One factor that has been important for decreasing my activity is the annoyance of logging in.
Minecraftforum.net requires verification of my email EVERY TIME I clear my cache.
Now, my internet habits may be other than mainstream because I clear history on a quite frequent basis, but the result is that — in order to acess the site I must:
Attempt to log into this site
Open (or have open) the relevant email
Wait for the verification code (which is reasonably fast, but still annoying)
Enter the code
Worse this repeats EVERY TIME I clear history.
While I enjoy the site, it's refusal to acknowledge a login from the same IP address to the same account with a valid password makes access far more annoying than the old days when thi swas sufficient….
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
Didn't know there is an minecraft discord, I went there and there was like people messaging every 20 or less seconds.
And I cannot even see the list of members, presumably they hid it because there were too many.
They mean that Discord (the platform) has replaced forums in general, which sucks because a Discord server is not a real replacement for a forum for various reasons.
Well, I checked out the highest played game which is counter strike, and apparently it have no forum and is using discord instead.
It means that other games will follow suit when they becomes famous or more played.
So I do not think there is any forum to go to anymore.
We are the last of our kind and at the edge of the internet world.
And in the future only Minecraft Forum will be remembered because Discord is not publicly accessible or archived - so goodbye once they close, a problem also mentioned in this Reddit post:
It is actually crazy how little information you can find on the download pages for even major modpacks, compared to the hundreds of images and detailed descriptions I give for my mods (I even had to move them to separate comments because I exceeded the post size limit):
I even see modders who only off3er downloads for their mods on Discord - at the same time, I see people on e.g. r/GoldenAgeMinecraft (most "retro" mods are hosted on Discord) constantly asking where they can find some mod, or find a tutorial / information on it, replies are "look at Discord" - do they even realize that they are making it impossible to find their mods because you can't just Google them? People even have difficulty finding my own mods even though you can just search for "TheMasterCaver mods" or even just my name, though for some reason Google thinks my "mods and tweaks" thread is the most relevant despite being dead for over 5 years).
Also, nobody really wants to discuss what they do when playing anymore? Surely there are still a lot of people who play singleplayer Survival, yet you only see like 3-4 active/semi-active threads here journaling their progress and the majority of people who claim to start a new one never post/update again (yes, Reddit is filled with single-image/sentence posts but I'm talking about a single localized thread showing what you've done, this is also why Reddit is no substitute for a proper forum, nor does it have the formatting capabilities, or the notification system, or people are just that reluctant to reply to something, I actually get more notifications on these forums than I do on Reddit, and lately it has just been stuff like "you mine thousands of ores per play session?" Yeah, right, or you play for 24 hours a day to mine that much. Of course, I've always had replies like this here as well and I just use these as proof of how little caving anybody actually ever does, a bit of math would verify my claims).
Surely there have to be more people out of the supposed hundreds of millions of active players who'd prefer a forum format; the fact that Discord is private should also help since you aren't going to get many search results for it.
Also, can this even be real (pull from Google's search page)?
The official Minecraft Discord! | 1205155 members. ... MINECRAFT. 212,263 Online. 1,205,156 Members. Accept Invite. ,. ,. Reactions. click to open image dialog.
1/6 of all members online at once? Do they literally spend all day there? I know that "online users" can mean many different things (e.g. counting only registered members, as this forum does, or just anybody browsing it, as e.g. Reddit has to do). I also get about as many search results for "minecraft forum" and "minecraft discord" so surely a lot of people are still seeing this site in their search results; of course, the login issues mentioned by ScotsMiser may be a roadblock (I've never so much as looked at Discord because I've clicked on a link before and it wants me to register, you also have to accept "invites" to join specific communities)..
There was a similar post to this because I know I made a post on this topic, but I don't see it here, so I'll mention some of the same things I did in that post.
The people saying that Discord or Reddit did this are failing to see the real causes. And I get why one might make that presumption, because those two places have certainly replaced these forums as the prominent community for Minecraft related things. So on the surface, yes, it might appear like those two things "did this".
