I honestly don't remember much in the way of political/social opinions or anything of the sort during my brief time at CF, but then again, as I recall, I mostly participated in the interactive threads that were meant for our entertainment and amusement, like the “game” threads and such.

Whatever the case may be, I would say that the younger gnerations are more vocal and opinionated about social issues, because they're the ones who are having to deal with the poor decisions and petty bickerings that have been (and in many cases, are still being) made by the older generations, basically they're making the messes, and leaving it to the future generations to clean it up, and they're pretty pissed about that.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Whatever the case may be, I would say that the younger gnerations are more vocal and opinionated about social issues, because they're the ones who are having to deal with the poor decisions and petty bickerings that have been (and in many cases, are still being) made by the older generations

I don't know if that's actually true- I think it's always the mid- to older ones that have to deal with stuff (now that would be millennials and Gen X). The younger ones just pretend they do but they're just Maggie from the start of the Simpsons- playing with the fake steering wheel while Marge actually drives the car.
I think the rhetoric you mention is as old as the line about “young people today are terrible” - (Back to before ancient Greece). These two things have being going on in tandem for millennia upon millennia XD

It probably comes down to what issues people have. Young people are usually busy getting an education, getting wasted and laid while getting an education, not getting crippled by student loans although “haha, future me problems”… there's so much anxiety, so much FOMO, being authentic but also staying relevant (I suppose how easy it became to make a name for yourself online sort of pushed out some teenage anxieties to ppls' mid 20's…? Most of the internet fights are out of boredom and being “addicted” to stress, even the super-conscious ones about making the world a better place. So the average student's life is probably affected by how education reforms do, status of birth control, LGBT+ rights, gun control (because they wanna feel safe at school) and… idk, I'm not from the US. As a millennial I only recently realized that all the lack of planning and saving up throughout the past decade or two is coming back to bite me in the ass when I have bills to pay and a wedding to plan and a family to start in the foreseeable future. If you plan for a family, financial stability tends to become prioritized over risky but YOLO business endeavors. Will you have a job next year? How much do you have to give up if you want just basic healthcare and raising a child? Will you even have a retirement fund?

Yeah, in a nutshell: different generations, different issues. And if you can afford to get someone banned over microagressions, you probably have so much more shit to look forward to that will take your mind off of it later on.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
It probably comes down to what issues people have.

Yep.
When you're younger you have so much more support that you're much more free to complain and worry and rail against authority and pretend you're dealing with all life's woes (obviously not in ALL cases).
People in general are more likely to give support to younger people, for most there's family support (not for all), there are financial options (student loans and stuff) that aren't available to older ones, concession prices etc, education options, lots of entry level job opportunities, even options in the military, and pop-culture and media in general is traditionally organised to primarily cater to the wants and tastes of that age range, not to mention entertainment venues etc…

They still have on the training wheels of life (not in all cases! The minority suffer). It's those older 20s, the 30s, 40s and 50s who really deal with the hard parts of life and the issues of previous generations. Theoretically as you get older you're meant to have amassed more money so you can better deal with stuff, but increasingly that's less and less likely.

I think we focus on extremes so traditionally is young VS old even though that's a false paradigm. And EVERYONE romanticises the young, especially the middle-age people.

Give or take, I like CF. I have more fans and interactions there than I do here on the DD. I follow creators and their blogs about their comic(s). It’s great for me. Sorry, for those who had a bad experience with the CF community. I do see the toxicity of some forums there. I personally, just like MKmonsters, stay away from all that drama.


DD for me feels too much like an after school club I wish I could be a part off, but I don’t quite fit in nowhere. It just doesn’t feel natural to me, here. You know the one kid that feels like the oddball of every club in the school, then decides to form his own club that nobody wants to join? I use to log in everyday for a few years with excitement because of how this community is with each other. I thought, now this is a great community to be part of. It was awesome! Then… I realize I was trying too hard to be part of it. It wore me out… I had to tap out. I just wasn’t feeling it like I use to.


All in all, I check out what’s going on here from time to time to see how my comic is doing then case out the latest forums on what’s on ppls minds. You know, Just to kind of see if anything changed on the site or see if some artist from the community has something interesting I may participate in.


Well, jolly ho. Carry on then. See you in a few moons, DD.

cdmalcolm1 wrote:
Well, jolly ho. Carry on then. See you in a few moons, DD.

Awww, I always thought you were a good part of he community :(
I miss you and people like you when you guys stop joining in :(

I guess I can kind of see where one would feel like DD is more of a club as opposed to more of a community like CF, but I think a lot of it has to do with how much smaller DD is. Of course, from what some of the longtimers around here have been saying over the years, DD kind of got screwed over and lost a lot of its community as a result, and never quite recovered to the same levels of what it once was. I don't know, because I obviously wasn't around when all of that happened, although I was aware of DD's existence since the late 2000s when I was looking for webcomic hosts to join - at that time, KeenSpace/ComicGenesis was dying a very slow and painful death, but for whatever reason, I ultimately went with Smack Jeeves, and, well, we see what became of it.

