How has technology made your favorite hobby worse instead of better?
How has technology made your favorite hobby worse instead of better?
I play darts, we used to write on whiteboards with sharpies. Now nearly every club has a computer with some kind of software. Usually this software is closed source and sends all the data to some kind of server. We as players have no choice if we want to play the tournament, we have no control. Many clubs also use the computer for training. So everyone can see when you are playing, where you are playing and how you are playing. Great to see how good your next opponent is. Also great to track people. But way worse is the fact that everyone just talks about their average. Oh I played so bad my average was under 60, I still won 3-0 but I was so bad. I hate this. I want back the times where I play shit, win the game with a nice finish and can proudly say it wasn't good but a nice finish and we stop talking, not hear from someone not even in the room how bad I played.
Kinda a niche topic to rant about I know, but no one in this hobby seems to get my concerns.
72Well I play video games, and woo boy, let me tell you about microtransactions, crap DLC content, season passes, never ending early access, unfinished releases, and anti cheat root-kits! If you’re on console you pay a premium to play online, if you’re on PC you have 18 different game launchers and DRM bullshit. Digital only stuff means you don’t own your games, cant loan them or trade them or sell them. I’m sure there’s more, and admittedly there’s good with the bad. Graphics have come a long way, and some rare innovations are fun to see. I still have fun with it, but wow it is a fucked up landscape full of way more land mines than it used to be.
47Board games have been nearly ruined by kickstarter.
Instead of buying a well reviewed and recommended game from a store, you have to back a hyped up sales pitch, and then wait 4 months for delivery, if the producers don't just bail with your money or go "oops, we couldn't finish what we promised, and we already spent all your money...".
And if you don't back it to later read the reviews, the game is out of print and still waiting for the first wave of deliveries, meaning a second print is still at least a year off.
Also, the ratings are heavily skewed by people rating on the hype or early/review copies, meaning the rankings are heavily amazonified.
EtA: Also games are heavily bloated with social media candy: heavy and fragile minis, box stands, blingy crap periferals (branded dice holding toucan) and still needing organisers, player aids and mods from third parties who've gotten review copies to make said supplements...
Oh, and the stretch goal extras (get another 150 vanity minis/3D printed scoring tokens) for only $150 and an 18 month wait!
41Video games. Streamers, YouTubers, and other ”content creators” have had a massive negative effect on the hobby as a whole.
The bandwagons driven by these people can destroyed games that should have had a mediocre reception, but instead were panned by a couple creators then that criticism was parroted loud and wide. Where a game could have had a nice little niche audience, instead it was shut down a year after launch due to the shitty bandwagons.
These people also drive companies to make horrible balancing and content decisions. Since these people play games as their jobs, and play them daily for 8-10-12+ hours, they have wildly different desires and perspectives on games. These perspectives again get parroted loudly, the game companies hear it, and make changes/decisions based on people that play all day every day. This destroys gaming for not only casual gamers, but all gamers that don’t play one game for 8+ hours a day every day.
I could go on and on, but these trash reality TV stars for nerds have done so much damage to the industry.
29Somewhat tangential, but Eddy Burback recently posted a YouTube video talking about AI, and how it's being marketed in a way that's intended to rob people of wholesome interpersonal experiences. Or at least dilute them by horning in.
Nothing is safe from tech bros. Certainly not hobbies.
25I have many hobbies, but they've all gotten better due to technology. I'll be curious to see what other people have to say.
21I LOVED books as a kid. I was reading at a high school level by the time I started kindergarten, and I just absorbed every book I could get my hands on. I would bring a 100-200 page book to school every day and would finish it before I got home in the afternoon.
I also enjoyed writing and would write my own stories. I was part of an organization in elementary school called Young Authors that encouraged kids to write, and I wrote 3 books through that group. It was my dream to be an author one day.
Then the Internet became a thing.
Suddenly, I didn't need to spend hours in a library reading through dozens of books to find information I needed. I could just do a quick search on Infoseek, or Excite, or AskJeeves, and have a repository of knowledge at my fingertips. It was life-changing!
As the Internet evolved and more data got dumped on it, I started spending more time perusing its depths and less time reading physical books. I ended up getting a job in IT because computers fascinated me so much. Eventually, I realized I hadn't picked up a book in years. Everything I wanted to read, I could find online.
