Certain activities attract certain stereotypes of people. For instance, the main demographic of fishermen tend to be older men who happen to reside in more rural areas. This is not an accident, but rather on purpose. To be able to fish, you require adequate strength, possess the ability to drive yourself, the willingness to be cut and injured, and to be near water which can support wildlife, not something you usually find in large cities. The requirements for participating in this activity select the participants of that activity, as for those individuals the activity has less friction than other activities. It would be difficult to get into fishing if you lived in the Mojave Desert.

I think that the amount of friction preventing or allowing an individual from performing an action drastically affects the likelihood of that action being taken by the individual. Take two people - Alice and Bob. Alice has no tools in her kitchen, while Bob has a fully stocked fridge and all the tools he needs. Bob will be more likely to cook dinner than Alice given all other factors are relatively equal. For Bob, cooking dinner is a simple task as his environment has been set up for less friction for him to cook. However, for Alice, she would have to make trips to the supermarket to purchase tools. The additional mental effort of preparing introduces friction between Alice and her kitchen, making her less likely to use it as much as Bob.

In a sense, the anime community is the same way. The friction of joining the anime community has degraded to a certain point at which anyone can just get into it. It’s never been an easier time to be an anime fan and to be involved in the anime community. Anyone can do it.

And therein lies the issue, that anyone can do it. If there are too many fishermen on a pier, the lines get tangled up. When you cast, you have to worry about hitting people with the line. The pier bans overhead casting and forces participants to underhand cast only. The fish cleaning stations form lines, while the fish rot. The high barrier to entry of fishing ensures the level of participants be enough to ensure each participant is able to enjoy themselves and not have issues doing what they enjoy. The gate is kept by the size of the pier, the dangers of cliff fishing, the price of fishing gear, the parking in the area, and other physical factors that prevent the sport from being too crowded.

Online spaces do not have these physical limitations. There are no limits on how many people can enter. You can’t go to Anitwitter and immediately see that the pier is crowded. But it is, and the impacts can be felt. When the field is so crowded, the most vocal and ideologically aggressive dominate the conversation, and everyone else is kicked out of the deep end of the pier to the shallows. Yet, the most vocal have nothing to contribute, so they converse with each other.

This is the lowest common denominator. Online anime culture spaces, due to their own popularity, ease of access, and lack of gatekeeping, have filled themselves with the lowest common denominator, whose ideology takes over as the dominant thought within the space.

While online spaces do not have physical limitations and can scale to as much as technology will allow, there is a limit to the amount of exposure each single participant in the space can get. Each person can only consume as much media as their time allows. If they permit themselves to consume and propagate content from the lowest common denominator, they will understand nothing but the lowest common denominator. Those who have isolated themselves from this ideology will move to other piers, or take up other sports such as hiking or golf, as the friction from entering the space will have increased due to difference between their perception of the hobby versus the image of the hobby shouted from the lowest common denominator.

Fewer and fewer people are reading books. By books, I mean fiction read for pleasure. You hear articles written all the time about how social media, the internet, TV, radio, telegraphs, and newspapers are ruining the attention span of young adults and how we’re all going to be like the wheelchair people in Wall-E. It seems like every other day another article comes out in the Washington Post or Buzzfeed about how millennials are killing books.

Why do we think reading books for fun is important? It’s not.

In 2018, we have better things to do with our time than read books. The people who drool and circlejerk over “classic” literature fail to realize that as humans have progressed as a society, we’ve grown better at doing stuff. We’re better at running, we’re better at cooking, we’re better at music, and we’re just smarter and superior overall to those hundreds of years ago. A modern high school sports team would have destroyed the competition in the ancient Olympics. We’ve developed technologies and activities that are much more efficient and provide a better return on time investment than those we’ve had in the past.

1984, the book of edgy high schoolers across America, teaches us about the dangers of tyranny while delivering a thriller story. It’s a wonderful book. Just like any edgy high schooler, I too enjoyed the book when I was in high school. It taught the 16 year old me about politics, society, and people. However, it took a few hours and a few hundred pages. High schoolers now can just watch a 3 minute Youtube video about the topics and themes of 1984 and be just as educated.

With the internet, anyone (like me!) can have a voice. Anyone can put anything out on the internet for anyone to read. Books are subject to the whims of the market, the editors, the publishing company, the formats in which they must adhere to, and other miscellaneous factors that ensure maximum readership and profit. Getting a book published is difficult, way more difficult than publishing on Tumblr or hosting your own site on Github for free. We use this self-selection process to say “wow, books must be impressive since they got published.” This is erroneous reasoning.

With the global market of ideas that is the internet, books are simply failing to compete. There’s more interesting stuff in the world than there is in the non-fiction aisle of the library, and with the internet, writings about those things and events can be easily accessed by the common man to consume. These news articles, opinion pieces, blogposts, even social media commentaries are often more concise, provide a better return on investment, and are simply more interesting than some book that became famous because the printing press wasn’t invented yet.

