A friend / former band mate of mine trades a lot of music gear, mostly guitar stuff. He’s always on the hunt for something newer / better / different. So he buys and sells a lot of used stuff. It used to be a fun hobby. He says now everybody is just out to screw you over. When he sells an item now, he has to go through this elaborate ritual of photographing and logging and carefully packaging everything. Weighing everything, etc. It’s insane. It has sucked all the joy out of it, so he does far less of it. Consumers have been trained by our corporate overlords to behave like this. Everyone is “I drink your milkshake” all the time.

I enjoy some hobbies but I avoid collecting stuff. I prefer creating my own stuff.

Magic the Gathering.

I played religiously in high school. Competed in tournaments every weekend. But around Stronghold, they just started churning out expansion after expansion after expansion, and even placing high in most tournaments, i just couldn’t keep up with the older guys that had incomes. So, i quit.

When Commander came out, i tried to play again, but it just felt different. It was more about who had the coolest mat, or who had the newest combo. It felt monetized, and i didn’t like it. The final straw for me was when i found out they did a promo expansion with My Little Pony… If you like MLP, cool. More power to you. But i HATE MLP with a rage that could scour all life from existence. My little sister was obsessed, and that meant it was in my face for a decade at least. Can’t stand that shit, and wizards going cash grab during the height of the bronie movement just killed the last of my good will.

Running Linux used to be a hobby of mine. But nowadays it’s so easy and problem-free, it’s just my OS.

I used to be hugely into World of Warcraft.

The more I think about it, what ruined the game for me wasn’t a particular update or new game feature. It was the community, or rather how much it has degraded into a hotbed of elitism, toxicity and greed.

WoW is the kind of community where you’ll be ostracized from joining groups unless you already have a high ranking. And even if you get into a group, people will abandon the group or boot you out and call you a “boosted retard” in the process over a minor error, like dying to a boss mechanic or not pressing the Bloodlust/Time Warp/Heroism button in time.

Blizzard doesn’t do anything, because Activision and Microsoft have spent years gutting out their customer support teams and installing automated systems in their place.

Podcasting

I love listening to podcasts, but almost never the ones that everyone goes on about. I like ones made by people with a passion for storytelling, or ones that serve as people’s journals, y’know?

I’ve made my own podcasts over the past 15 years or so, but a few years back I gave up. The barrier to entry lowering so sharply meant an influx of them, making it basically impossible to get mine heard. So I’d spend 8/10 hours making my 15 minute episodes sound as perfect as I could for them to get 5 listens. I tried to tell myself that I was doing it for me, but ultimately I wanted people to hear my efforts.

So I got burned out and at some point just abandoned the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that anyone can pick up their phone and bang out a professional sounding piece of audio, but between that and the likes of Spotify throwing cash at the already big names, it became impossible to stand out without having your own marketing budget.

So I used to be massively into warhammer 30k and 40k, I have over 100k of points of models probably over 200k. I used to have one of the largest book collections going, over £12k worth when I sold it. Yet I dropped out the hobby after several decades because

*My main army is space marines and they started killing them off so that they could reissue the entire range but worse *They dumbed down the rules progressively more and more *30k rollout and tournament support just stopped meaning that my huge investment didn’t get used anywhere near enough *models became more monopose

• New book releases of the same quality just stopped, because they wouldn’t pay to keep the big name authors

Plenty of people like the new direction, I don’t as it stole the ground from under me and required I rebuy in for worse.

Tech. The same people who got into law of medicine came here. No love for the platform. Love of money.

If I’m honest, video games and computers in general. The community has some to do with it, I guess, but more because the people making them just seem to not care about the customers at all anymore.

If I had to put my feeling into words, its that they try to make things at the smallest possible cost with the highest return possible, including throwing ads into everything (making for a poorer experience for the users), while simultaneously making everything bland so they can appeal to everyone.

Ten years ago, I loved video games, and now the only “next-gen” console I have is a Switch and a Steam Deck. I used to be a huge Windows fan, but now I can hardly stomach Windows 11, and run Linux exclusively as much as possible.

Big tech ruined tech. Big video games ruined video games.

not so much a hobby, but there was a rapper I was following who used to respond to you on Snapchat before his following got too big. I lost interest after the personal touch was gone

I still like his music, but I’m not as passionate of a fan as I once was

No. When I take up a hobby, it’s because I like the thing, not because it’s cool, or different, or whatever.