You do realize that CF is the place the cool kids went off and made for themselves and The Duck is the place for the rejects and unwanted?

How many here were kicked out of CF because we weren't hip enough and didn't adhere to their high standards?

If this was Revenge of the Nerds, the people on the Duck would be the nerds. 🤣 XD

From what I remember others saying, CF was the result of Kyo having a mad-on after getting his ass banned from DD for his piss-poor behavior.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
From what I remember others saying, CF was the result of Kyo having a mad-on after getting his ass banned from DD for his piss-poor behavior.

“I'm so much cooler than you and you won't acknowledge how cool I am so I'll go off and form my own club for the really cool people.”
Got to think like it's a bunch of cliques. It's actually part of what Groucho meant when he said he wouldn't join any club that would have him as a member. (That and the antisemitism of his time)

J_Scarbrough wrote:
From what I remember others saying, CF was the result of Kyo having a mad-on after getting his ass banned from DD for his piss-poor behavior.

To be fair on Kyo, that piss-poor behaviour also got him banned from Smackjeeves at the same time, so it's not like he had a whole lot of options besides building his own clubhouse. It also explains his love of swinging the banhammer as he liked to call it. Classic supervillain story arc.

Again, having been subjected to his banhammer, I can attest to that.

DD for me feels too much like an after school club I wish I could be a part off, but I don’t quite fit in nowhere.

Same. If I think about it, I think it's to do with the paywall that drunkduck required back in the day. If I'm remembering right. Before its second big crash, if you wanted more than 1 page to go up a day, you needed to be paying for it.
People here now are super friendly enough (I got a song on quack cast for my comic, *eeeeee*), but first impressions and all of that, even if it was over some decades ago. …
I found a subset of the DD community in the now long non-existent IRC room, but the forums were very hard to get into. A lot of activity was in Top Drawer too, which was locked to post count.

I think there's a misunderstanding of the timeline here…

Kyo's Comic Fury wasn't about cool kids or even about him being banned.
He created Comic Fury quite a bit after those events because he had matured a bit and wanted to get back into doing comics. I think he was in the middle of his degree at the time.
He used the concept DD as a rough model for it- not copying but basing it roughly on the style and form.

DD people started to go off to join CF when DD was being very poorly managed by Wowio so that it kept running super slow and glitchy after the halted redesign.
But the MASS exodus happened when the site was killed because the fool managing in at Wowio did not pay the hosting bill with the server company and so DD was totally deleted.

People had to find another host and they chose CF because it already had DD people there and it was familiar to them.

The “cool kids/rejects” is a funny narrative and we did play along with it but it's not actually true.

Some DDers who joined CF came back once we got DD back and running because of loyalty. Some came back because they didn't fit well with the younger community there or they were banned.


DD was the biggest webcomic host for a while in the 2000s because we were the best but also the Platinum buyout attracted a HUGE amount of people wanting to get seen and discovered.
That started to die fast after the halted redesign after Platinum sold DD to Wowio and then Wowio lost money during the GFC and everything hat to go on hold and the site started to run glitchy and slow.
Then after DD died new sites like Webtoons and Tappas had taken over as the big buzz sites and DD faded away.
But yes, back in the day the DD community was simply massive.



@Ksteak DD's pay system predated all this by a lot… Even predating the Platinum buyout. It wasn't so much a paywall and more a “pay to get extra features” thing. Volte6 was always a big believer in not blocking people from stuff haha!

It's an interpretation that reflects some of the feelings and motivations of the participants as opposed to the actual flow of events.
What it felt like as opposed to what it was. The legend as opposed to the truth.

And to paraphrase The Man who Shot Liberty Valence: when telling a story when it comes to the truth or the legend, go with the legend.

Because it often sums up what the people saw and experienced better than the hard facts.

I really miss the Drunk Duck of those days. The redesign was absolutely apocalyptic. Most of the people I knew here and frequented my comics left around that time. Wowio reeeeally screwed this place over.

Screw Wowio for screwing us over.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Screw Wowio for screwing us over.

They didn't mean to. It just turned out that way.
I've had many chats with the Wowio boss and he's not a bad fellow at all.
I mean Wowio did WAY better for our community than other big corporate buyouts, look at smack Jeeves, Tumblr, Twitter!
Brian gave us control over all the assets despite the site costing him a huge amount.



Like Bravo said thought, there's how things feel as opposed to how they actually were.

Like, for the redesign the chief programmer was super dedicated and super helpful, always very responsive to concerns. Sometimes I'd wake him in the middle of the night to fix issues.
Wowio consulted extensively with us on the redesign, but there were corporate concessions and compromises we had to make… like big ad spaces, the name change, loss of HTML editing etc. We weren't happy about it but had to go with it. And the strange colours grew on us a bit XD

Then the GFC hit super hard and DD was left to run on fumes. All programming had to stop and things were left unfinished. Wowio was in debit because they'd paid for stuff while expecting another round of investments to cover costs and have the GFC those didn't come. So staff were working for free for a while and even though work on DD was stopped it was still bleeding money.

