That’s right–explicit nudity on YouTube. Millions of views, so Google knows about it. And look at some of the related videos.
Oh, and you guys have hit on the irony on the few posts I bothered reading. FastEddie is so ashamed of tvtropes, but it was his own attitude that chased away any of the people like me who cared enough to try and fix things on our own. He set up a top-down hierarchy, bit everyone who tried to treat it like a wiki, and, guess what? Everyone with a even the smallest bit of initiative left. Okay, so there’s ccoa who actually came up with the initiative of gasp renaming tropes that were being misused.
You have a site that is run by one person. That’s it. And of course he can’t keep the crap out of it. But his solution? Involve everyone else more? Hell no. Censor the hell out of the site, destroying good content in the process? Yip, that’s the one he chose.
And thing I really hate is that, with the Google bounce, I’m afraid to tell the guy any of this crap to his face. I do still read the tropes. And despite all the shit everyone says is there, I’ve never seen it. I honestly don’t believe you can see it unless you are looking for it. Which honestly makes me wonder if those who complain are the same people who put it there.
Eddie has created a lot of enemies, that’s for sure.
Just out of curiosity but has anybody on this thread created a trope page at TV Tropes? There’s hundreds of them there so I figure that at least somebody here must be responsible for at least one.
I personally was never bothered by all the anime and fanfic content on TV Tropes. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it. People seemed to like having it there or else it would never have existed in the first place.
That’s one thing.
They’re not just cutting anime and fanfic stuff, they’re cutting scads of legitimate art in the process. The page for A Serbian Film is gone. Is A Serbian Film grossly offensive? Yes. Does that mean it’s not noteworthy art that deserves to be catalogued and examined? NO. As the Wiki ITSELF says, “True Art Is Offensive”. (Or, at least, it WOULD say that if they hadn’t cut that page too.)
Lolita is a historicially significant piece of literature that deserves to be understood if for no other reason than because it offends and challenges the reader’s sensibilities. Cut.
“Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” is a film based on a revolutionary piece of literature, that proved so controversial that the director was murdered for making it. Cut.
The list goes on, and at the rate it’s going it’s hard to say where it’ll end. Do we cut 28 Days Later because the villians intend to rape a teenage girl? Do we cut the works of Anne Rice because one of the characters in Tale of the Body Thief had a homosexual affair with a young boy? Do we cut the entire Twilight series because the protagonist is an underage girl sexually involved with a much older man?
Entries, and entire categories, that were compiled over the course of years by hundreds of contributors are being summarily thrown down the memory hole in the name of maintaining a stream of income that could most certainly be replaced if the administrator wasn’t so attached to it for some reason. (I’m surprised they didn’t go to donations the FIRST time this happened, two years ago.)
I, personally, never encountered any of these alleged roaming pedophiles that are supposedly being hunted down. (Surprisingly enough, the Paedo Hunt page IS still up.) Even if there were a few of them out there, this is the equivalent of burning your house down to hide the fact that the paint job was starting to peel.
I personally created the pages for Dune, Starcraft, Meat Loaf, Cee Lo Green, and the remake of Battlestar Galactica, as well as Thriving Ghost Town, Alternate History, and tropes that are now called “Strawman Political” and “Intercontinuity Crossover” (they were changed, without my consent or knowledge, from “Strawman Liberal” and “The Moorcock Effect”).
I also created the reference pages on American politics and American weights and measurements.
I heavily contributed to and wrote most of the current text for the entries on Taylor Swift, the Who (as well as Tommy and Quadrophenia), Rush, the Protomen, Black Sabbath, Ronnie James Dio, and the reference page on Christianity.
Aside from that, there are bits and pieces of stuff i’ve written spread across hundreds of pages on the Wiki.
This is part of why i’m so upset about what’s been going on - this is a community i’ve been part of since 2006 and have contributed a great deal to. I remember when most of the pages didn’t even list examples, and on the ones that did about 75% of them had to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember when Nightmare Fuel was a single page. I remember when discussion in the main page wasn’t discouraged and everyone called themselves “This Troper”. Now, I feel that it’s being mutilated into something I no longer recognize.
To be fair, the TVTropes owner started his site under a sort of “community contributions/belongs to the community” trope, right? That’s why everyone was contributing to it, right? And suddenly, it’s this BUSINESS that somebody OWNS and all the contributers are frozen out?
Oh, that’s the way business works all right. Collect and steal.
It’s people like you that make fandoms so toxic, and the reason I stopped bothering years ago. There’s always someone trying to dredge up drama whenever anything happens. Nobody cares about your stupid pointless drama. Stop trying to ‘recruit’ people to your ‘side’, to ‘fight’ the ‘good fight’. It’s pathetic.
I am reminded of the old joke about the fundamental cultural difference between America and Russia: if an American saw a neighbor with a cow when he had none, he’d try to figure out how to get one himself; if a Russian saw a neighbor wtih a cow when he had none, he’d try to figure out how to kill it.
The more obvious parallel is the various “notability” arguments on Wikipedia. If everybody who complained that some anime series has a longer entry than some important historical figure spent their energies adding to the important-historical-figure entries, Jimmy Wales would have to put his sad face onlne even more often to buy more storage.
I created Elemental Ignorance and kind of created the morass that was Jedi Truth/From a Certain Point of View/Half Truth (now under repair as a split between Half Truth and Metaphorical Truth).
I say “kind of created” because Silver Tyger Girl created the actual trope in a thread on the SDMB, I’m just the one who created the TV Tropes page.
Honestly, I hate the way the site is run. I don’t hate the vetting of new tropes, I think that’s necessary. I don’t hate changing creatives names, I think they overdo it, but sometimes it’s necessary. What I DO hate is all the fun they’re squeezing out of it, honestly I didn’t shed a tear for fetish fuel. But Nightmare Fuel and Troper Tales really had no reason to go. The community is also assholes.
I’d start my own site, I love the idea so much, but
TV Tropes has too much inertia. I know I could pull a Facebook to TV Trope’s Myspace (except the hollow shell of TV Tropes would be filled with fanfiction instead of indie bands), but that’s unlikely.
There’s probably already about 3 thousand thoroughly unsuccessful spinoff sites. It’d take a bunch of hubris to think mine would be The One (granted a lot of millionaires were born out of hubris).
I lack the web and server knowhow.
It’s a shame what’s happening, but I think due to TV Trope’s sheer internet-culture significance it basically boils down to “deal with whatever happens 'cause that’s what you’re getting.”