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by colechristensen 94 days ago
Why does what other people do affect you?

If you want to handcraft something, do it. How popular it is among other people isn't relevant.

3 comments

This comment screams someone who wasn't around during the rise and fall of Atari 2600 games or Commodore 64 games. More was certainly not better back then either.
There are literally 1000x more games being released today* than during the best days of the Atari/C64, and it is great. More has been better.

*Atari 1980 (20 games) vs Steam 2025 (20,008 games)

Because you use steam and the play store and ... to get games, and there will be so overwhelmingly much slop you can't find anything.

I've switched to emulators, a bluetooth controller and zero android games (and zero ios games on my work phone). But yeah it was/is horribly enshittified already. And what people predicted did happen.

The fact that the app store allows updates means existing games get systematically worse. Even the games I used to enjoy, and bought 5 years ago, like collossatron now have ads after every play.

It becomes a problem for everone when spaces meant for meaningful work become overrun with an awful stream of endless mediocre slop that someone quickly generated without giving it a second thought. The problem here is not that it is fast and easy. The cardinal sin is that it is fast, easy AND bad.
Huge gatekeeping energy right here.
Do you think people complaining about online marketplaces being overrun with unscrupulous drop-shippers are "gatekeeping e-commerce" as well?
No I do not because that's not a reasonable comparison?
Then you haven't understood the complaint.
I understood it just fine. You object to creations and creativity that do not pass your subjective quality bar and/or aren't produced in a way that is satisfactory to the people already behind the gate.

It's the literal definition of gatekeeping.

The problem you describe (quantity over so-called quality) is a discovery and curation problem.

Yet you blame the tools of creation and lament the lack of restriction or controls on production instead.

Yes these tools make it easier to produce, and yes that means that you have more low-quality work out there. I'm not pretending like that doesn't introduce new challenges.

But the answer isn't to gate-keep the tools or the process of creation or to stop or shame people from being creative with these new tools by universally calling their work "slop" or "bad".