Am I hallucinating, or did worldbuilding used to be cooler?

Yeah, I know, it’s the holidays and everyone’s getting nostalgic for the past, but hear me out. I’ve been into worldbuilding for years and I saw this sub blow up over the past 5 or so years. I remember when we were around 1 million subscribers and we’d get 5k viewers online at any given time, and it was great, we were a tight community, there were lots of veteran worldbuilders sharing their knowledge, and we had contests and game nights and it was a lot of fun. <br><br>But now I get on and it just…doesn’t feel the same. People are still being super creative, that’s for sure. But I feel like 90% of the posts are “I did a thing” rather than “I have an idea and would like your thoughts—what are your thoughts?”. <br><br>The veteran worldbuilders seem to have all moved on to other platforms, like Instagram or TikTok, and the people left on this sub are mostly beginners, and it’s hard to get any real discussion going. Also, it seems like the majority of the posts that do get posted are some variation of “What if we make a panopticon but it’s actually utopian?”. I have seen the Panopticon Utopia idea posted at least 4 or 5 times over the past year, always word-for-word, and every time the veteran worldbuilders will come in and go “Actually, panopticons are *so* based on a specific historical era and context, and if you want to do it correctly, you should really read Foucault’s *Discipline and Punish*”. And then the conversation will just end, because the beginner worldbuilder will be like “oh, yeah, sounds good, I’ll check it out”, but they never do, and they don’t seem to really want to put in the effort to learn, they just want to be told “oh, wow, that’s so cool, I’ve never seen that before!”. <br><br>So yeah, I guess what I’m saying is, I miss the older days of this sub, and if anyone knows of any other platforms or Discord servers or something where I can go to engage with veteran worldbuilders and have real discussions, that would be great.