I go to Steam regularly to play my games, usually posting simple screenshots of my game sessions. But when I go to the communities I see Internet videos, GIFs, memes, and memetic everything and it’s not really my thing. I even posted on Lemmy that I didn’t like memes in general and what do they post on here? It feels like people are having fun by abusing their humanity in the process or like a Reddit subreddit, and I specifically came to Lemmy on the Fediverse to avoid all that. They post things that I’m uncomfortable with and typically I don’t have fun by posting Internet memes for a living…that’s just weird.
Does anyone agree or does everyone here do it anyway?
I enjoy memes sometimes or whatever, but on steam I barely interact with community features other than occasional questions on the forums. I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything not interacting there.
I think of memes as like internet smalltalk. It’s a way of saying you exist so other people can be like ‘I exist too!!’ which loosens things up for deeper and more interesting conversation. It’s not everyone’s thing, though.
I don’t follow communities that are just for memes on here so I mostly look at my subscriptions when I’m not in the mood. I think you should just avoid what you don’t like and don’t worry about it.
The problem with Steam forums is that they are filled with horrible children with shitty parents, trolls, and clown farming bait. And the mods don’t do shit about it, but god help you if you speak your mind. It’s not bad with small indy games, but the big stuff like Elden Ring is full of that shit.
I do mostly engage with indy forums, when I have a question or want to report a bug. For bigger games, story or mechanics discussion is more interesting on a dedicated, moderated forum that’s separate from the official one. Official forums are usually sludge factory, it’s true.
Feel free to ignore the long rambling advice below this point.
Fan moderated forums are harder to track down, these days, and have their own flaws. Like you’d expect from something run by individuals. If you want to just share a long opinion and have people engage in comments, a blog or microblog would be better suited. With proper tagging, you can get people to discuss elden ring opinions on, say, tumblr, with you. Quality can’t be guaranteed. Diary platforms like dreamwidth are great for having long conversations with maybe three people, if you’re lucky. You can sometimes see genuinely interesting conversations in heavily moderated videogame news comments, also.
Discord has problems, but if you find one run by people who also want to have a discussion, it’s golden.
Maybe avoid official forums and hunt down something fan-made, while accepting a lot of failure. It’s like dating. Finding compatible people means meeting a lot of incompatible ones first.
Also, for really popular things, the trash is going to seem overwhelming, especially right when new things come out for it. If 10% of everything is interesting to you, a fandom producing a million items is going to overwhelm you with garbage compared to a fandom producing 100 items.
Unfortunately, I’ve been interested in engaging in conversations with fans of things for decades, now. Do you want to develop this useless skill that I have? Or just like, take up a different hobby? Engage in videogame conversations exclusively in person?