Nova 5 years later Part 1: The Community

[charizardf1]

It's been around five years since Nova has started and man has it been a journey. What I want to discuss now that's been on my mind for the longest is how much Nova has changed from the beginning to now as a community. This isn't really a story but a viewpoint on how I see Nova and the drastic changes it has has from then to now. (And Please just to clarify i am speaking from MY PERSPECTIVE and i will be sharing MY OPINIONS so please do not try to call me out for stuff. If i seem to be off about something to you please don't react in a huge manner and make a big deal of it.Simply just reply your thoughts and be respectful.)

When i first came to Nova the environment was what it was made out to be which was mainly about Pokemon and other games. The community had all a common purpose and valued what they like to do and were very passionate. We strived to be a good pokemon community and for a good amount of time it had been. Everybody related to each other and had deep connections due to having similar backgrounds and ties. It was interesting because so many people came from different sites yet came together with like minds and it just worked out. Most everyone came from a pokemon forum community background. 

The community was of course however not perfect though. Since the community was populated of mainly just early teens and little children there was indeed great conflicts from time to time but they would get resolved pretty well in the end and nothing personal would really come out of it. Nova had a rivalry with another place called Force which motivated and drove people to be more competitive but also at the same time caused more toxic situations. There was also an outside group called "The Skype Crew" that would instigate situations for their entertainment which would sometimes enhance conflicts even further. Through it all though Nova's initial environment overall was for the most part still satisfying because even though we had all our conflicts we would revolve back to our usual focus and be as we normally would be.

I'm not going to make this a super long thing to point out EVERY change throughout the years so we shall skip to the current modern day. Five years later the community has drastically and I mean DRASTICALLY changed from what it originally was. The community for the most part is a lot more diverse and have opened up to many different types of people. This has been both good and bad for the chat(in my opinion.) Good because it lets us have a wider variety of conversation than just mainly pokemon discussions but bad because it invites many irrelevant people who would have a negative impact to the community, further cutting off and dividing the community into personal sector groups like in high school. Conflicts have began to turn more personal with serious threats and attempting to ruin other people's credibility. Accusations are loosely thrown around and people seem to be less open minded to situations. The community mainly just seems driven by drama and have barely much in common to come together with. 

Nova as a community for the most part seems to have lost its focus and seems to have grow into something more negative than positive but I still don't think it's all too bad(yet at least...). We've all, as a community, have learnt a lot throughout our time and have hardened ourselves from a lot of past events. I feel like we think we are so great that we are starting to let it go to our heads. We are thinking we know so much when we actually know so little and it is one of the reasons it's killing us. Since we have grown up from kids we began to expand our ideologies and interests to other things which is normal. We are an ongoing chat so eventually of course a huge diversity would come through as the community grows. Even though things seemed to have grown for the worse I honestly still slightly enjoy the fact that we are able to see different lights than what we used to be able to in the past.