#and I was catching up on Ranboo’s stream from a couple days ago

[cat-hybridcellbit]

Okay I tried to let this go, but I’m feeling ranty so warning, everything below is from a tired and cranky perspective. Will be tagged with #critical #fandom critical for blocking.

Ranboo’s chat act like a bunch of spoiled brats and it’s honestly getting old. They feel like they can tell Tubbo what to say and when to speak, they try and dig up personal information on Ranboo because they want it, they don’t listen when he asks them nicely to not spam or drop a bit, AND THEY HAVE THE NERVE TO TRY AND CONTROL WHAT RANBOO DOES ON HIS STREAMS! And throughout all of this they don’t see themselves as the problem! Ranboo has had to stop and address chat multiple times in the last several days. He told them not to dig for his birthday, he got frustrated with their backseat gaming and told them off, he even felt like he had to apologize for his mining streams because some people didn’t like the content....

And I understand Ranboo not wanting people to go around talking about how bad chat was, because it hurts the streamer and can cause people to not watch. But chat acting like they’re owed certain things and getting nasty when Ranboo doesn’t play puppet the way they want is more likely to drive people away. The sad thing is you can’t even avoid it by closing chat, because the chat behavior leaks into the donations. Ranboo is too nice to his chat and let’s them get away with too much before calling them out. He needs to take inspiration from Philza and keep his chat on a tighter leash. ( I know Phil’s chat can be bad too, but Phil’s been around longer and knows how to deal with them).

There’s no end point to this, and I’m not even going to say I’m being objective or that I’m right. I’m just in a bad mood and very very tired, so I’m ranting.

[quicksandblock]

MCYT Demographic Survey Part 2 RESULTS

IT’S TIME!!!

Once again, thank you so much to everyone who participated! 1,654 people total responded to this - about four and a half times as many respondents as the first survey. It’s honestly incredible. I’m so happy the rest of you are as interested as I am in this stuff :D

The increased turnout is also why these results are being posted two days later than I’d intended. I want to give a HUGE thank you to my friend @quincepastey​ and my sibling @orestes-swimming​ for helping me out, and by helping I do mean they did basically all of the technical stuff for me, because my knowledge of spreadsheets was not up to the task. So thank you to Cupid for organizing all the data from questions 3 and 4 into something comprehensible for me, and thank you to Kal for making the charts! They are absolutely the MVPs and everyone reading this should go check them out. Thank you guys so much <3

Reblogs of this post are very appreciated. It would be awesome if the info about the results could reach everyone who submitted a response, so if you reblogged my first post about this survey, please consider reblogging this one as well!

For your convenience, here’s a link to the results of the first survey I did six months ago. Now - on to the results!

Question 1: What is your age range?

Compared to the results of the first survey, we can see that things have changed a bit! Specifically, the fandom has shifted just a little bit older. The solid majority of the fandom is still in the 15-17 year old range, but it’s gone down from almost half to closer to 40%. Almost a third of the fandom are ages 18-20, up from close to a fifth six months ago. 21-25 year olds have increased from about 10% to about 14%. And the youngest segment, 13-14 year olds, have gone from almost 20% of the fandom down to 12% - the sharpest change of all.

Finally, nearest and dearest to my own heart, there are now 26 whole people in the fandom aged 26-30 and 9 people aged 30+. Old Squad is growing, folks. We are... the 2% 😎 Special shoutout to the person who said their 15 year old kid got them into the fandom. I hope you know just how cool you are.

These results are interesting, but it’s also impossible to say how accurate the data is. This survey and the previous one were only posted on my blog, and they only reached a wider audience through the reblogs of my followers. So do these changes reflect actual changes in the demographics of the fandom as a whole, or is it just that my followers (and the people who follow them) have shifted older? To try to avoid this bias in the future, I may reach out to some well-known younger bloggers and ask them to reblog the next survey I do so that I can reach a more even audience.

Question 2: What is your gender?

Apologies for the small text, but there were so many unique write-in answers that I wanted to include them all. You may want to open the image in a separate tab for better quality.

In contrast to the age question, the gender spread of the fandom has remained pretty much the same. About half the fandom is still female, the nonbinary crowd has increased from 20% to 25%, 7% of us are male, almost 7% are genderfluid, and about 5% are agender. Just like last time, most of the write-in responses fell into the vague categories of either genderqueer or questioning.

