Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-18736543-20140221121809/@comment-24463401-20140222032303

ImGonnaBeThatGuy wrote: The Damn Batman wrote: I realized what I said may seem stupid. I do realize most people on here have the mental capacity of a goldfish out of water. You seem to have a good hold on the situation, some users on here think they'll be the next Slimebeast by writing a shitty JtK ripoff. The effort you put into the site is appreciated, maybe not by these people but whatever. I tend to stick to the chat these days because it seems like every time I try to help someone by editing their pasta, it gets deleted before I even have a chance to finish. It may be my compassion for new users, but I kinda feel bad when their stuff gets deleted. Please excuse me for saying that, I'm tired as shit and pretty angry at the wiki because it keeps crashing on me and my chat seems to not be working. You have a greater expertise on this so I'll just back off. I'm sorry for going off, man. You have a right to your opinion.

It's just, like I said, I love writing and I LOVE helping people become better writers. I do. Sometimes it's tedious and exhausting, but if I can help someone do something I love then it's great. It's just frustrating when people get so indignant about the idea of being proficient.

You love comics. I love comics too, but you know way more about them than I do. Imagine if you were a part of a site where amateurs could come and share their work, whether it's mini-comics or even just character concepts or whatever. But you get a ton of people who only read Archie, or Crtl + Alt +Del or Garfield. And they can't draw or effectively use the medium. That'd piss you off, right? You want to see good work from people who love comics as much as you do. And you could show them "Understanding Comics" or Kolchalka's book to try to help them, you can give them examples of really great professional work, but they don't care.

Comics is kind of a bad example because the art can be terrible, but the work can still be good and it's such a mutable form that it's a lot easier to break the rules than it is in writing.

It's easier to think of it like something that Justin loves: basketball. I can't ball for shit. I'm slow, I can't shoot, I'm medium height. Should I be allowed on the team just because I think basketball is fun? Or does the coach have to make a choice? Should the team be good or should the team be something that exists just for people to have fun?

If I like basketball, there's always other ways for me to play it. I can get better before I try to make the team. There's a hundred places where people can go to write where they won't be held to quality standards. DeviantART, Wattpad, even just a blog. This isn't the last place on the internet people can post their writings.

When I first heard of Creepypasta, I was reading things like "Candle Cove" and "The Rake" and "Russian Sleep Experiment" and other stuff that even if it wasn't great, it was still well written and interesting (Just to clarify, I do think those three stories are good, I'm refering to stuff like "The Gallery of Henri Beauchamp" which isn't amazing, but still completely held my interest).

Back then if someone asked me what creepypasta was, I would've said, "Oh, it's pretty cool, it's these amateur writers who putting out these interesting short pieces that might not be publishable in traditional outlets."

Now, I describe it as, "It's stories about how you should treat your Pokemon well, otherwise they'll kill your other Pokemon."

That transition makes me sad. To me that's the death of the site, not rules. I agree. Most of the stories on here these days is so formulaic and involoves death every two seconds. I maybe overestimated how many users are willing to take criticism. I would pay to see a whole month without any noobs running around screaming their egotistical heads off about their "masterpeices" being deleted. Btw its ok that you went off on me, it actually cleared up some misconceptions I had about the site and the medium.