TroperTales curator questions

Do we needed a thread to discuss:

• Policies and news regarding how we manage the curating of Troper Tales pages as a whole.
• Determining what authority a curator has.
• Standards of behavior for curators.
• Standards for determining whether to cut an example.
• etc.?

Will these general policies work?

• Curators should still use the same general standards of conduct as contributors. Be polite, don't delete other people's contributions without discussion, etc. Do not blank pages, even temporarily.
• HOWEVER, we also need to be able to trim the pages we are curating, so:
  • Cut one to several examples at a time with similar issues, or else replace the entire page with one you've sandboxed.
  • When weeding examples, ALWAYS explain why you are removing them in the politest terms practical.
  • Curators should not have to create a thread or otherwise ask permission to do this.

Should we have a central location for tracking who is curating what?

Will we follow through with a new crowner a month or two from now (or some other test) to determine if curating has worked?

Madrugada wrote:

Should we delete all anonymous comments, just new ones, just ones we can't figure out who added it (and add a link to the guilty party when we can), etc.?

The only item on Madrugada's list I have any question about it is the last item, the "sympathy-seeking, wangsting, and ego-stroking" item.

I think all the complaints about entries like that are sourced out of the SA thread and their culture, rather than ours. There is a lot more derision in their culture than we want in ours.

Incidentally, in terms of pageviews and daily visitors, what they call "reach" in marketing-speak, our culture is more successful than theirs. Snotty derision drives more people away than it attracts.  ^**

We are not going to improve/maintain our readership quality or quantity by adopting it.

We have been pushing back against snottiness in entries since June. In the time since then, our readership has grown at an increasingly improving rate. It has always been on an upslope, but the rate of climb has improved. This leads me to think that the drive is succeeding.

Anyhoo. With all that in mind, I'd suggest that the guideline is more about "off-topic" than "too human."

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Aversions: not on my Troper Tales, thanks. If it's not an example of the trope, it needs to be chainsawed with extreme prejudice. Or...I guess just regular prejudice is fine.

edited 8th Feb '11 4:24:30 PM by troacctid

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Well, I agree that the ego-stroking and angst is part and parcel of having people talking about themselves and their experiences, I do think that there are places where it can be dialed back a few notches with losing anything important.

But in many of those pages, it's off the topic of the trope anyway (like Badass Longcoat, which is the site of an ongoing battle with editors who spend far more time talking about what makes the character badass and maybe toss in "He wears one." at the end.) The Troper Tales for that page are facing the same problem — there are quite a few of them that mention the coat once and then go into raptures about how the poster is badass.

I guess what I'm thinking is that the focus should be on the trope in action, not how special the trope makes you. So yes, focus on "On-topic or not", not "too-human" is a good way to put it.

And I have no real problem with anonymous entries. I've made two Troper Tales entries myself; one I linked back to my name, the other I didn't.

And this?

?

Is really excellent to hear.

edited 8th Feb '11 4:34:56 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I don't even have an SA account and I have plenty of issues with the wangsting and ego-stoking.

Currently taking a break from the site. See my user page for more information.

That's not true. There's plenty of opposition to it in our site.

As for the idea that positivity is making us more popular, while I don't have access to our daily viewership, I do have access to Google searches.

• The number of searches for us has increased at a nearly linear rate, with the exception of a small boost provided by XKCD. We have not been increasing at a faster rate since the negativity purge.
• Yes, we're ahead of SA, but we are still far behind Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan in searches. While we might catch up to the former in a couple of years, we'll never catch up to 4chan. Bile is not dying out anytime soon.

Besides, even if we are more popular than SA, that doesn't mean it's because we focus on positivity and they do not. It could be because they've stopped feuding with the furry fandom, or because people no longer want to pay $10 to join a forum, or because Lets Plays have stopped being exclusive to SA, or because there's plenty of comedy sites and plenty of sites dedicated to mocking people, but nobody else does what we do. Or because it's just not as good as it used to be.

Do we even have a reputation for positivity outside of the wiki?

edited 8th Feb '11 4:59:46 PM by Redhead

The new It Just Bugs Me!

Searches are not the measure. It leaves out direct visits and inbound links. Try it on http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tvtropes.org for, say, pageviews.

