Fair warning: this is a rambly post. I feel that it's relevant and interesting enough to share, but if it's not your speed then tl;dr at the bottom.
It's been a very long time since I last visited this website. There was a point in time—amidst the Minecraft craze that swept my peers and I back in the early 2010s—where this website meant so much to me. Minecraft Forums was the anchor for my experience growing up with this game and its culture. I read each and every update changelog as they were posted on the home page. I scoured the suggestions forum in search of some hidden genius ideas, naively dreaming that the devs at Mojang might find these same threads if we made enough noise. And yet, despite my investment, at some point I unknowingly posted my last reply, and this account began to gather dust.
I am not who I was when I last posted on this account. I've grown up. I never truly stopped playing Minecraft (because you never really put it down for good), but I have certainly dedicated less and less time to it with each year. And that makes sense! Everyone has so much more time to spend when they haven't yet been bogged down by the responsibilities, hardships, and fulfillment of growing up. But after growing up, and after stumbling across this place by chance, I realized that I miss this website.
Now, I don't miss who I used to be when I last was posting on this website. I look back on my post history and I cringe (please don't look). I find my own words hard to read. I see the insecurities that have always plagued me take form in the weird, awkward, annoying way I wrote while learning how to communicate on the internet for the first time. That being said, I'm grateful I went through that phase. Every misstep in life, including cringy forum posts, teaches you how to do better the next time. And to have a permanent and easily accessible digital record of my years-old missteps is cringe-inducing—but strangely, it's healing too. It gives me context for who and where I am now. It is tangible proof that—in the midst of my present-day struggles with insecurity, doubt, anxiety, et cetera—I am doing so much better than before. I have made real, evidential progress. I am not who I was.
So why do I miss this place? Even though I don't want to be my younger self, he existed in a time where things felt easier. That's a separate can of worms that might be too sappy even for this post, but the relevant part of that equation is social media. I started using social media around the time I stopped using Minecraft Forums, but it was not an equal trade.
Social media has been decried at length, despite its omnipresence in most of our lives. Its algorithmically-driven nature seems to somehow be the root cause of both of these truths. It creates a trap that the general public recognizes for what it is, yet it has ensnared and invaded so many aspects of our life that to escape from it feels like too much effort. As I rediscovered Minecraft Forums—now with my present-day perspective, feelings, and thoughts in the back of my mind—I realized that the appeal of the forum is the lack of any algorithm, or immediacy, or any of the other cheap tricks social media pulls. It's what social media could never be: a place for positive, human-driven social interaction. You can post a somewhat-sappy, overly sentimental retrospective on growing up with online forums, and it'll get just as much of a chance on the front page as anything else. Everyone can be heard. Anyone can make a splash.
I do believe that something has been lost with the abandonment of forums in the online ecosystem. I think the world might genuinely be better off with more forums—but effecting that kind of cultural shift is well above my pay grade. So, for the time being, the best I can do is post a little more often.
If you read all the way through this, thanks so much! I hope these thoughts and feelings I've put here resonated with you, and I encourage you to do the same. The state of online forums isn't exactly something that just comes up in my day-to-day life, so it's a topic I've been dying to broach. If y'all are still active after all these years, then I have a feeling you have reason to be—and I'd love to hear your stories as well!
(tl;dr: Rediscovering MCF led to me reflecting on my growth as a person and the place of online forums in today's world)
That sounds like a lovely reminiscence of nostalgia if I ever heard one, and I mean that in a good way in case it's not clear.
This post is incidental timing with myself because I've been going through a similar feeling and I've been making my own post partly as a result of that (and also because I've... never talked at length about my favorite game in one spot so I figured better late on a dead forum than never?). It's more about the game itself than my nostalgia for the past, but I do relate because it's one I've loved and played for years, and fittingly the game itself sort of deals with some themes of life, like how it is fleeting and fragile and how you should make the best of something in the moment, before it passes by.
We always look back on our formative years especially fondly, but even as you get older you'll have nostalgia for the past. Time, it's an enigma like that. There's benefit to reflecting on the treasures of the past, but don't miss out on the opportunities to make treasures of now that will become your treasures of the past in the future.
