Why Fandom Cant Have Nice Things / Other

Conventions

Hotels that are commonly booked for business meetings or conventions have sometimes turned away attendees because, in the previous year, people trashed the rooms, stole things, harassed hotel staff/other guests, or generally raised a ruckus. And, in addition to getting blacklisted, these troublemakers cause headaches for everyone else.

• One state's YMCA refused to host a Jr. High camping weekend because a group of kids lit a fire in the cabins. Other YMCAs have reported similar damages - a Colorado one refused to ever host a Jr. High camping weekend again after a grill from an adjacent campsite was found inside their swimming pool.
• If you're attending a Furry convention, you'd better be on your best behavior. This is primarily because furry cons have a reputation for being Shoddy Shindigs, which makes it much easier for a few bad apples to ruin things for everyone. Due to this, cons after The New '10s tend to come down on rulebreaking pretty harshly.
  • New Jersey FurBQ was canceled after 2012 when people did rather lewd things in public. It got so bad that the town threatened the people hosting the event with legal action. The town also threatened to cut the budget of their emergency services (which the event was used to raise money for) if they refused to leave.
  • The Seattle-based furry con Rainfurrest met the same fate after its 2015 incarnation. Due to an official refusal to exclude anyone who wished to attend, that year's con attracted all manner of unsavory characters (including people who were blacklisted from other conventions), apparently convinced it was some kind of "fetish con". Various attendees proceeded to engage in every kind of kink you can think of and then some (with some attendees walking around in public wearing gimp suits and flushing "used objects" down the toilets), as well as rampant and extreme drug usage, widespread vandalism (examples include smashing fire alarms to avoid getting caught smoking cannabis, drilling glory holes in the bathrooms, flooding a floor of the hotel by breaking a toilet, and destroying the pool filter system by stuffing towels in the pipes), used adult diapers littering the grounds, and multiple incidents that caused 4 people to get arrested (a staff member for sexual assault, a con attendee for regular assault, and two other attendees for buying and dealing drugs). As a result, the host hotel kicked everyone out early and told them they were no longer welcome, despite the convention being insured and able to cover the damage. Additionally, thanks to other hotel chains being made aware of the damage that had been caused during the convention, and a con-goer sending poison pen letters to various hotels in the area, not a single hotel with a convention center in the entire Seattle area was willing to host the con, and an attempt to find a host in Spokane also failed. This caused the 2016 Rainfurrest to be canceled, with the con as a whole being completely canceled soon after. Internet Historian covered the incident in detail in this episode of his series.
  • Thanks to the ruckus caused by American furries, several Mexican furry conventions can only be attended by invitation. The rules for behavior at those conventions are very strict, and publicity is very limited to avoid attracting unwanted attention.
  • The Furry Fandom as a whole suffers from this trope. Because of the Vocal Minority that makes porn and engages in other embarrassing behavior, the group as a whole is derided and many are harassed, including the majority that are just normal people who happen to like drawing or dressing up as sapient animals.
• Power Morphicon got into some hot water with the city of Pasadena, California due to a panel held by Paul Schrier and Jason Narvy, better known as Bulk and Skull. The panel, which was supposed to be about comedy and comedic timing, turned into a pie-throwing panel and the resulting mess netted a whopping $9,000 in damages.
• Allegedly, a convention in Las Vegas was banned from Mandalay Bay because hotel staff reported seeing bathroom doors ripped off, shattered mirrors, and entire sets of clothing stuffed down the toilets.
• Several small cons and at least one hotel have banned Homestuck cosplayers due to the messes the body paint tends to cause. Because so many characters in Homestuck have grey skin, the grey body paint on those cosplayers can easily cause damage to the plumbing, pools, and hot tubs when cosplayers try to get their paint off. Plus, the fact that the body paint can rub off on other people when it's not sealed properly means that it can damage the costumes of other congoers. And that's not mentioning the tendency of certain Homestuck cosplayers to get too into character and create a public nuisance.
• RTX, a Rooster Teeth-themed convention, added a rule in 2019 against throwing things. Under the rule, anyone caught throwing anything would be ejected from the convention immediately and automatically forfeit their right to a refund. This rule was made after an attendee to the Achievement Hunter Live show threw a Moonball at the stage, knocking a can of beer out of Gavin Free's hand and smacking Ryan Haywood in the head. The Moonball tosser was also chased off of Twitter by angry fans.
