I recently came across an article by Mihnoír on his personal website, where he voiced his feelings about what I’d call the bastardization of nerd spaces. Actually, he doesn’t refer to these spaces as nerd ones, but from my reading that’s what he’s talking about. I must warn you: what follows contains my interpretation of Mihnoír’s thoughts, which might be way less accurate than I desire, but I hope it’s close enough. And if you haven’t followed the previous link yet, keep in mind you must be over 18 to visit Mihnoír’s site.

The article, titled Nothing Matters, and That’s Why It Does, could come across as hostile or overly defensive at first. Maybe it is, a bit. But I encourage you to actually read it all the way through, even if you don’t fully agree with him.

Mihnoír’s frustration can be summarized when talking about a portion of the people in fandoms:

They want nothing more than a hobby they can dip their toes into without getting too involved–a sample at Costco; a passing interest. […] The resulting environment is harsh, disorganized, and toxic[…].

In his perspective, fandom spaces have changed so much, now being open and accessible to everyone, that they’ve become an unenjoyable mess. I don’t fully agree with this, maybe because I’ve always avoided being part of fandoms that straight up annoy me, and I’ve rarely had an issue with newcomers. It’s also not a minor detail that I’ve never been a hardcore nerd and I’m not fond of the snobbish and socially inept attitude that many in the fandoms I’ve been part of have had. But I can totally see that fandom spaces are no longer “what they used to be,” and I’ve seen people being involved in dumb online drama way too many times for a thing they don’t even like that much (or at all.)

The good ol’ days

I’ll refrain from transcribing too much of the original article. There are a few key points worth highlighting: the first is that fandom spaces are no longer truly driven by those with a close relationship to the works they’re based on (or not enough.) In an older era of the web, these spaces typically took the form of forums. They were by and for people into these specific niches. I’ve been online since the late 90s, so I’ll describe them from my own experience, but keep in mind it’s my experience; they were, indeed, gated. That doesn’t mean you had to be a stereotypical nerd to be on the forum of a fandom, but you were expected to behave in such a way that clashing with others was very rare. If you behaved lazily or antagonistically, you would get banned. And this does not mean they were free of toxicity, but you could always move to another forum, if it existed one for that interest of yours with an internal culture that vibed with you. Blocking other users was also a decent option, because the asynchronous nature of forums, also based on subforums and threads, didn’t make you feel like you were missing much (in contrast to real-time chats.)

If you didn’t get along with the people from a certain forum, you could simply forget about that space. A fandom as a whole was way more decentralized, and if you really wanted to, you didn’t have to even listen to opinions you didn’t like.

These old spaces (that weren’t just forums) could sound romanticized at times in Mihnoír’s descriptions. But they were not perfect, and I bet Mihnoír knows that as well. Yet they weren’t terrible, and that’s where part of his frustration comes from. Not only did they feel more organized than what we have now, but I’d also say that, for the most part, there was a lot more of everyone minding their own business and staying in their own lane, even when people had different opinions. And if something actually happened, it would typically end there. Drama very rarely overflowed and reached those who weren’t interested enough to be part of an otherwise constrained space.

The other important point is the fetishization of aesthetics. The original article argues that everything is “commodified” and “easily-digestible.” I am not completely sure what commodified means here, as I would expect a commodity to be literally sold, yet he expands on the fetishization of aesthetics around -core trends: animecore, japancore, juminocore. This often does lead to commodification, though. I am typing these words the same week I saw ads for t-shirts with AI-generated illustrations of anime-like characters and text in Japanese.

In any case, I do agree with nearly everything about this second point. Archetypal style trends (or even specific styles) are wrenched and isolated from the works they were part of, then repurposed or resignified, and some groups implicitly claim them as their own because “they look cool.” It’s not the use of the styles that bothers me, but the act of resignification, trying to forget where it comes from while also, paradoxically, referencing its origins. Why is it that some people are SO attached to certain aesthetics yet they don’t care about “everything else” these aesthetics are related to? I found out this week that sometimes they even hate this “everything else,” but hold onto its aesthetics as if they were part of their personality. Aesthetics are a powerful force of attraction, and the key is that they draw you into something. They lead somewhere… and sometimes you might not like the destination.