It wasn't till I took over and we all worked to get us back up that we became financially stable.- Backed by my own funds.

Thank you, Ozone. Seriously

lothar wrote:
Thank you, Ozone. Seriously

Indeed, thank you! Can't be said often enough.

DD for me feels too much like an after school club I wish I could be a part off, but I don’t quite fit in nowhere.

DD isn't a club. SpiderForest is a club.
The way I understand it, most of us here wouldn't be eligible to join if we wanted to. Nothing against them, though. They'll have it their way, we'll have it our way.

Every community will sooner or later develop some after-school-club-like aspects, though. That's just basic social psychology at work.

PaulEberhardt wrote:

DD for me feels too much like an after school club I wish I could be a part off, but I don’t quite fit in nowhere.

DD isn't a club. SpiderForest is a club.
The way I understand it, most of us here wouldn't be eligible to join if we wanted to. Nothing against them, though. They'll have it their way, we'll have it our way.

To quote my avatar “I would never join a club that would have me as a member.”

DD isn't a club. SpiderForest is a club.
The way I understand it, most of us here wouldn't be eligible to join if we wanted to. Nothing against them, though. They'll have it their way, we'll have it our way.

Oh yeah. I went over to their site a year ago to look around. It was intimidating. Not that they're being unreasonable or anything, the creators within the circle probably find that it's worth their time and efforts. It's just even if you live up to their standards now, it's stressful to some to produce a new page every week and be active in the community. If you've ever been accepted to a club and kicked out of it you probably have some worries on that front. But yeah, it looks like a club or a covenant of sort. We do have at least one member who's there as well. I guess I could name like 5 or 7 comics that would probably qualify, another 5 or 7 that might have a chance and the rest, including mine… not likely.

I struggle to see what jumping through the hoops of a place like Spider Forest is about. What are the benefits? What do they do that couldn't be done for themselves by those not judged worthy by their standards?

Maybe we should save that discussion for the What is your guy's feeling about “SpiderForest” thread.

PaulEberhardt wrote:

lothar wrote:
Thank you, Ozone. Seriously

Indeed, thank you! Can't be said often enough.

Hey thanks Lothar and Paul <3
I appreciate it!

It's you guys that make the community though and the site. It's everyone here and the people who never join in the social forum stuff.
If the site was just me it'd be nothing LOL

Ironscarf wrote:
I struggle to see what jumping through the hoops of a place like Spider Forest is about. What are the benefits?

I think the benefit is something like this: if I publish on a site that has a minimum quality standard (however determined), all comics there will be somewhat good, and readers are more likely to go on a site with mostly good comics than on one where say one is good but two are very very amateurish.

So the fact that other comics around mine are good-ish will push my comic readership up too.

Yeah, thanks Oz, the fact that you are doing all you can to keep DD alive is some serious dedication, and a great service for all of us to have somewhere we can host our comics for all the world to see.

Yes, I whole heartedly agree. Thanks Oz !!

Comix like mine could not exist on the net if it were not for Drunk Duck and you Oz.

paneltastic wrote:
I really like the customization options on CF but honestly it's a hivemind of politically left leaning people who show zero tolerance for anything but “the message”. There are a few users who are decent but the majority of the site is unpleasant to engage with. If your comic isn't Pokemon/furry you're going to struggle to get and maintain an active audience.

I don't hate the people there but I've just decided to stop using it since it clearly doesn't work for me.

I left CF a few years ago over the Pokemon invasion and the left leaning Borg horde that looked for any reason to blast someone for whatever reason they could fabricate. I witnessed too many nasty mob lynchings over nothing where the mods (and Kyo) would turn a blind eye, yet reprimand someone for the most minor of offenses if it seemed right leaning at all or “anti Pokeman/furry”.

I saw my fair share of Pokemon and furry comics on CF, but I wasn't aware that was their zeitgeist. Either way, I can attest to such; as I've said many times before, when VAMPIRE GIRL was originally published on Smack Jeeves, it had virtually no readership whatsoever, and mainly because it wasn't a Westernized Manga, stolen video game sprite, or LGBTQ+ comic, which seemed to be what SJ's zeitgeist was at the time: if your comic didn't fall into any of those three categories, you went unseen.

That being said, VG wasn't a Pokemon or furry comic either, and yet, what few reruns I managed to publish on CF before Kyo's banhammer got significantly way more readership than their original run on SJ, and I do sometimes wonder what the readership would've been like if I was able to publish the Second Season in its first run on CF . . . I'm totally grateful for the readership and reception I got to VG here on DD, although I can't help but feel like it might have been just ever-so-slightly higher on CF if only because they had a much larger community, and I was active within their community as well.

Either way, it all sure beat the hell out of Smack Jeeves.