Chase & I were talking today and the subject of a certain, very large, costuming website came up. He asked it people even still use it; I told him yes, all the time, that’s part of its’ problem.
You upload something now and it’s buried as soon as it posts, because there are so many users now. You’re lucky to get one comment and a handful of views, whereas “back in the day” you’d get hundreds of views and 10-30 comments. Now, it’s like, what’s the point?
But as I see it, it’s not really the size of the community that’s the problem. It’s the mindset. Back in the earlier days, you knew everybody in the costuming/convention community. You looked forward to seeing what your friends and favourites were going to post next. You could easily scroll through newly uploaded photos and actually get to where you stopped last time you looked. You commented because you were a community, and these were your friends, and you were excited to see what they were working on.
Now, it seems to me, nobody cares about any of that anymore. As I said in my email back to Chase, “Nobody wants to comment; they only want comments for themselves, which I guess is a reflection of how the costuming community as a whole has changed over the years.” It’s 300,000 people yearning for “cosplay fame” – whatever that is.
I miss the old days. I mean, there are great perks to costuming getting bigger and bigger; the costumes are better, supplies are easier to get, and we’re, I think, more respected in the geek community than we used to be. But along with that growth comes the loss of that “small town” feeling of the costuming community of a decade ago.
It’s definitely a different hobby than the one I got into all those years ago.