I've read this thread and the others that were related to it, and I want to say that while I'll still browse TVT, I also want to see ATT become a viable competitor. With that said, there are issues that are likely to crop up as ATT forms and grows. I want to bring them up and inspire some useful discussion in the hopes that we can nip those problems and/or prepare to properly deal with those problems once they start cropping up.
As a warning, this will be something of an essay that will attempt to put TVT's current problems into context, and should inspire some ideas about how ATT and its administration could avoid/work around similar issues should they crop up here too. Much of this is based on research I made into the roots of TVT's issues and controversies, and my interpretations of my findings.
As another warning, this narrative involves not just TVT but other sites as well. I am merely trying to give context to why TVT is currently in the state that it's in, and any importation/exportation of inter-site drama is completely unintentional on my part.
Let's start by winding the clock back a few years:
The Second Google Incident and its fallout could be viewed as the culmination of a number of different factors, not just within TVT, but also coming from outside it.
I first encountered TVT in early January of 2008, only a couple of weeks or so before the Great Crash. The efforts of numerous tropers who tried to rebuild lost pages however they could (from saved pages, from the Wayback Machine, and from scratch) was quite inspiring for me; I found that it would be worthwhile for me to join such a wonderfully dedicated community, and thus I became a troper later in the year. I started out as a mere mostly-anonymous contributor, but within a year or so I decided to Get Known, which I did, and joined the forums in late 2009.
I remained blissfully unaware of certain, rather seedy undercurrents in the community, but those same sections would later play a role in the crisis of 2012. The first hints, for me, probably would've been the First Google Incident in the fall of 2010. However, at that time I was feeling that, since TVT had weathered other crises such as the Crash just fine, it would also weather this one and come out quite fine. Things seemed so settle back down to normal (or what could pass for normal on a site like TVT) like I had hoped they would. In retrospect, I likely should have treated the First Incident as being a harbinger of the trials and controversies that were to visit TVT within the next several years. In actuality, I ignored such warnings, even managing to remain rather blaise during and after the Second Incident. It wasn't until the past few months, as I was browsing the internet like I usually do (a similar action was what led me to TVT in the first place) that I was to eventually remove those Pollyanna-like blinders and realize just what had happened to TVT and its reputation over at least the previous couple of years.
Let's start off with the Something Awful forums. Some of us may know this site from such things as the Let's Plays of various video games and things like that. At the same time, though, the site and its members ("goons") are also quite well known for mocking things that they feel deserve mockery (it's pretty much in tone with their motto: "The internet makes you stupid"). Most such mock threads are usually posted in the "Post Your Favorite" ("PYF") section of the forums. Well, starting in early 2011 they did a series of such threads with TVT being the subject/target for mockery.
The links for the threads are posted below in chronological order, for your perusal:
Thread #1 (Archived)
Thread #2 (Archived)
Thread #3 (No sign of it on Google, likely disappeared into those parts of the SA archive that require becoming a member and paying a special fee to access)
Thread #4 (Archived)
Thread #5 (As of this post, current thread, but currently hidden behind SA's paywall).
You don't necessarily need to read the threads in their entirety. Myself, I skipped to random pages, but that was still enough to give an idea of their--rather dim--views on the site and its community as a whole. Also bear in mind that not all goons would agree with the mindset displayed by the particular goons in these threads; the participants are (for the most part) a (sometimes vocal) minority.
The first thread started off well enough, with some goons saying that they actually liked the site; but once they started discovering that TVT's community had a rather seedy underbelly they decided to invade the site in the hopes of "improving" it. This lead that thread to be shut down; the later threads made it clear that future invasions should not be conducted. However, these threads also revealed that plenty of the stuff posted in certain sections of TVT (especially Troper Tales and the forums) could easily give the site and its community an unsavory reputation (note the emoticon that they use to denote TVT and its community). Even today they are still at it: if you were to lurk in the currently-running "Shit_that_didn't_happen.txt" thread--at least when the paywall is down--you would notice that a large amount of the stories posted there were from the Troper Tales archive. It's practically low-hanging fruit and makes for easy trollbait; the damage it was doing to TVT and its community was the major factor in TVT's jettisoning of the TT section.).
Now, Fast Eddie at first seemed to simply brush it off as simply the antics of a relatively minor group on a site with a fairly large userbase. However, there are hints that some of what the goons were saying seemed to be starting to get under FE's skin and making him nervous about his site's reputation. What didn't help matters was that at least several other tropers had stumbled upon the SA threads, thought that at least some of the criticisms were legit (in my view, some were indeed legit, though not all; I'll get to that later). At least a few of those tropers apparently decided to join those threads so they could comment on how, in their eyes, TVT was flawed.