You need to look deeper than the surface to see what actually changed and led to this. I remember when Discord started becoming the prominent replacement to prior services. Remember TeamSpeak? It's seemingly still around, and I can't remember what happened with it as I never used it, but I recall people in some groups I was a part of did, and something happening with it years ago where people started abandoning it en masse and this is when Discord really started rising. Remember Xfire!? That one was old! It's from the early 2000s, for reference. Discord, at least the base concept of it, is anything but new. That's not to say those other things offered what Discord do, but Discord alone didn't do anything to change this.
Instead, other things changed, and Discord just happened to be in the right place at the right time to better fit what people were now looking for.
I'll cut to the chase.
The big change is the way we interact with the internet has changed in the last decade or so, and that is because the devices we use changed. Specifically, it was phones (and other mobiles). Smart phones started coming out in the late 2000s, but it wasn't really until the early 2010s or namely the mid 2010s that the amount of users accessing the web with such devices grew, and the internet itself (including applications and services) really started changing. The early 2010s was also when Windows itself went in on the experiment (that's what Windows 8 was).
I shouldn't have to state the obvious, but a phone is far less appropriate reading or creating more than bite sized, chat length content with. Discord and Reddit better cater to this.
There are several factors to this. One of them is that new, arriving people (young ones) on average have worse than ever attention span and no Internet culture of discussion.
Forums aren't instantly gratifying, bite-sized sources of information they are accustomed to. Replies generally arrive in several hours or even days. In this regard, there is a huge chasm between so called generation Z and the rest of the society.
I was timid to mention this in my prior post in whatever other thread there was about this subject, because I hate to be someone complaining about a younger generation. That's too typical of an older generation, right? (In case a reference is needed, I'm only one generation above Generation Z anyway, and the latter half of my generation also largely "grew up online", with the older half being the so-called "last generation to grow up outside".)
But yes, I can't disagree with this. I've noticed it more with the latter half of Generation Z especially (namely, the ones still not into adulthood) and the generation after theirs (Generation Alpha I think, which is still children).
Again, I'm not blaming a generation because because being a part of a generation doesn't mean much (my generation got a lot of blame from even older generations), but I have noticed this trend of intolerance of anything more than bite sized content from what I presume is mostly younger generation people. I'm talking three sentence comments (!) being replied to with "I'm not reading all that". This was on a YouTube comment, and it wasn't even a reply to me. Just a random comment with three sentences. And not like three very long sentences either, but three average ones. I've seen similar examples for other content that would be like a minute or so of reading, and I've noticed it more in recent years. The "TL;DR reply" isn't new, but you used to see it only in long comments, like my own here haha. But for a few sentences? Seriously? How bad is our attention span becoming!?
I think you're confusing tighter rules for unfair moderation.
I'll just speak broadly of this as opposed to anything specific you said, but here's been my experiences with moderation on this forum.
In my time here, I recall two or maybe three warnings. They were all for being off topic. I'm pretty sure all of them involved MasterCaver, so I guess I may have been the one getting him in trouble.
Being off topic versus on topic is a scale of Grey versus Black or White, so there's bound to be disagreements here. Therefore, I accepted that the place I was at set the rules and my feelings on it didn't, so I accepted them, even though I felt it just limited discussion too strictly.
When it crossed the line for me was when one of my comments was removed. I don't recall who did it, and no, I don't have any particular issues with who did anyway, because they were probably just enforcing the rules, so my issue was with the rule itself and not the one who enforced it. This was... mid 2020-ish, I think? Anyway, the removal of my comment was the part that didn't sit right with me, so I sort of spoke my mind on the matter in the thread it occurred in by saying discussions should be allowed to evolve and veer over time instead of being so strict on staying on topic (and I don't recall breaking the rules in doing this?), and then I left the forums because I acknowledged the rules as they were and didn't agree with them. So I felt the place was clearly no longer a place for me, and I wouldn't stick around if I was going to continue breaking them. Funny thing is, I'm literally only back because UnMined had a bug, and the official website for it had no contact, so I had to come here to report it, which I didn't mind. While waiting around (and it got fixed fast, so shameless recommendation to check out UnMined for your mapping needs), I decided to start posting again, and... I just stayed back since then.