• Weapons tend to cause a headache for places where you can expect to see cosplayers. Even if the cosplay weapons are clearly fake, made of cheap material that would never hold up in combat, or are too fantastical to be used in an actual fight, that doesn't stop a few bad apples from treating them as the real thing. And even fake weapons can still cause real harm if used recklessly. As a result, it only takes a few of the aforesaid bad apples to cause some fan gatherings to issue blanket bans on weapons for cosplayers.
  • The Oregon Renaissance Faire learned the hard way what some people will do with medieval weapons (swords, daggers, axes, etc). While the faire didn't issue an outright ban (since several vendors for their events sell prop weapons), a rule was added so that if a weapon is purchased or brought into the renaissance faire, the weapon has to be zip-tied closed or otherwise secured in a hilt/scabbard so that it can't be used.
  • New York Comic Con, the second largest comic con in the U.S., has only allowed cosplay weapons to be made of cardboard or styrofoam since 2015. Any other type will be confiscated for however long the attendee is on the premises and left in garbage cans out in the open for everyone to see.
  • The Phoenix Comic Con had to issue a blanket no-weapons ban in 2017 after a man was arrested for sneaking in with various actual weapons and body armor in a The Punisher-style get-up. The man had the intention of not only killing police officers but also longtime Power Rangers actor Jason David Frank. Fortunately, the ban was temporary and eventually lifted.
• The Rose City Comic Con in Portland, Oregon had a ban on "hateful symbols", stating that historical costumes are okay, but reminders of unspeakable atrocities aren't (meaning one could dress up as the Red Skull as long as they didn't bear the Nazi swastika or any other Nazi symbols). However, after a bunch of cosplayers entered the convention as SS-garbed Hello Kitty characters, they effectively changed it to remove all Nazi imagery, Red Skull, and HYDRA along with them.

Live Music

• The reason why Guns N' Roses were Persona Non Grata in St. Louis until 2017? On July 2, 1991, they were playing at the Riverport Amphitheatre when Axl Rose noticed a fan taking photographs. He asked security to confiscate the camera and eject the fan. However, when security didn't move fast enough, Rose did it himself, slugging the fan and several others in the vicinity along with a couple of security guards. The band stopped the show and left, and the audience responded by rioting and damaging the venue.
• According to Pete Townshend, The Who were banned from all Holiday Inn hotels after drummer Keith Moon helped trash a hotel in Flint, Michigan.

Other

• Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen deleted a backlog of stories about one coworker after people ignored his request not to try guessing their identity.
  • The Windows control panel used to allow users to select their timezone from a map of the world. This feature was eventually retired because, although Microsoft based the map on the U.N. recognized official borders, not every country agrees on these, with many border disputes existing between countries across the world. Some countries even threatened to ban the software for not portraying their borders in their preferred manner.
• Some media archiving channels who upload shows to Keep Circulating the Tapes may delete some of their uploads to encourage people to buy the DVD set, edit and/or delete specific episodes of shows to avoid being copyrighted claimed by YouTube's content ID system and/or won't take requests from commenters to post shows or episodes. Occasionally, these channels have faced harrassment by certain fans who don't want to pay for official DVD sets and those who want to see the episodes uncut. As a result, some of these channels have had to severely restricted requests for specific episodes or even disable comments on their channels to avoid being bombarded with requests, while other channels wind up being chased off of the site entirely.
  • In particular, one user dedicated a lot of time keeping the tapes circulated for old shows that had not been given a DVD release, but they were most known for uploading the entire Daria series to their channels. When they deleted their Daria uploads to encourage people to buy the DVD release, rabid fans began to yell at them for removing the series and told others where to find torrents of the series. They ended up deleting their account entirely, with over a dozen shows that never had DVD releases disappearing with it.
  • Another channel that posted old recordings of America's Funniest Home Videos placed a strict ban on requesting episodes in the comments. Nevertheless, people ignored him and continued to bother him with requests to post more episodes. This resulted in the channel owner to stop posting episodes publicly. Since then, he now only shares the episodes privately with only accounts he trusts.
  • One YouTube channel that posted old episodes of Behind The Music started getting requests for episodes that he didn’t have. Eventually, the requests reached a boiling point where he snapped at the commenters and told him to stop bothering him with requests. Despite this, requests for more episodes in the comments persisted. He eventually privated the episodes and eventually abandoned his YouTube channel.