Then the Second Google Incident went off. The seedy underbelly of the TVT community, which had been festering for years, was suddenly brought to light brought to light. Some tropers (notably some of the veterans, such as Anne Beeche--Bob Schroeck might or might not remember her) decided to leave TVT and head for areas--such as SA--where they could criticize TVT for failings real and perceived. All in all, it was a terrible time. One of the more notorious (in my view) incidents that came out of this debacle was when one of the members of the 5P group found himself being worn down by constantly having to analyze works to see if there was too much porn/pedophilia-pandering/other objectionable stuff in them to be worthy of having TVT articles on them. He left, needing a place to vent (something that I could actually sympathize with), and made the--rather poor, in retrospect--choice of going onto the SA thread. Once FE found out, that member was banned and his troper page replaced with the words "SA Traitor", the latter lasting only a short time before being removed once cooler heads prevailed.
As for the SA threads that helped drive FE to the breaking point: they became so loaded with former tropers complaining about their former community's failings that the mods eventually stepped in and locked them; they also put up a moratorium that lasted for about a year, and the current thread is determined to keep from repeating the same mistakes that dragged the previous threads down.
At this stage, it should be mentioned: SA has a history of being against pedophilia and related philias/fetishes, to the point where being an admitted pedophile is grounds for banning. Trying to make a distinction between pedophilia and its related philias (e.g. ephebophilia) will lead to you being looked at as a pedo anyway (as an aside, a certain infamous anime that features pedophilia--and whose title includes the words "jikan", "kodomo", and "no", though not in that order--is referred to simply as "The Anime That Must Not Be Named", or "That Anime" for short). Indeed, one of their more famous actions in recent times is what they did in reaction to the fact that Reddit was hosting some quite creepy subreddits. Once they found this out, while in the midst of a Reddit mocking thread, they were understandably horrified. When they tried to get the site's admins to shut down those subreddits, they were rebuffed, with the admins claiming that it would go against free speech to shut them down; this pissed them off even further. The final icing on the cake was the revelation that the creator/moderator of many of the creepy subreddits, a man with the screenname "violentacrez", was a relatively close friend of many of the admins. The goons took matters into their own hands and unleased a media blitz intended to call attention to these facts. The creepy subreddits were shut down only after these media blitzes, which the goons called "Pedogeddons", and violentacrez's identity was eventually revealed, ending his reign of disgustingness.
Now, these relate to the TVT threads because in those threads evidence (from the horses' mouths to boot) were laid bare for all to see that among TVT's seedier parts of its community were a bunch of pedophiles and pedo-apologists. It seems that the 5P was formed at least partly in response to this unsavory revelation.
Now, there were a number of other things that went on that I couldn't properly summarize (and besides, I feel that this essay is getting long enough already--it took me several hours to type this on Notepad, just in case certain problems come up), but this is essentially one of the major issues that helped cripple TVT and could potentially face ATT.
Now, from that narrative, I've made a relatively brief summary of possible solutions to at least some of these problems:
--Put in some Terms of Service whose reading should be mandatory for all users. The TOS must make it clear that, although we do not intend to enforce censorship on a level similar to what TVT is currently doing, we also have certain standards that, although being relatibely loose, should still be followed in order to keep the administration from cracking down like they did over on TVT.
--Do not allow Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel to be hosted on ATT. These made for extremely easy trollbait in the past, and newer entries could likely continue such a bad reputation.
---Alternatively, keep TT, but put down some rules--preferrably a reasonable number of equally reasonable rules--regarding how such tales should be formatted (e.g. nothing that comes off as too creepy, unbelievable, emo-like, and whatnot), and have a team of mods do a regular purging of those entries that violate those rules. (Of course, when TVT was hosting TT, the mods did no less than three major purges of such entries, but eventually gave it up as hopeless. I would recommend that, should we go with the option of hosting TT, we should create a mod team that has more stamina and willpower and is able to better handle such an admittedly Sisyphean task.)
--Have a mod team that is good at recognizing whether or not certain entries, in any article, violate the TOS; such a team could be useful in settling potential edit wars and the like.
--Personally, I feel that the "No Lewdness, No Prudishness" stance currently taken by TVT is a good move, but the execution as it currently stands leaves quite a lot to be desired. At the very least, we should try to find ways to better execute a similar stance.
