Why I Don't Dislike Dream's Community

I think Minecraft is in one of the best spots it's ever been in.

The "top Minecrafter's" of yesteryear (2013-2016) were almost all exclusively in it for a paycheck. Myself included at times when shit got boring before I swapped to documentary style videos.

When you have an audience capable of pulling 100,000+ live concurrent viewers at a time, there's absolutely no escaping the stan culture. And, within any gaming community anyways, when you have 100,000+ live viewers, and can pull 10,000,000 views per video without breaking a sweat, you are going to have toxic fans that stand out among the rest. It's the same shit that happens in politics. The crazies say crazy shit, get attention for being so crazy, and then people form this false idea that crazy is the norm of that community. But that's just not the case. Even if his fans are absolutely more dedicated than most, the majority of them are well-intended people who come together to enjoy some common interests. It's the new way of forming internet-based friendships.

Many of these friendships will years. Some will last a lifetime. The THPS community has always been dysfunctional to a degree, but I would argue that our bond is one of the most unshakable ones in all of gaming. How many dead games do you know got an overhaul expansion mod that completely revived it and it's community. There are hundreds, dare even say thousands of notable online games that have or had communities at or above the THPS communities size, and I'd be hard pressed to find 10 games had the same outcome as THPS/THUG Pro.

When surveying how toxic a community is, you have to look at the majority, not the outlier minority. Should we judge the entire THPS community on the actions of someone like ****? Should we assume the majority of people are malicious assholes who crash servers and cause mayhem just because there once existed a group who's sole intention was to crash servers and raise hell? Of course not.

I think it's much easier to assume that the current Minecraft culture is bad because of toxic Dream stans, because they're the loudest and most disliked group the game has ever seen. But percentage wise, they make up an exceptionally small percent of his overall audience. Again, we're talking about at most, 1,000-10,000 total super toxic fans out of a pool of 10,000,000. That's 0.01% to 0.1% of his total audience. Not just people who fawn over him, but the maliciously toxic ones. And I would argue that only 1-10% of his current audience are the kind to fawn over him and revere him like a god. But hey, I think we can all look back over some figure in our past that we can draw heavy influence from. The key difference here is that it's all on public display, and they get louder about it because they have a community to feel excited alongside.