I don’t play minecraft, and I live under a rock so, I didn’t understand the meme. TIL Notch took the good will he received from the gaming community and summarily flushed it down the toilet.
To play devils advocate,
When Notch was still a normal developer he was pretty progressive. I still remember the blog post where declared Minecraft has no distinct genders, all animals can breed with all of the same species, therefor everyone in Minecraft is gay. As a way to bash homophobes.
The chain of events as i witnessed it. And he also spoke of a few times is that money destroyed all his authentic friendships, his wife divorced him, everyone he met wanted him just for his money and he got completely isolated, also claimed to living for the most part on potato chips when on a podcast with moistcritical.
I also high suspicion from experience with other people he developed an alcohol problem which fuel his social media posts.
It’s no excuse but it is a recipe to make an otherwise decent person act in a monstrous way. Also a recipe to be easily influenceable by the wrong kids of al media.
Last i checked he took a long break from social media, and eventually came back as more sober person.
Can’t erase the fact he made some bad comments in the past. Many people seem to trow him on the same pile as Jk Rowling, who is actively and consistently doing harm. Such is far from fair.
Found the post
Notch is better than Rowling if only that he had the good sense to leave the public eye and separate himself from his work.
Thank you for this!
Last i checked he took a long break from social media, and eventually came back as more sober person.
This is news to me, do you have any more info? While I agree that you can’t erase the bad, I would like to have another (rare) example of someone who turned themselves around.
And thanks for your post in general. I didn’t know about his opinions on gender, and they’re surprisingly thoughtful, especially for that time.
That genuinely hard to refer to, its mors of an absence of controversy. His main social media is still twitter and this might have been the second time this year he postsed at all.
What i do know, He deleted his twitter account somewhere after 2021 and since 2024 appears to be back, working on a new game and expressed enjoying game development again (after presumably no longer enjoying it
Many of his pre-2022 post read to me as actual cringe and shit jokes. X appears to shuffle posts so its genuinely not hard still to find some really nasty ones. But everything since has been just a normal dude talking about developing game. Most opinionated expressing criticism against ai/vibe coding and how the epstein case is handled.
I dont know if he commented on the controversies since but the vibe i am getting is that fading in the background a little, being less famous and bombarded with internetfandom helped.
It just hit me you where asking for info nog just specific examples of proof of turning life around.
I found this article on loneliness from before the controversies many sources seem to point to facebook which I cant access though.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ive-never-felt-more-isolated-says-billionaire-mine/1100-6430171/
Also learned this from wikipedia.
] They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her.[64] On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce.[2] The divorce was finalised later that year.[64][9]
On 14 December 2011 Persson’s father committed suicide with a handgun[9] after drinking heavily.[1] In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father:[9]
According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse.
I think what i have is more of a theory that makes me see the human but what i sadly can’t find is wether or not he is sorry for what happened.
I think I kind of identify with this perspective. I used to view agender as the obvious goal and anyone trying to emphasise binary gender as being kind of backwards. I just assumed that every cool person secretly just wanted to abolish gender and then we could just do whatever we wanted without having to label it one way or another.
And so for a split second I thought the terfs had a point. I even defended the perspective on reddit I think 🤦 anyway, you know the rest. If you read enough terf shit they tell in themselves and it’s not a feminist movement at all, but only about guarding access to their role as afabs (in the patriarchy).
I’m not going to waste to many more bytes on a transphobe, but if he’s been doing some work and coming to his senses then I’m happy for him. I can imagine how his particular life path fucked him up (solo Java developer to probably richest indie dev in the world).
Exactly the meme that came to mind. Notch turned out to be such a disappointment
Why is he the worst person?
What is bad about Notch?
As others have stated, while he is correct on this issue, I wouldn’t look to Notch for his opinion on anything these days.
I honestly can’t even tell if Jennifer Gibbons (ESA VP of State Government Affairs who made the original statement) even has any idea what Private Servers are. It’s almost as if she was equating them to something like the community run WoW servers, which regardless of the morality argument, were in fact breaking ToS by circumventing WoW’s subscription fees.
In the case of Minecraft, that argument doesn’t apply. Minecraft has no online subscription. Private servers were the only way to even play online until Realms. While Mojang doesn’t officially support private server administration, they do provide downloads for the server binary and documentation on their official website. It’s not just allowed, it’s explicitly listed as a way to play.
Obviously they would prefer to push people toward Realms as an extra revenue stream, but the way multiplayer is architected in Minecraft makes this argument make zero sense.
I think the gaming community’s intuition on this one is correct in that she accidentally said the quiet part out loud:
The end state of the tech industry desired by corporations is one where copies of software and even the means to compute can no longer be owned, they must be rented from the gatekeepers–i.e. “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
Yeah, one asshole complaining about fellow assholes shouldn’t be considered news, even if it is his clock’s time of day to be correct.
I mean, it is news if he’s the one who made the game that’s being talked about.
He’s LONG since divested himself of control over it (not that I wouldn’t have done it for that price, either), so what he says about how it’s being handled today doesn’t really much matter anymore, IMHO.
It’s not evil, it’s plain stupid, why would I ever play Minecraft with my friends now if we can’t control the lobby?!
Isn’t notch like one step away from full blown Nazi
I mean yes, but it should be even more concerning when the sociopath thinks you might want to dial the evil down a bit.
How is this relevant to the actual topic?
Spill it!🍵💥☕
Never attribute to Malice that which can be explained by nearly terminal levels of stupidity.
everything to
increasemaximize shareholders’ profitsThis is a great argument for open source :)
