The Strength of the Retro Community.. and Some Areas for Improvement

This week, I’ve been a little reflective on how great the retro community is! I have the privilege of interacting with several members of the community via Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Patreon too! It’s great to see the projects that people are working on as well as to generally chat about retro technology. I love the feedback and comments I get on the different mediums and the ability to connect different people together who are looking for answers to problems!

Anyway, that’s the good part. Next, I’d like to share something that is on my mind, and I am not 100% innocent here and I recognize that. I feel that we need a renewed commitment in the community for people to ensure that they are being good to one another. In particular, there are certain individuals who seem to get a lot of criticism and/or hate from an unforgiving audience. Or some folks who say “my tech is better than your tech.” Or some folks who are just straight up rude to others. This makes me sad to see… the community is a small community and we need to stick together. My thoughts would be: if there is another member of the community you don’t like, don’t put that person on blast, don’t make a parody video, don’t start a flame war: just keep it to yourself. If there’s a certain piece of tech you don’t like, look for something good in it, or just move along, there’s plenty to see on the Internet that you WILL like!

One thing that I have always tried to do is to encourage and promote other folks in retro tech… it makes no difference to me if it is a retro tech YouTuber with 10 subscribers or 10,000 subscribers. And on the flipside, when it comes to unwanted insults, it doesn’t matter if you have 10 followers or 10,000 followers: I am pretty sure the insults cut the same.

So, I’d ask folks with hard feelings towards other members of the community: please, let bygones be bygones. Celebrate the success of others. Celebrate your own success. Work with others to learn new skills and share what you learn! And always follow the golden rule!

Thanks for listening.

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