@TomFulp anyone who gets blammed gets banned for a year…
The Pete Best of internet animation
Age 27, Male
hey!
Joined on 8/23/08
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Join https://theshizz.org/forum/ . It is an incredible forum about life, music, video games (and vgm) and awesome/creative stuff in general. It's invite only and can be accessed only by registered members. But once you're in there, you're in a fantastic online space! :D The community is made up of super amazing cool people.
Could blogs fit the bill here? There are a few animation/music/gaming blogs I follow (albeit rarely read because I'm terrible) that tend to post about cool things across all sorts of media landscapes that I never heard about & that not many else have mentioned. Though exclusively using blogs for "content discovery" is tricky because they're inherently disparate entities, unless a blogger goes out of their way to be generous with links.
This probably exists already, but maybe having a non-ad-hoc network of blogs would be cool, where there's some feedback/discovery/community across blogs? Or is that just Tumblr?
If you've got some good blogs, yeah I'm all ears!
To answer your unanswerable question, yes, by word of mouth. Talk to people directly. People have been doing that for thousands of years.
You know I feel like going up and talking to people is actually becoming more socially weird now that everyone is looking at their phone in every idle moment
Something akin to Imageboards and Imageboard culture could work(pre 2012).Honestly Anonymization,a competent lock-like exam or watchdog program that keeps the underage tards out and a trustworthy team of SysAdmins to keep the bad actors as low as possible could be a winning combo to bring about a site that would be akin to the Golden Age of Forums when everyone was still getting a hang of the Net without any Ego or CorpoCuckery making everything suck.
But that would require effort,so thats a bust since everyone would much rather bitch and expect someone to do it for them, especially this generation of poseurs.
Honestly, Discord ain´t much better since your Server no matter how well cared for, will eventually (inevitably mind) degenerate into a cesspit of Cliquewank, undercover gay op Dis-server drama and all kindsa murky shady shit going on behind closed PM messagings once you stop monitoring it intently and it gets filled up beyond what people or bots can manage.
My Advice is to keep it Strict, Small and to be Well-Connected with its users. Something akin to a hobby site or requiring some technical or otherwise specialised knowledge that it can use to gatekeep.
Theres a reason the only forums or communities that are still decent are highly xenophobic to outsiders.You should do some research about the why.Might help you glean some insight into finding such sites yourself.
Try SpaceHey or Fediverse for example.There is plenty of options but you will need to do a deep dive for them,especially nowadays since Faggoogle is employing algorithms that drown out lesser sites in favor of sending you to ones that will help them generate Ad-revenue.
If you don´t understand anything here ask me or PM me(although i think i am real clear here).
Theres also a reason why 4chan is still the font of Internet Culture of which all other sites and users steal their identity from.There is a golden formula right there even if it utterly covered in shit these days.
Overrall, if you don´t want to be a slave to the constant generation of time-wasting clips and clickbait, you are gonna have to go about it alone and just cut yourself off cold turkey from it yourself.Find some IRL hobbies or go trawl through some social meet-up style invites and find some interesting things old-school style.Afterall, finding interesting things online will never beat seeing or meeting them in-person.
I'd say find a trusted circle of individual curators who you share common standards with. I've got a few movie reviewers on Youtube with whom I share similar ideals on what I do and don't enjoy and usually I find their recommendations are exactly what I'm looking for.
This won't get you off Youtube per se but it's at least a way of finding things that you actually want to watch. The critic is meant to be the friend of the consumer, not the creator, so if you find a critic who shares your views on entertainment then you'll have a slew of recommendations right there.
On top of that, there's a number of free streaming services with a wide selection of both recognizable and unknown shows and movies to dig into, Tubi is a great option if you don't mind ads, sometimes I just click through there and find something or other that catches my attention.
All in all, I'd say curation is key, if that curation comes from a streaming service then mozeltov, if it comes from a good buddy with the same taste in entertainment then even better, I've gotten recommendations for things I'd've never looked twice at from practical strangers and thought they were the bees knees, I guess the best advice I can give ya is to talk to people, listen to them, this world is full of people who watch things, take note of what they recommend, they might just show you something great you've never thought to check out before.
I am a Tubi fan. For some reason I don't get as offended when something on Tubi sucks as I do when something on Netflix sucks, I think cause it's just got a cheaper air to it. And then when you find something cool, it's delighting.
If you want to share some of the movie review guys you follow, feel free!
@Emrox It has dawned on me that you likely read Hacker News and may thus already be familiar with many of these, but here goes anyways:
- https://animationobsessive.substack.com/
- https://nicole.express/
- https://shmuplations.com/
- https://letsanime.blogspot.com/
- https://www.synthtopia.com/
Happy new year!
You know I have seen articles from at least two of these on HN, but somehow it never occurred to me to read anything else from any of them. Thanks for the recommendations - I just killed an hour on shmuplations, hopefully I can find some time to really dig into to everything here!
TomFulp
What would it take for NG to be this for you?
Emrox
I think what makes twitter the closest thing is that 80% of the posts on there are commenting on things happening outside of twitter, which means you kind of get to keep an eye on everything from oscar nominees to tiny internet-rabbithole niches by following the people who keep up with that stuff. I don't see many people on NG talking about stuff outside of NG (except maybe on the forums? I haven't been on the BBS in a pretty long time, but maybe that's a piece of the puzzle?) That's not to diss all the good stuff that's posted here on NG, but I wouldn't want to limit my exposure to new media to one corner of the internet!
This is probably not at all in line with your "vision" for NG, but since you asked - to make Newgrounds my goto place for hearing about awesome stuff, there would have to be more of a culture of sharing/talking about influences from everywhere else. Tumblr used to be good for this - lots of niche fan accounts that would exclusively post art from one idiosyncratic manga artist from the 1930s or whatever. I've done at least a little bit of that on here, but it always feels a little weird, since most of what people talk about on this site is the stuff on the site.
I wrote all that and then it occurred to me that like half the stuff on here is fanart, so it actually doesn't seem so off-brand after all. But seeing pizza tower fanart never really made me want to play the game - so I guess the thing that's missing, for me, is some kind of discussion/analysis of *why* we like the things we like? Like, why we think they're important? When I first found out about GDC talks on youtube like ten years ago, it made me wonder why that kind of thing doesn't exist for animation - people sharing their wisdom, and presenting new ideas about different ways of exploring what the medium can do. Maybe the reason that exists for video games is that programmers are analytical people to begin with, which is less true of visual art stuff. Which is to say I have no idea how to get that kind of discussion going around here, other than to set a good example by doing it yourself, which I try to do sometimes when I'm not so lazy.
As for curating the good stuff that's already on here, I really like what @futurecopLGF does with the monthly game highlights thing - though ideally there would be like ten guys like that who all have different tastes, and then you can get your recommendations from the guys who like the kind of stuff you like. Also, I know you've talked about ditching the under judgment system, but I think that's a really key thing that NG has that places like youtube don't have - a mandate that everything has to get 150 people to watch it and vote on it, so that the good stuff rises to the top, even if it's posted by a complete unknown. I really took that for granted when I was a kid on NG, and now in 2023 every website on the internet requires you to do a ton of legwork to get the word out about the thing you've made, as if that's the only system that could possibly exist.