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There is always some talk that there are less and less new people joining the scene and I wonder how many these actually are. I would consider myself rather new and I love the demoscene! So here I have a few questions that are on my mind:

1. What are we already doing to attract newcomers/to reach out?
2. What are your thoughts and ideas we could do to attract newcomers/to reach out?
3. To the rather new people out here: How have you become a demoscener?

Back in the early 90s demoscene was a thing. I remember non-demosceners playing demos as benchmarks on Amiga or first PCs. Cracktros were playing before every game. You could learn how to code basic effects from zins. To me the competitive nature was very appealing. I've never released my older "prods" (usually with just one effect in asm) as I didn't bother to go to parties and I was too young for it I guess, but I was a big fan.

Now things has changed. You have professional benchmarks (some of them created by ex-demosceners) and games are superior in terms of fidelity and graphics.

You still have size-coding and nostalgia (oldschool platforms etc...), but also once in a while some interesting new tricks appear. You may say SDFs originated in the modern demoscene, even that the original ray-marching technique was described by John Hart in 1995, the procedural SDFs and real-time ray-marching was mostly explored by demosceners. You can even see Siggraph has a demoscene panel now, which is probably not in the demoscene "underground" spirit, but at least brings some attention.

Also everyone has different vision for demoscene now. Personally, I was hoping demoscene to be sort of f-u message to academia, industry etc... showing that a group of undeground rebels can do better than mainstream, but well... it was probably never like this anyway. So hopefully newcomers will have their own vision, which is more realistic today, like making nostalgic intros in Sketch, lol.

I have a colleague who was born in 1997 and is quite a good programmer. I gave him some links to youtube videos of Second Reality, "Happiness is around the bend", etc. He didn't react. Apparently the demos didn't impress him.

@Adok: Your coleague might have another reason why he does not react to you?

That's what we call a "Trottelposting" in German.

1)
- i try to make the parties and events that i already organize for the demoscene itself easily accessible for outsiders (outline, lovebyte, byte battle, shader showdown and shader jam).
- and i try to cooperate with likeminded outside entities to organize events outside the scene to address outside audiences directly (so far, shader showdown and jam).

2)
- we should end the myth that streaming on twitch or youtube is evil for questionable political reasons and feelings of personal disenchantment about what happened to 1 single demoparty in 2021 and none of the other demoscene related streamers who did actually follow the rules, and recognize that for outreach to be effective there is no sane reason to limit our potential streaming audiences
- i want to produce more cool shows and spend a little bit more time on announcing them to more or less likeminded communities

3)
i'm too old to remember that ;)

I think that in order to appreciate demos on any platform, you have to have knowledge of how a computer displays moving graphics and plays sounds on that platform, as well as the limitations of each platform. I've made games on Atari 8-Bit and Amiga, and even though it wasn't in assembler, I still knew the limitations of those systems, and how they can be exceeded by those even more familiar with the quirks of the hardware.

So when I look at demos on Amiga, etc, they impress me a lot and I enjoy seeing the old Jay Miner hardware being shown off, even if it is emulation.

The problem is the layperson, who has no idea about the above, and so they wonder what the fuss is about. They may like the pretty colours and the visuals and the music, etc, but for all they know it could just be a video (and usually is seen as a video on YouTube) and not realtime in origin.

He probably thought they were pre-rendered and not realtime. Did you tell him they were realtime and explain something about the hardware limitations?

Hm...i dont think we have a lack on newcomers.
That had been the case a few years ago, but the myths of "scene is dead", "almost dead" or even "dieing" ist over imho.

I told him that the demos are hardcoded and that Second Reality is from 1993.

The statement "Demos are realtime" is actually not quite true. Many demos contain precalculated parts. Farbrausch demos for instance are well-known for their loading bars.

Well, there's a rather easy thing almost anyone can do: check out local hacker congresses, creative gaming or programming events (even hackathons) or art festivals and offer to do an introduction talk about the demoscene. The worst thing they can say is "no", so no harm done.
If it attracts one or two new people to come to the next party, that already makes a bunch - and as a bonus they may then even be from your area and you can start working with them.

Plus, those event committees often follow up rather quickly with "Hey, for the evening program, would you be interested in hosting a demoshow?". We (being Echtzeit) are having one event coming up end of the month at the biggest Swiss digital society congress, and are always happy to share our slides, talking notes and captures for anyone else to re-use or reiterate.

well, not _every_ programmer is interested in graphics, so spoon feeding demos to those not interested ain't gonna work

Well, you can always go to an event hosting music production or graphics. You can organise a graffathon as the guys in Finland did. It's not like you're forcing people into your room, and adjusting your introduction to the audience is important, of course.
I know for example from gargaj that he did quite some in-depth tool and workflow discussions at conferences, I on the other hand of course mainly stick with a more high-level cultural intro, to work within my abilities.
It's up to you how - and if - you want to reach out on behalf of the scene.

yeah that was targeted to the discussion going on above...

if you outreach at places where there's already a creative / graphics vibe obviously the people there are familiar with the concepts and more likely to be interested. And even then it can be rather hit or miss to find them interested in a rotating cube is my not-so-proactive outreach experience whenever i spoke to creatives in other fields about my silly hobby.

