#oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 122: “We Need” and the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction

As someone who works in marketing, there are two little words I’m bloody sick of seeing. Because they always show up beneath announcements of cool things, prompts for discussion… anything, really.

“We Need”.

It doesn’t matter what you’re posting online, someone somewhere will decide that the thing you just posted about is completely irrelevant, and that they have decided to take on the heavy burden of representing the entire audience of Thing.

“We Need”.

Sometimes it’s a thing you know is coming anyway, so you can’t say anything. Sometimes it’s a thing that has been previously requested, but which isn’t practical right this second. And sometimes it’s a completely outlandish, unreasonable suggestion that no-one who knows the slightest thing about the business you’re working in would declare with such confidence that “We Need”. Always, though, it’s something other than the thing you have just posted about.

I know I’m not alone in this, because when I look at marketing posts from other companies, I inevitably see at least one “We Need” in the wild, fulfilling the exact same function outlined above. Talking about anything other than the thing that has just been announced or promoted, and instead speaking on everyone else’s behalf that “we” are absolutely, completely and utterly entitled to a thing that hasn’t even come up in conversation once.

Back around the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle — remember that? — I took umbrage at games journalists calling gaming enthusiasts “entitled” for whining at developers and publishers. I still don’t think productive discussions were had back around then. But honestly, some 10+ years later, I 100% get it. It’s downright exhausting to want to share things you’re personally genuinely excited about that you’ve been working on, only to be hit with the inevitable “We Need”s.

I’m pretty sure this all stems from a broader issue online: the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction, where a certain, loud-mouthed proportion of people on the Internet are never satisfied with the thing that has just been put in front of them, no matter how excellent it is. Cool new thing just announced? Yesterday’s news. “We need” the next thing, immediately, preferably sooner. Long-awaited and much-requested upgrade to something confirmed? Pish. “We need” something completely unrelated. Product getting excellent reviews from press and public alike? Balls. “We need” something that no-one else has asked for, ever.

This ties in with another theory I have about modern online discourse: the fact that there are people out there who don’t feel like they have anything to say if they’re not criticising. Saying “this is good” is anathema to them, because then they can’t “offer feedback” or “give constructive criticism”, even where none was asked for.

By contrast, I’ve often found that these people tend to do a better job of shutting down conversation than actually starting a worthwhile discussion. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve expressed my appreciation and enjoyment of something, only for someone to come along and feel the need to list everything they think is wrong with it, everything “We Need” to see fixed about it. When that happens, I just lose all interest in attempting to have a discussion, because that person isn’t interested in knowing what I liked about the thing. They just want the opportunity to “offer feedback”.

Feedback can be a helpful, useful thing under the right circumstances. But it needs to be asked for, or, in extreme cases, obviously needed. And by “needed” I mean “there is something demonstrably wrong with the thing”, not “this one dude doesn’t like the way the thing does something”.

“We Need.”

We need to learn to be satisfied and happy with things, because perpetual dissatisfaction is no way to live. Just stop for a moment and enjoy the thing. It’s much more fun than never reaching a point where you can do that.

#oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia

I’m all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I’m becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I’m going to call “nostalgia fluff”. What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says “This is a thing that existed.” and then don’t provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:

There’s a simple explanation for this, of course: it’s engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting “Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television”, the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say “Wow! I remember this!” and “SO NOSTALGIC!” and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn’t interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn’t always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are “good content”. Some of these people will even get snippy if someone “steals” their “content”, by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There’s a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I’m not doing so just to go “this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed”. Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you “shouldn’t” post anything too long or in-depth online, “because people won’t bother to read/watch it”. This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can’t read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that’s what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible “because people will click off within 3 seconds” or whatever kind of insulting. It’s insulting to the people who don’t click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone’s attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it’s insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I’ve done isn’t “interesting” within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I’m concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don’t really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It’s not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don’t give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it’s reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don’t have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

#oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep

One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn’t enough, the latest feature that it’s impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is “YouTube Playables”, a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can’t possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don’t get it. Who looked at YouTube and went “you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!” Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it “gets more people into gaming”. Frankly, I’ve always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn’t belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I’d almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don’t work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk “adds value”, so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there’s no “AI” features in YouTube… yet. Don’t you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

#oneaday Day 89: Under the influence

I’m not entirely sure when exactly “influencer” became a widely accepted job title, but I do vividly remember when I first heard it that I felt “…we probably shouldn’t make that a thing”. And in 2024, I stand by that. I find it horrifyingly dystopian that we live in a world where people are unironically referred to as “influencers” — and, perhaps even worse, there are people out there who see “influencers” as somehow inherently more trustworthy than traditional media.

The traditional media has its problems, of course, and it always has done. But there has always been a certain separation between editorial and commercial content — and when there isn’t, it is clearly demarcated. There are no such demarcations when it comes to “influencer marketing” — and, from where I’m sitting, there appears to be absolutely zero scrutiny or oversight of how “influencers” are doing business, with minimal obligations for them to share the fact that they’re being paid to say things.

The scourge of “influencers” is a universal one, but obviously my most direct experience with it is in the world of gaming. One of the most common criticisms thrown at old-school games journalists is that they’ve been “paid off” by publishers to do things a certain way — either to inflate a product’s review scores above what it is perceived to “deserve”, or perhaps to disparage rival products.

Having spent several years in the industry, I don’t doubt that there have been occasions where that goes on. And there have been plenty of related incidents, too, with probably the most famous being “Gerstmanngate”, where a writer was let go from Gamespot for giving a bad review to a game whose publisher had spent a considerable amount on advertising said game.

Most people would agree that a games journalist being in the pocket of a publisher is a bad thing. I don’t believe it goes on nearly as often as the most insufferable people on the Internet think it does, but I think we can all agree that if money changes hands in this way, the “journalism” on the thing in question is compromised.

And yet the same people who would take a games journalist to task for accepting money from a publisher to cover a game are all over the world of “influencers”, believing that having your face on YouTube makes you inherently more “real” and “trustworthy” than those people who hid behind all those pesky written words. And “influencers” (no, I’m not going to stop with the scare quotes, I fucking hate the term) are openly accepting paid promotional deals, then covering the products in question. Some of them remember to disclose this; not all do. But regardless of whether or not any disclosure is going on, how is that any fucking different?

I find it absolutely unfathomable that “influencers” accepting money for coverage of things is apparently just tickity-boo, whereas the exact same thing was one of the worst accusations you could throw at a games journalist. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

I feel mostly immune to influencer marketing, but it’s very clear that the younger generation in particular are very susceptible to it. And it’s dystopian. It’s horrible. And it’s one of those things that we can’t just “walk back” any more, because the influencer “industry” has become so massive over the course of the last decade or so.

I saw someone argue earlier that we’re probably overdue for a brand new “segment” of the Internet, like how we once had stuff like Telnet and Gopher alongside the World Wide Web. If the Web has become this utterly devastated late-stage capitalism wasteland, perhaps it’s time for people to move on to something else? And no, not the fucking Metaverse. Honestly, at this point, I’d welcome the ability to engage with a fully text-based Internet that wasn’t 99% controlled by advertisers. Then we can leave all the “influencers” and their mindless zombie followers to it, and build something better elsewhere.

And then wait for that to be ruined. Still, it might be fun for a few years at least, before the Brands find it.

#oneaday Day 88: Is social media marketing over?

Just recently at the day job we’ve been having some Thoughts about using social media for marketing. I won’t go into the details for obvious reasons, and I will note that everything I say here is my own opinion and no-one else’s. But I feel like the age of social media marketing is coming to a close.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve never been on board with social media marketing from a consumer’s perspective. Facebook went from being tolerable to almost unusable once The Brands™ arrived, and it’s only gotten worse year after year. And back when I was an active user of Twitter, I not only didn’t follow any Brands™, I actively went out of my way to block any that ended up in my feed through “promoted” tweets or whatever.