  • Another YouTube channel who posted Behind The Music episodes and other VH1 shows deleted his channel and erased his online presence after being bombarded with targed harrassment over him editing the episodes to avoid copyright claims over the song and music video samples used in the show. He initially disabled comments on his channel, but trolls still continued to harass him via his social media pages.
    • Other media archiving YouTube channels that post logos, VHS openings and commercial breaks have fallen victim to trolls and immature kids in the comments who spam requests for videos, as well as immature, hostile, harassing and irrelevant comments. As a result, most of these channels have become quite annoyed with these comments and have gone to great lengths to protect their channels from trolls and kids. For instance, some channels have placed strict limits on the amount of requests posted in the comments while others do not allow them at all due to both not being able to keep up with requests as well as the channel owner wanting to maintain control of their channel by uploading whatever they see fit. Some of these channels have had to block other users and delete some comments (and even hold their comment sections on approval only mode) in order to enforce their ban on requests and annoying spam comments, while other channels have gone to more extreme methods including disabling comments or deleting their channels to avoid dealing with the community at all.
    • In one rare case, one of these channels placed a strict ban on requesting videos in the comments. Nonetheless people ignored him and continued to bother him with requests. As a result, he blew up at said people and disabled comments on all his videos. However, he reinstated the comments on "approval only" mode. Immediately after this, people resumed bothering him with requests, which resulting in him having another blow up at the community. He eventually deleted his account and hasn’t returned to YouTube since.
• Twilight fans actually found a way of inverting this. After the stars of the film broke up due to Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson, Twi-hards flocked to their nearest outlet store in order to hide magazines that detailed the story. Some of them even took pictures of themselves doing it, making this a bizarre case of Why Non-Obsessed People Can't Have Normal Things.
• AMC Theatres has banned people from wearing certain costumes it feels may make others feel uneasy in the wake of James Holmes' homicidal rampage at a Cinemark theatre in Aurora, Colorado. It doesn't help that Holmes referred to himself as The Joker.
• Around 2014, the site Childstarlets, an archive of famous child actresses, made its image gallery inaccessable to non-members as well as enacting a paywall to sign up for an account. This was presumably done both due to an increase of pedophiles visiting and joining the site as well as people stealing and reposting images on other sites without permission of the owners.
• Except under special circumstances, the Stonehenge site can no longer be directly accessed by tourists because of the concern that people will chip off pieces as souvenirs.
• For troops and families stationed in U.S. military bases overseas, this can be a problematic issue when some military member commits a serious crime against locals (at least in Japan). This angers the host country's government and citizens to the point that a base curfew lockdown is enforced until things return to normal. You won't be able to enter the base after hanging around at clubs late at night, and you will be questioned by armed guards.
• Neil Gaiman no longer gives his own opinions and speculations about Doctor Who due to getting hate mail and being quoted out of context by news outlets after he gave his opinion on the Twelfth Doctor's casting and the 13-regeneration limit rumor.
• A Winona Ryder fanpage on Instagram fell victim to trolls making fun of her 2001 shoplifting arrest and other harassment. This resulted in the account owner disabling comments on all posts. Even after disabling comments, trolls continued to harass the account owner via DM. The account was later set to private and was eventually left abandoned by the owner.
• Tumblr
  • It's surprisingly common for bloggers to wipe their blogs and/or change their usernames if a post they write instigates a massive amount of backlash. Such backlash is much more frequent when the topic of social justice is brought up.
  • Similarly, bloggers may disable anonymous comments or asks entirely if certain people abuse the G.I.F.T as an excuse to harass people. While disabling anon usually cuts down on the vitriol, it also means that those who might not have an account or are too shy to come forward with their name attached can no longer do so even if their intent is completely benign.
  • The person who's known on the site as "xkit Guy" used to offer popular xkit extensions for Tumblr users to revert unpopular site design changes. That is until bloggers who were frustrated at his slowness of updating decided to deluge him with abuse and hatemail — culminating in a dubious accusation of harassment — and ultimately drove him off the site.