Anyway, based on that, staff certainly had the right to outright removed content as recently as 2020. And even the opening post in this thread in 2023 was edited by a staff member. And no (!), I'm not calling that out, nor that staff member who did it. That's their business, and maybe the reason was justified. I'm just calling attention to the remark you made about the ability to edit and remove content being gone long ago, as this is seemingly not the case. I don't even disagree with the staff being able to edit or remove content. I've been a staff member on forums long ago and that is beneficial, perhaps even necessary. But it should remain for actual malicious content, not "off topic". Those should be dealt with by using mere warnings (which is why the warning itself didn't bother me much, and it was the removal of my post that got me to speak my mind and then leave).
Anyway... I have nothing bad to say about the staff itself. Not back then, and not now. My stay here has been as close to positive as it can be. I simply disagreed with the "strictness" of "being on topic" and felt that while the subject came up, I'd share my impressions.
Say what you will about these platforms enabling more real-time communication and having a less "childish" userbase, but I've found them to be significantly more cliquey, hiveminded and often outright toxic than what I remember on these forums. Not to say that forums can't be cliquey and hiveminded as well, but I think the nature of Reddit and Discord tends to enable it to a larger degree.
I've noticed what you're referring to specifically on platforms with submitted comments being weighted by other users based on an upvote and downvote system.
I disagree with such systems. I find the upvote system here useless... but also harmless. When there's upvotes and downvotes though, what you describe happens. Reddit even used to stress not to use downvotes for stuff you disagree with, but just actually bad content, but we can all see how that goes these days.
1/6 of all members online at once? Do they literally spend all day there?
I have no idea how Discord counts this, but remember that a lot of people install Discord on a phone or PC and simply have it running all the time. So unless they don't launch it, then if they're not completely idle on the device, or maybe even if they are but they are "online but away", yes, maybe it counts them?
Maybe in general. I still use forums reasonably often, although yes discord and similar apps are my go-to if I have less time because it's for more personal relationships.
I remember how I used to check out the mods section here a lot. Now with both Curseforge and Modrinth most devs don't bother maintaining a thread here and I don't blame them.
There was never a guarantee that devs had proper version control here or that they wouldn't use some shady file hosting site.
I know Discord is one of the reasons why the social aspect of forums died, but proper modding sites helped in the killing as well
Proper modding sites don't require an account to download content though, and cannot ban you on any grounds the owner feels like (especially if you never communicate).
1/6 of all members online at once? Do they literally spend all day there?
Simply having the app open on your device without checking it counts as online. If they filtered out users on idle status, it'd drop to less than 1 in 20.
There was a similar post to this because I know I made a post on this topic, but I don't see it here, so I'll mention some of the same things I did in that post.
a) Discord and reddit succeeded from apps like snapchat, instagram, now tiktok. It was the apps more than phones themselves. Many people still use PCs plenty although dwindling. I think the psychology of those apps and the media competition and environment they promote has a big effect.
I don't mind reading long things if they're interesting to me. Same like how I ignore short things that are not. The attention span is one issue, but curiosity I think is a bigger one. People are not really willing to put in effort into things, like TMC's example of consistent picture uploads of gameplay (time to add pics, time to even play consistently), myself included.
c) The forum moderation on here and elsewhere is no better or worse on average than any short-site like the examples listed, and more obscure ones i can go into. There are semi-forum sites like BlueDwarf that are composed of both aspects of the spectrum. I believe that attitude can make anyone lose interest in anything, and that explains a lot of my leaving. Nowadays, I am more active on forums than on text apps simply because I have very few rooms/servers left on them. Too many conflicts and too much fast-paced writing, often off-topic. Text apps also gamify social interaction whereas forums focus on being on-topic. If I come to a server or space on X topic, I want to discuss X, not have a general conversation. That's called being pointed, and it's not a bad thing in my eyes.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager."
