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Back after like 12 years
How did like 5 people manage to keep this forum running for like a DECADE?! Please teach me this level of tism so I can use it to create an ai family for myself. Also tvtropes user rottweiler was a piece of shit. I don't know if he's still around but I just wanted to put that out there.
Comments
It's not so much autism as much as it is an inability to move on, but yeah.
On the rare occasions I revisit TVT's forums I end up seeing familiar faces anyways (in a sea of unfamiliar ones), even though the atmosphere is quite different from what it was back then. Also, apparently back then is what is now considered the "wild west" era of TVT.
That's how I see it.
Also I personally don't want to see the big social media companies completely bulldoze the rest of the internet.
I would have seen that as a case of autism that was, shall we say, orthogonal to everyone else's vanilla autism.
Agreed, though this is why I'm interested in open-source and often federated social media like Mastodon/Misskey and Lemmy/Mbin and the rest of the ActivityPub "fediverse" as well as Matrix as well as the non-federated Revolt. Actually doesn't explain why I'm still here -- the reason in this case is that I'm here because I'm still here, basically, and I just like stable hangout spots that I can frequent but not feel burdened with spending time in. And someone's still willing to host this site. Also I'm the only active mod and someone has to be in charge of dealing with the occasional weirdness.
That said, sidenote and IJBM: the sometime tendency on the internet to attribute any sort of curious behavior to "autism". This undersells how inherently weird the real world is. Also, this undersells Florida Man.
Good point.
But the autist meme is a good way to ignore how at least 20% of humanity is not "normal" and therefore you're actually not as special as you think you are, guy sitting at a computer at a forum with an average 4 users total.
Man, those were the times. I bet there's been lots of SPOON-based name changes ever since that would make me upset.
I still occasionally find TVT referenced in the wild, I guess it's become an established "internet thing".
Also suddenly I'm remember how for several years after most of us left TVT, the lot of folks on IJBM/HH people just didn't want to be associated with TVT, and especially with the term "troper".
I realized that while I had been heavily involved in TVT, other people had probably gone in more heavily.
On the topic of established internet thing, well, yeah, seems it's reached that level of recognition.
Admittedly, there was that cringe 'This Troper' business but I hardly see the need to distance yourself from TVT in general. It's a handy enough resource/hangout spot as any, yes?
Also, I like how we never fail to revert into a discussion on a forum we left like ten years ago. (Well, officially left. *sad Hotel California noises*)
*stares into my recent posts in Forum Games*
Guess I never really left, lol. Took a break for a few years, yes. Left, no.
From what I remember, the whole separation from TV Tropes started out as a friendlier "we got kicked out of TVT so we may as well be our own thing" (if I had known we would be doing that I would have chosen a different username), but not long after some things happened:
- TVT started getting a reputation for cringy and creepy stuff, both inside and outside TVT/IJBM.
- Whenever some drama happened at TVT, it'd find its way here and result in more drama for us (ironically enough).
- Often when a troper got banned over there, they'd come here and repeat whatever behaviour they got banned for in the first place.
In hindsight, that third one was probably the bulk of our new userbase growth. Nonetheless a bunch of IJBMers became bitter over this and thus started pushing for separation more aggressively.Nonetheless, to this day I still think TVT's unsavoriness was overstated, the site was always almost entirely about fun media stuff, with the cringy/creepy stuff being something you can ignore and not feel shame over, even if it's within the same website.
[Edit: Actually, now I'm having doubts as to how much one can ignore it. Hmmm...]
Also, this could be me getting old, but a bunch of stuff we'd label as cringy back then I'd now instead label as young people having shameless fun. Maybe I should have been cringier.
Regardless, this was harder to find than you'd expect so here it is for posterity: And:
Perhaps it was a somewhat fortunate thing that I wasn't an amateur writer. I had less incentive to try to use the site as a way to publicize my stuff, and thereby might have avoided some of the more embarrassing behaviors.
As opposed to how ignorable the stuff is, I think that sorta depends on one's perspective.
It's easier to ignore if one's idea is "TV Tropes is a site for cataloguing media tropes" than if one's idea is "TV Tropes is a user community". And it's probably easier to ignore if you haven't gotten deeply involved in the more, uh, "chuuni"? (for lack of a better term) of the user-generated content.
FWIW I still have a TVT account. Same one; I never got alt accounts nor got banned. Though it's been a lot less active than it once was.
Meanwhile, in case anyone was curious, the original Trash Heap thread on the TV Tropes forum eventually got shut down.
Edit: Grammar.