Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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I'm 21, which places me well on the younger tip of my two biggest strictly recreational interests: MLB and menswear, and I would generally say I make a serious attempt at nerding out in those areas. What I think has changed is how atomized the communities are from broader audiences. Being a baseball fan 60 years ago meant arguing over whether Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle was better. Today, it means arguing over whether or not to use defense-adjusted or fielding-independent statistics to measure the value of pitchers, which is a much more interesting question (Mays was clearly the better player), but also far more granular and inaccessible to casual fans and passive bystanders. Similarly, I think a lot of people are surface-level fans of the Smiths than in the past, but I think past Smiths fans are probably pretty comparable to present Bladee fans in terms of depth of knowledge (although Bladee is probably a much bigger leap for a non-fan than the Smiths are). I think it's actually gotten harder than ever to start getting interested in a lot of subjects because most of the in-depth communities are in so deep that there aren't really any clearly visible footholds to start off with.
I agree with you but it’s also a very online thing. In real life an autistic hardcore fan is happy to talk to a casual fan at a party because it’s still better than talking to the 90% of other people who don’t care about [baseball / The Smiths / coffee] very much at all.
Аs an autistic hardcore fan, I definitely agree. Another thing worth noting is that you have to kind of obscure your level of knowledge around people you don't know well. Being a SABR member might embellish my resume among baseball fans, but it's not gonna help me much when I'm talking to a girl at a bar. I suspect we see a lot more hardcore enthusiasts on a daily basis than we realize, but there's a sort of social contract we sign to make casual conversations more bearable.
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I have found that I can't stand reading anything written by most fanbases of the things I nerd out over, but I am happy to discuss with those I happen to meet in person. People can really be insufferable assholes online.
This may work both ways, because then there's the Motte. Which makes me wonder how recognizable any of us on the Motte would be to one another in real life, or if we would have anything at all to say to each other. Probably not nearly as much as we type.
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