Didn't know there is an minecraft discord, I went there and there was like people messaging every 20 or less seconds.
And I cannot even see the list of members, presumably they hid it because there were too many.
RE the decreasing forum activity:
One factor that has been important for decreasing my activity is the annoyance of logging in.
Minecraftforum.net requires verification of my email EVERY TIME I clear my cache.
Now, my internet habits may be other than mainstream because I clear history on a quite frequent basis, but the result is that — in order to acess the site I must:
Attempt to log into this site
Open (or have open) the relevant email
Wait for the verification code (which is reasonably fast, but still annoying)
Enter the code
Worse this repeats EVERY TIME I clear history.
While I enjoy the site, it's refusal to acknowledge a login from the same IP address to the same account with a valid password makes access far more annoying than the old days when thi swas sufficient….
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Retired StaffThey mean that Discord (the platform) has replaced forums in general, which sucks because a Discord server is not a real replacement for a forum for various reasons.
Well, I checked out the highest played game which is counter strike, and apparently it have no forum and is using discord instead.
It means that other games will follow suit when they becomes famous or more played.
So I do not think there is any forum to go to anymore.
We are the last of our kind and at the edge of the internet world.
Most of my life are spent on computer games, so I am used to games forum.
It is a great suggestion to find other forums, but it will take time to find interest in other hobbies related to the forum.
I am not trying to post stuffs, but ironically the emptiness of the forum made me do so.
And in the future only Minecraft Forum will be remembered because Discord is not publicly accessible or archived - so goodbye once they close, a problem also mentioned in this Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthebeast/comments/xvdtww/the_trend_of_using_discord_as_the_main/
It is actually crazy how little information you can find on the download pages for even major modpacks, compared to the hundreds of images and detailed descriptions I give for my mods (I even had to move them to separate comments because I exceeded the post size limit):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/1294926-themastercavers-world?comment=5 (just for the first release)
I even see modders who only off3er downloads for their mods on Discord - at the same time, I see people on e.g. r/GoldenAgeMinecraft (most "retro" mods are hosted on Discord) constantly asking where they can find some mod, or find a tutorial / information on it, replies are "look at Discord" - do they even realize that they are making it impossible to find their mods because you can't just Google them? People even have difficulty finding my own mods even though you can just search for "TheMasterCaver mods" or even just my name, though for some reason Google thinks my "mods and tweaks" thread is the most relevant despite being dead for over 5 years).
Also, nobody really wants to discuss what they do when playing anymore? Surely there are still a lot of people who play singleplayer Survival, yet you only see like 3-4 active/semi-active threads here journaling their progress and the majority of people who claim to start a new one never post/update again (yes, Reddit is filled with single-image/sentence posts but I'm talking about a single localized thread showing what you've done, this is also why Reddit is no substitute for a proper forum, nor does it have the formatting capabilities, or the notification system, or people are just that reluctant to reply to something, I actually get more notifications on these forums than I do on Reddit, and lately it has just been stuff like "you mine thousands of ores per play session?" Yeah, right, or you play for 24 hours a day to mine that much. Of course, I've always had replies like this here as well and I just use these as proof of how little caving anybody actually ever does, a bit of math would verify my claims).
Surely there have to be more people out of the supposed hundreds of millions of active players who'd prefer a forum format; the fact that Discord is private should also help since you aren't going to get many search results for it.
Also, can this even be real (pull from Google's search page)?
