TLP Experiment Aftermath Discussion and Analysis

The "example" was general on purpose, yes. The KH fanfic is mine, but the character in question has not actually appeared yet, both of which are why I pretended not to notice your follow-up question.

It's okay, I get that you tried to keep up the general poorness status of the draft with it being general. And thanks for telling me what the fanfic is (while I won't make a page for it since it already has one, I may read it).

Alright, fair enough.

If nothing else I've proved that people enjoy getting to create chaos when you give them the chance to do it constructively, but also that so much chaos won't attract more hats than bombs. Which is valid.

I didn't notice the draft while it was up, but I had a few good laughs looking through it and the comments just now. wingedcatgirl's example and WarJay claiming to be "new at this" were a couple of standouts.

Any thoughts on the experiment as a non-participant, besides the laughs?

People judge a draft by its length and/or how organized/polished it looks from a bare glance? This had at least a few paragraphs to start off with, and folders, whereas some of my drafts that got bombed had short descriptions and only a few examples to start. e.g. Secret Message Wink, Tough Guy Spitting.

This Index Is Stuck and This index Is A Trap were created around the same time, but only the latter got a bomb, early on. The former was about twice as long as the latter at the start, and also had its examples divided into two different sections.

Works by Topic only had ten list items when I posted it, but had two different sections (the first two).

Yeah; honestly, that was the entire test. I wanted to see if people could be convinced to hat things that look superficially good without reading the content (or ignoring the objective flaws in said content). I wanted to see how much we could push it before it became obvious people were only looking at the surface. At least 7 people didn't read anything besides maybe the first paragraph.

Bump. I still feel like there's information to get from this. A post asking why Lineless Animation had 7 bombs, where it became obvious the poster never actually bothered to check the examples section and only the description, reminded me of the experiment's entire point- to see how often people actually read the entire draft before claiming it's valid.

People's utter refusal to just actually read the content of a draft/published trope fully is honestly something that needs addressing, beyond just making a garbage draft and asking people to hat it. It's what led to the downfall of The Autographed Ball. It's what leads to so many TRS issues and people refusing to learn that the TRS actions even took place. It's what's allowing some drafts to sneak under the radar because they look ready to launch, but actually are far from it.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 13th 2020 at 9:49:29 AM

A draft only needs to be superficially good to get people behind it. It doesn't matter if the examples are mostly ZCE are badly written, if the description describes something that sounds vaguely like a trope it will get hats.

I didn't know a lot of tropes were lazy about trope descriptions until recently but it explains why certain tropes gets misused a lot even if there is nothing wrong with the defition or the description. I think a lot of tropers rely on the title and what they percieve the trope to be instead of following the description. Even when a trope has been cut or has been altered significantly, people still use it as if nothing happened instead of checking the page because they remember the trope existing and don't bother to check if something has changed.

I still think a good step would be requiring people to "sign" their hats by posting a comment. It encourages participation and discourages drive-by hatting, and allows us to ask a hatter directly, "Hey, why do you think this is ready to launch? What about [unaddressed problem]?"

Definitely. Anonymous hats and bombs are too much of a problem. In addition to not being able to hold people accountable, they also allow people to use socks or meatpuppets to do the hatting/bombing for them.

Of course, hatting and bombing reasons being compulsory will also remove the need to ask why people hatted or bombed something.

But yeah, people are just allergic to description reading. It's frankly infuriating just how often people ignore the actual definition of a trope just because the title might not be 110% informative. Even when it is informative, they still get get wrong, which is happening to me here.

That allergy creates a ton of problems, from people blindly throwing hats at anything that looks okay to people posting blatant misuse even after it gets pointed out that said examples are misuse. Luckily most people didn't fall prey to my experiment trap, though I wonder just how many more hats I would've gotten if I eased up on the joke nature of it and just made it look like a superficially good draft with a very subpar amount of effort added into the actual content.

I don't know that a "reason" needs to be compulsory; "signing" a hat could be as simple as posting, "Launch it, I think it's ready. —HighCrate"

The fact that I have to take the trouble of posting anything, coupled with the fact that it can't be done anonymously, would take care of like 80-90% of the problem IMO.

The reason we need...well, reasons, is because people use hats and bombs for very ridiculous and unhelpful reasons. A hat can be for reasons like "launch now, looks good", "I like this idea", "I'm a goddamn sockpuppet of the sponsor and I want to launch this", or "I think there's too many bombs so here's a hat". Bombs are the same way, going anywhere from "this idea is trash", "this shouldn't launch yet", "there's too many hats", and "I'm a sockpuppet of someone who already bombed this and think it needs to be super-bombed".

A reason wouldn't just be to remove anonymity but also ambiguity. Unexplained bombs and hats can be extremely stressful for a sponsor and can lead to a lot of confusion and strife, not to mention abuse of the system.

Eh. I would suggest at least experimenting with removing anonymity without requiring "reasons" more elaborate than "I think it's ready to launch" and seeing how that works. We could always introduce a more strenuous standard for "reasons" if that fails to solve the problem.

I'm still not sure what has to happen to actually implement any of this. Ideally we'd want the need for "signing" to be actually baked into the system somehow, but that would require a change to the site's coding which tends to be a roadblock.

Failing that, though, we could still make it a rule that there need to be at least five signed hats (that is, comments that formally say "I'm throwing in my hat" in the TLP comment section) before launch, and unlaunch anything that lacks that.