Y’see, I’ve always had the somewhat controversial viewpoint that social media is best used for socialising. I used to actually quite enjoy using Facebook when it was a place to interact with friends. Likewise Twitter used to be a ton of fun when it was just people hanging out and shooting the breeze. But today? Both of those platforms are nigh-unusable for different reasons. And with people jumping ship from both, I struggle to see how their usefulness as marketing tools can continue.

This comes particularly to mind after the recent news that the “live service” game Concord has taken the unprecedented step of not only ceasing its online features, but actively refunding anyone who bought the game just 11 days after it hit store shelves. The writing was already on the wall for it; reports shortly after its launch suggested it had made “just” $1 million and only about 25,000 sales; these might seem like big numbers, but they really aren’t in today’s gaming industry, particularly towards the big-budget end of things, which is the space Concord occupies.

This occurrence got me thinking: how much of Concord’s disastrous launch was down to the troubled landscape of social media today? A few years back, a big game launch like this would be accompanied by a frenzied Twitter campaign in an attempt to drive “organic” (ugh) word-of-mouth promotion. To put it in non-marketing speak, the game itself would post something on social media, then other people would share it, gradually spreading word of the game through shares, replies and retweets.

Today, we live in a world where Twitter is fast becoming a dirty word, as Elon Musk’s “X”, as Twitter is now known, is increasingly becoming prone to the “Nazi Bar Problem“, since his constant bleating about “free speech” and “wokeness” has meant pretty much the only people left there now are some of the absolute worst dregs of humanity imaginable. It’s no longer fun or useful to the vast majority of people who used to hang out there, so a lot of people have jumped ship — either abandoning social media entirely, or moving to alternative platforms such as BlueSky. So one has to wonder how much value there is in marketing to what is rapidly looking like a room full of Nazis.

The same can often feel like it’s true of other platforms that are less of a “problem”. I talked recently about the issues we had attempting to enforce rules more specifically on a Discord I help manage, and it’s hard not to think about that “Nazi Bar Problem”. We don’t have a problem with “Nazis” as such (the few who have shown inclinations in that vague direction have been shown the door) but there are a few people who have become so entrenched that they’re a problem… and it’s honestly making us wonder if the time, effort and mental health expended on said server is worth it.

Can a product or Brand™ survive without social media? The assumption has always been “no”, but like I said above, I’ve found myself actively repulsed by Brand™ presences on social media for the most part, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Sure, there are some Brand™ accounts that post interesting things — and the one I’m in charge of I try and make an effort to use in such a manner — but are they really adding any value?

I’m not convinced they are. We are living in a peculiar time, and I don’t think anyone quite knows what’s going to happen next.

#oneaday Day 59: Popularity produces pricks

And not in the way you might be thinking. Okay, there are times when someone getting popular or enjoying some success with something leads to them becoming a prick, but that is not what I’d like to talk about today. I’d like to talk about life as a small-scale creative person on the Internet, and what happens when something you produce manages to extend far outside of its usual audience.

I’m prompted to talk about this as a result of the thoroughly lovely RoseTintedSpectrum’s recent video on the first series of beloved video game TV show GamesMaster, which, to put it mildly, has been doing numbers since he released it. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend giving it a look:

What we’ve all been noticing since the video started blowing up, however, is how much more frequent comments from complete arseholes become once you cross a particular popularity threshold. Not necessarily comments that are being directly insulting to the video maker, but comments from people who are just being dickish. People who use terms like “woketard”. People who think the ’90s was a utopia where white people flourished and you never, ever had to look at those filthy Muslims. You know the sort of people. The same sort of people who cry “DEI” anyone someone with a slight tan appears on screen.

When this first started happening, we were discussing the phenomenon in a Discord server that hosts a number of UK-based retro gaming and retro tech YouTubers, and we all had similar stories to share. There comes a point, it seems, usually after you cross the 1,000 views mark, where there’s a marked uptick in comments from twats.

