Comment by et1337 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by et1337 | Hacker News Reader

I took a photography class from this guy! Ohio represent!

On topic: I've experienced exactly what he's talking about in the field of indie game development. The entire gamedev industry is on Twitter. It was an endless treadmill of validation seeking for me. At first it's screaming into the void, then it's strategically following and unfollowing people, then eventually it's one mega tweet that gets retweeted by your childhood hero or one of the cool indie illuminati kids. It's never enough and you're never happy.

There's a super indie hip event in LA called IndieCade that I've probably spent $250 in application fees over the years trying to get my game into. I was devastated every time I got rejected. A couple months ago I got tickets for free, and coming from a fresh perspective outside the industry, it was shockingly underwhelming. There was a dad with 13-year-old daughters showing off a painfully amateur interactive fiction they wrote as a family. I couldn't believe THIS was the thing I had cared about so much.

Whatever industry bubble you're in... it's not that important and no one outside the bubble cares. And when I realized that, it felt like a huge burden lifted. :)

Thanks for writing this.

I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that Twitter definitely puts us into an industry bubble, where the same ideas are repeated over and over in the echo chamber.

When you are inside the echo chamber, it is extremely difficult to realize how little significance those people have outside that bubble. Sometimes it is good to take a step back and look at all of this from an outsider's perspective.

I belonged to an indie game community where the only people making money were the ones making development tools and selling it to the community.

If you want to make games, really what you need to actually do is make a game and don't stop until it's done, and wrap yourself up in your customers, not other game developers.

I agree with you. The biggest challenge I have is wrapping myself up with my customers. I have no idea how to go about doing that. Any ideas? Resources? Tips?

The cybersecurity community is very similar to your description. Add in a small dash of actual spying and espionage that makes everyone paranoid over what everyone knows / has and it can be very unhealthy.

It is a huge difference from the “learning to program/programming” communities. Those groups can also foster their own feelings of self-lack, but not on the scale of cyber.

I second what you said. People want to call those in infosec paranoid, but there is also the very real risk of spying or theft or intellectual property that one can never let their guard down. It's not paranoid if it's true! This mentality is very tiring to keep up with but if you don't, you can lose badly.

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