Quote:
Originally Posted by Lazy Orang
Personal designers neither ask for outside testing nor do they singlehandedly dominate the landscape. It's not really comparable, in any way. There may be little give, but there's virtually zero take.
|
Your entire complaint is based on their wanting to take more and not being able to. There's very little give from personal customs and if there's very little take it's not because personal customs don't want to take, it's because people aren't interested. Personal customs, by their nature, are a self-centered pursuit, so it shouldn't be shocking when you don't always inspire participation from others.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lazy Orang
Also, while I'm certainly not against collaboration, I feel as though the veneration of it over everything else is concerning. Personal creativity can be just as valuable as the collaboration of a larger group - I feel as though an attitude that's almost critical of someone persuing their own ideas and interests is deeply harmful, and has resulted in the place we're in now.
|
Plenty of people venerate personal customs over collaboration. Plenty of people do personal customizing over collaboration. And I'm totally happy for them to do so (literally no skin off my nose). The difference between these two pursuits is that one, by definition, is an individual pursuit, and one, by definition, is a community pursuit. Should it be any surprise, then, that the community pursuit involves more group discussions, energy, and involvement?
I'm not saying personal customs are objectively worse than collaborative projects (I believe that they are the majority of the time, but that's an argument for another time, irrelevant to this discussion). I'm saying I'm not interested in participating in personal customs. Personal customs are a way of saying: I want to do this my way, this is my vision, and I'm not really interested in working together.
OK, so other than saying "hey, that's cool, man" what do I have to contribute to that compared to a collaborative effort?
At their best, personal customs might evolve into spontaneous collaboration, based on feedback and the openness of the person who will claim sole credit for the end product. That's personal customizing at its best. Why would I invest any significant time seeking out that interaction in personal custom threads, hoping to shift the winds that don't naturally blow that way, when I could just collaborate easily and naturally in a playground that's set up for that express purpose?
Personal creativity and collaboration are both worthwhile and should both coexist (and have and do just fine). But if you expect to get just as much attention working alone as you do working together, then you're not being honest to yourself about how the world does (or should) work.