User blog:HopelessNightOwl/Has the narrator community written us off?

Maybe I'm beating a dead horse by even bringing this up at this point, but it seems like the big Youtube narrators are getting less and less interested in this wiki's existence as time goes on. It's no secret that NoSleep has kind of been made the current flag ship of creepypasta, and even stories not originating on Nosleep often seem to be trying to imitate NoSleep. Combine NoSleep with r/truescarystories and the various other CP-oriented subreddits, Reddit seems to have a lock on the creepypasta genre.

I'm not bitter about this, as I know websites have life cycles of popularity, but what irks me about NoSleep and its satellite subreddits overshadowing everything else in creepyasta from this wiki to Creepypasta.com to SCP is that it largely seems to be a product of the laziness of big narrators. I mean I know Reddit in general is more popular than Fandom and that no doubt has a lot to do with it, but even so it's annoying that the narrators, who more or less act as gatekeepers for what creepypasta stories and authors enter the bloodstream of popularity and which stories and authors remain obscure, seem to prefer NoSleep not because it is more popular with listeners but simply because lazily grazing the constantly updated Popular feed of NoSleep is easier than searching for good material on other platforms.

For example, I took a look at CreepypastaJr's monthly compilations for 2018, and every single story he has narrated since the start of the year has been from Nosleep. CMP is a little more balanced with some stories from this wiki and other platforms mixed in, but even he seems to mainly stick with writers from this wiki who are already popular such as Empy. And even the channels that have a lot of variety such as NaturesTemper seem to think they can only compete if they have a majority of NoSleep video titles.

They don't even bother with narrating our PotM winners anymore unless the story was originally a popular Reddit post. As I recall PotM used to be a staple of Youtube narrators, but All Too Human and Burnin Down the Ozarks have only been read by one medium-sized channel and a few tiny channels.

It kind of feels like narrators are increasingly looking at this wiki as being kind of like the Something Awful Forums: instrumental in shaping the history of creepypasta, but now an anachronism.

I would be fine with this. Again, if this wiki is fated to fade into obscurity on its own, so be it, that's the circle of life on the internet, but it would just be nice if narrators would not do the disservice of making their fans think the world of creepypasta is entirely NoSleep-centered, and what's particularly concerning is the fact that many new creepypasta writers don't even bother with other creepypasta platforms because they know the easiest way to get a narration from a big channel is to play the NoSleep lottery, so they spend all their time trying to write a story based on the most attention-grabbing title, and their writing suffers from it. I've seen meta posts from the NoSleep moderators themselves admitting as much and lamenting the fact that while their niche creepypasta community going viral over the past two or three years has been very good for NoSleep and the narrators, it hasn't been very good for anyone else in the creepypasta community, and even NoSleep is suffering from it now because they have a bunch of new young writers who have no frame of reference for writing internet horror outside of NoSleep narrations posting bad stories that have formed a sort of endless feedback loop of just ripping each other off with no fresh influence. And meanwhile we on our end have to deal with new users posting terrible stories who are obviously trying to rip off NoSleep, or in some cases just picking NoSleep stories at random to reupload here, many of which aren't very good by our standards despite being hits on their home platform.

Anyways, this blog is turning out longer than I intended. I didn't want to ramble for too long because I don't want to seem like I'm angry about this, because I'm not. And for the record, there have been some good things about the dominance of NoSleep. For example, I appreciate the fact that they have rekindled interest in television pastas, a branch of creepypasta that I feel has been neglected over the past few years, and while most of the TV-centered stories coming out of NoSleep aren't great, I wouldn't say they are terrible for the most part. Plus, the fact that they don't have a haunted gaming story blacklist means teenagers are free to post their terrible haunted game pastas there, and not have to try to slip past the radar here as often.

And I guess having casual creepypasta listeners equate creepypasta with cringey NoSleep titles is better than them equating it with Jeff the Killer and Minecraft darkfics as used to be the case. It would just be nice if narrators' need for ad revenue wouldn't keep artificially maintaining NoSleep as the center of the creepypasta universe. And for gosh sake, it would be nice if they would at least glance at our PotM winners.