And yes, forums are the superior format compared to most other social media formats in my mind, but their heyday was a couple of decades ago and I can't imagine it's coming back any time soon. It seems like the rise in the use of phones and the change towards instant gratification and lower attention spans in the last decade especially is part of why. Forums were great in a different tech/internet landscape but I'm not sure if/when they'll return with prominence. Though, this one seems especially inactive for what it is; it deals with Minecraft of all things and yet there's still far more active forums out there. (I also just noticed the other day the gaming forum has a newer account spamming pages of posts for some weeks that are nothing but videos to advertise a YouTube channel and nobody noticed, and I imagine some of the other inactive forums might have that going on [?], so take that as a sign of how dead some categories are.)
That sounds like a lovely reminiscence of nostalgia if I ever heard one, and I mean that in a good way in case it's not clear.
Thanks! I appreciate you giving it a read.
This post is incidental timing with myself because I've been going through a similar feeling and I've been making my own post partly as a result of that (and also because I've... never talked at length about my favorite game in one spot so I figured better late on a dead forum than never?). It's more about the game itself than my nostalgia for the past, but I do relate because it's one I've loved and played for years, and fittingly the game itself sort of deals with some themes of life, like how it is fleeting and fragile and how you should make the best of something in the moment, before it passes by.
This sounds really cool actually, I'll have to go give it a look! Forums definitely seem like a good platform for these sorts of passion-driven mini essays.
We always look back on our formative years especially fondly, but even as you get older you'll have nostalgia for the past. Time, it's an enigma like that. There's benefit to reflecting on the treasures of the past, but don't miss out on the opportunities to make treasures of now that will become your treasures of the past in the future.
Very aptly put—that's something I've been trying to focus on a lot in my life right now; simply finding a way to be present can make a world of difference, but it can be so hard to remember to commit to and ground yourself, et cetera.
And yes, forums are the superior format compared to most other social media formats in my mind, but their heyday was a couple of decades ago and I can't imagine it's coming back any time soon. It seems like the rise in the use of phones and the change towards instant gratification and lower attention spans in the last decade especially is part of why. Forums were great in a different tech/internet landscape but I'm not sure if/when they'll return with prominence. Though, this one seems especially inactive for what it is; it deals with Minecraft of all things and yet there's still far more active forums out there. (I also just noticed the other day the gaming forum has a newer account spamming pages of posts for some weeks that are nothing but videos to advertise a YouTube channel and nobody noticed, and I imagine some of the other inactive forums might have that going on [?], so take that as a sign of how dead some categories are.)
I agree. While I would love forums to be as central to everything as they once were, the current mainstream internet ecosystem is just not built for this sort of community anymore. I've noticed the same thing about this forum in particular being strangely less active than other less popular ones; I think it just comes down to the type of Minecraft content people share being less project-oriented. Not many people are map makers anymore, and modders just seem to post development updates on Discord these days. Age might be another factor, as there's another forum I'm on which is a lot more niche, but way more active and I have to imagine it's due to a target audience that's been on forums way longer than most average Minecraft players ever have been.
Great, it's nice to do a slow read sometimes. Actually get into the detail.. I came back to forums after trying a minecraft discord server - which is absolutely not the place for 'long form discussion'; I posted only 3 paragraphs and someone had to reply to announce they "were not reading all of that", haha. I haven't found these "way more active" sites either though. eg Planet Minecraft doesn't look very enticing.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing since Jan 2018. Vanilla Survival on Bedrock - PC.
This is already a few months old, but I guess that's relatively just in time considering how little activity the forum gets nowadays. I had my account restored by a support member a few days ago, because I hadn't logged in for about 9 years and that was before the migration from emails and passwords to Twitch, Google, etc. I was honestly kind of shocked, and I even looked around a few times to make sure I wasn't missing the most "active" subforum or something. I subconsciously came to the conclusion, so many years ago, that this place would be immune to the overall dying-out of forums on the internet, but now I realize I'm just part of a trend that came and went. Maybe I didn't want to accept it?
I subconsciously came to the conclusion, so many years ago, that this place would be immune to the overall dying-out of forums on the internet, but now I realize I'm just part of a trend that came and went.
A good reminder that we, as humans, tend to take things for granted. Yet in reality, little in guaranteed. Embrace things as they last because you never know how long they will last.
I was actually surprised even back then that the forums were ever as busy as they were in their heyday because it was well after forums as a medium had begun falling out of favor as the de facto communication method. So I definitely anticipated that things wouldn't last indefinitely. Minecraft was still in its novelty phase at the time, oh, and I think it had a link in the launcher. Those two things, and a bonus third thing of phones rising as a method to access the internet (which led to Reddit's popularity spike) are the big reasons the forums isn't as active anymore.
Those two things, and a bonus third thing of phones rising as a method to access the internet (which led to Reddit's popularity spike) are the big reasons the forums isn't as active anymore.
