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What happened to NSider?


Terranort

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How many users actually left over political arguments though? I can't think of many. What I've seen is a gradual decline in activity which has been ongoing since the NS2 days, with the core userbase aging and naturally moving on to other things, like kirbymeister said. Also, from what I've seen, there's been little to no conversation about promoting the site or doing anything that would attract new members, not that I would know the first thing about how to do so.

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Why can't all of these suggestions be correct?

 

First, this iteration began during the twilight months of the last election season, and as much as the more wide-eyed amongst the user base expected otherwise, Ninfora does not exist in some cultural vacuum. In theory, its approach to "sensitive" issues is probably the best I've seen ever--especially relative to many others in the anime and/or gaming communities. Here, socio-political discussion was allowed and even welcomed because it was correctly recognised as being infinitely more imperative than stupid, dank memes and who qualifies as best girl in fucking Fire Emblem.

 

Nevetheless, there is a price for such things, especially when these discussions were as unfettered as they were. And it was so because the leftward discourse came from a place of pessimistic destitution--and in some cases, poseur grand-standing at the lowest common denominator--more than it did the actual belief that the spread of those ideas would lead to any net positive societal shift. The word, "empathy" was weaponised as a catch-phrase and thrown around in an informal sanitisation campaign by people who were otherwise--sometimes by their own admission--completely disinterested and uninvested in Ninfora as a community, regardless of its purpose. Meanwhile, rightward discourse was characteristically deflective, defensive, insensitive, and impenetrable to the point that the vomitorium of the other side was somewhat justified. There were no educators because there were no learners, and there were no learners because there were no fucking educators. "Right" and "wrong" were the essence of impotence. Merely, there was a collective of broken people haphazardly and begrudgingly co-existing with a few disinterested neutrals.

 

It thus follows that the community itself was always broken, right down to its objective. There was talk in earlier months about promotion and growth and how it might be fostered, but this was summarily shot down every time by the sentiment that NSider2's structure and methodology ultimately led to its stagnation and downfall--CrowdGather notwithstanding. The level of accuracy in that sentiment is ultimately unimportant because it would eventually be asserted that Ninfora is, by execution, not a successor, but a temporary seal upon the gaping vacuum left by its ostensible predecessor. Those who migrated here from that community did not do so with the serious intent to reproduce it--or if they did, it was an aspiration with a short shelf life. They just wanted something to act as a counter-point to the finality of the death of something so familiar and nostalgic. At some point, apathy set in, with no manifestation there-of more easily cited than its Clubs feature: a token way to fracture the community in to many sub-groups and cultures existing in their own little corners in much the same way that a conceptually-maligned myriad of sub-forums do, albeit with a distinct club house feel. This is not a realisation lost on the member base; yet, the feature remains. And who cares? The pulse has long slowed by this point, and it stands little chance of quickening. Why funnel more resources to it beyond server maintenance and the occasional IPS software update?

 

As far as I can tell (and correct me if I'm wrong), there wasn't even any acknowledgement that Ninfora reached its year mark in September.

 

Meanwhile, most of the aforementioned member base who have yet to depart (formally or otherwise) have established external connections with whomever they like or at least tolerate. Returning here is a habit, but most of them would be set without it.

 

It will last a while longer, but barring some successful revitalisation effort, I am conceding the inevitability.

Edited by Schmengland
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... I like the Fire Emblem thread. It's better than Reddit where no discussion lasts more than a few hours and it's all softcore waifu hentai anyway.

 

I can't say I've ever really made a friend in this community since I don't have those dank chat thread memes. But it's been amusing to talk about video games and watch your weird antics play out over the years.

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I'm active when I'm playing a game I feel like chatting about. Such as breath of the wild. But I've been playing older games recently and haven't felt the need to really talk about them. Games really aren't what the use to be anyways. Also since I got married, I have other things taking up my time. We all started back on Nsider as either kids or young adults. I know for myself after the last 14 years that I've been a part of the community a lot has changed.

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this thread just feels like so many words to say that not everybody feels like foruming all the time.
i really doubt this place slowing down has much to do with anything other than the fallout from ns2 exploding has settled and so there's not really any excitement left.
i could be wrong since i was never involved, but it's very rare for a healthy, active forum to exist in the world of social media and reddit, anyway.
if y'all don't want it to die, just try to remember the positive reasons you have for coming here in the first place.
and if there aren't enough then so be it

Edited by Pichi
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On 10/25/2017 at 7:59 AM, Youngster Joey said:

Most of us are growing up, too, our interested and time for videogames is waning. 

 

 

tbh i wouldn't bat an eyelid if this was indeed the largest contributor for declining activity in 'traditional' forums - the new guard won't tend to use that kind of thing anymore.