These ideas are what came out of my brain, but at the same time I am also willing to listen to other, alternative suggestions. I firmly believe that with some well-done conversations we could hammer out a way for ATT to become a viable competitor, instead of becoming a cesspit that even TVT would mock.
As a warning, this will be something of an essay that will attempt to put TVT's current problems into context, and should inspire some ideas about how ATT and its administration could avoid/work around similar issues should they crop up here too. Much of this is based on research I made into the roots of TVT's issues and controversies, and my interpretations of my findings.
As another warning, this narrative involves not just TVT but other sites as well. I am merely trying to give context to why TVT is currently in the state that it's in, and any importation/exportation of inter-site drama is completely unintentional on my part.
Let's start by winding the clock back a few years:
The Second Google Incident and its fallout could be viewed as the culmination of a number of different factors, not just within TVT, but also coming from outside it.
I first encountered TVT in early January of 2008, only a couple of weeks or so before the Great Crash. The efforts of numerous tropers who tried to rebuild lost pages however they could (from saved pages, from the Wayback Machine, and from scratch) was quite inspiring for me; I found that it would be worthwhile for me to join such a wonderfully dedicated community, and thus I became a troper later in the year. I started out as a mere mostly-anonymous contributor, but within a year or so I decided to Get Known, which I did, and joined the forums in late 2009.
I remained blissfully unaware of certain, rather seedy undercurrents in the community, but those same sections would later play a role in the crisis of 2012. The first hints, for me, probably would've been the First Google Incident in the fall of 2010. However, at that time I was feeling that, since TVT had weathered other crises such as the Crash just fine, it would also weather this one and come out quite fine. Things seemed so settle back down to normal (or what could pass for normal on a site like TVT) like I had hoped they would. In retrospect, I likely should have treated the First Incident as being a harbinger of the trials and controversies that were to visit TVT within the next several years. In actuality, I ignored such warnings, even managing to remain rather blaise during and after the Second Incident. It wasn't until the past few months, as I was browsing the internet like I usually do (a similar action was what led me to TVT in the first place) that I was to eventually remove those Pollyanna-like blinders and realize just what had happened to TVT and its reputation over at least the previous couple of years.
Let's start off with the Something Awful forums. Some of us may know this site from such things as the Let's Plays of various video games and things like that. At the same time, though, the site and its members ("goons") are also quite well known for mocking things that they feel deserve mockery (it's pretty much in tone with their motto: "The internet makes you stupid"). Most such mock threads are usually posted in the "Post Your Favorite" ("PYF") section of the forums. Well, starting in early 2011 they did a series of such threads with TVT being the subject/target for mockery.
The links for the threads are posted below in chronological order, for your perusal:
Thread #1 (Archived)
Thread #2 (Archived)
Thread #3 (No sign of it on Google, likely disappeared into those parts of the SA archive that require becoming a member and paying a special fee to access)
Thread #4 (Archived)
Thread #5 (As of this post, current thread, but currently hidden behind SA's paywall).
You don't necessarily need to read the threads in their entirety. Myself, I skipped to random pages, but that was still enough to give an idea of their--rather dim--views on the site and its community as a whole. Also bear in mind that not all goons would agree with the mindset displayed by the particular goons in these threads; the participants are (for the most part) a (sometimes vocal) minority.
The first thread started off well enough, with some goons saying that they actually liked the site; but once they started discovering that TVT's community had a rather seedy underbelly they decided to invade the site in the hopes of "improving" it. This lead that thread to be shut down; the later threads made it clear that future invasions should not be conducted. However, these threads also revealed that plenty of the stuff posted in certain sections of TVT (especially Troper Tales and the forums) could easily give the site and its community an unsavory reputation (note the emoticon that they use to denote TVT and its community). Even today they are still at it: if you were to lurk in the currently-running "Shit_that_didn't_happen.txt" thread--at least when the paywall is down--you would notice that a large amount of the stories posted there were from the Troper Tales archive. It's practically low-hanging fruit and makes for easy trollbait; the damage it was doing to TVT and its community was the major factor in TVT's jettisoning of the TT section.).
Now, Fast Eddie at first seemed to simply brush it off as simply the antics of a relatively minor group on a site with a fairly large userbase. However, there are hints that some of what the goons were saying seemed to be starting to get under FE's skin and making him nervous about his site's reputation. What didn't help matters was that at least several other tropers had stumbled upon the SA threads, thought that at least some of the criticisms were legit (in my view, some were indeed legit, though not all; I'll get to that later). At least a few of those tropers apparently decided to join those threads so they could comment on how, in their eyes, TVT was flawed.