• GameFAQs:
  • The infamous "Life, the Universe, and Everything" board (a.k.a. LUE), which has a rather interesting backstory:
    • When an LUE regular posted on another social board and subsequently drew its ire, other LUE regulars flocked to that same board for a mass posting invasion. CJayC, the founder and then head admin of the site, gave LUE three choices: shut down LUE, raise the level requirement for posting, or split the board. Regulars agreed on the level requirement increase:
    "LUE gets FOUR times the moderated messages of any other board, more account bannings than any other board, and definitely causes more than its fair share of trouble than any other board on the entire site. This can't go on. The problem is not with the moderators or the TOS; the same moderators and the same rules apply on every other board on the site, yet no other board needs the kind of attention that LUE appears to require."
    • LUE got its Wham Episode in November 2003, when someone on the board instigated the invasion of a memorial blog for a person who committed suicide. CJayC, after some legal threats that he was able to deal with, imposed a user ID cap on the board, disallowing anyone whose account was created after a particular date from ever viewing or posting on LUE.
    • Then there's the "ExcLUEsion", in which CJayC turned LUE into an opt-in board with an 11-day opt-in window, on top of the other restrictions already in place; anyone who missed their opportunity can never come to LUE ever again. Nowadays, since the members became older and wiser, the board is now one of the least disruptive of GameFAQs.
  • Several non-gaming boards (namely Music: Metal and Music: Rap and Hip-Hop) gained user-level requirements that barred newly-registered accounts from posting. This was all thanks to low-level accounts going on the boards, making topics and getting responses that they did not like (sometimes open hostility, but often apathy and indifference), and starting fights with regulars that would often result in a ban and multiple warnings for the other parties.
• The Audiovisual Identity Database (AVID)^note Formerly known as the Closing Logos Group (CLG) Wiki prior to late September of 2022:
  • The wiki now requires visual or audio proof for "mythical" logos or variants. This is due to a massive administrative shakeup caused by the owner claiming that a mythical logo variant was a fake made by one of their own, with nobody else believing them until somebody found proof that they were right and the variant had been fake all along.
  • The wiki’s forums used to allow discussion on the elusive T.A.T. logo. However after too many incidents with trolls claiming to have found the logo and people attempting extreme methods to find the logo, the wiki’s admins placed a permanent ban on discussing the logo until it’s found.
  • Starting around 2014 the site started to become infested with trolls and by 2017, it had only gotten worse to the point where the admins placed a strict ban on responding to trolls in the threads. The ban was introduced after a previously banned troll used sockpuppet accounts to harrass two of the wiki’s admins. He abused the “cancel membership” feature and used a VPN to evade being banned. Eventually the harassment merged into full blown stalking as the troll proceeded to dox the aforementioned admins, which resulted in their departure from the wiki (and the internet as a whole) to keep safe. The wiki’s admins attempted on multiple occasions to bring this matter to the attention of the wiki’s hostsite Wikifoundry, but Wikifoundry staff refused to do anything about it. The staff’s handling of the situation with this troll would be one of many instances which prompted the wiki to leave Wikifoundry in May of 2020 and move to Miraheze.
• More than a few GoAnimators have sworn off interacting with the GoAnimate fandom after having to endure the fandom's more unhinged side, usually because of excessive drama, hostility between users and rampant attempts at plagiarism.
• Midnight showings/releases. All it takes is for one group of idiots to make management decide not to do them anymore. Examples taken from some blogs include:
  • A midnight showing of Twilight ending with a member that disliked Twilight assaulting several people in line coupled with a massive mess in the theater.
  • A midnight release of Grand Theft Auto IV ending with someone stealing copies.
  • A midnight release of a Call of Duty game ending with someone shouting "Call of Duty sucks!", tagging the store, and spray-painting several people in attendance in the face.
  • A midnight release of the PlayStation 3 ending with a fistfight breaking out over the last one.
• DeviantArt:
  • While there are many skilled artists on there, the site's reputation as being for perverts and amateurs has resulted in many artists either leaving to other websites or completely refuse to join. While the site does have a lot of fetish and otherwise bad art, it is a website intended to be for everyone and there are more artists on there that do not draw porn than there are those that do.
  • Some artists, even ones that are skilled and beloved, are driven away from the site because of drama or trolls. Others react by disabling all comments on their artwork. The latter particularly hurts Web Comics on there, as a large part of the fun is discussing it with the artist and other fans.
  • Artists on the site (and in general) either stop posting their work online, take some of their art down, or slap gigantic watermarks over them, all because of people (or, in rare cases, companies) trying to steal their artwork and sell it, and later, AI art-generating software that have stolen countless art data.