What’s so different now?

I fondly remember a forum that no longer exists, specifically made for anime and manga fans in my town, back in the mid 2000s. As I hinted before, a forum has its own culture. A user on a forum willingly had to register, log in, and stay. It was technically “a click away,” sure, but compared to how accesible everything seems to be now, it was like “five or six clicks away.” There was a sense of commitment you had to have to go back to a specific website that modern social media does not require.

Then Facebook became really popular, and slowly swallowed the forum’s activity. Then Twitter did the same, helping the web 2.0 take its shape. The forum died, and the community dissolved almost completely in the sea of the new internet. What’s so different about these platforms and the old countless forums? The answer is reach and interconnectivity… in a bad way, even though this is what keeps people hooked to them.

When you posted on a forum, you posted for the users on that forum. If someone was able to read you, chances are they were a registered fellow user. Nowadays, you likely are present on at least one of the few big platforms with many millions of users and no overly specific audience. On X, you won’t have much trouble finding porn stars sharing explicit content, 13-year olds attached to youtubers in sickly parasocial ways, experts on DevOps, and fascists. Addictive rage-driven algorithms are, in my opinion, just part of the problem. In a greater scale, everything now is meant to be shared, to “connect.” Everyone can see what you write, they can subpost, they can provide their opinion, from everywhere, while sitting on the toilet, even. If something becomes popular enough to build a community around it, then part of that community will end up on the big platforms. And if it doesn’t, it will be mentioned on them. Exposure can’t be avoided. And because the big platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram, are first and foremost designed for individuals and not for communities, the result is a mess. Does it make sense to you to gather so many people in one place and tell them to express themselves and be authentic? Can anyone really expect no conflicts and no misinformation among people so vastly different? That’s what a personal site was for: it’s someone’s own space. You could visit them and confront them for what they think or share, but the dynamic would be very different. People on forums can have their differences too, but it’s the community that matters the most. The organization of forums into subforums and threads, as well as their local rules and target audience, provided a clear framework for interacting with others in much more specific ways.

The effects of having a single space for everyone to express themselves about anything go beyond creating drama. It also homogenizes opinions, creating false dichotomies. It’s one or the other! Not in a you’re in favor of this or you hate it way, but instead you fully agree with these 100 ideas or you don’t belong in this group you think you’re part of. Oversimplification wins, and it shouldn’t. The world is way too complex. Humans, individually and collectively, are too complex.

This affects fandoms, too. Some people might imply you are genocidal for liking a fictional character. While reasonings like that are not new at all, I feel they weren’t as common, and they weren’t so much in-your-face all the time either. That’s another thing big platforms enable users to do: they can find enough like-minded people to engage in discourse, and swim in their own ideas. They don’t have to be majority, they have to be enough.

Lastly, I want to add that groups from a single fandom across multiple online spaces didn’t have the need to get along. A comment about that other place would suffice to make the differences clear without long arguments. That’s not possible today: everyone is everywhere, together, and big spaces belong to no one. Many of the smaller, constrained spaces are also affected by this, as they attract people from the big ones, many times expecting they don’t need to adjust to the local habits and expectations.

Criticism is, in fact, valid

I don’t want to oversee this: Much of the discourse I see comes from a moral ground. I don’t agree with most of it. Many times I’ve shared the same feeling of rejection that made a random person pronounce against something, but I couldn’t make myself say “this should not exist” or “we shouldn’t like this.”

This happens a lot with works of fiction produced in Japan. It makes sense, as they are made with their own sensibility. Back in the 90s and the 2000s, anime geared towards a teen audience in Japan was sometimes presented in the west as animation “for adults”. They might have explicit violence, immoral relationships, sexualization and non-explicit sexual content (most of the times involving underaged characters), or simply “non-christian” values such as the relationship of a character with life and death.

