Hey. Hard truth of the day for you:
The sims community is only ever going to be as nice or as toxic as you make it.
I mean this in both directions.
The first (and most obvious) is something everyone says at least once here - if you want the community to be a better space, you have to be better in it. You have to choose kindness, most especially when it feels that you should not be kind. You have to lift others up even when you feel forgotten. You have to let things go when you really want to stir shit up and you know you would be rewarded for it.
I am not good at it much of the time; I mean this with love - I'm a messier bitch than you in my own head. But you've got to stop treating kindness like a character trait. It's not. It's a series of good, sometimes very uncomfortable choices. It's something we can all get better at.
If you want a better neighborhood, YOU have to be the better neighbor. It's on all of us, and no one will do it for us.
The second thing I mean you will like even less.
You get to decide who 'the community' even is.
The Sims - life simulations in general, even - make up a huge market share, with an international demographic. The volumes of people hyper-fixated on their little pixelated blorbos is vast and colorful and very fucking numerous.
Tumblr does not make it feel this way. Tumblr makes it feel like we're all in this together, and there's only actually... idk, like a high school worth of people. You know vaguely of others, but you mostly spend time with a few lunch tables, maybe share doodles with that one girl. You have a few friends and a few acquaintances, and it feels like all of their opinions have weight.
That's not what the internet is, though. You are simply looking at a still pool and thinking it is much shallower than it actually is. We all are.
If you don't want the community to be full of drama, it is your responsibility to fix that. There are truly unending numbers of accounts to follow; if the people in your sphere are being bad community members, you don't have to keep them in your community. Kick them out. Block them. Follow twenty new accounts doing cool shit, and let the toxicity shrivel and die. This is hard, but this probably means there are creatives you like who are part of the problem. Unfollow them too. Let ALL of them go.
It's not on you what other people say or do. But if you let every dumb ask or poor take become a voice of equal weight to the positive ones, you choke out the environment you've been growing for yourself. Your responsibility is to build a micro-culture that makes you want to come back - and doing so will likely shift the larger group a bit, but that's not the point. The point is you make simblr a better space for you.
Tend your fucking garden. If you let the weeds root, they will take over and ruin the view.