You forgot to mention that place that perma43 mentioned, which is probably even more important, seeing how it came about at around the same time the forums went into a death spiral; Reddit? I see people posting links to "that place" all the time, or referring people to it for more information, or asking me if I have it, or want to continue the conversation there (which leads to the end of the discussion), I also often get PMs like "hello do you have a discord i can contact you on i would like some help on world painter if you have the spare time, many thanks my discord is tollro" (an actual example, which I simply ignore, then again, the user who sent it hasn't even been online since a couple hours after they sent it to me, which is just another chronic issue with the forums, or say, somebody makes a thread about a new Survival world journal and makes like 1-2 entries before simply stopping (also, you seem to have had no interest whatsoever in my current world, which has to be more interesting than my first world), it doesn't help either that there are literally only like 3 users who are regularly active by any measure (is this "TheMasterCaver's forum" or what? It sometimes feels like it, even a small Reddit for ancient versions of the game is much more active, unfortunately, they don't allow versions newer than 1.2.5 and are overly obsessed with Herobrine and a Reddit for versions like 1.6.4 gets barely any activity, and in any case I simply almost never get into the kinds of discussions that the forums have, "tl;dr" and "you wrote / didn't need to write an essay" are common replies to my posts).
If you're referring to Discord, that basically falls under the "phones as an increasingly used way to interact with the internet" reason I described.
I think you give Discord and Reddit a little too much credit for why the forums here are less active. I've said this before, but while they are certainly popular and while they certainly draw activity their way now, they themselves weren't the direct underlying cause of a loss of activity here (there's a number of reasons for that), rather they are just two of the beneficiaries of what is one of the underlying cause (that is, a changing population that has changing ways it interacts with the internet, namely by use of phones).
...also, you seem to have had no interest whatsoever in my current world, which has to be more interesting than my first world...
I wasn't even aware you had a new one. My interest in the game has been slipping a bit lately (I haven't even played in something like a couple/few months now myself) so that also might be part of why I may have failed to notice it.
Your previous one I was aware of seemed to focus on statistic updates of mining sessions, whereas my interest in following a world would lay more in seeing a survival journey that focuses on builds or on what was seen/found while exploring. To add onto that, it's no secret that my interest as of late lays more with some of the things the game world is doing since 1.18, and I now find it harder to be interested in the world canvases that more resemble those of prior versions.
Basically, our interests don't seem to naturally overlap much here, and there's nothing wrong with that.
This goes the other way, as most of your responses to any of my updates in my worlds tended to be not about what I was doing in my world, but rather a response that had to do with something specific about the game itself. Which is fine.
If you're wondering why I'm interested enough in Zeno's latest world despite being based on a pre-1.18 version, that's because it's focused quite a bit on exploration and highly showing off the custom trees/forests it has going on.
But yeah, a bit back to the topic of the forums themselves... I even tried to create/engage in non-Minecraft related subjects a bit more at times, but as you said... the place has very little activity to be found here outside the game itself (and sometimes, even then there's little to be found). For example, the entire support forum effort is almost single-handed being held up by TileEntity. That poor forum when they ever stop being active.
Hello all!
Fair warning: this is a rambly post. I feel that it's relevant and interesting enough to share, but if it's not your speed then tl;dr at the bottom.
It's been a very long time since I last visited this website. There was a point in time—amidst the Minecraft craze that swept my peers and I back in the early 2010s—where this website meant so much to me. Minecraft Forums was the anchor for my experience growing up with this game and its culture. I read each and every update changelog as they were posted on the home page. I scoured the suggestions forum in search of some hidden genius ideas, naively dreaming that the devs at Mojang might find these same threads if we made enough noise. And yet, despite my investment, at some point I unknowingly posted my last reply, and this account began to gather dust.
I am not who I was when I last posted on this account. I've grown up. I never truly stopped playing Minecraft (because you never really put it down for good), but I have certainly dedicated less and less time to it with each year. And that makes sense! Everyone has so much more time to spend when they haven't yet been bogged down by the responsibilities, hardships, and fulfillment of growing up. But after growing up, and after stumbling across this place by chance, I realized that I miss this website.