There’s nothing wrong with reading books for pleasure. Getting immersed in a book is fun, and a good book can be a comfortable way to spend an afternoon. But compared to modern media formats, the opportunity cost of reading a book just isn’t very worth it.

Before Discord, there was something else that many on the internet used. IRC or Internet Relay Chat is a protocol upon which numerous networks built their communities. IRC culture is vastly different from Discord culture. In IRC, the user connects to one or multiple IRC servers. Anyone can then create a channel on these IRC servers, or join a channel that someone else has created. These channels contain the community that the user wishes to join. Whoever created these channels were the owners of the channels, with the IRC protocol supporting an extensive permissions and ban system. IRC does not support GIFs or emojis. It doesn’t support voice chat. It doesn’t work well with mobile. If you lose connection to the IRC server, you lose out on that conversation. If you wanted something, you had to write it yourself. Being completely textual, even logging in required some form of computer competency.

IRC was created 30 years ago, and many still use it and the network of servers set up almost three decades ago.

Why Discord’s model sucks

Many IRC communities have persisted through decades. I’m not talking about IRC servers, but rather IRC channels. The same will not be said for Discord.

While many argue that the main problem with Discord’s ability to retain long running communities can be traced due to the fact that it’s an application run by a corporation rather than a protocol people can write their own stuff for, there’s a large factor to the fast decline of Discord communities that many do not consider.

A user joins a Discord server, which is created by a person. This is the community that the user joins. This server can have many channels, each of which may have a different topic. In IRC, the user joins a channel where the community resides, while in Discord the user joins a server in which the community resides.

Thus, the Discord community may have many different channels.

The problem with too many channels and small communities

Large communities are probably fine.

For small communities, the splitting of the chatrooms into different channels leads itself to the problem that most of these channels are not used. The user sees them not being used and thinks that the server is dead. There’s simply not enough conversation to allow users to join in.

Imagine 40 strangers living in a mansion with 40 rooms. Most people are going to stick to their own room. Imagine 40 strangers living in a single house. They’ll be forced to talk to each other, or they can leave.

There’s just not enough conversation in a small community to justify the number of channels they have. Most Discord server owners don’t realize this, and they create a crapload of channels that nobody except a few use once in a while. Users don’t get to know each other. While there may be several hundred users in a server, it may rarely see conversation.

IRC is different. A community is one channel. You either talk or you watch people talk, or you get out. It takes active effort to connect to an IRC channel, while on Discord when you’re on a server, you connect there forever automatically.

By condensing the space, users in IRC are forced to interact with each other, which forces lasting bonds.

This is why IRC communities last decades, while Discord communities will not.

There’s a lot of other problems with Discord’s chat model, but I think this is one that people don’t often realize, and is one of the main contributors towards dead communities.

We are hosting two panels at Fanimecon this year! We are hosting our typical Animemes talk on Sunday May 27th from 11pm-1am, but we would like to invite you to our brand new panel: Keep Anime Anime - Whitewashing of Anime Culture.

In today’s globalized world, access is the name of the game. Companies tout statistics bragging about floating balloon with internet access to server rural communities in Australia, or brag about how they’ve brought electricity to much of India. However, is access always a good thing? Sure, globalism has provided great humanitarian benefits to much of the world, but should the same apply for cultures?

A few years ago, GamerGate happened. Whether you as a person are “for” or “against” GamerGate, there is no denying that it not only changed the culture of video games, but also the political atmosphere. Suddenly, it was cool to reject the mainstream. Games were originally designed for the basement neckbeard, fingers coated with cheetos dust while downing countless bottles of mountain dew. Gamers were bullied for being uncool, and they were ostracized and often looked down upon for not enjoying mainstream hobbies such as football or baseball. Now as video games are easily accessible and e-sports are streamed on ESPN, the formerly bullied feel as if their culture has been appropriated by the same audiences who shuuned it in the past.

While GamerGate’s claims of culture appropriation are valid or not, cultural appropriation is a real thing. Sure, if we think of ourselves as cultured by avoiding Sushirrito and going to the Real Sushi(tm) place next door, conveniently ignoring that the workers speak Spanish and the owners speak Cantonese. We know quinoa is bad for the poor South American farmers who can’t afford to eat their own traditional food anymore, but a few articles about the health benefits of the crunchy grain and Kimberly’s incessant ranting about how her hot new yoga instructor thinks it’ll make people live forever will make us change our mind.

Companies such as Crunchyroll enjoy bragging about how many “overseas fans” they’re connecting to the “industry.” They make broad claims about how overseas money is helping the “industry” while they themselves make big bucks from subscribers. Now, we even see their names on the start and ending credits.

More and more people have access to Japanese animation than ever before. Come to our panel to learn why this may not be a good thing.

Sunday, May 27th 12am-1am (Saturday Midnight/Sunday Morning)