1/6 of all members online at once? Do they literally spend all day there? I know that "online users" can mean many different things (e.g. counting only registered members, as this forum does, or just anybody browsing it, as e.g. Reddit has to do). I also get about as many search results for "minecraft forum" and "minecraft discord" so surely a lot of people are still seeing this site in their search results; of course, the login issues mentioned by ScotsMiser may be a roadblock (I've never so much as looked at Discord because I've clicked on a link before and it wants me to register, you also have to accept "invites" to join specific communities)..
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?
There was a similar post to this because I know I made a post on this topic, but I don't see it here, so I'll mention some of the same things I did in that post.
The people saying that Discord or Reddit did this are failing to see the real causes. And I get why one might make that presumption, because those two places have certainly replaced these forums as the prominent community for Minecraft related things. So on the surface, yes, it might appear like those two things "did this".
You need to look deeper than the surface to see what actually changed and led to this. I remember when Discord started becoming the prominent replacement to prior services. Remember TeamSpeak? It's seemingly still around, and I can't remember what happened with it as I never used it, but I recall people in some groups I was a part of did, and something happening with it years ago where people started abandoning it en masse and this is when Discord really started rising. Remember Xfire!? That one was old! It's from the early 2000s, for reference. Discord, at least the base concept of it, is anything but new. That's not to say those other things offered what Discord do, but Discord alone didn't do anything to change this.
Instead, other things changed, and Discord just happened to be in the right place at the right time to better fit what people were now looking for.
I'll cut to the chase.
The big change is the way we interact with the internet has changed in the last decade or so, and that is because the devices we use changed. Specifically, it was phones (and other mobiles). Smart phones started coming out in the late 2000s, but it wasn't really until the early 2010s or namely the mid 2010s that the amount of users accessing the web with such devices grew, and the internet itself (including applications and services) really started changing. The early 2010s was also when Windows itself went in on the experiment (that's what Windows 8 was).
I shouldn't have to state the obvious, but a phone is far less appropriate reading or creating more than bite sized, chat length content with. Discord and Reddit better cater to this.
I was timid to mention this in my prior post in whatever other thread there was about this subject, because I hate to be someone complaining about a younger generation. That's too typical of an older generation, right? (In case a reference is needed, I'm only one generation above Generation Z anyway, and the latter half of my generation also largely "grew up online", with the older half being the so-called "last generation to grow up outside".)
But yes, I can't disagree with this. I've noticed it more with the latter half of Generation Z especially (namely, the ones still not into adulthood) and the generation after theirs (Generation Alpha I think, which is still children).
Again, I'm not blaming a generation because because being a part of a generation doesn't mean much (my generation got a lot of blame from even older generations), but I have noticed this trend of intolerance of anything more than bite sized content from what I presume is mostly younger generation people. I'm talking three sentence comments (!) being replied to with "I'm not reading all that". This was on a YouTube comment, and it wasn't even a reply to me. Just a random comment with three sentences. And not like three very long sentences either, but three average ones. I've seen similar examples for other content that would be like a minute or so of reading, and I've noticed it more in recent years. The "TL;DR reply" isn't new, but you used to see it only in long comments, like my own here haha. But for a few sentences? Seriously? How bad is our attention span becoming!?
I'll just speak broadly of this as opposed to anything specific you said, but here's been my experiences with moderation on this forum.
In my time here, I recall two or maybe three warnings. They were all for being off topic. I'm pretty sure all of them involved MasterCaver, so I guess I may have been the one getting him in trouble.
Being off topic versus on topic is a scale of Grey versus Black or White, so there's bound to be disagreements here. Therefore, I accepted that the place I was at set the rules and my feelings on it didn't, so I accepted them, even though I felt it just limited discussion too strictly.
