User blog comment:ArmadillooftheAges/Useless thoughts and opinions from an old user here/@comment-25941663-20190303183131

I am going to drop in my two cents, since I've been reading some points that even though they are interesting, I think kind of miss the mark.

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I understand perfectly well what you mean with the higher standards thing. What we have now is no longer creepypasta, it's amateur short horror fiction. The reason for this is that CP was a fad, it reached its pick more than half a decade ago and nobody is really interested in that anymore (there are exceptions, of course, but that is the general feeling). Just as any other fad, it ran out of steam. It's no longer novel and original, and we are not getting this back. Further down in a comment you wrote this:

"A Pasta hasn't gone viral for the very same reasons we've been repeating for days: they don't have the same ingredients the originals did."

One of the ingredients you speak of is their originality. The originals were new and that's why they were a hit. Stories that come out now are no longer new. You cannot keep repeating the same stuff over and over expecting them to catch on any more. People are over that.

This is why this site is now mostly used by amateur authors. These authors love reading and writing and they want a place to put their work on. They take good care of their craft and keep improving, and that forces the genre as a whole to mature. It's just the natural progression of things. It is not for everyone, but it's inevitable.

To conclude on this point, basically a long time ago the wiki was at a crossroads: Either act as a library for CP, or evolve into a short horror fiction site. If we had become a library, right now we would not be having this discussion because they wiki would have been dead for a long, long time.

On the topic of User Categories: You say that someone's work should speak for itself. I am afraid this is no longer possible. Sure, there may be some absurdly crazy geniuses out there who can put forth masterpieces with no advertisement/promotion and they gain traction. It can happen, sure, but this is so much hard today than it was years ago. The competition is crazy and to stand out you need not just talent and hard work, but also luck and more importantly, promotion. The user categories are sort of that. A (small) way to help promote authors. Now we can point to the user categories page and go "here are some stories from contributors". I agree that giving a category to any user with more than 10 stories kind of defeats the point of this. But still, it is a step in the right direction and there is plenty of room for improvement.

Finally, on self-promotion: Again, talent is no longer enough. You need to promote yourself. A lot. Even just getting your name out there is good enough sometimes. If you want to get published, the higher ups might want to do some background research. Googling your name and seeing no results come up is a red flag. If you have blogs like this, and you have in general put yourself out there, you look more legitimate/hard-working.

Also, nobody is shoving merch/books down anybody's throats. A mention on one's profile or a blog post is not obnoxious self-promotion. It's just letting people know of your other work. It hurts nobody, so there is no reason to get upset about it. Live and let live.