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Comment by alex1138

17 hours ago

Some of it was the death of Flash (though with Ruffle now there may be hope) but the web now just feels much less diverse.

Or possibly I just miss being a teenager. Or some combination

6 comments

alex1138

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dag11  12 hours ago

I feel the same thing.

I think part of it also is that, games with the same scope of flash games are still being made, but they're being made for phones which is where the customers. Flash games were the perfect mobile game before mobile games existed.

But the magic was that flash games were created on the same machines they were made on, so curious players (often kids!) had a natural funnel in to dabbling with the creation side, so whole communities of creatives formed naturally.

I don't know how we can solve this disconnect between creation and consumption :( Sure there's many apps that let you build content from phones (swift playgrounds, other game-making apps, and now a whole gold rush of agentic prompting app-building apps...) but a phone is inherently non-immersive so I don't know how a creator can ever get into a flow state of building content on a phone itself.

But also we possibly just miss being teens on computers.

tombert  13 hours ago

I really feel like there are fewer websites now.

When I was eighteen, I went to Something Awful, Newgrounds, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, GameTrailers, Cinemassacre, YouTube, and SpoonyExperiment daily. Nowadays it's basically just YouTube for all that stuff (though I haven't watched Spoony for quite awhile).

Newgrounds is still around, I probably should make more of an effort to go there, and I do have stairs in my house, but I definitely don't go on as many different sites as I used to.

I certainly miss the days when everyone had their own web page.