User blog comment:EtherBot/Negative Culture and How I Write My Showcases/@comment-26475800-20180913192058/@comment-25458443-20180914075258

This was originally going to be about how the reason I hadn't stopped writing showcases was because there was one half of me worried about the hole they'd leave. That's why it's called 'negative culture' and not 'bye guys im leaving,' because one of my biggest issues with the site is that newer authors tend to get really mean feedback puncuated with a vague "But anyway, try harder and use the workshop, I guess." That's the 'negative culture' I was going to talk about, but I couldn't find space for it in the end.

A lot of the stories by these newer authors have genuine qualities and things that are specific to them in an interesting way, even if they also have a lot of jank, and that's one of the reasons I wrote the showcases. I wanted some vehicle to say 'hey this is interesting and special and you deserve to keep working on it' for authors who otherwise only get 'check out the workshop please' and an endless slurry of deletion reports in their talk box. That's a frustrating place to be as a writer and the point of the show was partly to say that it's almost completely unnecessary. It's possible to be motivating and nice to people, but to still give criticsm when needed.

Of course the other half of my brain was convinced that there would be no hole left behind, because the formula I've been using wasn't even effective anyway. People still act the same to new authors, and a few of the authors I've covered still haven't even touched the wiki since I wrote them. This is the point that I didn't really do a good job articulating because it's kinda weird and sad to write a goodbye post and I had trouble choosing what to say. There's no one reason why I don't have fun writing these anymore. What I just detailed is only one of them, and it was hard to choose what to cover when writing the blog.

Anyway, that was the point of the blog originally, but I ended up finding it more necessary to explain why I was leaving, and also what my progress was in case anybody wanted to move further into crafting 'effective' showcases.