User blog:EtherBot/Let's Talk Deletion!!!

I think the way pastas are deleted is damaging to people's high spirits and is counter productive at creating a site of diverse horror stories.

I always get afraid to say anything about it and I think other people do too because we all kinda associate that kind of opinion with ranty users who just joined the sight and got their first precious work of art deleted only to contest it after the fact in the form of a blog post saying "uuuuuuuh but it was preeeetty cool you guys I swear"

But aside from that I really think the way this site handles deletion is really broken. It's weird to see things deleted for reasons like: http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Point_of_Murder

"Twist is cliche and doesn't have enough story to make it effective"

I didn't read this story so idk whether it really was just so horrible with the worlds most cliche and uneffective twist ever written but I can't help but stumble onto that and be like "Bu-bu-bu-buh but...that's subjective!"

I write poetry pastas a lot because I think there's too low an ammount of well written poetry pastas on the site but you wouldn't know I write poetry pastas because half are deleted. I think it's weird that objectively competently written poems that maybe aren't scary are deleted as opposed to objectively poorly written poems 'that also aren't scary. ' I get the impression that admins kinda operate on a different wave-length where they're expecting something super different from a poetry pasta than I am when I go writing one.

Most of the stories I submit are ones I personally am happy with. The sense that I accomplished exactly what I set out to do is a kind I generally enjoy but forgive me for kind of writing more blog posts than stories because although I still have horror stories I don't submit them nearly as much anymore. They just sit in my harddrive and notebooks collecting dust.

This site really does have a system that I think discourages aspiring writers from getting better. Having your story deleted has the sickening feeling of simultaneously "NOT HAVING THE WOY-LD UNDERSTAAANDING YUR  ART!! " and also like you seriously genuinely did a job so poorly that it's not even allowed to be on the site anymore which can be very disheartening. For being a community that I really believe has a passion for horror and upcoming writers the way we delete pastas only serves to make writing pastas at all seem kind of disheartening and risky. Deleted pastas get a single line on the deletion page explaining why it was deleted which really isn't going to help a writer get better. If you pick at the admin who deleted the pasta most of the time they're willing to send you a little message that goes into more depth but I'm consistantly shocked by just how confindent they are in their decisions.

There seems to be no room for discussion when it comes to why your pasta was deleted which further highlights the sense that you as a writer failed at what you set out to do. ''That you didn't accomplish what you set out to do. ''I find for most writers who want to dabble this doesn't actually encourage them to "Heh, alright!! Do better the next time!!!" but rather it just paints the message of "You are unfit to write horror for this site"

And another thing our deletion does is make the stories all blur into eachother. The sole concept of this site if a sandbox of diverse spooky delights from varying authors written for varying audiences but instead, because we have a small number of key people who ultimately get to decide which stories are good or not, it comes off as a site full of very similar feeling pastas. Pastas that are written the same way, in bold descriptive ways that maybe has a different emotional center or theme but still all blur into one another. Half of the pastas on this site could believably be from the same writer judging by how similar they all come off.

The process is meant to be a sort of filter to leach out the poorly written pastas and keep this site at a baseline standard, and I get that I really do. But it results in what comes off as a highlight reel for the stories that resonated with 10-ish guys who basically read every pasta on the site. It is a system that is unweildy, poorly thought out, difficult to actually pull off and doesn't come across the right way to writers who just want to try their hand at spooks and frights.

Forgive me is this sounds weird but I don't even think this site needs to have a manual deletion process at all, it results in poor stories getting a pass and great stories getting the boot. You could reasonably tell me "Well hey what do you mean poor stories? That's an opinion" but that's my point I have different standards and expectations for pastas than other people just like every single person on this site. A filter system basically just says that there is an objective set of CORRECT standars and expectations that every story should follow and that, I think, is objectively not true in the slightest or most abstract sense.

So what do we do? I dunno! That's not my job I'm just a writer. I'd make my case for a voting system where if a story gets too many downvotes than it gets deleted or archived somewhere else. I'm not saying I have the big idea that will fix the system, I'm just saying that the system needs to be fixed and brainstorming for a big idea needs to be more encouraged than it actually is.