Comment by userbinator
11 years ago
Why is the hacking culture like this dead?
The demoscene is very much alive, if you look at places like pouet.net there's plenty of new demos released even in the sub-1k categories. The newest ones there are from this month. However, you might be correct to say that it's become less known amongst general computer users and programmers, and I think the consumer-oriented nature of computers today (especially mobile devices) is mostly to blame; users are restrained and actively discouraged from tinkering with their machines software and hardware-wise, and isolated from knowledge by many layers of abstraction and complexity. There's a big movement against users sharing executables with each other and running them, and while the security concerns are real, I think it's also had a chilling effect on the hobbyists. The fact that antimalware software tends to detect packed demos as suspicious/infected (false positives) doesn't help either. In addition, many people probably found their way into demoscene via the warez scene that it grew from - and with the growing antipiracy concerns, that route is becoming narrower too.
While I don't think the demoscene is currently "dead" per se, it's certainly at risk of becoming even more of an obscure and fringe culture than it is now.
I agree with this, I think the fraction of people who are looking at computers in this deep way is similar to what it has always been, but it is still a small fraction. And as such its activities are swamped in the noise of other things with the same name.
Perhaps part of the difference is that before (when RAM/CPU was expensive/slow) you were forced to do this to make something impressive and now we have an excess of compute and RAM. So to rekindle that challenge we set an artificial limit.