Now here I am at 40 years old and my dream of being an author is gone. In our modern age, most people don't read physical books anymore and authors don't make enough to survive, unless they make it on a best-seller list or something. Even Stephen King is more well known today for his political commentary on Twitter/X. I haven't heard much about any books he's been writing in a long time.
I once wanted a library room in my dream home. I still kind of do, for the aesthetic. But I don't really read physical books anymore, and I could only fill maybe a single wall with the books I currently own; mostly treasured classics from my childhood that have been stored away in boxes for years. I'd be better off having a PC gaming/theater room in my dream home, as that's more where my modern interests lie.
I love the Internet age. It revolutionized my childhood and brought us into a wonderful age of information. But I can't help but think about how completely different my life would've been if it hadn't been invented. I sometimes wonder if I would've been more happy and/or successful in a world without the Internet.
21Phones ruined Burning Man. Their cameras make people tourists, and their onsite social media precludes immediacy.
21Got into 3D-printing a few years back. Intended to print some replacement parts, a few decorations and gadgets, and took care to not waste too much plastic. In the internet, there are pages dedicated to 3d models other people have printed. They were always a good inspiration on what could be done, and even if the model isn't exactly what you wanted, it was always a functioning prototype to test with.
Since last year, multicolour printers have gained popularity. They automatically change between 2 different colours, but to make sure nothing of the old colour is left in the system, every time they change it they print out a few grams of waste product.
It's a waste indeed if you look at the "poop bucket" of anyone who uses these types of printers. Idc if it's only the "technically recycleable PLA" they use, I don't like it. And now I have to manually filter out those models, and they can fill an entire page depending on what's the new trend right now.
16I’m more of a sewer than a knitter or crocheter, but I’ve heard AI patterns for knitting and crochet are really bad online now (and an utter waste of yarn and time).
15Model trainers used to be 2 wires to the track from a DC transformer. Add in a switchboard if you want blocks. Set the locomotive on the track and it would run based on your output from the transformer.
Now they are mostly computerized, and prohibitively expensive. A decent steam locomotive used to be $300-500... Now in the $700 range. Granted there is new functionality, but it feels like a hobby simple enough for a 7-12 year old to enjoy became an old rich man's hobby.
14Definitely better. I play tabletop RPGs (D&D, Pathfinder), and technology has allowed us to do all sorts of things that would be challenging in a physical medium. We can create detailed maps with lighting effects, sound effects, and triggers. A lot of the more tedious parts of the game such as initiative and health tracking get automated, and applying damage and healing is as easy as clicking a button while having a unit selected. And to top it all off, we're not restricted to playing with the people around us and physically getting together. You can sit at home in your PJs and just hop into a Discord call to play with your friends. I'm truly grateful for it because I was able to continue playing Tabletop RPGs with my sister when she moved 1300 miles away to live with her then boyfriend, now husband.
13I've been on social media for a little over half a year. With the introduction of AI image generators, I have had my art stolen by an AI image prompter, who took my art and made it look like a congealed mess, in addition to being accused of using AI on another site back in June, even though I've posted progress pictures, timelapses of me drawing and PaintTool SAI files with many of the layers being intact. The AI image prompter was locally banned by a moderator, while the other person had their account removed by the administrator, who then apologised to me about that person's rude behaviour.
13My favorite hobby is gaming so I'd have to say always on requirements for single player games.
12Programming and Linux is my hobby I guess but new languages, distributions, and frameworks spring up all the time. On one hand the innovation and creativity and variety are inspiring and impressive. On the other hand it makes analytical types like me more likely to spend time researching solutions than actually implementing them. It's also too easy to find the perfect tool for whatever your problem is or get invested in solution and before you know it the project is abandoned or flipped into a commercial product so you have to start the hunt all over again and convert all of the stuff that depends on it. I think it's a "good problem" to have but still a bit of a problem.
It would be nice if open source software had a more reliable way to be sponsored so contributors could have some monetary support for their efforts. I say reliable because some very popular projects have little to no sponsorship so we could be one pissed off dev away from Y2K.
9I casually bicycle around town and like to see who I can keep up with to test how fast I am. More and more folks have ebikes now and it's getting way less fun.