No surprises on this one! The fandom continues to be overwhelmingly female and queer. Next time I think I’ll include genderqueer and questioning as options to try to catch some of those people into a formal category. All y’all are so valid, especially the person who wrote in their gender as “soup” <3

The results for questions 3 and 4 will be under a cut, because I don’t want to completely destroy people’s dashes.

Before I get into the last two questions, a couple notes. First, I want to explain how I came up with the list of creators, since a lot of people were either excited or disappointed by the fact that a few different people were on there.

On the last survey, this question was a write-in, and I had to transcribe and collate all the answers by hand to come up with the actual number of people who followed each creator. For this survey, I simply took the list that came out of the previous one and pasted it in! I also added a few people who no one wrote in six months ago but who are much more prominent now (Ranboo being the biggest example). So if you were excited to see your favorite small creator listed as an option, they were there because someone wrote them in last time! And if you wrote in your favorite small creator here, they’ll be an option on the next survey. The list is entirely crowdsourced and it will expand with each survey.

That said, the same also applies for more controversial creators. Specifically, I’m talking about CallMeCarson. Several people questioned my decision to keep him on the list - and to be honest, I considered taking him out. But in the end I decided to leave him in as an option for the sake of completeness and consistency with the previous survey. I want to emphasize that this is not me condoning his actions. But for the sake of the data, I felt that it was best to leave him in.

That said, let’s move on to questions 3 and 4!

Question 3: What creator(s) do you primarily follow?

So, it’s harder to compare with the previous survey on this one, and that’s purely because on the previous survey I didn’t have the help I did here. The chart I was able to make for the results back in October was frankly trash. Also, the fact that I split “followed creators” into two questions - primarily and casually followed - definitely throws things off. However, we can still do a certain amount of comparison!

The most obvious change is Ranboo. He straight up was not on the previous survey at all - I think he’d been streaming for less than a month at the time. Now, about 55% of respondents listed him as someone they primarily follow. The Dream SMP itself has also jumped dramatically. Previously, about 5% of people wrote in Dream SMP. That has increased to over half. Quackity has gone from less than 2% to about 30%. Karl has gone from 4% to 30%. Phil has gone from about 8% to a little under 50%. The SBI have jumped from 11% to over 40%.

Techno has gone from about 50% to over 60%. Tommy has gone from 45% to over 55%. Wilbur has jumped from 43% to 55%. Tubbo has remained steady at about 38%.

Dream has apparently dropped some of his following percentage-wise, falling from 50% to about 35%. However, George, Sapnap, and the Dream Team itself have all jumped from 10-12% to almost 30%.

I’m not going to go over the rest of the list, because that would just get way too long. However, I will drop a link to the spreadsheets of data for this survey and the previous one, so anyone who wants to can do some comparison of their own!

Question 4: What creators do you casually follow?

I won’t do as detailed of a comparison on this question, because there’s nothing to compare it to - this question wasn’t on the previous survey. However, it’s interesting to see how many more people follow Fundy, Nihachu, BadBoyHalo, Captain Puffy, Eret, Awesamdude, and Jack Manifold casually rather than as a primary favorite. Out of the top twelve, Karl, Quackity, Phil, and Tubbo are the only ones who don’t have a major discrepancy between the amount of people who follow them casually versus primarily.

I would be curious to hear people’s thoughts on why that’s the case! Personally, I would guess it’s a combination of each of their approaches to lore on the Dream SMP, the frequency and times of day that they stream, and the people they tend to make content with and be associated with by the fandom. I may go into that more later, but this post is already very long, so I’ll hold off for now. Here’s a link to this question’s spreadsheet for anyone who wants to take a closer look!

...And that’s a wrap! Good grief, this got long. Kudos to anyone who actually read the whole thing because I know my attention span would be challenged. I’m already thinking about the next survey - a couple people suggested that I add in questions about orientation and nationality, and while I want to keep the survey pretty tight in its scope, I am considering it. It would be even more data to process but it would be interesting to know!

I would love to hear people’s thoughts on these results! I’m only one person, so I know there’s interesting stuff I must have missed. Please, please feel free to reblog with your thoughts and observations! A lot of work went into this (both from me and from Cupid and Kal! Thank you guys again!), so I’m really hoping to hear what people think about it :D

I plan to reblog this and reply to some of the things people wrote in at the end, so stay tuned for that. And once again: thank you all for your interest in this project of mine <3 See you with another one in six months!

