voredere:
ot3:
i dont like the idea that kids these days are doing their fandom rps with ai chatbots. that’s how you’re supposed to make lifelong friends as a weird really online teen.
it’s because forums are dead. tumblrs become too janky to easily find communities and many are abandoned, twitter isn’t very intuitive for it, we don’t have mailing lists, facebook doesn’t really let you make character accounts anymore, and all the old “omegle but for role play” type websites died out ages ago. toy house exists, sure, but can be hard to get into and in my opinion is more oriented towards displaying art and designs rather than writing.
these days there just isn’t space to meet other online rpers and connect like there used to be. back in the day you could go to gaia, neopets, any number of pro boards and other custom forums, you could meet people in chat rooms, there were websites dedicated to rp matchmaking and ads, email lists and circles and “guilds”, tumblr communities, just unlimited networking options.
these days if you don’t have an established network your options are:
-reach out on mainstream social media (high risk of no one finding your profile, high risk of regular accounts finding your profile and being rude about it)
-join an MMORPG, LARP, or tabletop (not the same imo)
-get really into solo writing
-use the janky AI out of desperation
it sucks pretty bad but i feel like the best way to tackle the issue isn’t “ugh why do people use these awful bots” so much as “hey where the fuck DID all the role play networking websites go”
it’s the same energy as when people started wondering why kids don’t go outside anymore after they were banned from the malls
Reblog2 weeks ago with 22,052 notes