8Computing and Gaming both being internet reliant in the most part has destroyed the industry completely as it is used as a weapon to monetise everything pay or don't play or you know that game you could play well don't pay you now can't play scenarios rule, and servers deliberately being shutdown to recapitalize on an updated game it's just monoply and capitalism gone too far. They don't need to login to play offline either so why the need for server access to verify ownership more than one time they could just provide an unlock key that's for offline use games that lasts for life, this is the way it should be done for computers and consoles all you need to do is an occassional reconnection to update the built in database file that stores these encrypted unlock keys and that database file should be made to reside on all machines, that would be the way around online verification being required every single time you come to play, thus internet access is only really needed once for each game to be verfiied forever in that database file, if it doesn't exist in the current database going online briefly automagically verifies a game inserted or loaded when it's online without any input required from the user and it remains valid for life as long as the database is present on the machine/s the companies then just make these files cross compatible and available forever and the controlling bodies for software and games sales should make that a legal requirement on all machines with an export to usb option either and cloud and external storage option and then the worlds problem of offline play without internet is forever solved as would be computer software installations as well if made a requirement for this to.
8Go has been changed a lot by technology, mostly for the better. The ability to review every game you play with AI, for free, is an invaluable resource, and we've also learned a lot about the game from AI.
But, there are also several limitations that it's important to be mindful of. The AI likes to play on the razor's edge because it can read well enough to know exactly when it's actually in danger. A human player trying to emulate that style will often just get themselves killed. Human teachers can still be more useful, despite being weaker, because they can better identify trends in a person's thought process and explain the "why" behind a move, communicating the general principles that we as humans need to rely on because we aren't computers and can't read out every variation every time. Sometimes people get too obsessed with trying to play the "top engine move," and it can blow up in their faces.
I was at a go event a couple years ago where a professional from overseas was reviewing people's games, and somebody got in an argument over a move because the pro criticized his move, but the player said the AI backed him up. I can kinda understand both sides of that. On the one hand, if the AI says something, it's not wrong. But on the other hand, I think it's important to consider multiple perspectives and incorporate them into your play, and you'll always be able to put things into the AI, so I think there's something to be said for biting your tongue and just letting the pro give their perspective with the limited time you have them for. I guess I've never been one to be afraid of telling stronger players when I think they're wrong, but it feels kind of disrespectful to me to pull AI on a visiting pro.
I guess one part of the game I find appealing and beautiful is that there's so many ways to play it, and your moves can serve as an expression of your personality. Introducing this sort of objective lens can get in the way of developing your style and making your own judgements. On the other hand, getting feedback that tells you when your judgement is way off can help your refine your instincts going forward. It's just that it's important to understand why the AI is saying something, and to understand that a minor percent loss can be worth it to push the game in a direction that's easier for you to play. It's a complicated subject, all-in-all.
7It hasn't for me really because most of my hobbies are still done more or less the way they always have been lol I cross stitch and build models and the whole point of those is that they're handmade. I collect vinyl records which hasn't really changed much except that they're more expensive now. I play guitar which technology has mostly helped more than hinder... The only thing I can think of is that a lot of the modern assembly line cheap guitars aren't really built all that well anymore, especially considering the price you pay for them, but even that has gotten a lot better in the last decade
6gaming, so much better. more people can create games with more types of games.
4When it comes to crafting, it's been great. So many free resources and videos. When I was little I pretty much only knew purl and knit and shyed away from more advanced patterns. I taught myself and if I couldn't figure it out, I just couldn't do that pattern. Now I can get even the most difficult pattern and have someone walk me through it, either via forums, if not a knit-a-long. Almost every stitch has a video tutorial. So many free patterns. So many stitches. And even the paid patterns are so creative now. Yes, there are classics, but do you want a mermaid blanket? A Cthulhu hat? Wanna make your cat a custom sweater? It's just a search away. You can even get specific. I joined a discord for goth stitchers. I don't talk, but seeing the patterns and resources specifically in that niche has been great.
I general, if you want to learn how to do something, there's a tutorial for it. I've fixed my toilet, done minor car maintenance, and a lot of things that I usually think I'm just too dumb to figure out. But there's almost always someone on the internet willing to walk you through it. I sewed my first (very basic and poorly done) garment this weekend. I have always wanted to learn how to sew, and, with a second hand machine and YouTube, I took the first step. I love how easy it is to access information. I love getting lost in the rabbit hole of this new information or that new hobby. I recently asked someone how they knew the history of Vermont curry on a lemmy post. I love that shit. I loved that someone looked it up because they just wanted to know, I like that know I just know a little something extra.
3Honestly, technology has made getting high and playing video games and D&D MUCH better.
1