So you got your technician's license? You get to do such fun activities as: call out on simplex FM voice for no one to respond or talk to the 70-year-old+ "repeater guys" who are on every day from 6 am - 6 pm about uhhhh radios, grilling, ex-wives if you want..... and then listen to the silence when everybody runs out of things to talk about in the presence of an "outsider" (someone who hasn't been on the repeater every day for 10+ years).

Not interested? That's fine, instead you can just listen to the activity on the repeater when they think no one else is around and hear interesting conversation topics like what the repeater guys would do if someone they were dating had an abortion including, but not limited to, "putting 2 between their eyes".

Not interested in even that? Okay, if your radio is capable of digital operation, you can connect to a system of linked repeaters and make contact with a different set of 70-year-old+ repeater guys. Once you make contact and talk a bit (maybe even have a good time listening to their stories if you're into that), you can look up their callsign and find their Twitter and find out they're REALLY RACIST and that probably the only reason they spoke to you in a polite manner or at all is cuz you have a "normal-sounding" male voice.

If this is what the self-policing culture of amateur radio is like (at least where I am in the United States currently) then we need to give many, many more Baofengs to unlicensed zoomers immediately

Anyway, that has been my experience so far in a rural area in the US. It hasn't been all bad (making contact with the International Space Station was cool) but yeah. I'm going back to a city soon, maybe it will be better there.

I really do want to get into this hobby and I love the technology (need to find the money sometime to do more packet stuff) but a lot of this type of stuff has been off-putting