TLP Experiment Aftermath Discussion and Analysis

So recently I had the wild idea to run an experiment on the TLP, for the sake of seeing how good people are at reading the content of a draft before hatting/bombing/commenting. The experiment was approved by the mods and I was allowed to create this nightmare of a draft. Now, many of you already know this as a lot of people were playing along with the experiment, but I'm sure some people here weren't aware that it was, in fact, a fake and purposefully-bad draft, so if you weren't...well, surprise.

Anyway, we were discussing the experiment on the TLP Crash Rescue, but I didn't want to monopolize the thread, so I decided to move it here. This is where we'll discuss the results of the experiment, see if anything interesting can be gleaned from them, and where I can answer any questions people may have about the draft's creation process and what the end goal was.

One question I'd like to ask about is, how many problems did you spot? I went out of my way to make as many mistakes as possible both minor and major, and while people quickly responded to the draft's original title (Doofenshmirtz Experimenting), a lot of other issues seemed like they flew under the radar. Others still were ones other tropers added while giving "examples", so I can't take credit for everything here. I'm very curious what people noticed as well as how many things slipped by, because it can give us some interesting information on what kind of editing mistakes people find more easily and what things are/aren't draft-killers. ^note for the sake of transparency, I'll list all the little errors; see if you caught them all! There's low-context examples, improper indentation, sinkholes, invalid examples, a general example, a video-game example in the wrong folder, empty folders, speculative examples, un-italicized work titles, a non-cited fanfic example, and trope-redlinks. Whew.

Other interesting facts are:

• The fact that it peaked at 9 hats, but did rack up a number of bombs. No hat reasons were given and very few bomb reasons were given; one person did express concern over the hats and I had to pretend that their very valid point saddened me. In reality I wish more people gave their thoughts when they hatted and bombed it, partially so I can tell how many of the hats were genuine.
• The fact that the title issue created a whole lot of buzz, which died down as soon as I changed said title for the sake of attracting hats
• A lot of examples were given and though many of them were obvious jokes like the draft itself (my favorite being any that referred to "experimenting" in the sexual sense, and the Weird Al one). However, many others seemed like genuine attempts, so I'm curious as to how many of the commenters were bamboozled.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 24th 2020 at 2:55:50 PM

I can't list all of them off the top of my head but the iCarly one was the first mistake I spotted, before I read the full description and realized what was up. Speculation is a major pet peeve of mine- I've known people who treated works pages like a dumping ground for their headcanons (and I've done it myself...) and it's misled me about works. Oddly I don't see that mistake as much on the TLP, usually because people speculating are trying to shoehorn existing tropes into their favorite show.

(The name was also a big clue since I'm a huge PNF fan and I thought the trope would be about something completely different since his experimentation is not his major association, he is rarely even shown inventing. Oddly enough I was willing to tolerate the name because I initially thought it referred to constantly making new inventions which is something he IS known for.)

I'm curious what other people's "tipping point" was if they didn't start with the description. It might say something about us as people, and what we prioritize in our editing.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 24th 2020 at 2:57:11 PM

Ha, I temporarily bamboozled ya, huh? Glad you caught on though; I wonder how many people went through a similar process as to yours.

In my defense it was 4 in the morning and I'm used to the TLP drafts having inappropriately short descriptions.

A rough estimate of my thought process:

• Saw trope name and thought it didn't quite fit, but gave it the benefit of the doubt that it was about something different
• Left a comment calling out speculative example, as well as debating the name
• At some point I realized the sponsor was the person I saw in the TLP every single day and then I read the whole description through and realized what happened.
• Deleted my speculation comment out of embarrassment. (Probably the wrong thing to do since you WANTED feedback.)
• Added a half-assed but not quite parody example, the Toy Story one. I'm a bad liar so I didn't want to throw anything too bad up there. But I did get a little bolder later suggesting an awful snowclone name.

I can't remember the exact process of spotting more mistakes but I quickly checked the Western Animation folder for the trope naming example and was disappointed at the total ZCE. The Real Life example was probably my favorite because it reminded me of that dreadful Nazi Counterpart draft we had last week.

The Comic Book folder being completely empty was also kind of hilarious, not just for the obvious shoddiness of it all, but because of how frequently experiments happen in superhero comics.

One thing I wasn't sure was an error or not was the Tom Lehrer example. Is it in poor form to recite lyrics for song examples instead of using subscript or quotes?

Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 25th 2020 at 3:14:37 PM

I admit I saw this draft as fairly legit and tried to keep up a normal demeanor, with maybe one or two cracks, I gave two examples. I knew it was fake, but had the potential to be real.

In terms of the title, I gave my reasoning what I think of it in the draft itself.

As for hats, I did give one. Because I used to think this may actually succeed, the idea was interesting and unique and there were several examples. Yes, it was formatted improperly, but that can always be fixed immediately post-launch, unlike the title, wick standard, or definition (I think of it as a day one patch, it's typically an acceptable practice in development these days, and while I do try to keep proper formatting on my pages, I don't see it as something to need TLP), so I don't see that as a reason to not launch. And to be honest, the complaint that the draft had too many hats and was not ready to launch felt like it was presented in an ignorant of this being something of a parody and whiny way, even if valid.

These are my thoughts for now (I don't know if I have more later). Thanks for reading.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 25th 2020 at 9:42:29 PM

Lol, I'm glad even my intentional garbage fire of a draft was still hat-worthy. I guess I can't mess up even when I genuinely try. Interestingly, ~High Crate also admitted to thinking the idea had actual potential and that it wasn't outright bomb-worthy. Not hat-worthy either, but not something to completely reject. I almost felt bad completely dismissing all of their on-draft arguments because I genuinely could not accept them if this experiment was to work as intended.

