TV Tropes meta thread

Well, it's an appearance trope those tropes almost always get misused. Also, the description didn't define the trope well. It shifts between long hair and long hair as a high status symbol. The focus wasn't really on exceptionally long hair specifically. It was just a hub for any character with long hair so that's how people used it.

I created a sandbox for Impractically Long Hair as a TLP placeholder so that I or someone can take that concept to the TLP in the future.

Edited by MacronNotes on May 20th 2022 at 12:20:30 PM

Rapunzel Hair could be a redirect to that.

I'd advise against it, it'd just continue to gather wicks.

Also, conversation for TRS.

Sorry about that. Probably didn't help that my first post here was a mod post, even if it was regarding a page that only the staff can edit.

I was wandering through the wiki, and I came across a monstrosity when it comes to zero-context pages - the page for Sanford. It looked like something out of the late 2000s. I commented them out but a lot of the example didn't even have context.

Ah, that takes me back. So many pages were like that as people practically competed to out-smartass each other. That's what happens when your media conventions catalogue/encyclopedia website is built up by hundreds of late 00's Internet netizens whose earliest exposure to writing tropes and media criticism came from the Evil Overlord List, the Mary Sue Litmus Test, and Anti-Shurtugal.

I remember it causing a bit of a stir when the site decided we were going to make a conscious effort to move away from that.

Around what year was that decision to change made?

Man, it was so long ago. At least a decade by now.

Yo, ~Fighteer, ~Septimus Heap, do you guys remember what the wiki was like back around late 2010? I noticed you guys were participants of the threads that initiated the effort to move away from writing pages to sound snarky, condescending, and bashy. What actually prompted that decision to stop "bad attitude" wiki writing?

That was back when Eddie was still in charge, and as we got bigger and bigger we sort of collectively realized that calling people idiots for not understanding our rules was making us seem fairly mean.

To be honest, I don't precisely remember who made the decision or it if was a gradual consensus. Eddie was always in favor of keeping rules short and pithy, but we kept having to make them more elaborate and specific because a lot of folks aren't capable of understanding something unless it is directly spelled out.

That... explains things. It's that era when most nerds took Nostalgia Critic at face value and thought that was the right way to talk about media — and worse, the real people associated with media — in real life.

Yeah, that explains a lot. Bit more about pointing out the annoying patterns you see Caustic Critics talk about all the time and less about actually analyzing the media.

I still sometimes see posts complaining about how removing the snark "ruined the fun", and while I do like some snark, it's nice to see this website and its users trying to "mature".

I do think there's been too much pushback against the snarkier days of the wiki recently, like I think some of our projects are over-correcting things, but there's a difference between harmless gags that some people don't think are funny and being so snarky it just comes off as rude or try-hard-y.

I became active on the wiki when tides were changing in 2011-2012. The older days had their issues but I still that I was there to experience all of the fun and shenanigans.

We have become less informal over the years which is fine with me. Although it isn't easy to strike a balance between that and what people consider the fun bits of the wiki.

Edited by MacronNotes on May 21st 2022 at 11:04:19 AM

Thanks, Fighteer.

And yeah, there's a reason it was around this time, a little earlier if I recall, that the "TV Tropes is only interested in hosting a friendly, civil forum." line you see every time you post became a thing.

That prompted some people to complain they were being censored, or Big Brother was watching them.

Just to be clear, we are watching, and we are censoring things. This is not a matter of dispute. As a private site, we can make our own rules. If people don't like the rules, they can ask for changes. If they don't like our decisions, they can leave. It's that simple.

I'm not in the least bit concerned about people who resent that they are asked to be civil on our site. They get banned and we move on.

Any community is only as good as the most toxic of its members, because they drag everything down to their level. It's important that we practice what we preach and not have our policies and moderation tone be too nasty. (I've had to learn that lesson quite a few times myself.)

Edited by Fighteer on May 21st 2022 at 10:54:19 AM

"Just to be clear, we are watching, and we are censoring things."

Oh, sure. But the people doing the most complaining weren't the folks who needed to be thumped every other Tuesday, it was people who 10 times out of 10 just posted completely innocuous stuff of no consequence, freaking out over a sign they saw before posting something.

The complaining thing has been ongoing over years. I suspect the earliest instances may be the Darth Wikification of So Bad Its Horrible and the locking of Sonichu.

I've brought this up before, but it's worth reiterating: a huge part of why I've always been on board with cleaning up complaining is because the primary thing that drew me to TV Tropes in the first place was that it was basically the only site talking about patterns in media I could find at the time (2011 or so) where an overly negative tone wasn't the explicit goal in the first place.

The people who think removing the snark is "ruining the fun" are free to look up the track listing of Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones and read the name of the last song on the ablum.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 22nd 2022 at 5:33:07 AM

So the site wide removal of Rapunzel Hair makes me wonder, how do mass amounts of wicks get removed so quickly?

People are just really dedicated to wick cleaning.

Also, many Rapunzel Hair wicks are Zero Context Examples so it's just search and delete for the most part

Sometimes I think cleanup is a bit too eager to remove page jokes without checking to see if they're actually disruptive (in one recent case, an image caption was removed for complaining when it was literally a Self-Deprecation joke quoted from the show), cuz I think our conversationalist style is a huge draw of the site, but most complaining can be easily cut with little lost. Even putting professionalism aside, excess complaining will alienate viewers who actually like those works and it'll encourage more fighting between fans.

That was brought up, actually, but we never reached consensus whether it should be put back up. You know how the Caption Repair thread can be at times.

Edited by FernandoLemon on May 22nd 2022 at 1:55:44 PM