For real. My preferred forum was closed I’m 2015 after 13 years active. Facebook killed it. I will never understand why people chose Facebook over that forum. You could blog and post pictures and chat with people in peace and quiet without having to deal with the entire world looking in on your cringe teenage angst.
Generally, I just remember how all these forums and blogsites that used to make up the internet were pretty much dead and gone by 2017. The art community went from having good platforms like Tumblr and deviantart to having to deal with the nightmare that is Instagram and Twitter. There still hasn’t been a good alternative to artists posting their artwork since Instagram took over. It was a shittification then and it has only gotten worse since. But people now have grown up with this bullshit and therefore they don’t question or demand better. They don’t know what it used to be like to be an artist online. It was fun and inspiring. AI slob hasn’t helped the matter either.
Reminds me of how millennials and generations onward have learned less and less maintainence skills to the point where most of us can’t sow or fix shit if it’s broken because we grew up in a consumer culture where you just buy a new one when the old one breaks. The quality of products have decreased too so they break quicker which gives people incentive to buy a new one instead of fixing.
My parents generation hold on to old items and they patch up their clothes and know how to fix shit around the house but they didn’t teach me any of that because the culture shifted and it wasn’t really needed.
We are not only losing skills and tactile learning and understanding, we are also rapidly torpedoing out planet into a massive trash heap. Which is a bit of a duh, I know, but still.
I for one have noticed the insane decline in the quality of clothes after covid. It is shockingly shitty now and tears faster than ever. Shirts and leggings I bought ten years ago still hold up while similar shirts and leggings from a few years ago already tear or unravel. It is shocking. I guess this is what will eventually happen to art too.