[xpoolboy]

alright i saw a couple posts talking about the potential future (or non-future) of the dreamsmp so i'm gonna put my two cents in

while the dreamsmp is an amazing server, it was doomed to eventually dry out, and it's been heading that way for the past six months. basically since after the final disc confrontation, or maybe the red banquet. i predicted it would last no more than 2-3 years, because of the circumstances in which it was made and it's purpose.

first, it wasn't made to last. it was made for one or two streams for the dreamteam, and when tommy was added it expanded from there. at the start, tommy was the backbone of the smp, and while wilbur added in the roleplay aspect, tommy started the conflict and storyline aspect of it. he's what made it interesting and appealing to viewers. someone else mentioned this before, but i can't find the post so i'm just saying what i remember: after dream realized that people were growing from joining his server, he started adding people he thought had potential as content creators to give them a boost. however, as they grew and expanded their audience and got an audience of their own, they became less and less reliant on the dsmp for views. i think you can really see this through tommy's switch on videos on his main channel when he switched from posting edited stream videos of dsmp roleplay to his mod videos. he no longer needed to rely on dsmp content to get views and an audience, and therefore was creating less and less content on it because he didn't need to. when these creators get the big enough boost they need from the smp, they switch up their content to reach even more audiences. tommy hasnt posted a dreamsmp video since about 10 months ago.

in addition to this, i've noticed a pattern of how people tend to act when they're first added to the smp - for the first couple weeks or even months they'll spend every free waking hour on the server establishing themselves, getting gear, catching up to everyone else. then, they stop going on it as much and log in less and less as the novelty of "oh my god i'm on THE dream's minecraft server" wears off, this is especially shown in ranboo and foolish

thirdly, quarantine and when COVID was very bad ABSOLUTELY was a huge reason for the success of the dsmp and the activity on it. they could barely do vlogs because of restrictions (and outrage from fans if they didn't follow COVID protocols properly), hundreds of thousands of teens had excess amounts of free time to discover new creators, and most importantly: the cc's had nothing better to do than play minecraft all day. once the COVID situation improved, more opportunities to create new and different content were created. they'd been on the server and used it as their main source of content for many months now, and they either got bored of it or just wanted to try something new

fourthly, every minecraft roleplay server has an expiration date. none of them can last forever, and the dsmp was in a very particular situation that made it last over a year longer than most would. however, that situation is rapidly changing, and the creators are moving onto new content and barely logging into the server. while there might still be a bit of lore, it will most likely be to wrap up their arcs.

[bisastertiefling]

so ranboo’s lore teaser for his stream this friday was “ a lesson well learned “ and to me this could have two implications :

the most recent thing this could tie into would be the message he found in his and tubbo’s mailbox ( i think it was the same stream where the syndicate then actually went to snowchester to check it out ) that said “ careful, remember what happened last time ? “ and it wasn’t signed by anyone and wasn’t addressed specifically to either tubbo or ranboo, i don’t think it’s been touched upon since, but that’s the most recent instance of lore that could tie into that teaser

the OTHER option is from some time ago but it’s when sapnap gave him the “ :) “ note from dream after visiting him in prison, it triggered ranboo’s enderwalk state and in the in-game chat we see, in ender,   “ doomed are those who try to run, for it always catches up eventually :) “. this could be the lesson, ranboo has tried to run from his enderwalk state / just ignore it and that could finally be coming back in a bad way. maybe we’ll see the consequences of it, maybe we’ll see what he’s even been DOING in his enderwalk state, what he was doing off stream ( thus we can assume it was in his enderwalk state since he’s also never shown us anything on stream ) that caused his tools to lose so much durability

so we’ve got a couple options on the table, and it could even be about something i’m not taking into account. maybe his continued insistence on not wanting to be involved in things unless they have direct implications for him / those he cares about ( mainly tubbo and michael ), especially lately whenever it’s about the egg he just says “ i don’t really care “, maybe it’s about that, that he HAS to care about the things happening around him even if it doesn’t seem like they have direct implications at the time because by just not caring about them at all and pretending they have nothing to do with him, it can then catch him completely off guard when something big happens. lets not forget that the red banquet is two days after this stream so while i don’t see something happening with the egg as big as a possibility as the other two options i don’t think it’s something that should be written off either, especially considering vines were placed in both ranboo and tubbo’s bases respectively and they’ve had run ins with the eggpire that haven’t really gone well.

idk, like i said we’ve got a few options here for what could happen but at the same time it could be something that we haven’t even considered