When it crossed the line for me was when one of my comments was removed. I don't recall who did it, and no, I don't have any particular issues with who did anyway, because they were probably just enforcing the rules, so my issue was with the rule itself and not the one who enforced it. This was... mid 2020-ish, I think? Anyway, the removal of my comment was the part that didn't sit right with me, so I sort of spoke my mind on the matter in the thread it occurred in by saying discussions should be allowed to evolve and veer over time instead of being so strict on staying on topic (and I don't recall breaking the rules in doing this?), and then I left the forums because I acknowledged the rules as they were and didn't agree with them. So I felt the place was clearly no longer a place for me, and I wouldn't stick around if I was going to continue breaking them. Funny thing is, I'm literally only back because UnMined had a bug, and the official website for it had no contact, so I had to come here to report it, which I didn't mind. While waiting around (and it got fixed fast, so shameless recommendation to check out UnMined for your mapping needs), I decided to start posting again, and... I just stayed back since then.
Anyway, based on that, staff certainly had the right to outright removed content as recently as 2020. And even the opening post in this thread in 2023 was edited by a staff member. And no (!), I'm not calling that out, nor that staff member who did it. That's their business, and maybe the reason was justified. I'm just calling attention to the remark you made about the ability to edit and remove content being gone long ago, as this is seemingly not the case. I don't even disagree with the staff being able to edit or remove content. I've been a staff member on forums long ago and that is beneficial, perhaps even necessary. But it should remain for actual malicious content, not "off topic". Those should be dealt with by using mere warnings (which is why the warning itself didn't bother me much, and it was the removal of my post that got me to speak my mind and then leave).
Anyway... I have nothing bad to say about the staff itself. Not back then, and not now. My stay here has been as close to positive as it can be. I simply disagreed with the "strictness" of "being on topic" and felt that while the subject came up, I'd share my impressions.
I've noticed what you're referring to specifically on platforms with submitted comments being weighted by other users based on an upvote and downvote system.
I disagree with such systems. I find the upvote system here useless... but also harmless. When there's upvotes and downvotes though, what you describe happens. Reddit even used to stress not to use downvotes for stuff you disagree with, but just actually bad content, but we can all see how that goes these days.
I have no idea how Discord counts this, but remember that a lot of people install Discord on a phone or PC and simply have it running all the time. So unless they don't launch it, then if they're not completely idle on the device, or maybe even if they are but they are "online but away", yes, maybe it counts them?
Maybe in general. I still use forums reasonably often, although yes discord and similar apps are my go-to if I have less time because it's for more personal relationships.
I remember how I used to check out the mods section here a lot. Now with both Curseforge and Modrinth most devs don't bother maintaining a thread here and I don't blame them.
There was never a guarantee that devs had proper version control here or that they wouldn't use some shady file hosting site.
I know Discord is one of the reasons why the social aspect of forums died, but proper modding sites helped in the killing as well
mmm
Proper modding sites don't require an account to download content though, and cannot ban you on any grounds the owner feels like (especially if you never communicate).
This discussion was actually made on my birthday May 31 😎
Member lists are hidden by default on discord since a recent update.
Simply having the app open on your device without checking it counts as online. If they filtered out users on idle status, it'd drop to less than 1 in 20.
a) Discord and reddit succeeded from apps like snapchat, instagram, now tiktok. It was the apps more than phones themselves. Many people still use PCs plenty although dwindling. I think the psychology of those apps and the media competition and environment they promote has a big effect.
c) The forum moderation on here and elsewhere is no better or worse on average than any short-site like the examples listed, and more obscure ones i can go into. There are semi-forum sites like BlueDwarf that are composed of both aspects of the spectrum. I believe that attitude can make anyone lose interest in anything, and that explains a lot of my leaving. Nowadays, I am more active on forums than on text apps simply because I have very few rooms/servers left on them. Too many conflicts and too much fast-paced writing, often off-topic. Text apps also gamify social interaction whereas forums focus on being on-topic. If I come to a server or space on X topic, I want to discuss X, not have a general conversation. That's called being pointed, and it's not a bad thing in my eyes.
The Death of Forums in general is depressing
By default the app hides lists nowadays, but also big servers will only show online members (not sure what the threshold is, 1000+ maybe?)