@lily

popular opinion: @theawesome98 is really bad

you know, all this talk about falling off has really got me thinking. what even is falling off? most people would agree that you can refer to a person as fallen off once they have either begun to produce content of lower quality, or have stopped producing content altogether. but the phrase ‘fallen off’ has seem to have met a similar fate as ‘cope’, ‘cool’, or even ‘ratio’.

‘how?’ you may ask. it’s simple. all of these terms are dreadfully overused in an online space, with no regard to their original meanings or ideas. some are less severe than others, for sure, but it is still a blatant disregard for the word’s well-being.

for example, people like to say that games, such as minecraft, have fallen off. but such is true only to an extent. and that extent is only visible from a clouded point of view. if you really think about it, the sphere of a game like minecraft is just so large that no one person could ever truly know if it has ‘fallen off’, because in order to deem something of such a title you must understand how the greater community has taken the content in.

perhaps you like to use a term like this more lightly. maybe you only use it when something has simply stopped producing content up to your liking, and you couldn’t care less about the community’s point of view. in this case, you may end up falling into a hole of endless ignorance, as you begin to use certain things to your own benefit that truly only bring your demise closer.

so again i ask, what is ‘falling off’? and truly, do you know who I was talking about yesterday? i don’t think you do. and i now don’t think anyone does. the only way to really know if a person has fallen off is to understand the ideas of this person in all spheres of this person or thing’s publicity. let’s take the idea of wasteof falling off as an example.

wasteof still gets a healthy amount of posts daily, has functioning bots, and plenty is going on in development with accounts like @jeffalo and @beta sharing information about the next release of wasteof. however, some may feel, at least at certain times, that it is yet to meet their expectations. this idea of ‘falling off’ is the primary fear of development in general.

jeffalo, just like many others, has created a service that many use on a day-to-day basis. such a platform falling off in a single day is unlikely, but if the more popular people begin to slow down their use of it, then the smaller people will begin to fall away from it as well.

that’s all a social platform is. it’s like a stack of jenga blocks, and if you take out the wrong one, it’s all over. outside forces can affect these jenga blocks as well. for example, a stray gust of air could knock over the hours of work put into this game of jenga, and now you must start again from the ground up.

sometimes, that gust of air only knocks down a few blocks, and despite that still being a setback, it is much easier to recover from. this can be shown in even some of the biggest social platforms in the world. discord, for example, released their rebrand back in May of 2021. people didn’t like this change so much, and so they began to blow air at the stack of jenga blocks that made up Discord, until a few of them began to fall.

unlike some other companies, however, discord didn’t fall down, they simply rebuilt until the blowers stopped blowing, and people stopped caring. nowadays you rarely hear complaints.

so all falling off really is, is the pressure of outside forces trying to make a single thing fall down. nothing has ever fallen down on it’s own.

so now, if your parents ask what you’ve learned today, you can say that you learned the psychology of ‘falling off’ with an effective metaphor of jenga blocks. you’re welcome.