  • Artists can take commissions or do adoptables on the site.^note Adoptables are pre-made character designs sold for real money or the site's currency (Points). After selling an adoptable, the artist gives up the rights to the character to the adoptable's buyer. Many artists either limit how many requests they'll do or stop doing certain types of requests because some people would either constantly criticize their art or make asinine requests.
• At Mines View Park in Baguio City, Philippines, there used to be local children who would climb onto the wishing well and catch coins thrown by tourists to showcase their balancing abilities and attract tourism. However, some tourists would hurl coins at the children with the intent to Troll and/or injure them. Unsurprisingly, the act of children catching coins thrown at the well is no longer practiced.
• During the 1990s, it was common for primary schools in the U.S. to allow any manner of trading card games to take place during recess. Then, one group of kids would start stealing cards or get into fights over who won, leading to the adults just banning the games to avoid any more trouble.
• There was a certain extinct tree in Madagascar that turned out not to be extinct: one last living sample was found in somebody's back yard. People began sneaking up and taking little pieces of the tree as souvenirs, so the Madagascar government put up a fence. People climbed the fence, so the government put up another, higher fence. People climbed over both fences, so the whole area had to be upgraded to "restricted", which meant a 24-hour guard had to protect a critically endangered tree that was safer before it was classified as "critically endangered." Douglas Adams, who recorded the incident in his non-fiction work Last Chance To See, said that even he couldn't make up something like this.
• Pinside, the largest online pinball community, has a tendency to drive off industry figures with constant vitriol. Most well-respected creators now refuse to post commentary, answer questions, or make Pinside-exclusive announcements on future projects. One creator, Stern Pinball game designer Steve Ritchie, has even described Pinside as "cancer".
• While finishing her career as a model, adult performer Justine Joli transitioned into a new career as a dominatrix; but after a couple of months, she announced that she would no longer discuss her BDSM activities on her social media, nor would she accept her followers as clients. While she didn't give any details about her encounters with her fans, it's heavily implied that these restrictions were because certain fans had expected "services" that Joli was not offering, and that others had wasted her business time by booking sessions for the sole purpose of meeting her.
• Even Disney Theme Parks have their examples:
  • Costumed characters used to semi-freely roam the parks to greet visitors, sign autographs and pose for pictures, but by the end of The '90s this practice was scrapped in favor of scheduled meet-and-greets in specific locations and a huge expansion in the number of character meals offered at park and hotel restaurants. This is because the old system was effectively abused by "character hogs" — families and tour groups who insisted on taking up huge chunks of a character's limited time, leaving other guests neglected, while other pranksters would "hilariously" physically abuse the characters. While the current system is far more regimented (and expensive in the case of meals), it allows more people to get pictures with the characters they want, and is far safer for the costumed performers, who now have "attendants" (read: bodyguards) and professional photographers.
  • Tarzan was pulled from the parks because female guests kept groping the cast members, reaching under their loincloth, and pinching them on the butt.
  • There used to be an Easter Egg for the Toy Story costumed characters where, if a guest yelled "Andy's coming!", the characters would drop to the ground and lie still like the characters in the films. Unfortunately, word spread across the Internet, and soon guests were shouting it at the characters constantly as opposed to the previous once or twice a day. Out of concern for the actors' safety, the practice was dropped. Now, whenever you yell "Andy's coming!", the toys either look around for him and shrug, or they point out that they're currently owned by Bonnie (and yelling "Bonnie's coming!" doesn't work, as they'll just say she's in daycare or school).
  • School trips to Disneyland or Disney World tend to have the theme park issue blanket bans to a school if one kid on a trip is caught doing something against the park rules, such as a kid harassing the staff/mascots, students starting fights, or a student caught stealing things from a gift shop. These bans are usually still in effect long after the offending kid would have graduated.
  • There used to be a policy where guests in wheelchairs or with autism would be allowed to skip straight to the front of the lines for certain rides. However, some people decided "Screw the Rules, I Have Money!", and hired a handicapped "guide" for a premium sum to pose as a member of their family during a trip to Disneyland or Disney World. Because of this, disabled people are now given cards with a time on it, and told to return during that time.
• Mick Foley is an avid user of social media. In October 2016, he discussed direct message with a fan about Raw's women's division, in particular pushing the women in it who weren't getting pushes at that time.^note Foley was named the general manager of Raw in July 2016. The fan then posted this discussion to the public, resulting in Foley announcing that he would no longer communicate with fans via DM.
