Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-5564808-20131226192356/@comment-1196539-20140114181214

Noothgrush wrote: Hitting random is a massive clusterfuck of old and shit stories. Which, granted, a huge majority of stories on this site are subpar at best, but we're talking about the quality of creepypasta as a whole. You can't say that all of creepypasta is stagnant when there's still a good population that are good or often great. That's the point. Likelihood. I'm not talking about hitting "random" ONCE and judging all of Creepypasta by whatever one page happens to come up. I'm talking about hitting "random" a hundred times and counting the number of good stories vs. bad ones, cliches vs. originality... etc. In percentiles. It's mathematical, it's averaging--it's the data gathering process. What better way is there to get a feel for the overall state of the site, good AND bad?

The answer is that there is no better way. In fact, the only difference between this method and your method of browsing the site arbitrarily is that your method is influenced by your subjective, personal interests--what strikes your fancy and what you want to click on.

CrashingCymbal wrote: We're talking about getting a median from Creepypasta nowadays and Creepypastas from the past. The difference? Creepypastas had more focus on convincing people this shit was actually real. Nowadays, 90% of people know Creepypasta is fake so the focus has switched to quality of writing. Kind of going against the old cliché here, the newer stories are actually of a greater quality (In my opinion, anyway). I couldn't disagree more. I would go so far as to say that what you're describing new pastas as don't even qualify as creepypastas, by my definition. The mark of any good creepypasta is to trick the reader into thinking that maybe, just maybe, it could be real. If it doesn't even try, I wouldn't call it a creepypasta at all. I'd just call it a horror story.