Board Thread:Administration/@comment-24376429-20140208190533/@comment-1216259-20140210002711

I've been silent on this mostly because I don't feel that I'm involved enough to do anything about it, but since you asked for input, in my experience, when a site dramatically changes its content, it never ends well. I also do not feel that many of this site's recent tightening of rules have much to do with quality.

For example, Slenderpastas--please hold all accusations of Slenderman fanboysim until the end--were one of the things purged for being "spinoff" pastas. This has nothing to do with "quality." Quality was not even considered. The stories featured Slenderman, so they were purged, regardless of quality. This is an inane policy based on technicality that ignores WHY there are so many spinoffs:


 * Slenderman, last I knew, is a public domain character. Saying that only Victor Surge can write pastas for Slenderman is like saying that only Bram Stoker can write stories about vampires. Looking at it through that lens, there are few pastas that really feature original characters, & the "good" ones are even fewer.


 * Victor Surge's Slenderman was not even the one we know today. Many of the "staples" of Slenderman, such as having no face & causing distortions in machinery, were collaboratively created by other people in the "Create Paranormal Images Thread," & the later series like "Marble Hornets" & "Just Another Fool." So there was never a time when only Victor Surge was writing about Slenderman. This brings up the related question, "what even counts as the original"? A compilation of the entire Something Awful thread? The first posts by Victor Surge?

In any case, let's get off the subject of Slenderman before it distracts from the main point, which is that the standards being enforced have less to do with "quality" & more to do with arbitrary filtering.

So, what exactly IS "quality"? If you ask me, there are whole genres that should be scrapped. "Lost Episodes," for example, strike me as inane, rambling nonsense filled with weird cliches. Lacking in cohesive narrative, they can hardly be said to be "stories" at all. But, as other people point out, this kind of elitism doesn't make sense if we're talking about objective literary merit. Even if it's "bad," it's clearly a major Creepyasta genre, & I kind of thought that this was "the Creepypasta Wiki," not "the pretentious amateur horror writers Wiki."

So what do I think? Well, first of all, I question why discussion is even invited, considering when the criticism is "we don't like this policy," the response is "oh well." If you want to just do whatever without worrying about what "the fans" think, then you might as well make it an administration discussion.

Otherwise, I would focus on something that actually decreases the amount of trash floating around here, very little of which is actually spinoff material. The Jeff Purge got rid of, what, like 5 stories?