 

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For me it was the political infighting. I used to enjoy coming here when we could talk about video games without accusing each other of being nazis. Now we can't even be excited about a new Mario game without it devolving into scurrilous partisan bickering. Video games used to be the thing that united us, and NS2 was the place we could share that passion. Now that we're assuming the worst possible motives of each other, it's impossible to just share in the joy of a hobby.

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I only visited and posted in the political containment thread like once or so, but glad I haven't done anymore beyond that from the sounds of it. With some other places I go to or things I watch, escapism from politics is hard enough as it is under the current climate, and don't need to add to that by going to the thread for it here, whether it involves people calling each other Nazis or whatever.

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8 hours ago, Shulk said:

I'm active when I'm playing a game I feel like chatting about. Such as breath of the wild. But I've been playing older games recently and haven't felt the need to really talk about them. Games really aren't what the use to be anyways. Also since I got married, I have other things taking up my time. We all started back on Nsider as either kids or young adults. I know for myself after the last 14 years that I've been a part of the community a lot has changed.

Yep. I'm on whenever there's some new news of a game I'm interested in and that kind of thing.

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Let's just say that the way things went down and the things people said informed my opinions of others. I don't think that's a bad thing at all, and if they're gone now good riddance.

 

Also, let's not kid ourselves here, webforums in 2017 are a dead medium and it's a miracle that Kodiack keeps us up at all.

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And not to put too fine a point on it, but...

 

Quote

I used to enjoy coming here when we could talk about video games without accusing each other of being nazis.

 

Take away "accusing each other of" and this is a perfect summation of the internet as a whole, and particularly gaming communities. The fact that the accusation is what outrages people is representative of the whole issue. I know this makes me complicit in "partisan bickering" but there are some political opinions that I cannot abide. Sorry.

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Heya kids.

 

One of my first posts on this website told you to enjoy the time you have left here as a community. I meant it. Nsider 2 might have, at one time or another, had a chance of becoming a a larger forum than it eventually became. That chance, however, was long, long past being a possibility before Koduck and YR thought about splitting from CrowdGather. Hell, let’s be honest. Even way back in 2007, the writing was on the wall for forums. Only the largest forums were going to survive as anything more than serving increasingly tiny communities. That’s just fine. Discourse on the internet has always been ephemeral in nature, and in this era of social media and services like Discord, why bother with forums?

 

This was compounded by the increasingly niche nature of this community. Allow this to serve as your reminder that Nsider was shut down a decade ago, children. The primary audience of Nsider 2 and Ninfora has always been stragglers from that community, with a smaller number of people added on along the way. Naturally, that audience shrunk and shrunk over the years, and you’re still bleeding users without replacing them. Those users, over time, grew up from being stupid children, got actual responsibilities, and slowly drifted away from the stupid Nintendo forums they used to post on. That is to say, this was all an inevitability anyway, so you really shouldn’t be surprised that your forum is becoming a ghost town. If you still want to talk to anybody here in the future, make sure you can do it elsewhere.

 

As a sidenote, I really shouldn’t comment on clubs, but I’ll just say that keeping them this long was a stupid idea. Neat concept, but overall destructive to what’s left of this community considering you can barely keep the chat thread running.

 

But hey, let’s address some points from the thread. This couldn’t possibly be a bad idea.

 

VIDEO GAMES BIGGEST ROAD BLOCK TO BECOMING A “RESPECTED ART FORM” ARE THE PEOPLE WHO PLAY THEM:

 

Let’s just acknowledge the baggage first. Yes, I was one of those super abrasive assholes that talked about politics on this forum. Did I help push people off this forum? Yeah, sure. I don’t regret it. They either expressed opinions that I could not abide being openly shared in a community I was a part of, or they lost an argument, felt they got bullied by the Belgian Internet Terrorists, and ran. Either way, not sorry.

 

By the way, it certainly was not “half the forum”.

 

The prevailing wisdom on the internet was (and still is) to quarantine political discussion away, so that it can be ignored by those that don’t want to engage. Last year’s election simply popped even the most durable bubble and made politics something that could no longer be ignored. Shit got polarized, to put it mildly. Needless to say, that wisdom is misguided. Politics are something that govern your everyday life. Even beyond your pathetic existence, the GOP deciding to pursue stripping healthcare from millions, well, affects millions of other people. These discussions are extremely important, massively more important than mere video games, and ignoring them leads to apathy or, yes, horrid ways of thinking. Just take a gander at how a sizable group of gamers sympathize with actual (literal) neo-nazis. Go read up and understand what Nazism entails. I’ll wait.