It makes sense when you think about it. A video blowing up and getting a lot of views means that it’s being pushed by the ever-mysterious YouTube Algorithm to people beyond your usual audience and subscriber base, which means people from circles you might not normally mix (or want to associate) with may start stopping by. And boy, do they love to hear themselves talk.

I had something similar a while back when I had my own video “blow up”. It was this one, a video I’m still pretty pleased with, but which left me feeling well and truly vindicated in just making videos about what pleases me, rather than what is guaranteed to be “popular”.

Because what no-one tells you about getting popular and suddenly attracting all these complete penii is that it’s genuinely stressful and often quite upsetting. I got to a point where I had to “pause” comments on the video above because the influx of them was stressing me out so much. And I wasn’t even getting nearly as many dickheads as Rosie is getting on his video. It was just overwhelming, and not in a good way; I did not like it at all.

The same is true for anything tangentially related to social media or online presence. Post something — be it picture, video, blog post, article, whatever — that manages to get a significant reach, and it’s seemingly inevitable that you’ll have to deal with dickheads. This is, of course, frustrating, because one would hope that it’s possible to get a significant reach on something without attracting the very dregs of Internet society, but with every “success story” like the ones I’ve described above, it seems increasingly inevitable that the dickheads? Oh they will come. They will come in droves.

I wonder how many people have been put off from a potential career of making creative things online by this sort of thing. I guess after a certain point you start to get used to it and be able to tune things out — and once you reach a certain size as an online personality, you can start hiring staff to take care of things like the comments section for you, so you can focus exclusively on actually making the videos.

But for everyone who gets to the point where they’re able to hire a staff, I’m sure there are myriad more who gave up the first time they saw mild success, because the dickheads came. And I can’t help thinking that’s a real shame. Online culture shouldn’t have come to this. But it has, and we just have to live with it, it seems, because no-one seems in a particular hurry to do anything about it.

Thank heavens for YouTube’s “Hide user from channel” setting, at least, which means the dickhead of your choice is banished to the abyss; you’ll never see them in your comments section again, and neither will the rest of your audience — but, here’s the fun bit: they’re still able to rage impotently at you, never knowing that you’ve effectively “blocked” them because YouTube doesn’t tell them that.

This is the one bit of YouTube I can honestly say is absolutely masterful. There are few things better than knowing that there are dickheads who think they’re posting amazing putdowns of your latest work, only for their comments to be silently banished to the abyss before they get anywhere near you.

Anyway, the Internet sucks, but go subscribe to Rosie ’cause he makes good vids. Ta-ra.

#oneaday Day 58: Was Ignorance Bliss?

There’s some nasty shit going on in the world right now. Without getting bogged down in the details, there are some vicious riots going on “Up North” in this green and pleasant land, following the horrible killing of several young girls at their dance class.

It’s hard to understand quite how outrage over the murders has escalated to what it is, but it’s fair to say that things have gotten A Bit Racist, to say the least. Last I heard of the situation, a Holiday Inn Express that was supposedly housing immigrants — immigrants completely unrelated to the murders, I might add — was besieged by exactly the sort of people you’re probably picturing when talking about people who are A Bit Racist Against Immigrants.

I won’t dwell on the situation because I haven’t read up much on it, so I’ll refrain from commenting further about specifics. But it’s brought something into focus for me which is a tad worrying: the fact that despite how we’re supposedly a lot more tolerant, progressive and understanding these days, as a society, a lot more of this horrible shit appears to be happening.

Whether it’s racist riots against people who had nothing to do with a horrible crime, transphobia at the Olympics (against someone who isn’t actually trans) or just general foul behaviour and intolerance, we seem to have hit something of a bump in the road in attempting to create a 21st century utopia.

Who am I kidding; we absolutely were not on the road to a utopia. Everything has been going to shit for a while, so it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that people are starting to act up, even if their behaviour and attitudes are completely misdirected. So I have to ask myself: was ignorance actually bliss?