The only "reputation" elements I am aware of are for us being a time-sink and humorous. Luckily, off of SA, I don't believe we have any other reputation than that.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Alexa's results are similar. We're still ahead of SA and still behind ED. Couldn't find any 4chan info, but due to the nature of the site you're not going to see a lot of people linking to it.

The new It Just Bugs Me!

Well, these other sites that do have a reputation for a particular approach to cynicism and general negativity, and using them as models of a certain degrees of those attitudes, and further making a guess about a relationship between degree and site activity, we can pretty safely say that you need a very high degree of it (the 4Chan level) to get an increase in activity.

A less completely batshit level (the SA model) isn't more successful than what we're doing.

I'm not interested in spending a lot of my life supporting something as batshit as 4Chan.

Both of these are just yack-fests, which means they aren't good models for us, though, since we're more about our content than about our conversations. ED is sort of in the same niche we're in. Humorous crowd-sourced content. They do have a much higher aggression profile than we do and are busier overall than we are, but it is close, and we're gaining ground...

Maybe it is just my preference, that we remain a friendly, breezy place with some interesting perspectives to offer. Correcting our trajectory back to that path feels "right" in an esthetically satisfying sense.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Why do we care if we are behind in views on sites that are based on completely different things?

Troper Page

I'd like to see these comparisons used as benchmarks rather than as competition.

They are. Any thoughts about the actual topic?

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

I suppose focusing on whether or not an entry is representative of the particular trope is far less likely to be a judgment call than determining whether an entry is "too" egotistical/etc.

As a curator for one of the surviving pages, that would make my job easier.

Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!

Seems logical to start with "not an example" and than maybe go to "not a troper tale". With luck that will clean up a lot of the examples that also have problems in other areas.

Edit: grammar.

edited 8th Feb '11 6:48:57 PM by FrodoGoofballCoTV

And when it comes to the "not-believable" entries for some people, it also comes with Tropers/Curators who have different levels of Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and can imagine some things being possible, while others are like "yeah, right". Since there is no way to prove everything that the contributor says is true other than linking to a published website article, a photobucket/image hosting site, or a youtube video, perhaps we can be a little less unsympathetic towards some stories that aren't easily believable on common grounds, because there are a lot of people out there, and have different experiences. Some people get lucky, and some people get unlucky. And sometimes even if it's an outright lie, it can be funny.

Troper Page

Yes.

I didn't write any of that.

@ Vorpy: Would snarky commentary to some entries (like in The Reason You Suck Speech) be allowed as well as long as they work towards humor and aren't too generic?

Troper Tales are not required to be true, remember. And those that are true may not be believable, as we all know. So I think we need to drop fact-checking and Willing Suspension of Disbelief from the criteria.

As for the ego-stroking, wangst and sympathy-magnets, as the Fast One said, this isn't SA, /b/ or RP Gnet and what's an acceptable degree of aggression on those sites isn't acceptable here. So I think we can leave the worries off. If it's dickish or unpleasant and off topic, get rid of it, otherwise the rule is excessive. (Obviously, Rule of Funny is as applicable as it always is.)

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

^ I disagree. The premise of Troper Tales is "This is my experience with this trope." That presupposes that they are true; if it's fiction, it should be in the unpublished works area, not troper tales.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

What about table top gaming examples? Those really are my experience, but they don't fit anywhere else. It would be nice to have a standard for how to do role-playing examples that aren't from modules. Even if it's as suggested in the past just having a page for gaming tales.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I was responding to "They don't have to be true." If an entry is something that really happened in a game,and it's recounted as something that happened ina game, it's true. It's a real experience. But making up some shit just to post it isn't a Troper Tale. It's fiction.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Ah, that makes sense as a distinction.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

So far the discussion look like we're pretty close to being able to draft a troper tales content guideline.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

I was just trying to clarify on how obviously fake an entry would have to be before it got axed. If it was a parody of a behavior, would it be axed, or an exaggeration?

Troper Page

So we're keeping Incest Yay, I Call Him Mister Happy, Porn Stash and that kind of stuff, and that's final?

No drama, please. I just want a straight answer from TPTB.

edited 8th Feb '11 10:05:00 PM by TripleElation

Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate to