Refer to someone you’ve never met by their name if you can. This usually works best in a school or work setting. And when they ask how you know their name just simply reply:
Honestly, homebrewing becoming a mainstream hobby would be pretty great, I’m always interested in trying a beer someone else brewed and it would probably make sourcing ingredients a lot easier if there was enough of a demand to necessitate a local shop in my area.
This works up to a certain size, then you start having to contend with more shameless money grabs, scalpers catching wind of things and making it impossible for actual fans/users of the product to get stuff for a reasonable price and more scammers.
And the opposite end of that is the corporatization of your previously small cozy wholesome authentic cottage industry sized hobby. It happened to videogames in the late 2010s.
Cycling? Great, increased funding for infrastructure and increased general awareness. Amateur radio? Lower prices for rigs, innovation, and more contacts to be made.
If your interest in a hobby is based on its exclusivity, it may be that you’re more interested in exclusivity than in the hobby itself…
I think they were more likely referring to how when the public eye is on something many companies will start churning out low-effort products to capitalise on the interest. The market would be flooded with cheap and inferior products in that niche, potentially threatening the smaller business that actually cared about making quality products for those hobbyists. I know this won’t apply to every hobby, but there are definitely a number of them that will.
Well, some people don’t do well with the higher speed and more social interaction it can lead to. It doesn’t have to result in giving up that hobby, but leaving communities related to it.
It’s not that some hobbies are based on exclusivity or even some other hipster rationalization, but there definitely is a period where a shit load of new people come in, read half a wiki page, then proceed to argue and talk down to people who have been at it for years. It ruins communities if the audience widens too much at once. I’ve been online long enough to have seen it happen multiple times.
The thing is that the mainstream aspect will burn out, like most fads do, but the people who really love it will keep loving it, and some (usually small) amount of the new influx will also stick around permanently and enrich the community. It’s just about surviving through the fad part that is hard.
The rapid growth will destroy your hobby by warping the culture beyond recognition and forcing you to act the their norms. I’ve seen it happen more than once.
For me it depends entirely on 1) which hobby and 2) how the mainstream audience shapes it; if investors believe they can make more money by promoting certain aspects of the hobby, they can change it’s entire landscape. And that’s not even getting into what can happen when IP law gets involved.
It’s a shitty tradeoff to have to make, because sometimes I just want to everyone to enjoy what I enjoy. I’ve also seen hobbies die from too much exposure.
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