Now, I don't miss who I used to be when I last was posting on this website. I look back on my post history and I cringe (please don't look). I find my own words hard to read. I see the insecurities that have always plagued me take form in the weird, awkward, annoying way I wrote while learning how to communicate on the internet for the first time. That being said, I'm grateful I went through that phase. Every misstep in life, including cringy forum posts, teaches you how to do better the next time. And to have a permanent and easily accessible digital record of my years-old missteps is cringe-inducing—but strangely, it's healing too. It gives me context for who and where I am now. It is tangible proof that—in the midst of my present-day struggles with insecurity, doubt, anxiety, et cetera—I am doing so much better than before. I have made real, evidential progress. I am not who I was.
So why do I miss this place? Even though I don't want to be my younger self, he existed in a time where things felt easier. That's a separate can of worms that might be too sappy even for this post, but the relevant part of that equation is social media. I started using social media around the time I stopped using Minecraft Forums, but it was not an equal trade.
Social media has been decried at length, despite its omnipresence in most of our lives. Its algorithmically-driven nature seems to somehow be the root cause of both of these truths. It creates a trap that the general public recognizes for what it is, yet it has ensnared and invaded so many aspects of our life that to escape from it feels like too much effort. As I rediscovered Minecraft Forums—now with my present-day perspective, feelings, and thoughts in the back of my mind—I realized that the appeal of the forum is the lack of any algorithm, or immediacy, or any of the other cheap tricks social media pulls. It's what social media could never be: a place for positive, human-driven social interaction. You can post a somewhat-sappy, overly sentimental retrospective on growing up with online forums, and it'll get just as much of a chance on the front page as anything else. Everyone can be heard. Anyone can make a splash.
I do believe that something has been lost with the abandonment of forums in the online ecosystem. I think the world might genuinely be better off with more forums—but effecting that kind of cultural shift is well above my pay grade. So, for the time being, the best I can do is post a little more often.
If you read all the way through this, thanks so much! I hope these thoughts and feelings I've put here resonated with you, and I encourage you to do the same. The state of online forums isn't exactly something that just comes up in my day-to-day life, so it's a topic I've been dying to broach. If y'all are still active after all these years, then I have a feeling you have reason to be—and I'd love to hear your stories as well!
(tl;dr: Rediscovering MCF led to me reflecting on my growth as a person and the place of online forums in today's world)
That sounds like a lovely reminiscence of nostalgia if I ever heard one, and I mean that in a good way in case it's not clear.
This post is incidental timing with myself because I've been going through a similar feeling and I've been making my own post partly as a result of that (and also because I've... never talked at length about my favorite game in one spot so I figured better late on a dead forum than never?). It's more about the game itself than my nostalgia for the past, but I do relate because it's one I've loved and played for years, and fittingly the game itself sort of deals with some themes of life, like how it is fleeting and fragile and how you should make the best of something in the moment, before it passes by.
We always look back on our formative years especially fondly, but even as you get older you'll have nostalgia for the past. Time, it's an enigma like that. There's benefit to reflecting on the treasures of the past, but don't miss out on the opportunities to make treasures of now that will become your treasures of the past in the future.
And yes, forums are the superior format compared to most other social media formats in my mind, but their heyday was a couple of decades ago and I can't imagine it's coming back any time soon. It seems like the rise in the use of phones and the change towards instant gratification and lower attention spans in the last decade especially is part of why. Forums were great in a different tech/internet landscape but I'm not sure if/when they'll return with prominence. Though, this one seems especially inactive for what it is; it deals with Minecraft of all things and yet there's still far more active forums out there. (I also just noticed the other day the gaming forum has a newer account spamming pages of posts for some weeks that are nothing but videos to advertise a YouTube channel and nobody noticed, and I imagine some of the other inactive forums might have that going on [?], so take that as a sign of how dead some categories are.)
Thanks! I appreciate you giving it a read.
This sounds really cool actually, I'll have to go give it a look! Forums definitely seem like a good platform for these sorts of passion-driven mini essays.
Very aptly put—that's something I've been trying to focus on a lot in my life right now; simply finding a way to be present can make a world of difference, but it can be so hard to remember to commit to and ground yourself, et cetera.
I agree. While I would love forums to be as central to everything as they once were, the current mainstream internet ecosystem is just not built for this sort of community anymore. I've noticed the same thing about this forum in particular being strangely less active than other less popular ones; I think it just comes down to the type of Minecraft content people share being less project-oriented. Not many people are map makers anymore, and modders just seem to post development updates on Discord these days. Age might be another factor, as there's another forum I'm on which is a lot more niche, but way more active and I have to imagine it's due to a target audience that's been on forums way longer than most average Minecraft players ever have been.