• During the early days of ECW, fans used to bring in various items from a nearby thrift store to be used in their matches as part of contests... at least, until one fan who didn't understand what kayfabe was brought in a cast-iron skillet. Mick Foley, used to cheap pots and pans, didn't realize what he grabbed until he was mid-swing, putting The Sandman out of commission for two weeks due to a concussion. The contests ended soon after that incident.
• The sub-reddit r/Battlefield, dedicated to the Battlefield franchise, had enough of the "armchair historians" and shut down all discussions about the historical accuracy of the franchise due to one too many single-issue campaigners joining the subreddit solely to criticize Battlefield V for having women fighting in World War II.
• The creator of Cards Against Humanity webhost "Pretend You're Xyzzy" temporarily shut down servers after a user used a blank card to make a school shooting-related answer. The offending user even had "school shooter" in their username, making it potentially serious enough to contact authorities. When the servers went back up, blank cards and in-game chat were disabled entirely.
• Material from Neil Simon's works was a staple of high school forensics competitions until the early 2000s, when his lawyers sent a cease-and-desist to the national governing body of such competitions and stated that no one can perform his material in competition without paying royalties. The reasons for this vary, but most reports pin it on either a very poor performance that Simon himself was appalled by, or someone asking him permission to perform one of his plays. Whether these circumstances will change following Simon's death in 2018 remains to be seen.
• There have been incidents where college students have become so rowdy they've ultimately killed the events they were celebrating:
  • In New Hampshire, the city of Keene held a pumpkin festival every fall. However, in 2014, what had been a family-friendly event for nearly two decades became rife with violent rioting from students over at the nearby Keene State College less than a mile away from the festival grounds. While it was initially people just throwing stuff like beer cans and rocks, it quickly turned into a full-blown riot that culminated in 235 police calls, the disciplining of 170 students, and death threats against an elderly man and officers. Because of this, the Keene City Council essentially canceled the Keene Pumpkin Festival the following year. This led the festival, now known as the New Hampshire Pumpkin Festival, to be moved to Laconia in the center of the state from 2015 onward, with the last festival's organizers Let it Shine assisting the Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce that year before the latter took it over entirely. Eventually, in 2017, a new Keene Pumpkin Festival, promoted by Let it Shine as the "official" continuation of the old festival (making the Laconia move Canon Discontinuity to them), was held, but now with numerous changes and restrictions in place makes the current Keene Pumpkin Festival virtually "Pumpkin Fest" In Name Only. The current Keene Pumpkin Festival now focuses solely on young children instead of general visitors, imposes a strict cap of five thousand pumpkins (moving away from the original intention of having as many jack-o'-lanterns as possible to break records), no vendors (despite the fact they never had anything to do with the rioting in 2014), and now lasting for only one Saturday during daylight hours instead of over a weekend, with Keene State College also implementing a strict curfew for its students in the week leading up to and on the date of the current festival, including no outside visitors on campus and no parties.
  • In northern New Jersey, Rutgers University President Richard McCormick officially ended Rutgersfest (once described by the Urban Dictionary as "daytime obliteration at its finest") after 30 years, thanks to the 2011 edition being rife with violence such as frequent fights, four people being shot, and an incident where one person was hit in the head with a bottle, leading to eleven people being arrested. The fact that New Brunswick's police director blamed the college certainly didn't help matters.
• The British Royal Family had to deal with this in 2019. A tougher moderation policy on their official social media accounts was added, not because of political hostility, but because fans of the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) and the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle) were frequently having Flame Wars in Instagram comment threads.
• YouTube featured an option to allow viewers to submit captions for videos, usually so the videos can be watchable in foreign countries by allowing bilingual fans to translate. Starting in the summer of 2019, however, many popular YouTube channels turned off this feature because people started to use them to either advertise their own channels or attack other YouTubers they dislike, especially the ones calling attention to the issue. YouTube would remove this feature in 2020, despite protest from many users who relied on the community captions as a viewer or content creator. This has lead to many channels to instead use the often inaccurate automatically generated captions, or having to pay for third-party captioning services.
• This is the reason behind the outrageous $6000 price tag on the bare-bones configuration for the 2019 Mac Pro, the long-anticipated update to the platform since the widely-reviled 2013 model. Due to its bad reputation among casual Mac users, Apple knows the Mac Pro will be a prime target for third-party upgrades no matter how good they make it, so they priced it that high to discourage unlicensed upgrades.