Then the Second Google Incident went off. The seedy underbelly of the TVT community, which had been festering for years, was suddenly brought to light brought to light. Some tropers (notably some of the veterans, such as Anne Beeche--Bob Schroeck might or might not remember her) decided to leave TVT and head for areas--such as SA--where they could criticize TVT for failings real and perceived. All in all, it was a terrible time. One of the more notorious (in my view) incidents that came out of this debacle was when one of the members of the 5P group found himself being worn down by constantly having to analyze works to see if there was too much porn/pedophilia-pandering/other objectionable stuff in them to be worthy of having TVT articles on them. He left, needing a place to vent (something that I could actually sympathize with), and made the--rather poor, in retrospect--choice of going onto the SA thread. Once FE found out, that member was banned and his troper page replaced with the words "SA Traitor", the latter lasting only a short time before being removed once cooler heads prevailed.
As for the SA threads that helped drive FE to the breaking point: they became so loaded with former tropers complaining about their former community's failings that the mods eventually stepped in and locked them; they also put up a moratorium that lasted for about a year, and the current thread is determined to keep from repeating the same mistakes that dragged the previous threads down.
At this stage, it should be mentioned: SA has a history of being against pedophilia and related philias/fetishes, to the point where being an admitted pedophile is grounds for banning. Trying to make a distinction between pedophilia and its related philias (e.g. ephebophilia) will lead to you being looked at as a pedo anyway (as an aside, a certain infamous anime that features pedophilia--and whose title includes the words "jikan", "kodomo", and "no", though not in that order--is referred to simply as "The Anime That Must Not Be Named", or "That Anime" for short). Indeed, one of their more famous actions in recent times is what they did in reaction to the fact that Reddit was hosting some quite creepy subreddits. Once they found this out, while in the midst of a Reddit mocking thread, they were understandably horrified. When they tried to get the site's admins to shut down those subreddits, they were rebuffed, with the admins claiming that it would go against free speech to shut them down; this pissed them off even further. The final icing on the cake was the revelation that the creator/moderator of many of the creepy subreddits, a man with the screenname "violentacrez", was a relatively close friend of many of the admins. The goons took matters into their own hands and unleased a media blitz intended to call attention to these facts. The creepy subreddits were shut down only after these media blitzes, which the goons called "Pedogeddons", and violentacrez's identity was eventually revealed, ending his reign of disgustingness.
Now, these relate to the TVT threads because in those threads evidence (from the horses' mouths to boot) were laid bare for all to see that among TVT's seedier parts of its community were a bunch of pedophiles and pedo-apologists. It seems that the 5P was formed at least partly in response to this unsavory revelation.
Now, there were a number of other things that went on that I couldn't properly summarize (and besides, I feel that this essay is getting long enough already--it took me several hours to type this on Notepad, just in case certain problems come up), but this is essentially one of the major issues that helped cripple TVT and could potentially face ATT.
Now, from that narrative, I've made a relatively brief summary of possible solutions to at least some of these problems:
--Put in some Terms of Service whose reading should be mandatory for all users. The TOS must make it clear that, although we do not intend to enforce censorship on a level similar to what TVT is currently doing, we also have certain standards that, although being relatibely loose, should still be followed in order to keep the administration from cracking down like they did over on TVT.
--Do not allow Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel to be hosted on ATT. These made for extremely easy trollbait in the past, and newer entries could likely continue such a bad reputation.
---Alternatively, keep TT, but put down some rules--preferrably a reasonable number of equally reasonable rules--regarding how such tales should be formatted (e.g. nothing that comes off as too creepy, unbelievable, emo-like, and whatnot), and have a team of mods do a regular purging of those entries that violate those rules. (Of course, when TVT was hosting TT, the mods did no less than three major purges of such entries, but eventually gave it up as hopeless. I would recommend that, should we go with the option of hosting TT, we should create a mod team that has more stamina and willpower and is able to better handle such an admittedly Sisyphean task.)
--Have a mod team that is good at recognizing whether or not certain entries, in any article, violate the TOS; such a team could be useful in settling potential edit wars and the like.
--Personally, I feel that the "No Lewdness, No Prudishness" stance currently taken by TVT is a good move, but the execution as it currently stands leaves quite a lot to be desired. At the very least, we should try to find ways to better execute a similar stance.
These ideas are what came out of my brain, but at the same time I am also willing to listen to other, alternative suggestions. I firmly believe that with some well-done conversations we could hammer out a way for ATT to become a viable competitor, instead of becoming a cesspit that even TVT would mock.