About a week ago I posed this question to my Twitter followers:
No one had a good answer to this. In fact, there were zero serious answers. Then again, I was asking Twitter, where you would presumably not be if you had a good answer to this question. But I did get a few "likes" which suggests to me that some people at least agree with the premise that it might not be worth it to be addicted to a website in exchange for the few times a year you hear about something cool.
So today I pose this question to you - is it possible to hear about good new things without having to engage with mind-numbing and addictive internet feeds? If anyone has any ideas, I'd really like to hear them. Here's one idea I came up with:
What if there was something like a Discord server where people recommend art/media, but the requirement is that you're only allowed to post stuff that totally blew your mind? You know, the kind of art that makes you think about it for weeks after, or even changes who you are as a person. To post a recommendation, you'd have to write a few sentences about why you think the work is important, kind of like the write-ups I did on absurdly ambitious art earlier this year, or my favorite Canadian animation before that.
Well, you probably know where this is going by now, so here's the invite link:
So if you liked either of those blog posts, come join the fun. Who knows, you could be getting in on a budding cult of personality! Maybe you'll even get the rare opportunity to take some screenshots that get someone cancelled one day! Or you can go around to the three or four people on the internet who remember Peck and say, "yeah, I talk to that guy all the time on Discord."
I'm gonna keep it short because I really just wanted to promote the Discord link. This was originally going to be a whole long-winded essay like I usually do on here, but I changed my mind partway through writing, since the welcome page on the Discord is like six more paragraphs you gotta read anyway. (I mean it! Reading the welcome post is mandatory.) Anyway, here's what the opening paragraph of this blog post used to be. it's kind of cheeky, and I liked it too much to throw away:
Every time I go on Twitter I want to die. This was true even back when Twitter was called Twitter - actually this has been the case for about six years. I've watched the website downgrade year after year, and yet no one seemed to care about this until just recently. Why is it that people are suddenly so sensitive to every little degradation of this one website? What changed? I guess we will never know.
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.