• Besides complying with Trusted Computing initiatives, forged video cards being passed off as higher-end models and sold online could also be one of the reasons why newer-generation Nvidia and AMD GPUs have their firmware digitally signed. While old cards could still be illicitly flashed and sold as new, it's very doubtful that counterfeiters would be able to make an actual 1050 Ti appear as a newer-gen model. This also led to an unfortunate side effect where the Nouveau open-source driver team can't implement certain features due to the tight security of the video BIOS.
• CSX Transportation used to do steam excursions for a brief time in the 1990s, but after a steam locomotive collector made the mistake of running one above the railroad's speed limits, they started liability insurance requirement of $200 million and introduced their official policy of "no steam on its own wheels", banning the operation of steam locomotives and other antique rail equipment on their trackage.
• Frisco 1522, the only 4-8-2 steam locomotive in the United States to have an excursion career, hasn't done any excursions since 2002. The only reason given for it's retirement from excursions was due to supposed "increased insurance rates", with the Museum of Transportation of St. Louis (where it's displayed) repeatedly saying that a return to service isn't possible.
• In the UK, steam locomotive operations on third-rail-electrified lines were banned for many years after several people risked electrocution by walking onto the track to take photos of a steam locomotive. The 2016 return of celebrity locomotive Flying Scotsman provoked mass trespass on railway lines that caused over eight hours of delay to scheduled services. While rail enthusiasts tried to blame this on a Newbie Boom, observers noticed that many of the trespassers appeared to be experienced photographers. This led to a ban on the advance public release of detailed schedules and passing times for steam excursions.
• In May of 2021, after a series of aggressive and violent encounters with customers, Target briefly stopped selling trading cards in their stores after an incident in a Wisconsin location where a man that was being assaulted by four other men over sports trading cards pulled out a gun, though no shots were fired. While non-sports trading cards were back on shelves by mid-June, sports trading cards are still unavailable in stores. Walmart pulled their sports trading cards from their stores soon after this incident, with no word as to when they'll be back on shelves.
• Juliane Snekkestad, a Norwegian female model, stopped answering fan questions via social media in 2018 after fans responded to a statement of hers with abrasive and transphobic-homophobic remarks: "Actually, I am a boy in a female model body." While she never actually claimed to be transgender, some people on social media took it to mean that. It proved quite controversial in her native Norway, and in the United Kingdom where she is popular.
• Synnøve Karlsen, British actress of Norwegian heritage, went dark on social media due to continually being pinged for promotion by people promoting Alibaba Group products or eBay stores during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2020 and anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown enthusiasts using her Twitter and Instagram pages to promote their conspiracy theories, often pinging @Synnove_Karlsen. Ms. Karlsen has never officially given any anti-vax or anti-lockdown opinions, despite what fans think. Incidentally, one of her tweets was re-tweeted by Donald Trump during 2019 and during the pandemic, in an attempt to try and encourage an Internet Counterattack, but this did not work.
• A TikTok trend showing off or mentioning Z-Library^note A file-sharing platform for pirated books/scholarly articles/academic texts. indirectly resulted in its clearnet domains to be taken down by US authorities. Predictably, this angers students (the main demographic) and the piracy community, and suggestions to make piracy sites even harder to access begin to be thrown around and skepticism towards outsiders looking into piracy become higher, which can frustrate laypeople that really need the service but do not follow these developments. Similar controversy arose when film and TV site Soap2day shut down in 2023 after an increase in TikTok promotion.
• The AI text-to-speech service ElevenLabs was forced to paywall its voice cloning services after an incident where trolls over at 4chan used the site to spew out hate speech and fake news such as having Emma Watson's voice recite passages from Mein Kampf. This did not sit well with both watchdog groups—who are concerned about its potential use of spreading political disinformation—and relatively-benign internet users who merely wanted to make parodies of video game characters saying random things.
• The Pokémon website PokéCommunity Forums has a sprite section where among other things, people can show off sprites they've created. One kind of thread that used to be there were "sprite shops", where people could request sprites made by the creator of the thread. Unfortunately, these threads lead to problems such as bickering and complaining from requesters, and eventually, the PokéCommunity staff decided to ban "sprite shops" altogether, with any "sprite shop" thread made being immediately locked.

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