I used to pick these up sometimes in the 00's and they were great. Definitely leaned a little heavy on the gadgety/nerd shit side, but there were unusual little projects, insane reader submissions, and interesting journalism, and they didn't insult your intelligence. Even the advertisers were pretty cool
Now they run a full-size glossy magazine full of pseudo-diy geek crap like le ebic 3d-printed, raspberry-pi powered lighted funko pop carousels (I assume) and shamelessy repost other peoples' shit online a la buzzfeed. What the hell happened???
The market for 3D printed funcopop carousels is bigger than the market for serious DIY, sadly. But fret not; there are still plenty of great make magazine issues to read, you just have to go back in time to find them.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Popular_Mechanics.html?id=OWYEAAAAMBAJ&redir_esc=y
Checked
There was a bookstore by me once that had a bunch of ~100 yr. old PM. Really a jaw-dropping way-things-used-to-be thing, since most of the "easy" projects therein involved torch welding or complex jointery with hand tools, etc. People really used to know how to do shit
What you and OP
are saying is that today's DIY community is based in the information age since that's what children have access to.
id love to find a community. this isnt a community but more a board of negativity and cheap laughs. oh and online sucks compared to good offline. not even in the same ballpark.
It's there if you look, but let's be real, most DIY or educated people are seen as a threat by society at large, so they are reclusive.
can confirm, I have a small workshop and every normalgay who has seen it thinks it's a kaczynski shack.
Loose moderation leads to what you're complaining about but unfortunately there isn't much of a middle ground. Any place that's both popular and moderated becomes a leftist political operation in short order. Look at what happened to the knitting community as an example. For a while you could still find niche discussion forums for obscure hobbies and topics but even those are infiltrated now and mostly dedicated to political crap but with a thin veneer of whatever the forum was originally dedicated to.
The net result is that you pretty much have to deal with the jokey and trollish attitude of boards like this one if you want to at least find some wheat amongst all the chaff. Everywhere else gets rid of most of the wheat and ideologically flavors the chaff.
A lot of actual forums (as in sign up and post with a goofy signature) still have a lot going for them imho since they have some barrier to entry, imply a niche interest and are frankly mostly patronized by jims who don't know or give a shit about stupid internet culture. On the other hand since they're not anonymous you get cringy social media behavior and they often seem to end up getting dominated by a gang of 5 or so -experts- whose internet loser quotient would give any /r/obot a run for their money. So there's good discussion going on but you need to ignore maybe 50% of the posts (which needless to say is a gold medal thread on PrepHole)
Doubt. The 5 leaders always end up being a furry, and a gay, that were assigned to moderate by their botnet and 3 hold outs from the original forum.
Ten years ago I would agree but now those top five are too interested in signaling their virtuous dedication to a political ideology completely off topic but because they're the mods or dominant posters, everyone has to ensure their crap to get to the few remaining nuggets of content.
Print media and writing died 15 years ago. You gotta find someone incharge of a substack you like or something.
A good magazine that wasn't 50% ads was like $15-20/issue man, and that was in 2000. So now circulation is down to nothing for everyone, so there's no ad support at all, and there's inflation. Are you ready for a $50/month magazine? That's what you'd need to spend to get some decent writers and graphics people to write articles anyone would want to read.
Or you get the same garbage everyone else has like GPT/Indian derived articles about the latest viral search term amd not even thinly veiled ads for funky pops and ryobi drills.
Not to sound defeatist, but magazines are not coming back. For better or worse, Youtube videos have replaced the medium. There are some youtube channels out there that tackle these subjects, and even respond to viewer comments and email.
I have seen in hobbyist circles time and time again, people try fandom magazines. People will round up people in their extended friend circles to work together. Final result is printed and or pdf, funded through preorders and donations. They last about 3-8 months. Even the Japanese with their genetically loyal disposition can't even keep them running anymore.
https://www.magcloud.com/shop
Try this site. This was to be a marketplace for startup magazines. Great if you wanted to escape the Source Interlink stronghold on magazine distribution (although I heard they went bankrupt?). Unfortunately, look at their featured and recommendation selections. Endeavors from 2013-2017.
Like what anon said here
The finances aren't going to align back. The amount of design and writing effort for something as short-term as a magazine isn't going to be desired by todays consumer. News is too cheap. Even if its mostly narrative or sponsor driven.
>What the hell happened???
Original editor, Phil, sold it.
A lot of magazines were made quality at first to pick up in audience with whe idea that theyd be sold and run into the ground for profit for later. This is one of those.
This technique is still used on social media .
I wish I had grown up in the time where pop mech had interesting projects and articles and not Elon musk simping and telling people how to tear down statues.
Did they not get the memo that Musk is now a slave owning chud who stole everything from others?