 

Speaking of, nazis. I’ll totally agree with the point that, if you are more concerned with being called a nazi instead of why you’re being called a nazi, you need to do some deep reflection. Protip: You’re either espousing similar talking points to those that neo-nazis typically do, you’re associating with neo-nazis, or you just said some seriously dangerous shit. Try to avoid doing that in the future, and you won’t be called a nazi. Promise.

 

Anywho. This is a video game forum, however, so shouldn’t we just talk about video games? Time to give you the spiel again. Video games are an artform. Art is, inherently, political, even in as medium as unworthy as video games. It is a reflection of the person creating it. You can kick and scream about how you can divorce the art from the artist all you want, but that is an impossibility. Art is not made in a vacuum, and Gears for Breakfast knowingly deciding to keep a neo-nazi of a voice actor in their game colours the experience of playing it, especially those that neo-nazis want to see wiped from the gene pool. You cannot avoid politics. Hell, that new nazi killing game also came out and was using the current political climate to its full marketing advantage. It’s not a matter of ‘keeping politics out of video games’ so much as recognizing that they were always there. Say it with me now: The Mario and Zelda series both make use of problematic tropes, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying them as long as we acknowledge their problems. That this is even a contentious point to make reveals just how fucked up the gaming community is, to be frank.

 

Finally, I’ll admit that we didn’t always use the politics thread. The horror. Once again, I am not sorry that you had to see a troll that was always arguing in bad faith, by the way, tell a black woman that she had nothing to fear from his southern heritage. Such discussions, are, once more, ephemeral. Picking them up and moving to another thread is pointless for any other reason than the peanut gallery not wanting to see it. Then again, you didn’t need to see it. If you’re not interested in a discussion, you are not obligated to take part. Go read a book for a while and it’ll probably burn out by the time you get back. Or just post your Penis shitpost anyway, it’s not like anyone reads them. Don’t be childish and try to drown out discussion like certain members did.

 

A STORY ABOUT NEOGAF:

 

I was already on my way out of NeoGAF before the implosion, but let’s make this clear. The self-destruction of NeoGAF was largely due to Evilore (The owner of NeoGAF, if you’re unaware) handling himself extremely poorly. His past was never clean, as he had posted and even admitted to being a sexual predator before. He had, just the week before, posted a rant against believing victims of sexual assault, that it was an untenable position. I wonder why. How he handled the situation with amir0x was also horrible, by the way.

 

This accusation came from an ex of his doing a #metoo post, later deleted because it became something much larger than she wanted. I won’t repeat the accusation, but let’s just say that an adult really should know better than to do what he did. The post circulated in the less than reputable parts of the internet and eventually hit NeoGAF proper. Evilore’s past is why he didn’t get a single shred of the benefit of the doubt from most of the community. Then he fucked up even harder. What does Evilore do with a forum that’s calling for his head? What does he tell his moderators?

 

He tells the mods basically what he said in the later statement. That everything was false and harping on about how she was deranged and couldn’t be trusted. The mods and admins all resign, and NeoGAF is left in a lawless state. Evilore uses Modbot to make an extremely weak promise of a statement coming soon. Meanwhile, the internet takes notice, the servers started to buckle, and Evilore takes the site down.

 

Three or so days later, Evilore finally comes out of hiding and brings NeoGAF back online with a frankly insulting statement. He blamed the downfall of the forum on the negative atmosphere created by political discussion, and vows to bring NeoGAF back to a gaming focus by banning political discussion. Thus killing the heart and soul of NeoGAF, even without the mass exodus. On an interesting note, if you were there to brave the account suicides that were posting goatse immediately after it came back online, you would have noticed how quickly the progressive masks of those left fell off. Funny, that. 

 

Anyway, that is an extremely lengthy way to say that the downfall of NeoGAF is in no way similar to what’s happening here. Unless YR or Koduck happen to be sexual predators, but I rather doubt that. What you're facing is simply the by-product of time.

 

 

 

This is already way longer than I intended, so I’ll stop there.
Catch you cool cats on the flip side.

Edited by Mocha
There, I fixed it.
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Since it was brought up, Wolfenstein as a series has always been about killing Nazis and putting them in their place; the people offended by the newest game are just either ignorant far right or Nazi sympathizers. With the Charlottesville incident and other shit that's happened, of course Bethesda was going to take advantage of the timing with the latest game, and they were right to do so. I do like how it has all gathered new fans for Wolfenstein because of the timing, even though Doom has always been more my jam far as classic shooters go.

 

I engage in politics where it concerns me here and there and empathize with those oppressed by the certain changes since the election, just I don't get that invested in it every place I go...

 

Oh, and yeah. The clubs feature was a terrible idea for this place. Still stand by that. :\

Edited by Ridley Prime
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