrow, would there still be crazy outrage, or would people just shrug?

 

There would still be crazy outrage.

 

I raged intensely against it during the "Lithium Incident", but if it happened again tomorrow, I'd probably just shrug and leave for good.

 

Is that because your use of the forum has changed, or because you would consider it unforgivable for Unity to make the same mistake twice, or some other reason?

 

Both, plus I no longer do any gamedev or use Unity, so I'm overall much less invested than I used to be.

 

I think a few years ago, there was still a huge Steam-based Indie rush where people knew they could get noticed on Steam. Then, it became apparent that any baddie could release baddie's first asset flip onto Steam, and game the system a bit to pour dozens, hundreds, thousands of shovel-ware **** onto the market.

The result was chilling for many an indie dev, because their content was not going to get noticed anymore but for the grace of pure luck. I know I stopped searching through Steam's store for interesting looking stuff, because finding anything good had become a needle in a haystack.

That's not the exclusive reason. Maybe not the primary reason for this lull. But I've got no doubt it has had some measurable impact.

 

People used to come here with big dreams and strong beliefs. Usually they were told they were crazy and/or had their threads closed. They went elsewhere. Lol

Seriously probably the people who created many of those "interesting" discussions just are chasing the next big gold rush whatever that is. Others probably switched to other engines. And others maybe life happened... graduated, got jobs, married, whatever. Maybe we all got tired of debating. Ha ha.

Most of the folks whose posts I used to enjoy reading the most have left over the years. A few are still around but haven't posted much.

Anyway you made an interesting one here.

 

These are still some of the best forums I have used so I think Unity has that going for them. I'm waiting for ECS to be mature before I really dive back into Unity again, until then I have lots of work to do on the backend side which is written in Go so not much to discuss here. I do occasionally stop by and lament on the state of unity networking.

 

I rarely get time. I am too busy these days to do so, really. Mostly I am busy with games and learning game technology which is a massive one indeed.