I'll try and answer a couple questions, but I doubt many people will see this anyway lol 1. Why? This was coming. I knew I was 100% going to quit Scratch when I hit 18 and the school year ended. But I'm still doing it a bit prematurely, but I'm done here. I'm pretty old to be on this site. I'm above the recommended age, my art and ideas are often too mature (understandable. Scratch wants a safe place for all ages). And, the biggest reason honestly? I'm tired of it. Tired of being on Scratch. But those are things about me. Here are things that are on Scratch: The AI training. I know they won't be allowing you to just make a project through generating it, but it does urk me a little. We've never needed AI before, why now? I don't see how it improves Scratch much. I've always tried to defend ST and their choices, it's not easy running a site with a bunch of children yelling at you about how you're doing it wrong, but I can't really find a good place to defend this. The discourse. All people do is argue now, especially about the membership or the use of AI. Mostly on the forums, but it's still in most places. It's not good for my mental health (and probably not yours either) The parental verification. Scratch is probably required by some law to do this, so I do not fault them much for this, but I still do not like it. There are a couple other reasons, but they're too miscellaneous or small to be given their own category. 2. What about your projects? I've unshared basically everything that means something to me or that I no longer want a ton of people looking at (because some old projects got resurfaced, I removed the ones that no longer represented me), + some exceptions. I went a little overboard and unshared some I meant to keep shared (mostly collab stuff/payments/beloved projects). If I accidentally unshared some art of your OC or some finished payments or whatever, let me know and I'll happily reshare it if I get the chance. 3. So this is goodbye forever? Probably not. This is a soft quitting. It's not easy to drop something that's been a part of your life for the past 6 years. Also, some Scratch-only friends may want to talk to me a bit more. I'm developing some games, so I might be back to tinker in the Scratch editor a bit if I don't feel like messing around with my code. Maybe I'll make a small animation and post it once in a while. I will be coming on here much more rarely though, and I will guarantee you that I will never fully come back. One day, this tab will be closed and never opened by me again. ---------- When I first joined Scratch, I always imagined myself getting extremely popular. I also used to see projects of other people quitting and I had a hard time imagining myself doing something like that. Now I can see why. Despite this, I'm very content with the way things turned out. I like the friends I've made on here, the wonderful ideas I've seen from others, and even though it can be toxic at times, people have always been nice. Thank you for reading this, whether I've known you for a long time, or you've just stumbled on this project, I'm glad you stayed. <3 It's actually going to be my birthday soon (at the time of posting this). Happy birthday to me!!
