Topic: Do you think "fandoms" have become more and more toxic?

In recent months I have found that I can't stand fan-pages on social media, or other groups online. It feels like more often than not there is an abundance of negativity. Even on pages where we all supposedly like the same thing I often find more people complaining or attacking one another because they think you like the wrong part of the thing, or you like it for the wrong reasons or somehow you like it in the wrong way. I have been running into this a lot on not just gaming threads, but pages for western movies or Japanese anime. Many people just unilaterally declare their opinions on likes and dislikes as facts and if you disagree then they say you have bad taste or are foolish or (much worse insults) for doing so.

This site seems to do a good job of keeping the negativity under control, but this site isn't the norm in my experience. What do you think?

Fanbases in general are just...the worst, rarely do I run into one that I actually like. Otherwise, everyone just attacks/bash someone else for saying something.
Anime: "I like dubs." gets bashed a lot (this has actually happened to me)
Monster Hunter: "Hopefully World will come to Switch." *gets attacked constantly saying the Switch is too crappy to handle a massive game like World. (wat?)

I just...cannot win...

@Joeynator3000 This is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about.

Oh, so now you can't win and you don't want to discuss anymore, huh? I'll show you!

XD

I agree with Joey. I think most fandoms confuse really liking something with hating everything else that isn't the thing they love. Not only that, but people have become more and more cocky with their opinions, and seem to be bitter with every game, movie, or whatever thing they enjoy, assuring it became "crap" just because it took a different direction or whatever.

Anyways yeah, this site seems to be calm for the most part...We do get a few trolls here and there, though.
Just...be careful around the Youtube channel. lol

I think a lot of the problem arises when people refuse to actually have a discussion. The hardcore fandoms need to understand that just because someone is criticising something you like, doesn't mean they hate it.

Also, there's sometimes a hive mentality with opinions. Anime is probably the most obvious one with the whole dubs vs subs debate. I just don't understand why it's been universally accepted among hardcore anime fans that subs are always better. A lot of anime aren't even based on Japan, in which cases a different language makes it more realistic.

I agree with this and think it's pretty spot-on in many situations. Unfortunately, most attempts at constructive discussions (at least some that I've observed online) devolve rather quickly. Thankfully, not everyone online is this way, and I believe that most of the narrow-minded ones are (overall) a minority. Unfortunately, these are the people who usually scream the loudest.

I've had the sub vs. dub discussion as well, but a more recent experience for me has to be the bashing of Yo-kai Watch within the Pokemon fandom.

Yeah you do hear the minority speak the loudest. A lot of people fall into that sort of "middle-ground" category. They are indifferent to most things and don't care basically. But in the internet age, it has become much easier for smaller groups to be the loudest.

Also, the Pokemon vs Yokai Watch seems to be somewhat of an extension of Pokemon vs Digimon from the 90s. But Yokai Watch is unique in that it actually was beating Pokemon in Japan for a while. It's a shame that Yokai Watch received the hate it did, cause it has a lot of merits that Pokemon can learn from. But when something is so popular and big Pokemon, the fans like to write-off any potential alternatives.

I think it's because of FANATISM.
Love by One Side.

Yeah, fandoms do seem to be getting more toxic, including here. The Nintendo fans used to be the nice ones, but now the fandom seems just as toxic as the other consoles.

This is nothing new, you're just noticing it now.

Stephen King's Misery came out before I was born, that's all I say about that.

Fandoms are choke-full of people who have adopted [media/product] as a part of their own identity. The moment these people feel what they like is under attack/under pressure to change, it becomes an attack on their own identity. That's when toxicity comes into play.

Videogame enthusiasts are a very extreme case of this because the marketing of these products is usually made with that angle in mind, and it works. It also happens with other media, of course (as a marvelite, it's pretty bad in there too).

This looks to me as an extension of the fact that, for whatever reason, society in general is becoming more tribal. Look at politics in America or Brexit over here (sitting in my shop in old blighty at the minute). Fandoms are just another form of these in-group out-groups, and woe betide whomever may decent from their own group's thinking, let alone if you decide to attack another group. Or even just attempt to have a discussion with one!

I see similar things on this very website. Get any group of people dedicated to a single thing or company together and eventually you'll have the situation you described. It's why in all my internet years, I've only frequented two forums. This and another. And even I think that's too much

That's an internet-wide problem. Tribes form, people fall prey to groupthink (especially on social media and in the gaming community), and, more broadly, I think many humans are still unable to handle the temptations posed by anonymous communication with others on the net.

This forum has (mostly) avoided that sort of thing. I think that might partially be due to size: NL is a successful and decently-sized community, but it's not a behemoth like (the artist formerly known as) Neogaf or GameFAQs. We also, let's admit, have pretty decent mods that try not to abuse their power over others, something I'm noticing disturbingly often in other communities.

Not really. I think its just as toxic as ever, but more concentrated than it was before the internet.

Fire Emblem is probably the perfect example of this. Franchise nearing death, Awakening and Fates turned the franchise from near dead to one of Nintendo's most popular franchises yet those who liked Awakening and Fates are bashed on a lot and it's probably going to happen yet again for FE Switch.

