GoMontag will not be shutting down, but development on it will be on an indefinite hiatus.
The short and sweet of it is that I’m tired of trying to make this site be something more than a pet project of mine and I want to move on. I’ve been working on this site for well over a year at this point, where I’ve had to take a break between October to December of last year for personal reasons I won’t bother everyone about. It’s not going anywhere as much as I had hoped it would.
The reasons why I made GoMontag
There are quite a few reasons as to why I made this site.
It’s getting difficult to actually own a product now
Nearly everything is going the route of buying a digital license for a product in entertainment, and smart appliances are starting to be locked to an online service. Much like how Louis Rossman and Ross Scott are doing their best to try and change legislation around the ownership of different products and the right to repair, I wanted to have something that lets people know about what they actually own through individual products based on the format they buy them from.
When you buy a licensed product, you don’t actually own it. Instead the company who has the ability to sell it can remove it from your library at any given time. This has been happening with different Sony products for a good while now.
I wanted to find ways of getting away from Social Media
I understand that there are good things about social media, but honestly, I hate it. I hate Facebook, I hate Instagram, I only really tolerate BlueSky because I can decide what I want to see, I’m sad about the state of YouTube, and everything wrong in the world can be traced back to how much of it revolves around Twitter (even before Elon Musk bought it). Part of the reason I named this site GoMontag was in reference to the message of Fahrenheit 451. However, instead of it being about how much Ray Bradbury hated Television, it’s how much I hate social media.
Everything that Ray Bradbury warned about with Television is way more true about social media. Thanks to everything being centered around a recommendation algorithm rather than focused around following a specific person, we’re getting recommendations that are centered around rage-baiting individuals into responding to them.
If there are two things I could remove from this world it would be recommendation algorithms and infinite scroll. These two technologies by themselves have ruined everything.
I wanted to make sure a product wasn’t made fully with Generative AI
I don’t believe anything fully made with AI deserves money. I could go into every reason as to why I dislike it but I’ll focus on the main reason I dislike it. People are using it to steal from each other, making it difficult for someone who wants to put in the effort to create something to make money from their own work. Thanks to Claude Code, people are actively using the software to steal from independent developers. People are going into Chat GPT to take YouTube video scripts, reframe them, and then steal videos from people who have put in honest work into them. All video and image generation was created from stolen images and videos from people who initially created them. AI doesn’t create; it can only iterate based off what information is fed into it.
You know what I’ll add another thing; Generative AI has pretty much destroyed people’s conception of art. I don’t want to generate my media suited only for me. I want to experience what someone or a group of people have created. I want to connect with other people through different mediums of art, not create my own experience suited only for me and myself alone. I don’t want Grand Theft Auto: Andy City Stories AI generated for me. Even if all the bugs were worked out and even if the story was generated to fit what I wanted my life experiences to be, I would find it boring. I want to experience a world that someone or a team of people handcrafted, and that isn’t going to be done with Generative AI being used.
Why I’m holding off development
As I’ve stated before. I’m tired of trying to make this work and I want to move on.
People are way busier now and it’s something I should have expected
While I have been getting support from friends and family, Not with money, but people have been pretty happy to support my endeavors and said that they like what I’ve created. Heck, my brother has been assisting me with some of the services used for this site.
However, when I do show this off to friends and family, I haven’t been getting anyone posting anything or signing up to request to do so. I kinda wanted to see if I could get someone to create or edit a product/format article, so that they could provide me feedback on what I might need to fix.
I completely understand that people are busy now. It’s just something that I should have expected when developing this site.
I’m getting sick of the internet and how it is now
When I started really using the internet as a teenager, I wanted to use it to talk about games that I enjoyed and find other people who shared the same taste in games as me. As well, I wanted to learn how to develop my own games, create my own maps for the games I enjoyed, and subscribe to YouTube videos that talk about things I’m interested in.
Now a days most discussion about nearly everything is how bad something is or about something that I really don't care about like internet drama.
It also doesn't help that everyone has become significantly meaner online now than they were even 10 to 15 years ago. Even years between 2007 to 2010, trolls weren't nearly as bad as they are now.
Generative AI has pretty much sunk it's teeth into everything online
Nearly every decompilation of an old game "ported to PC" is vibe coded now and optimized poorly to run on PC. Heck, vibe coders been doing this with games that already have a native PC ports.
Game modding now is all vibe coded "What if X Game is in Y Game".
This kind of stuff doesn't excite me. If I want to play Minecraft, I'd just play it on my PC from it's executable. I don't think I'd every want to play it within Skyrim or another game. The prospect of a native PC port doesn't interest me either because for most retro games I can just play games on a native console or if I have to through an emulator.
Not only that but there are so many videos online for short form content pretending to be real but are actually AI generated. The only reason why someone would want to do that is to fake clicks and get revenue from them.
It's just all insincere. Very few things feel like they have effort put into them now.
I need to focus in on things going on in my life
Without going into too much detail, I have been needing to focus on other aspects of my life. So I'm going to be dropping GoMontag for now. If I have anymore things to say, I'll update this blog to let you know.