I think back to my time living through the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s and I don’t remember ever feeling the sense of existential anxiety and dread over the world that I do these days. It’s entirely possible that this was entirely due to our collective ignorance of various groups of people who were downtrodden and oppressed, which of course carries its own problems, but I don’t remember encountering anywhere near the sort of outright hatred that is expressed today towards certain groups.

And it wasn’t as if we weren’t aware of the people who come in for the brunt of the abuse today. I just legitimately don’t remember the hatred being anywhere near as vicious as it is today.

At least some of that is down to social media, of course. It’s entirely possible that hatred like this was going on, but no-one saw it because not everyone had the means to plaster all their odious beliefs over every available space online. There was no “collective public space” like Twitter once was (and I don’t think it is that any more, since a significant portion of people have abandoned it completely, and the most active of those remaining tend to veer fairly hard right) and so people tended to stick to their own communities.

On the one hand, that probably allowed hate groups to thrive in private; on the other, well, you can see the result of everyone being thrown together just from a casual glance at Twitter on any given day. It’s not pretty.

Part of the existential anxiety and dread I feel over this whole situation is whether or not I “should” be doing something more, or even if that’s possible. I’ve always settled for some variation of “treat others as you would like to be treated”, and even take that as far as not commenting mean things on YouTube videos I really dislike (because I hate it when I get horrible comments). But is that really enough today? And if not, what can one do, other than simply actively not be a racist transphobic shit, and not go deliberately seeking fights?

#oneaday Day 49: No Hate

I have little to no time for cynical negativity, and I’ve felt this way for quite some time. I’ve been trying to pin down exactly why I feel like I can’t participate in a conversation where one or more of the participants has switched to “cynical negativity” mode, and I think I’ve just answered my own question: it’s because it feels like those who are being negative are trying to close the conversation.

I don’t always mean literally, as in “let’s not talk about this any more”, but I tend to find that a negative opinion about something almost certainly stops people from wanting to pipe up and say “actually, I liked it”, because these days that often seems to lead to an unnecessarily heated argument. Both sides become entrenched in their respective positions, and both inevitably come out of the encounter feeling worse about the other person.

I know. I have been there on a frustrating number of occasions. There are Discord servers that I have come to feel less than welcome in because I liked something that someone with a louder voice than me didn’t. And I feel it’s genuinely quite hard to find a place where you can just go and be enthusiastic about something any more, without some killjoy jumping in and rattling off a laundry list of its “flaws”. And the negative one always seems to come off better than someone who feels positively about something — even when the positive one clearly knows a lot more about the thing in question.

Once someone has opened that initial negativity valve, one of two things tends to happen: 1) the conversation ends, with the positive person left feeling like they can no longer talk about something they like, or 2) other people, some of whom have no experience with the thing under discussion, feel emboldened to jump on board with the person being negative, leaving the positive person feeling like they’re being ganged up on.

There are responses to this, and I’ve heard them all.

“If you really love something, you criticise it.” That may be true, but “criticising it” is not the same as shitting all over it and, in some cases, casting aspersions on those who do like it.

“Stop being so defensive.” I am defensive because you are attacking something that is important to me.

“People are allowed to have different opinions.” If that is the case, why do I now feel like I cannot open my mouth and express my support for the thing that “the room” has now decided is “bad”?

“Stop playing the victim.” I’m sorry, but after probably over a decade of this at this point — of feeling like I have no place to really “belong” — I feel somewhat hard done by.

More than anything, though, it’s just boring. I know we can all have a good laugh at the creative ways in which people talk about things they dislike — it’s a lot harder to be “amusing” when you’re being positive, it seems — but when no-one seems to like anything any more, it becomes extremely tiresome.

I’m not saying no-one is allowed to dislike things. I’m not saying no-one is allowed to hate things with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I’m saying I wish people would just be a little more considerate of those who like things, and want nothing more than to be able to talk about the things they like with other people.

