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The Old Cubing Community...

EntireTV

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So I don't want to sound old and experienced in cubing because I'm not. I'm pretty slow and have only been cubing for about 2 years.

But recently I took a little break from cubing, because school was getting back into the swing of things. And I come back and check my social media, this forum, YouTube, etc. and see that all of a sudden it's infested with kids. Now I am not saying this is bad but it is just an observation.

I'm actually happy cubing is growing but with that we have almost 200 people competitions with so many "slow" people (not trying to put anyone down). But I was thinking back to when I started cubing how the community seemed much more mature and niche, and I liked it that way.

Am I the only one missing the "old" community? And for the really experienced cubers, have you noticed this change in previous occasions?
 

mDiPalma

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I also took a pretty big break from cubing and came back to a vastly different community - one that I will also agree has definitely changed for the worse.

First and foremost, this forum is all but completely dead. Positive contributions are drowned out with stuff like "Make Assumptions about the Next Person" and "The Entire Bee Movie Script." But it's not just this forum. Speedcubing.it is constantly saturated with people's silly cubing diaries (personal accomplishment threads), and I'm sure the same thing is true for other online forums.

I hate to say it, but it's in part due to the way that our admins manage the community. One, they completely ruined the format for this website. All the important stuff is missing or hidden for the sake of appealing to newbies. I had to dig 15 minutes to find these statistics a few days ago, when it should be so easy to find. Featured threads are featured for months on end, for no reason (why not feature something else after 3 weeks of beating a dead horse?). New threads don't even appear at the top of the portal until someone replies to them (how can someone reply to them if it's not on the portal?). Not to mention the search function is almost useless (try typing in "zz-d" or something short like that). Also, the mods edit and move posts for no reason. That new "LL skip method" was moved to the "New Method/Concept Development Thread" even though it is a COMPLETE method, including a comprehensive algorithm set and all. Seems like there are too many cooks in the kitchen - and few of them even have a culinary education. Also why are there so many "One answer question" threads?

The mods also punish positive contributors for no reason. Ben and I were both banned on (what I'll say is) a whim. There is no way to even petition these actions. I'd like to think that I've contributed more to this community than "making an acronym out of a previous poster's word," yet I have been banned, muted, and have 80 infraction points... Ben was literally banned because he made a video about being able to get sub20 with bad cubing habits. This is just silly. Don't ban people that contribute positively to the community. It's like a child threatening to hold his breath or go on hunger strike.

But it's not just the mods. The toxic community is also a major contributor to its self-deterioration. A few years ago, that jskyler guy was actually trying to help people out by making video guides and tutorials on how to be color neutral with cfop in 30 days, yet numerous people absolutely shredded him for no visible reason. Unsolved (or whatever his name was) was trying to make a 5x5x5 solver and had different opinions than a few members of this forum, and he got ripped to pieces and left. One of my close friends posted some slight misconception about the way corner and edge cycles interract after only a week on this forum, and she got such flack that she never wanted to come back. This happens too frequently. And the condescending attitudes and short responses (like Dene's in this very thread) don't help either.

Another issue is that this type of community is just not suitable for the majority of discussions that are had on a regular basis (that are more conversational in nature). That's why people move to things like #rubik, discord, and reddit for the majority of their conversation. This forum has unfortunately become more of a place to record things (accomplishments, methods, software) than to discuss them.

I also agree that there is definitely a larger proportion of younger, and I'll say "less-knowledgable" cubers with different interests. Beginners aside, the old community was always curious about learning new things and had an appreciation for methods like Petrus and Heise, or weird puzzles and cuboids. Nowadays the average reddit cuber has no idea what the Petrus method even is. It could be, as was suggested, that younger cubers are getting more and more access, as a demographic, to social media and the internet in general, which magnifies the effect of a "less-knowledgable" community.

All in all, I feel the community is definitely worse than it used to be. That goes for this forum in particular, but also for the community as a whole.
 

shadowslice e

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I agree with most of these points but not this:
Unsolved (or whatever his name was) was trying to make a 5x5x5 solver and had different opinions than a few members of this forum, and he got ripped to pieces and left.
The main reason Unsolved got "ripped apart" was that he straight up lied about a lot of stuff and also was not exactly very nice to anyone who challenged him even if they were questioning what often seemed like jumps out of nowhere with little to no justification and complaining when people asked him to justify

I also agree that there is definitely a larger proportion of younger, and I'll say "less-knowledgable" cubers with different interests. Beginners aside, the old community was always curious about learning new things and had an appreciation for methods like Petrus and Heise, or weird puzzles and cuboids. Nowadays the average reddit cuber has no idea what the Petrus method even is. It could be, as was suggested, that younger cubers are getting more and more access, as a demographic, to social media and the internet in general, which magnifies the effect of a "less-knowledgable" community.

This is also my main complaint about the forum: while there are a few more methods which are gaining ground, almost any method proposal will not get anywhere with any investigation.
 

One Wheel

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I'm hardly an old hand at cubing: I learned to solve a 3x3 less than two years ago, and I've only been to one competition, but I was disappointed by it. I really enjoy speedsolving, even though I'm not all that good at it, but I was shocked at the competition by kids basically treating their parents, in my observation, as ATMs, and the parents were fine with it. Maybe it's just culture shock: I grew up the oldest of 10 kids in a family with an expendable income on the order of $10k/ year, and all my friends were from similar situations. We weren't poor, we just knew that the "poverty level" was a slightly off-color joke about unfathomable worldly wealth. The week after I went to my one cubing competition I went to a bible quizzing competition that was run by the people I grew up with. On the surface the demographics of most of the competitors were similar: predominantly white, averaging around middle school age, intelligent, well educated kids, all from Wisconsin or nearby areas. Comparable ratios of adults to kids, too. Slightly higher female to male ratio for quizzing, but still around 50-50. The quizzing kids were very respectful and well behaved, happily sitting for a 15 minute sermon before stuff started. At the cubing comp the competition area was never below a full throated roar until it was time for 3BLD, when after a few requests for quiet most people left the room rather than quiet down. I generally really enjoy kids, and I'm sure that most of the people involved in cubing are genuinely nice people, but as far as I'm concerned I'll stick with the weekly comps here, and only go to an official comp if it's convenient and has a selection of events I'm really interested in and time limits such that I can most likely complete averages. There would be ways of organizing competitions to encourage a more mature environment, and there is no law stating that for a 6-year old and a 40-year old to compete they have to interact on the 6-year old's level, but I don't see any will to change.
 
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I do feel like the lots of kids are joining, and their are lots more noobs. From listing to the old Cubecast, it seems like everyone knew everyone, now it is lots of people who don't know much.Varasono
I trolled the world (didn't mean to, I trolled myself) with coming up with a method subset for Varasono kina like guemond and some kids at comps were saying,"No way! Your the one who inveted Fortega!" I kida did invent it, but I would have liked it better if he said,"Oh you know that 2x2 'fortega' method? That is pretty much guemond."
 

qwr

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Interesting discussion. I knew about the ss forums in 2012 but never joined, so I never was involved with the "old community". Even being on this forum for three years I've already seen like two "generations" of users come and go which happens on any forum.
 
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