monster_urby said:
TWHL is one of the oldest Half-Life modding communities and in recent times it certainly has been quieter around the main site and forums. The site itself is not as active as it once was, but remains a useful resource with the wiki, map vault and competition dashboard.
For me it's kind of amazing that TWHL still exists. It's one of the first communities that I've joined online, less than 6 months after having an internet connection (2006/2007) with 32 kb/s speed. It brings back a bit of nostalgia after those phpbb/vbulletin forums. There are still many communities left communicating through these forum types, but a lot of them died. In my country, there were big communities around hardware/software/gaming magazine forums. In the early 2010's most of the physical mediums died, and the communities slowly started to fade away. I'm guessing this is what happened in other countries too.
Then the forums slowly started being replaced with chat platforms, one of the most popular being Discord. Although highly practical in some sense, I believe it's just another symptom of the dopamine-hit-style environment the internet is today. Discussions fade into a black hole, unlike these forums where you can search, structure and have some statistics. Discord is a forum, irc and teamspeak/ventrilo server all in one. All-in-ones don't ever do one thing well.
People also grow up and there's very little time to devote to niche online communities if you have multiple interests.
Then the social media garbage started and really took off in the 2010's, sucking people's time. Nobody is immune from these trends, I myself joined Facebook because high school friends pushed me to do it. Then Instagram because a college girlfriend told me to. Now I reluctantly joined Threads because some people I know post there. I never joined TikTok and I hope I never will.
In the past decade phones have practically enslaved us. It is now impossible not to check your phone several times per day. People mindlessly scroll through stories, reels and other forms of short form media shit. I do it too, and I've done it against my better judgment until I had enough humility to recognize that I am addicted to my phone, not unlike others. What slowly got me into the addiction were a few tough mental months where social validation from online forms provided me the feel-good emotions I needed to push through the days. When I work, the only solution for focusing is to close the internet connection on my phone and put it away from my field of view.
I've been also following AI trends for a few years. The hot shit right now are LLMs and diffusion models (a.k.a chatgpt/llama/mistral, stable diffusion/ midjourney/dalle a.k.a generative ai models).
The internet is slowly becoming now a cesspool of generated robot regurgitated data deluge and fake art. Where once the internet was a source of good information and radical sincerity, filled with mostly tech or trade-inclined people, it's now... I don't even know how to describe it anymore. My feeling about it is how Mark Hanna in Wolf of Wallstreet describes the stock market:
Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real.
Whoever is able to still ignore all of this and focus on their or these little community gardens, they can consider themselves trully blessed.
Technology robs us more time than the government and other necessary human chores ever will.
So considering all of this - it's a damn miracle people still come to TWHL to discuss and create stuff around an engine that's 25 years old.