I like guns, I like shooting, I enjoy going to competitions–even if I’m not very good–and I’d love it if I could get more people into it, even if they’re ‘gaming’ competitions. (And make no mistake, there are a lot of people that do everything they can to game a competition stage, just to shave .2s off their time, or increase their hit factor by .1.) Yeah, it’s expensive–I think I burned about $200 in ammunition I’d reloaded last weekend–and ‘cheapening’ it would make it much easier to practice more.

No, not because of cheapening. I’ve left hobbies because of the crowds associated with it (anime) or because I couldn’t afford pay to win (magic the gathering). My current hobbies are one that benefit from community but don’t need it: homebrewing, baking, 3d printing, food preservation, etc.

You use the word “hobby”, but I think this is a unique problem to hobbies involving collections. Personally I stay away from collection hobbies because they inevitably devolve into a binder full of stuff you don’t use or enjoy because you already own it, and a rat race to obtain stuff you don’t have. That’s not my idea of a good time.

Granted, most hobbies are money pits or conversely time sinks, but that’s kinda the point. As long as it brings you joy or personal fulfillment.

Every kind of hobby ultimately rests on some different kinds of reward mechanisms. Whether it’s the thrill of winning at a competition, the excitement of discovery, or the satisfaction of accomplishment, these sorts of positive emotions are what keep a hobby interesting and engaging for us. Collecting is no different, and this is where I believe the problems start.

Collecting as a hobby gets its main motivator from acquiring rare stuff. While there is a learning component to it (learning about all the stuff that’s out there, the history, why some things are rare and others are not, and what fair market prices are for everything) and a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment (from gazing at a completed collection), the main drive that keeps people engaged is the excitement of unboxing and taking possession of new and rare item.

Unfortunately, this is an extremely fleeting and hollow emotion. It can last as little as a few minutes and rarely lasts more than a few days. In the long run, I believe this is what leads people to lose interest in collecting: they simply run out of rare stuff to obtain and thus lose the excitement they once had. Some even get so frustrated and disillusioned by collecting that they go out of their way to destroy or sell off their collections, often experiencing an enormous sense of relief afterwards (but potentially also a sense of loss and regret).

Contrast this with hobbies based around making or fixing stuff: making wine, brewing beer, gardening, cooking and baking, repairing old clocks or TVs or computers, restoring old cars, woodworking or blacksmithy or hobby machining, making jewellery or clothing, programming video games. These hobbies all differ from collecting because they’re focused on learning and personal growth. For example, there is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to pick a few jalapeño peppers off the plants you raised from seeds, but the ultimate driver is the thrill of learning how to better take care of plants so that next time they grow even bigger and healthier than before!

Likewise with a repair hobby such as fixing old clocks: each one you come across (and there is some overlap with collecting here) has a unique history with a unique set of challenges to overcome if you are to get the thing repaired and running again good as new. But it differs from collecting in that the biggest satisfaction arrives at the end, when you complete the repair, rather than the beginning when you unbox the clock.

Some of the other making/crafting/food hobbies also provide additional satisfaction when you’re able to give away or sell your creations to friends and family (or strangers at a farmer’s market or Etsy shop). Having another person be happy as a result of something you learned how to do is incredibly rewarding in ways that an obscure collection may not be. It can be quite a downer to have others fail to understand what’s so interesting about your collection and even painful if they tell you they think it’s a waste of time and money. Of course, ultimately this reward/consequence of a hobby depends greatly on your relationships to other people and how much you care (or not) what they think.

Magic: The Gathering.

As soon as they made a rule that you can’t have a deck of 30 Black Lotused and 30 Fireballs, I just gave up. What’s the point if I can’t have fun?

I would try continuing what collection of games I’ve tried to build, through Steam but it wasn’t the same. Nowadays, the used video games market has turned into just a platform full of resellers, pawn brokers and stingy greedy collectors.

Yeah…

It’s a “hobby” which is buying things that aren’t made anymore.

How was it going to end any other way?

Lots of people wants to buy a few old things. The people who pay the most get it, and they won’t sell for less than they bought, so prices keep going up until there’s no supply and rich bored people just keep trading back and forth as investment.