I’m not demanding censorship, I’m just not surprised that it’s being demanded. I would also rather like it if all the fanfic and Survival of the Fittest examples were removed, just so that it would gain some veneer of respectability instead of being considered totally degenerate by outsiders. And I’m a little sad that I’ve outgrown fandom, and have been looking back with it with a combination of nostalgia and horror. And I called out BigT as a drama queen, before he got banned for trying to start inter-fora wars. And, due to this thread, I recalled the searing visceral disgust that I felt when finding shockingly depraved pornography on the internet back when I was a pure innocent lamb, so I shared it with the thread.
That’s been the entirety of my contributions to the thread.
Ugh…as much as I hate to dredge up this whole dreary mess again, I just had to add this.
Apparently, due to someone else complaining, in the last few days, the site site decided to censor all tropes involving rape. Including rape as used (or overused) as backstory; “Mind Rape” (as in, psychic violations, often treated the same or as a standin for physical rape); rape as being considered exceptionally vile even by villains, etc. So for everybody’s peace of mind…
Predictable; once they decided to go the censorship route the self-gutting of the site was pretty inevitable. I expect most content will eventually be erased, given that virtually everything offends someone, and they’ll be left wondering why almost no one visits the burnt out husk of their site.
“Due to the seventh Google incident we will no longer be allowing pages relating to television, as they were unacceptably offensive to our Amish and Luddite readers.”
To reiterate what I said in April - when did the ads stop existing to help the Wiki, and the Wiki came to be a deliver medium for the ads?
The isn’t about indulging in or watching portrayals of pedophilia, rape, or other objectionable activities; the is about refusing to mention them even if a character opposes them or it’s an important plot point. Which will make any synopsis of various shows incomprehensible; why did Jane shoot Bill? We can’t say! Apparently, she just killed him for no reason, and everyone else went along with it for no reason, and the law let her get away with killing him also for no reason.
And let’s hope the gun control lobby doesn’t complain that tvvtropes is glorifyng violence, because then we won’t even know WHAT she did. I’m reminded of the “Prince Charles has been accused f doing something, and I can’t tell you what, but trust me, it’s not true” incident a few years back.
To be fair, Der Trihs was responding to the claim that all works relating to rape, even mind rape, were deleted. If so, I’d say the slippery slope has been hit and TV Tropes is sliding right down it.
TV Tropes needs extensive cleaning out. Even if they were to end up keeping trope pages related to rape or other sexual content, the majority of content of those pages are crap.
Just because something happened doesn’t make it a trope. Pages tend to become catalogues of all situations in which, for example, a rape occurred. Rape occurring merely as a plot element isn’t rape occurring as part of a trope. There has to be more to it than that.
As an aside, what’s with all the Sonic The Hedgehog crap on TV Tropes? It looks like some spammer went through just about every page I’ve visited and stuck a Sonic The Hedgehog example under comic books. Was there some Sonic fetishist on at one point or other?
It’s not just storage space, it’s bandwidth. Obviously, one wouldn’t expect to start out with TV Tropes’ level of traffic, but that information would serve as a useful upper bound.
But seriously, I’d consider footing the bill myself. Love the site, hate the administrator’s tendency to nuke any problem from orbit.
Going back a year, the site’s viewership is clearly in the 500,000 - 1,000,000 visitors a month range. Let’s say an upper bound is 5 pageviews per visitor, and you’re looking at 5,000,000 pageviews a month.
I visited ten pages using the “Random” link and came up with an average page size of 24.22 KB per page.
So 5,000,000 pageviews at 24.22 KB per page requires monthly bandwidth of 121,100,000 KB or 115.5 GB.
For comparison’s sake, getting a dedicated server at HostGator for $175 a month will get you 10 TB of monthly bandwidth. So at the very upper bound, you’re talking $2100 a year in hosting costs.
Kidding aside, apparently he has a comic book that’s gone like 200 issues that have touched on EVERY! SINGLE! TROPE! The entirety of the complex human condition is apparently summed up in those 200 issues.
Since it’s a reader-contribution site, and it’s a geek-friendly site, and geeks tend to be obsessed with one work or another, you get these occasional works that span a third of the site. It’s like one fan of Sonic the Hedgehog, or The Dresden Files, or some random anime, is absolutely intent on cataloguing every minor thing that happens in the work.
I love geekdom, but the obsession and evangelism a lot of geeks push on others can be a real turn-off.