Pretty interesting honestly; everyone seems to have a different threshold at what constitutes a launch-worthy or at least not-bomb-worthy draft, and that in and of itself is a good takeaway from this experiment. Even intentionally bad drafts can still have some merit to them, which I think is cool even if it wasn't at all what I was aiming to prove.

If we put this on the Salvage Yard, would it be a good idea to link this draft as the idea's "source", even if the idea was entirely meant as a joke?

As for acting normally, I...did my best. But normal me wouldn't make something like this to begin with and eventually I started being as snarky about the whole thing as I could be without giving the whole game away- from claiming I've never made a draft before to whining that nobody was giving me hats. If I acted normally, it may have fooled more people, but it would've also defeated the entire purpose of the experiment. I was forced to give the lowest effort possible, helped by the fact that I had no intention of making it something I could launch anyway, so my sarcastic and dismissive replies hopefully reflected that low-effort tone.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 25th 2020 at 3:30:35 PM

piter, plain and simple, this is misuse of hats. hatting a draft is supposed to mean you think it is currently ready to launch. we don't want to have to run around fixing every TLP draft after it's launched. they shouldn't be launched until they're fixed.

I mean, I didn't really want to say anything since it just fascinated me that someone thought the draft as-is was launch-worthy in general, but yeah. Also this.

that's because you're too nice. :P

either way, this is exactly the sort of information you were looking for, and hopefully now we can clear up at least this misunderstanding.

Again, I do format what I write. I just largely used to think "ready to launch" if it's ready as a trope (I can understand what it is from the title Laconic and description, is a viable and not duplicate concept, meets the 3 example and 12 wick standard), not necessarily as a page. But I was wrong, sorry.

My very first trope (one I made when I have been for two weeks on the site) launched with some blunders, like not having the examples word be a heading, using Main/ redundantly with links, and some folders having inconsistent names (and some things had to be corrected before that), but the trope itself worked as far as I remember (I and it would still improve as those were the noob days, but still). Then again, War Jay 77 is not a noob, so I should have probably been stricter, but it met the requirements for a trope.

Anyway, I'll look at the formatting in the future as well. The hat button admittedly mentions nothing about formatting, but then again, it doesn't mention anything about the 12 wick standard either which I do enforce, that will have to be updated by admins someday. Still, you at least have some info for when people give hats for your research, so that'll help.

I hope this is more understandable and you can forgive me for this, War Jay 77.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 25th 2020 at 1:34:20 PM

Yeah, I almost never drop bombs, because it's always possible that a draft could get better, but I'm very unlikely to continually keep checking back to see if my bomb's still warranted.

So it never seems quite fair to drop a bomb that an improved draft might remain saddled with because I've moved on.

Yes, that is also part of the reason why I never drop bombs in terms of good ideas and also because it can be discouraging, if I think a draft is a bad idea with okay execution or just crap I'll typically ignore it (unless we're talking about Mario Pissing). I just never felt like dropping bombs is worth doing, if the idea's bad others will probably do it anyway and I see no need to pile on.

By the way, you were asking if you can add Mad Experimentation to the salvage yard sandbox? Yeah, if you want to.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 25th 2020 at 4:55:48 PM

No, I was asking if the draft should be considered a valid "source" when the entire point is that it's a joke.

I think so, just warn people about it, since it did have legit examples (like the Tom Lehrer one, and I think paraphrasing a song's lyrics is acceptable).

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 25th 2020 at 6:04:22 PM

Yeah, just say something like "draft was made purposefully bad as an experiment, but it garnered a surprising amount of legitimate examples and had a few people say it had a genuinely good concept".

Cool.

So I've learned that some people have different standards and that even something intentionally bad might be salvageable. It isn't what I was looking to prove, but it's still a solid takeaway from this experiment and makes me wonder how far I would've had to go for everyone to consider it an objectively bad draft, short of making another Mario Pissing.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 25th 2020 at 12:41:38 PM

I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't have checked this draft out if it weren't for the fact you began begging for hats in the title. I would guess that a lot of these drafts are able to fly under the radar of most people because of the sheer amount of items in TLP that don't get a lot of activity.

Yes, the hat begging was certainly something that brought people to it, but not that effective at actually getting hats. I wonder if there was some "Discard Event Horizon" when people basically stopped giving hats because of some bad move (maybe not putting Flakboy in video games, maybe growing increasingly ignorant, maybe the hat begging). And yeah, some drafts do get utterly ignored, but I'd say it safe to assume at least 80% of drafts get one reply.

Just an interesting tidbit for you War Jay, but I thought Protagonists Make Poor Parents was the experiment draft at first since you made it shortly after announcing that you're making an experiment. It was an acceptable draft at that point, so I was unsure.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 25th 2020 at 7:45:14 PM

Huh, interesting.

Yeah, the hat begging is something I'd never usually do but we wanted to see if more people would give hats if I just...requested them. -shrug-

Just out of curiosity: how long is this gonna stay up before it (obviously) gets nuked?

Not much longer. I just want to advertise the discussion.

It's been discarded.

Well, it's gone and after 69+ replies. It's impressive that people actually waited this long.

Anyway, ~wingedcatgirl, I'm sorry to bother you, but I DO want to know what that KH fanfic you listed in the examples was. Because maybe it should have an article on the wiki and I want to make sure that you know Examples Are Not General.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 27th 2020 at 10:37:59 AM

You do realize 90% of the examples were intentionally bad? That was on purpose. A lot of people wanted to see how far things could be pushed. Rule violations abound.

I certainly know that, though I'd probably drop that estimate to 80%, based on my examples and a few legit comments. I just want to know about that Fanfic example, maybe it is real and she didn't want to give its name to keep up the intentional poorness, but it likely should have a page if it's real (and maybe I just want to read it).

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 27th 2020 at 4:04:46 PM