We could also consider raising the minimum number of hats, although I think we should try the "signing" idea before messing around with the hat-minimum; requiring "signed" hats might reduce the number of hats we see to the point where 5 is a reasonable minimum again.

Edited by HighCrate on Jul 13th 2020 at 3:35:43 AM

The amount of required hats is fine, the big issue is that it's 5 more hats than bombs. So a draft with 5 hats and 8 bombs shouldn't launch, but a draft with 13 hats and 8 bombs can.

Raising the minimum number of hats without doing anything else would only encourage more hatting tomfoolery.

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Jul 13th 2020 at 4:58:36 AM

So what are the takeaways from this experiment? Review the examples in OP before hatting?

Yes, though the experiment was intended to get a better idea of TLP culture and standards, that's def a takeaway.

I have an idea. I want to make a serious attempt out of making a trope for slapstick interactions with musical instruments, e.g. someone's head gets stuck in a tuba or slammed between a pair of cymbals. But I can't do that until I think of a description for it. Before that time comes, what if I were to start that draft right now, missing description and all, as another Schmuck Bait draft? If the schmucks who hatted Mad Experimentation don't read descriptions, would they even notice if there is no description to read?

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Jul 25th 2020 at 9:28:21 AM

That'd be fun! I wouldn't mind trying that. Would the examples be jokes as well, or is it just a good draft without a description?

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Jul 25th 2020 at 9:30:28 AM

Because "Mad Experimentation" already had joke examples and I don't feel like sifting through joke examples looking for legitimate ones when the time comes to switch from schmuck bait mode to serious mode, I'd say the latter.

This would be interesting, to see if people put more stock in legit examples than a description, or if the description is what gets the attention.

I would say the biggest failure of "Mad Experimentation" was the emphasis on it being a joke. We basically memed it to death and it only really proved that the people on the TLP like to goof around.

Eh I think it will get at least three hats but a lot of people will point out the lack of description and that may entice anti hats. I think it's better to just have a one line description than no description.

Probably better to include some attempt at a description, even if it's pretty brief. Maybe throw in a single sentence to test people if you wanna have fun, but I wouldn't want the opposite to happen, for you to get bombed prematurely if people mistake you for a troll or something.

I don't care for the experiment, but there were a couple of comments I thought I could match with my own take. Now that this thread's been inactive for a bit, it ought not to be intrusive to add it.

When it comes to hats and bombs, I find that I barely hand these out and if I do it's only hats, not ever bombs. The problem with hats, I find, is that I'm only willing to hand them out for tropes that I like/have the necessary knowledge of. And then I only hat if I don't otherwise invest (much) in the trope for the same reason I don't hat my own tropes.

I don't bomb on principle. For one, as others said, because a trope might improve and then be stuck having to overcome the earlier and no longer relevant bomb. Bombing, in a way, is an act of immediately withdrawn commitment and I rather not commit at all.

On top of that, I don't think there's a culture in which I can justify bombing as long as good faith can be assumed. Like, to take the experiment, I assume a problem with the original title is that it contained a name and that's a no-no. Thing is, I think I know that's a no-no, but don't ask me how I know that because I have no clue. Any semblance of help/advice/instructions is very hard to find (and even refind!), yet there are plenty of tropes to come across that do have a name in the title, Chuck Cunningham Syndrome being the first to spring to mind, creating the impression that this is an acceptable practice. I'm not in a position to correct a sponsor in such a matter, so I'm not bombing them either.

Equally so, I take it that video game example in the wrong folder is a clearcut case, but examples can actually be very hard to place. Multimedia examples, in particular ones where facts carry over between the media, I still don't know how to handle if to get to a trope two+ media are needed. Then there's obscure-ish folders like Newspaper Comics vs Comic Strips, Eastern Animation & Asian Animation, and the ubiquity of the Literature namespace when examples on a page can go under literature, fairy tale, folklore, religion and so on. And again, there's not much help to find; the path of least resistance is to let it be, unless I happen to be familiar with an example.

(The 12 examples rule is the only one I find enforcable, but it is also unbombable by default. And even here, there's the ambiguity of what 12 examples are if there's multiple examples to be found in "one" source. I do think a trope should have more than 12 examples, but if that's the bottom of the barrel, then it's still a vague one.)

Which leads me to the notion that a trope has to be launchable to deserve hats and that it should principally not need any fixes. I find telling people (how) to do something exhausting and inefficient. I rather make improvements on my own, which is (socially) harder to do with a sponsor around than when the trope is off into the wild. This, at least, could be amended with some culture changes. Like, since a trope is supposed to be a community go, maybe instead of making it so that the sponsor has to explicitly say or permit others editing the description, it could be the other way around? That sponsors have to explicitly say they don't want anyone just editing and that any changes have to be discussed first? Just a thought.

I don't have a way to wrap this up, so for closing, in the spirit of improvement, I'd like to draw attention to the Trope Description guideline effort that's gone limbo a while back. I've been meaning to return to it myself — have been collecting examples of "bad" writing with the aim to compose an example paragraph that looks good at first glance but which can easily be made better. In general I'd like a lot more examples and step-by-step instructions in there. I'd be nice if others could look into it too lest the thing turns into Pfff133's Personal Pet Peeves.

Edited by Pfff133 on Aug 23rd 2020 at 4:52:08 AM