I miss the good old days…
Good post… Very interesting reading all the replies. …ANDY
It’s hard to believe I’ve been on this board for almost 13 years. I feel like I was a kid when I joined this place, and in many ways I was. I was still in high school at the time, heck, I acted like I was in high school back then. I cringe when I come across some of my old posts. Now I’m 30, I finished college, have a steady job, a dog, and living my best life. I read through this thread, and I see a lot of points I agree with, particularly about the loss of community around here. This place used to feel a lot tighter. Everybody was on a first name basis. Nowadays you just don’t know who you’re talking to anymore. The internet is a cool place. In this thread, I can talk to somebody from California, Pennsylvania, and just a short drive away from me all at the speed of fiberoptics. But the internet has, I feel, also offered humanity one of the most forbidden fruits: the curse of anonymity. We don’t know who we’re talking to, and sadly, most just don’t care. Social media has certainly contributed to it, but it just exploited a flaw of the internet already present.
I’ve taken my fair share of breaks from the hobby, and every time I return this place seems a little different. I remember this place pre-TOTS, when personal websites and email addresses were the only way to get a really good mask. It was cliquish, certainly, but it was warm. You felt a certain personal touch interacting here, like you stepped into an old neighborhood bar where everybody knew everybody who came through the door. You asked somebody how their kids were, how the dog’s health was, how the better half was doing. We were a community. I think I actually took my first break not long after I joined just because I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing here. I used that time to better study the franchise, the masks, and not try to stand out like a total newby. I didn’t come back to posting again for almost a year, and by that time my head was spinning with how changed everything was. That was 2012, and TOTS had just come out with their first Myers masks.
TOTS has definitely been a game changer, and I feel for both better and for worse. It’s made collecting more accessible to everybody, but it’s also made the collecting more accessible to EVERYBODY, including the rude little snots who don’t remember the community, and think they know it all. I used to call this place “the Myers mask community,” but these days I’m hesitant to use the word. We’ve lost the personal sense of community. It feels like the cart has come before the horse, where instead of standing back and learning before jumping in, people just go straight to TOTS, build up a collection as fast as they can buy one, and then slowly upgrade from there. Sure, we all started with something lesser than what we have now, but back then it felt like we took the time to build a collection, and not build one just to have one and feel like part of the group. We earned out place over time instead of buying it on the spot.
I saw somebody mention how much buy/sell/trade this hobby has become, which I really have to agree with. There’s too much flipping these days. People buy a mask, then turn around and sell it a week later at a decent profit. It’s meant to be a hobby, not Flip This House. It astounds me when I see people, on Facebook especially, who land their “grail piece” only to sell it two weeks later. It’s clearly pure profiteering, and I’ve always felt like flipping cheapens the idea of collecting. A collection isn’t meant to be a hoard, you should sell off old pieces you no longer like. But you should also buy pieces because you like them, not just to turn a profit from them. You should know a little bit about everything in your collection, maybe even be able to tell a story about a few of the more notable pieces. That’s what collecting is.
As for social media? I think we’re entering an interesting crossroad of the internet. Facebook has been slowly bleeding for years, with the median user age increasing every year. Twitter’s future is still uncertain with an egomaniac at the helm. And Tik Tok, the primary platform of under-25ers, is on the edge of being banned in the US. We may very well be seeing the beginning of the end to the age of social media. And where else will there be for people to congregate on the internet? Chat rooms that act as quasi-message boards like Discord? Message boards again? Who knows! One thing I do hate about social media is how abusively divisive it is. Politics and controversy find their way into the heart of just about every conversation there. Personally, I’ve all but abandoned my Facebook account, deleted my Twitter account, and have no interest in anything else besides messaging and Instagram. I think I’m a happier person for it. I’m currently on another break from the hobby, and popped in only to see if anything new was being said about the TOTS Rob Zombie mask line up, but I came across this thread and felt the need to respond. I don’t look back very often in life, but I always seem to find my way back here.
I’ve certainly not been around as long as many of the people still on here, but about 10 yrs. I still come back to lurk now and then. The move to FB and IG was happening when I started collecting. The new trilogy seemingly watered down the community even more.
There’s barely any discussion unless you are messaging someone privately on social media. And if there’s discussion, it quickly turns into a heated argument on FB. Though that stuff has always happened, FB made it worse. Lot of keyboard warriors on there.
So many guys come in hot and heavy for 6 months to a yr and are gone overnight. Life happens sometimes but it’s sometimes just to gain “clout” like has been mentioned here. Those of us who enjoy collecting and Myers are always around even if we take breaks.
There’s a lot to agree with what has been mentioned here. I’ve watched massive changes in 10 yrs so can’t imagine those who have been around for 15 or more
I miss when people would still even hunt down things like BIC lighters in the same color from the same era that Loomis had in H2. Now the hobby is geared more toward people wanting to repaint masks on social media and make a quick 300. I made my first account here in 2003 and wound up being insanely poor in my young adulthood and not even having internet, forgot about the board, then remembered it in like 2017-2018 and came back