@Ralizah "The internet" was just fine when it was a bunch of tech geeks on BBS, IRC, etc. AOL was always a cesspool of ignorant idiots and bullies. Modern "social media" made the AOL format "the internet." It's telling that half the founding figures of Facebook have sworn off social media almost violently as a destructive force, and regret their involvement in it and use their time to warn others away from it.

Most "forums" such as this tend to work out a lot better (and are generally old school) than "social" (which are based on network effects) formats do.

It's definitely seems like one of the more apparent trends over the last five or so years (not that everything was sunshine and roses before that). As @Jacob1092 has mentioned, it appears to fall line with a more general 'tribalisation' of many Western societies, with a corresponding deterioration of discourse. What I don't know is how the interplay there is between the internet and society at large works, and which way the influence flows. Is the internet merely reflecting changes wider in society, or is it responsible for them?

The development of 'Web 2.0' more tightly integrated social media into the fabric of the web, and at the same time, the proliferation of smartphones, 3G networks, and general ease of access to the internet massively opened up internet use to more people at more times of day. Not only has the way we use the internet changed, but who used it and how often. For one thing, no more queuing up for Internet cafes.

And then the question of 'size' and how it relates to 'community'. @Ralizah mentioned this and I think it's really important. People's desire for debate is strongly tied up with a desire for community, and the desire for community is often comes with a desire for a sense of 'belonging'. Not necessarily in any overly soppy sense, but enough to feel that the people you're talking with are more than just apparitions. At the very least we want our words to make something of an imprint of the world (otherwise we wouldn't bother writing them), but writing to an ever changing, ill-defined audience is like trying to carve your thoughts into a running stream. Im order to feel like part of a community, you need to be able to somewhat picture it, but in 'wall-less' communities like Twitter, or even vaguely defined communities like 'fandoms', this is nigh on impossible. How can you feel like 'part of something' when you've got no feel for what the thing you're part of actually is - other than a stream of bickering voices? How can you turn each of those voices into a person when your only contact with them is a single sassy tweet in a stream of hundreds? Where does that leave the posts that aren't sassy, or perfectly delivered memes, or somehow outrageous enough to be worth interacting with? Suddenly any content that doesn't deliver the maximum amount of impact in the timeframe any given user is likely to engage with it will be forgotten. So there's a race to the extremes in order to stay relevant. Anything that doesn't contain the necessary amount of snark, sass, flamboyancy, or general oneupmanship isn't shared or retweeted, and anything that anything that isn't shared or retweeted gets quickly discarded. That's the basic food chain of social media on a sufficiently large scale.

If our social environment grows too big, we need to become caricatures of ourselves in order to stay noticed and relevant. We're more likely to cling onto existing trends and narratives in order to be more easily understood within the existing, accepted framework of ideas that surrounds a debate. We're more likely to make caricatures of other people in order to mock them and define ourselves against them. So I think 'scale' has a lot to do with it, as well any any/many more subtle points.

I'm not sure how much of which of the above points contribute to the current online social climate found in many fandoms and other communities, and I'm not even sure to what extent each point is true. But that's at least what I think at the moment; fandoms are simply too big an entity to allow the sort of fine grained discussions that deal with the (often quite personal) reasons why people are actually fans of the thing in the first place. Discussions of larger scales inevitably fall along certain lines, construct tenets, and establish accepted narratives, and this inevitably obscures the myriad of different reasons why each individual might like the thing and want to share their feelings.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble. There have been so many changes in the last few years that it's hard to tie their influence together very conscirelt (let alone accurately). But it's a really relevant and interesting topic, so thank you for starting the thread!

Interestingly enough, I almost brought up the tribalization and group-think that seems to be inundating politics and modern society as a whole in my previous post. I held off because I wasn't sure how that would interact with the site's rules. I'm glad that seems to be accepted in this discussion.

I don't agree with everyone on everything, and I think we would be hard-pressed to find someone who agreed with every single thought and idea of ours. However, I am willing to have a constructive discussion on why my views may differ from another and how the other individual(s) may think. The problem is that there are so many out there that don't like their ingrained views challenged and refuse to hear the other half of it. What bothers me even more is when many take a random off-comment, sensational news story, etc. as fact without doing any fact-checking.

To use my previous example, it bothers me, as a long-time Pokemon fan (we're talking Gen I and Season 1 of the anime here) how much the fandom has bashed Yo-Kai Watch for being a "clone". The gameplay is in fact very different, and in fact I would argue that the story elements (well, sidequests, anyway) are more refreshing than anything Game Freak has cooked up recently. I think some of the fear here was that fans were afraid that this series would replace Pokemon; not only did I think this was a crazy notion to begin with, but Pokemon is going stronger than ever. What bothers me the most is that so many were quick to write off what is, overall, a decent series of games.

This is precisely the main reason why I stopped posting on IGN years ago. I still check articles there on occasion, but I rarely check the comment sections on the articles (and usually regret doing so) and swore off using the forums there completely.