What caused your niche interest/hobby to blow up in terms of popularity?
It could be a small surge but something where you noticed a sudden influx of people. Maybe a game you were playing that got quite popular after it was streamed or there was free weekend on Steam.
For example during the quarantine and around the time when the used console market got prohibitively expensive handheld emulators like the RG350 and much later the Miyoo Mini got quite popular. This was partially due to more people at home wanting to play their favorite classics but also them being promoted as "fake" GameBoys and PSPs on TikTok.
I've been skateboarding since '85, and in the 90s is was basically dying out as everyone turned to rollerblades. The one two punch of Tony Hawks Pro Skater and Tony landing a 900 in the Xgames on live TV really reinvigorated the sport.
I think the realisation that rollerblades are pretty boring once you've become decent on them had a lot to do with it. Unless you're going to get into serious acrobatics, there just isn't a wide variety of tricks you can do on blades, compared to skating.
I agree, I did rollerblade as well for a while, though I stopped before grinds really became a thing. We tried, but the frames at the time just weren't built for it.
It just became about jumping bigger and bigger stair sets, and at some point you either give up or really get hurt.
Now days due to various injuries I can't blade or ice skate, though I can still hold my own in a skatepark or on a snowboard.
Yeah that's exactly we did, had a couple of big wipe outs on the crazy stairs we were doing 180s down and were just like, is this all there is? And even if you're doing grinds that's like, one trick (no matter how many different angles you can position your feet when you do it).
I save my knees for basketball these days, but I miss the skateboard.
Does "hosting a lemmy instance" count as a niche hobby or interest? If it does, then reddit is the cause of the sudden popularity
I'd say so. It's like being on a social network before it really took off
Stardew Valley.
One man made his (and a lot of other people's) dream game, by himself, in four years. Now there's loads more people making the games they want to play, or trying to. And I love it.
Always been a naval history aficionado, which is a fairly niche interest among history fans. Always bugged me slightly, I get that boats and oceans are just ... niche, but its also extremely useful as a lens through which one can begin to more broadly understand global affairs. It has a lot of tendrils everywhere, from military to industry and economics to diplomacy and culture to even a good bit of STEM, since ships are complicated and physics is a bitch. It's the bulk of global logistics to this day, though.
Sales pitch over, there were never that many of us. Then World of Warships came out.
This guy has made no small splash either:
https://youtube.com/@Drachinifel
From time immemorial, the purpose of a navy has been to influence, and sometimes decide, issues on land. This was so with the Greeks of antiquity; Romans, who created a navy to defeat Carthage; the Spanish, whose armada tried and failed to conquer England; and, most eminently, in the Atlantic and Pacific during two world wars. The sea has always given man in expensive transport and ease of communication over long distances. It has also provided concealment, because being over the horizon meant being out of sight and effectively beyond reach. The sea has supplied mobility, capability, and support throughout Western history, and those failing in the sea-power test -notably Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler - also failed the longevity one. - Edward L. Beach, in Keepers of the Sea
I played factorio on either the original version or the one after, and thought wow this game is really cool I'm glad something like this finally exists. I see a couple small youtube channels talking about it and making videos, and I'm like cool maybe in a couple years this turns into a polished game. ~3 months later and the game is one of the most downloaded on steam and is getting huge updates every few weeks. Totally shocked me that it was that ridiculously popular.
It's addictive.
I'm in playthrough 20. Each playthrough the factory becomes more efficient (usually).
I read a book about Lean Manufacturing and I needed to apply the learning to the game. It's interesting to see the changes in this playthrough. No more supply buffer chests. I'm relying on just in time supply chain. Well except the past of my factory that makes the factory, that's still full of chests of stuff waiting to be built.
Built my own quad-copter and flew it around. Had to flash plane ESC's with custom firmware, wire it all up manually to a controller and muck around with the values to tune it, then you could hand fly it (very carefully). It was amazing! - an RC plane that could hover.
Nowadays, if I go somewhere and some normie's "flying" a DJ, I'm annoyed with them. It's really breathtaking how good these got so quickly.
Stranger Things.
I played TTRPGs a lot growing up, but moved on when I went to university. One pandemic and a lot of nostalgic synthwave later, I'm rolling dice again.
Same! I went from 0 to 60, I play in 4 regular games and have a 5th character that is for Organized Play that I run about every other month or so.
Stranger Things and Critical Role both had a big part in blowing up TTRPGs
Definitely. I think culturally we were ready for a resurgence and then a couple of catalysts kicked it off. Critical Role was undoubtedly one of them.
A group of professional voice actors streaming it on Youtube.
What would it be in this situation?
D&D. I genuinely thought Critical Role was so well-known that everyone would know what I meant.
Your problem was in how you described them. While you are correct in that they are professional - they are a bunch of βnerdy-ass voice actors.β
However, I did originally know who you referred to.
It hasn't yet. I wish one of them has but none have gotten there yet. I do talk about them often in the hopes that one does (albeit for the secondary reason that some of them are difficult to explain since people think of it and think of something wholly different than me).
Tbh gaming as a whole. I'm 34, and I've played video games basically my whole life. When I was young, it was a niche interest. It grew rapidly, but I remember when we were a fairly small number. Now gaming is so assumed that individual games are hobbies. Gaming language is embedded in our culture. I remember it being a rare novelty that few people understood and fewer took seriously.
Not sure what caused it, but D&D exploded in popularity at some point.
When we young teen boys were playing in the mid-80s, it was not cool. You would never talk about it to other people that weren't into it as it was unspeakably nerdy. Keep that shit on the down low. Nerd.
Now I don't play because it's so crazy complex. I might go for gaming the old-school way, but I tried and the mechanics are archaic and difficult.
Beats made the headphone market absolutely explode. I think the fact that the early ones really kinda sucked brought a priceless amount of free exposure to AKG, Grado, Sennheiser, etc.
Even the low-tier headphones got significantly better
Science fiction conventions. Back in the day, a World Science Fiction Convention ("WorldCon") was incredible when the reached over 1000 people. New York Comic Con has almost 180,000 people last I checked. And adjacent to that, anime. It used to be niche weirdos in basements in the US but now in an enormous industry.
Graham Hancock got a lot of people talking about pre-historical human civilizations. Explaining a lot of evidence all over the planet that Western historians just ignored.
Sure wasn't the Greeks or Romans or Egyptians that built/made/buried all of that stuff in China, SE Asia, India, South America. They were just as smart everywhere. But it didn't sell as many books.
Never heard of the guy, when did he start publishing this stuff? David Graeber talked about the advanced civilization that existed in China and the Islamic world during the European Middle Ages, and Kim Stanley Robinson alluded to the same point in The Years of Rice and Salt.
World of Warcraft released. Before that only nerds and losers played PC games, according to some.