This is a delicate topic, as I do agree that fiction can change the world. But I’ve grown to dislike the common overly-simplistic conception people have of “normalization,” because a work of fiction only by itself does not affect the world. Its relationship with the spectators, readers, or players, definitely might. As an adult, there’s a lot of content I don’t approve of because it targets a very young audience which is most likely growing up in circumstances even worse than just without unsupervised internet access. Most of the time it’s not really the content I have an issue with. It’s where and how it’s shared. And because fandoms no longer feel like alleys in a block, or like a block in a neighborhood, it’s like everything is shared everywhere, for everyone. Everything has lost its boundaries. I am not really surprised by the neverending discourse you can find surrounding fandoms and withim them, because, how could I? Most things belong to their own unique corner. If they’re within everyone’s reach, raising an eyebrow is to be expected. I just think people are aware there’s a problem, but they misidentify the source.

I sometimes suspect all parents are terrible at rising their children, and they expect the world to accomodate to them. I’m sorry, the world should be different, but capitalism does not care about your kids’ development. Both things, the parents and the world, can be wrong. In a world with better and present parents, or in a world that makes a better job at distributing content considering abstent parents, I would have less of a problem with this.

But yes, you can criticize anything. You have to know what part of it could be reasonably criticized, and you shouldn’t be insufferable while doing so. In a way, it doesn’t quite make sense to say we should stay in our lanes when we’re exposed to so much stuff, a problem we contribute to.

Then there’s content that is actually intended for adults (not necessarily R18, but that too, definitely.) Many of us are adults, and I believe that as educated and mature individuals, we can allow ourselves to enjoy nearly anything fictional. But, again, it’s works aimed at adults that I’m talking about here. These works are not for everyone, and should have stayed within their fandoms’ boundaries. That’s no longer a thing on the Internet. I am aware of the existence of purposely shocking eroge games like Euphoria without the need to engage with NSFW content on social media. How come people can so freely share these things and make them go viral “for the memes,” without any kind of moderation? Because it’s more profitable for the people investing in those huge online social networks. Because capitalism.

The obvious culprit

There’s a lot more I could talk related to how extreme interconnectivity sucks. Remember what bronies did to a show meant for kids? But I keep thinking: it’s capitalism’s fault. I can’t tell what Mihnoír blames capitalism for. Maybe he’s only considering commodification. I blame it for nearly everything (I’m exaggerating… but not that much.) People nowadays are way too used to online habits built around the market without even realizing. Netiquette, in part, has changed and adapted to it as well, like the laziness he talks about. Can I really blame people for sharing opinions and content wherever they feel like, or asking dumb questions without researching, making them available to anyone? “That’s how it is.” And something that feels isolated and momentary, like posting a picture in your corner of the internet, can have a snowball effect within minutes. Hurray, interactions, positive or negative! No wonder fandom spaces suck. I wish the like button had never been invented.

If anything, I don’t feel pity specifically for the quirky losers who lost their spaces, because they are part of this sucky world too, and they’re not exceptional. Maybe it’s a pity that those spaces were lost or became too open, but that loss or openness is just one case among countless others. It’s not an issue unique to them. Just imagine the pain medical doctors go through having to read stupid shit because everyone thinks they’re health experts. Even worse: they have to read stupid shit from fellow medical doctors with stupid audiences because it’s easier to escape from scientific consensus now than it was in an era of TV shows and magazines.

I hate the current state of the world, and now the internet reflects the worst of it. Even habits, hobbies, or professions that have nothing to do with fandoms are threatened by capitalism and its AI garbage and viral content.

I feel nostalgic for a world that was better than what we have now, not for one that was good. It was bad already. As Mihnoír mentions, some spaces were great for “marginalized” nerds, often ridiculed. Wouldn’t it have been better if no one had ever felt ridiculed in the first place?