Someone liking or loving something is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even if you end up not feeling the same way about the thing in question, you can learn something about the person you were talking to, and why the thing might be important to them. Meanwhile, if you close them down by saying you hate the thing before they’ve even had a chance to express themselves fully, that’s a potential relationship that is never going to go anywhere.

I feel bad that I even have to justify this. But with every passing day, I feel more and more alienated from people who should, in theory, be my friends, based on our shared interests. But when I’m confronted with negativity, I don’t feel welcome. I don’t feel like anyone wants to understand me. And I don’t feel like anyone wants to be my friend.

That’s a really shitty way to be feeling, let me tell you. And I hope it never happens to you.

#oneaday Day 32: Lies, Damned Lies

A lot has been made about the supposed proliferation of “fake news” and, regrettably, because discussion about it started around the time of Trump’s last ascendancy (and to quite a significant degree from the Trump camp), not everyone takes the concept entirely seriously. But it’s definitely something that happens, and it’s making the Web less and less useful.

Earlier today, a member of a Discord I’m in posted a link to the following tweet:

The screenshots are of Windows Defender supposedly finding a plain text file containing nothing but the text “This content is no longer available.” to be a piece of malware — specifically a Trojan called Casdet!rfn. Obviously a plain text file is not malware, so this is ridiculous, and thus Microsoft must have made a silly mistake and we can all laugh at them, ho ho ho.

I tried it.

Windows Defender did not find it to be malware.

I Googled it and found several outlets reporting on this “story”, including some that really should know better (looking at you, Tom’s Hardware) — and not one of them had seemingly put in the minimal amount of effort required to verify that this was actually a thing. In other words, none of them had done what I did above: recreate the situation by composing a blank text file, putting the words “This content is no longer available.” in it and then scanning it with Windows Defender. A two-minute job, tops.

No, instead the most rigour anyone put in was to look at the replies to the Twitter post, which are fairly slim in number, making me wonder exactly how this misinformation had spread in the first place. The tweet in question has nearly 700,000 views, though only 800 of whatever the Muskrat is calling “Retweets” this week, suggesting the majority of its minor virality has come about through situations exactly like the one I describe above: people sharing it via means other than Twitter.

Now, I don’t blame the chap on Discord. He was just sharing something he thought was funny. I don’t even blame the original Tweeter, because it’s entirely possible that this was true once and it was quietly fixed in a Windows update. But I do blame all these people, and Google.

Not only for reporting on this without doing the absolute bare minimum of fact-checking, but for not correcting these stories if indeed it was once true and now is no longer correct.

Either way, the result is the same: a lot of misinformation gets spread very easily, often by people who have no ill intent. It’s not the fault of the people who share this stuff — although I personally would check any sort of claim like this before resharing it myself — but it absolutely is the fault of outlets authoritatively sharing this as “news” without doing any sort of research beyond looking at a few Twitter posts.

Sadly, this is what “news” is these days. Get a good hook for a story that might be the slightest bit clickable and/or shareable, then write it up (with at least 600 words for SEO purposes, of course) and just make some shit up in the middle if you need to. Doesn’t matter if the story is true or not; by the time people have clicked or shared, the article has done its job, and it doesn’t matter if anyone twigs that it’s bollocks or not.

In some respects, I’m sad that I’m no longer working the games journalism beat. But in others, I know that if I was still a newshound, I’d likely be gently encouraged into this sort of odious practice in order to get the numbers up.

I had more integrity and rigour when I was covering stuff for GamePro and USgamer. I’d find stories, research them myself and report on them only when I was good and sure that there actually was a story there. And I didn’t have to make a big deal out of doing that at the time, because that was the expectation for someone working a News Editor position.

Now? Engagement above all. Who cares if something is true? Numbers go big, suits stay happy. Fuck the actual audience who might want the publications they read to be reliable and trustworthy; they are, after all, the least important part of the whole equation these days.

If you’re looking for the Web as it once was, then I’m sorry to inform you that This content is no longer available.