Demoscene isn't so much dead, as IMHO it never really flourished to it's full potential. The numbers are just not there - I've said it multiple times, but top demoscene prods are getting max. 200k-300k views from video captures (and probably even less from downloads). This is far less than average/boring short on CGBros for comparison. I know it may be not the point, as it's a niche/underground art etc...but well, this may translate into incentive to participate.

Maybe people who you identified might be slightly interested can be lured to joining you to visit some parties, strictly for the party aspect at first. That's the best way to invite to the demoscene. Maybe someone would come again the next time, and ask herself the third time, hm... why don't I have somehing in the compos btw.? This seemed to have worked several times from my observations.
I wouldn't put too much pressure on it or act too enthusiastically about it. If it's mostly a thing for old geezers/hipster amateur programmers, so be it...

What Havoc said :-)

Seriously, at least, with those of us who have started or who have been doing fairly regular demoshow streams on Twitch and / or Youtube, we are starting to do some outreach, which hopefully may get some new people interested. Not all of my followers on Twitch are sceners but they have been intrigued by what I've been showing in recent weeks.

I remember I was explaining to someone how they are realtime and different than if you captured the same thing in a video, and the response was "Isn't playing a video realtime?". I laughed and realized, well yes the decoding and playback happens in realtime too. It's not an easy concept to grasp or appreciate, also in my experience, those who are meant to be attracted by demos, not only for the technical but other reasons too, they are going to appreciate on their own, for others whether it's realtime or anything else doesn't impress or make them sold.

Many modern games have real-time cut sequences (in engine), some with special effects as well (not just fly-by). At this point you don't have to lower the detail much compared to pre-rendered cinematics. It has no compression artifacts and looks more seamless with the rest of the game. The style is quite different of course.

I personally tend to see that the following is true: first - times have changed. Demoscene in some ways - not so much.So with aself critical eye I think : In the beginning demos looked far more cooler than the games and computer have been the future and demoscene and for the people participating in it was this feeling and looking like that,too. And second there was no internet. Now it looks sometimes more like the other way around - demoscene in some ways doesn' t look so modern at all - games often look much better. And to satisfy your creative needs for code, music and gfx or just showing off your skills the internet offers a worldwide possibility with a lot more freedome and niches with less caring about group votes and legends that mainly always are hyped more of their names instead if their latest skills or running into some unspoken rules that some new people sometimes just don' t know. And the vision for the future has been exchanged with a nostalgic view that tends to be very often also a conserverative view in that sense, that many people want to stay it in one way or another that fits to their personal view. That in itself can be a break for innovations for a scene. I remember one oldschool scener at a seeing a damn great demo from some newcomers- he accepted that- just to say in the same sentence to me- how they couldn' t greet his group- didn' t they know respect ? Just for that point the demo couldn' t be voted for. I just looked at him puzzled and asked him, why the heck they should care ? How can they know you ? Or another case - a new group released also an awesome demo but used a sample that was obviously taken from some known track and for some people at that time it was in an coding language that wasn' t typical for demo coding- so most people have been picking about these points also here on pouet in their release comments.It was a mighty bad expression of the "open mind" of the scene. So they stopped, opened up an software development team, released some games and a few years later even some tools for shading programming that then has been praised by some of the same people that have pushed their beginners mistake over and over again. Funny how life goes. Just 2 of a big pile of stories I have seen over some years.
The last great innovation in the scene with the most impact was the introduction of the live coding events and to some extend the online demo parties- because these worked out for some people that didn' t attend to parties because- well let be frank - life! I personally think if scene itself doesn' t open up for even more new ideas, we might be stuck to the fact that we are celebrating a youth culture that has been gone- just like reliving woodstock for just another time. Not dead , no - that demoscene urge is a part of us! But not very appealing enough for a new generation. So the first thing has to be critical look at the current state and our own attitude.

imo demoscene is mostly about art now, not about techs. i'm not saying there's still no tech in demoscene tho.

talking about the main topic, i propose to revive demoscene mentoring discord. (can i share the link here?)

Less elitism, it was cool in the 90s when there were lots of people in the demoscene but today there's no point in being called "elite", as there are simply not enough sceners. Being humble is the new "elite".

More tolerance within emulation. It's nice to have a real working machine but don't make it a habit to brag about it way more than you should. The real problem is that nowadays these retro machines are starting to cost even more than they should (you rarely see an unexpanded AMIGA 1200 being sold for less than 600 € today).

More tolerance between platforms. I still see occasionally some people claiming that C64 is still alive and AMIGA is dead, saying that to deliberately start flamewars (and not as a joke).

(Just a short reminder that for some people the use of old platforms is not an expression of conservatism or nostalgia but an expression of steep radicalism)

Its so funny that this discussion went again to "scene is dead" tendencies.
Its not. Period.