Alright, I've kept quiet enough about this but this where I say shit is too unreal. This is a wall, and will be available upon request since I'm sure someone (not naming names) will delete it, tell me to modmail it then ignore it.
For those who don't know, for 3 years I ran a Final Fantasy fan group on facebook. The biggest english based one, for the last 4 years (I retired 2 years ago). It's also the largest one (by at least 10k members). And during that time I had to deal with: the coming of waifu culture, minutely shitposts, fads, an attempted coup (the group started with 5000 members, 500 left when I started... their group died within a year) and generally the pain of being the head of a team. I had to write rules, enforce them and most importantly listen to my members. Even if I disliked something (like daily "trivia" threads), I was one person and allowed them because the vast majority of the group enjoyed them.
I've run contests (giving away a few hundred AUD worth of stuff), ran contests, polls, etc. Everything to get my community from 4500 to 30k+. So I think it's fair to say, I know how to work with a community. (I was even offered a few thousand USD for the group. But I ain't no sell out, my group was for the members not for some advertising company).
A few months back, I tried running two sets of character popularity polls for GL. One for male characters, one for female characters. Now, given that many "top tier" characters are referred to as "waifu's" or husbando's, the two groups were named waifu wars/husbando husbando hustle. This is embracing the culture in many fandoms of labelling a character who you really like as your "waifu" (wife) or "husbando" (husband). Now, while in some communities (Nisekoi for instance), this can get out of hand this has never gotten A) aggressive B) flaming or C) shitposty to a bad extent. In fact, it has mostly been relegated to user flairs or character discussion. So, it has not harmed a single person in this subreddit's community in the near year I've been here.
Now, I will not say the community fully embraced these polls. However, a large portion did. The original plan was ambitious, and would have required a lot of threads. Being a smart member of the community, I messaged the moderator crew well before the initial post. Here is the "conversation". As there was no reply in the end, I decided to post. While silence is not a consent, neither was I given an answer or told not to. I would test the waters with my initial post.
And after I posted the very ambitious character polls initial round, I was contacted and had this conversation. Now, I don't know if many of you have tried to run a popularity contest via reddit, but unless the post is pinned it is very hard to run a contest out of posts that will be pushed further and further from the front page automatically. (Thanks Reddit). So, I either had run the gauntlet and play chicken or give up. Worst that could happen is a perma-ban (SometimesLiteratev2 anyone?)
It got removed, shit happens.
Now, with a recent series of posts written by myself and /u/tomato314 that both satirised unit reviews and sought to provide the other side of the argument when it came to unit reviews (you will notice that not a single bit of incorrect information about any units actual capabilities was published) it became clear that this sub was evolving past the boring "might as well be a wiki" stage. With the humour, came the deletes. And people were upset with this. You guys (the fans), actually enjoy humour. And when your lols are deleted... you don't like it. Who knew?
So, we got the new humour tag in response to the negative backlash to a well informed post that actually takes several hours of multiple people writing, critiquing and editing, getting deleted. As opposed to say, this question that belongs in a megathread, this guy asking us to give him ideas for a youtube channel and RHM's daily carry spam. That is not to say they do not deserve their own threads. RHM puts a lot of effort into making his content. But it's no less than the effort we put into our satirical guides and deleting one for being a "shitpost", while the other is probably just copy-pasted?
Let us just remind you all, of what a shitpost is.
A shitpost, let me remind you, is
"A worthless, aggressive or trollish post of poor quality to an online forum or social network, in some cases intended to derail discussions or otherwise make the site unusable to its regular visitors.". I'll ask anyone, who has read my work to accuse me of "poor" quality.
Or of derailing anyone else's discussion (by posting my own threads). But that is just one definition. We can turn to Know your meme, where shitposting is
"a range of user misbehaviors and rhetoric on forums and message boards that are intended to derail a conversation off-topic, including thread jacking , circlejerking and non-commercial spamming."
Once again.....I am not in violation of any of those in any topics I do.
Even Nazta himself admits that they are not low effort.
Now, this tag was added with the addition of a filter to remove those posts. If this had been done by default, I would not have minded. Given the usual tone of this subreddit (minus fan edits of sprites), it would have been nice to ease people into it. But hey, we got our tag. We could finally shit post and the people who did not want to see it had an easy "opt" out option. This is what you call a win win situation.
And my first thought was "let's do a incredibly reduced, non-waifu character poll to test the waters". If it was deleted, lesson learned no hard feelings a hard-ass is a hard-ass but at least they're consistent. I can respect that.
Now, just to be clear here were the rules in the making. So let's just go over what said character poll could not do:
Could not be low effort (no problem)
Could not be about waifu's/husbando's (easy, remove all references and make it about favourite character)
Could not include meme's (this was hard, but for you guys I'd remove the memes)
And I posted it here btw, as you can no longer access it.
Here is Nazta himself, not banning it. He asks if the plan was to go to 27 threads this time and the reply is: No. At worst, 6 (one of which had already been posted). We can all agree here, given that it was not deleted by the head honcho that it was implicit that it was not against the rules.
Well, I take my dog for a walk and come back to this lovely message. So, in the roughly 2 hours since he gave implicit consent that he was alright with this... he comes back newly revised rules which make my thread a rule break? Does anyone else see the problem with this?
Either A) the rules were edited to SPECIFICALLY target me and my post or B) Nazta thought it would be funny to let me think that somehow, I would be allowed to do something a lot of people wanted to happen.......before taking it away. Which is it?
The problem here folks, is that this is not a dictatorship. If it were the post would have been deleted right away. This is a child playing at king, someone with no sense of consistency or fairness. I'm tired of doing my best to work with someone who thinks it's fun to play favourites and who is allegedly "part of a team" that consists of him telling the others what to do. (Not outing my friends on the admin team but more than one has said it).
/u/Nazta, if you don't change you're gonna run out every content creator until there is no one left. Your inability to work with people, you absolutely bonkers and nonsensical mood swings and your inability to compromise is going to run this community in to the ground. It'll just be threads asking about upcoming JP content in GL, questions that should be in megathreads and fan art.
And if you want that, that's okay. Because I'm sick of jumping through hoops weekly to appease whatever the fuck mood you're in. Which sucks, because you do good things for the community occasionally.
/u/SometimesLiterate, out. (be back tomorrow as /u/sometimesbanned)
EDIT: fucking called it