Great, it's nice to do a slow read sometimes. Actually get into the detail.. I came back to forums after trying a minecraft discord server - which is absolutely not the place for 'long form discussion'; I posted only 3 paragraphs and someone had to reply to announce they "were not reading all of that", haha. I haven't found these "way more active" sites either though. eg Planet Minecraft doesn't look very enticing.
Playing since Jan 2018. Vanilla Survival on Bedrock - PC.
This is already a few months old, but I guess that's relatively just in time considering how little activity the forum gets nowadays. I had my account restored by a support member a few days ago, because I hadn't logged in for about 9 years and that was before the migration from emails and passwords to Twitch, Google, etc. I was honestly kind of shocked, and I even looked around a few times to make sure I wasn't missing the most "active" subforum or something. I subconsciously came to the conclusion, so many years ago, that this place would be immune to the overall dying-out of forums on the internet, but now I realize I'm just part of a trend that came and went. Maybe I didn't want to accept it?
Great post.
A good reminder that we, as humans, tend to take things for granted. Yet in reality, little in guaranteed. Embrace things as they last because you never know how long they will last.
I was actually surprised even back then that the forums were ever as busy as they were in their heyday because it was well after forums as a medium had begun falling out of favor as the de facto communication method. So I definitely anticipated that things wouldn't last indefinitely. Minecraft was still in its novelty phase at the time, oh, and I think it had a link in the launcher. Those two things, and a bonus third thing of phones rising as a method to access the internet (which led to Reddit's popularity spike) are the big reasons the forums isn't as active anymore.
You forgot to mention that place that perma43 mentioned, which is probably even more important, seeing how it came about at around the same time the forums went into a death spiral; Reddit? I see people posting links to "that place" all the time, or referring people to it for more information, or asking me if I have it, or want to continue the conversation there (which leads to the end of the discussion), I also often get PMs like "hello do you have a discord i can contact you on i would like some help on world painter if you have the spare time, many thanks
my discord is tollro" (an actual example, which I simply ignore, then again, the user who sent it hasn't even been online since a couple hours after they sent it to me, which is just another chronic issue with the forums, or say, somebody makes a thread about a new Survival world journal and makes like 1-2 entries before simply stopping (also, you seem to have had no interest whatsoever in my current world, which has to be more interesting than my first world), it doesn't help either that there are literally only like 3 users who are regularly active by any measure (is this "TheMasterCaver's forum" or what? It sometimes feels like it, even a small Reddit for ancient versions of the game is much more active, unfortunately, they don't allow versions newer than 1.2.5 and are overly obsessed with Herobrine and a Reddit for versions like 1.6.4 gets barely any activity, and in any case I simply almost never get into the kinds of discussions that the forums have, "tl;dr" and "you wrote / didn't need to write an essay" are common replies to my posts).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
If you're referring to Discord, that basically falls under the "phones as an increasingly used way to interact with the internet" reason I described.
I think you give Discord and Reddit a little too much credit for why the forums here are less active. I've said this before, but while they are certainly popular and while they certainly draw activity their way now, they themselves weren't the direct underlying cause of a loss of activity here (there's a number of reasons for that), rather they are just two of the beneficiaries of what is one of the underlying cause (that is, a changing population that has changing ways it interacts with the internet, namely by use of phones).
I wasn't even aware you had a new one. My interest in the game has been slipping a bit lately (I haven't even played in something like a couple/few months now myself) so that also might be part of why I may have failed to notice it.
Your previous one I was aware of seemed to focus on statistic updates of mining sessions, whereas my interest in following a world would lay more in seeing a survival journey that focuses on builds or on what was seen/found while exploring. To add onto that, it's no secret that my interest as of late lays more with some of the things the game world is doing since 1.18, and I now find it harder to be interested in the world canvases that more resemble those of prior versions.
Basically, our interests don't seem to naturally overlap much here, and there's nothing wrong with that.
This goes the other way, as most of your responses to any of my updates in my worlds tended to be not about what I was doing in my world, but rather a response that had to do with something specific about the game itself. Which is fine.
If you're wondering why I'm interested enough in Zeno's latest world despite being based on a pre-1.18 version, that's because it's focused quite a bit on exploration and highly showing off the custom trees/forests it has going on.
But yeah, a bit back to the topic of the forums themselves... I even tried to create/engage in non-Minecraft related subjects a bit more at times, but as you said... the place has very little activity to be found here outside the game itself (and sometimes, even then there's little to be found). For example, the entire support forum effort is almost single-handed being held up by TileEntity. That poor forum when they ever stop being active.