Unfortunate Implications sources: Quantity vs Quality

I feel that any changes to the rules of a trope like this should be handled with great care.

I'm personally in the camp of "I'd rather give up a few good entries than open the floodgates to random twitter opinions and tumblr posts" which would immediately cause the trope to dissolve into the nattery fluid that it was before the rule was implemented.

I know this is sucky if you want to apply the trope to less well regarded works, like the Warrior cats examples given earlier on, but I'd rather have a curated but potentially incomplete trope than a wild west that may have a few more good entries but countless more terrible natterfests.

I just feel like I should make it abundantly clear that I'm still advocating for tighter curation. I just don't agree with holding the website these opinions are posted on as the end-all-be-all. Take it into consideration, sure. Try and look for better sources, sure. But if we're curating it anyway, is there any harm in allowing the occasional "good" Tumblr blog to be used as a source?

People are gonna do it anyway, people already do it because they don't read the trope page, so the literal only way to prevent this from happening is to make it a locked page that doesn't allow off-page exampled. I don't see how making an exception every so often is the same as opening the floodgates- we'd still be curating it anyway.

This whole thing just feels a little too black and white, like we can either have a curated trope or a site-wide disaster, but that's not true at all. We can still enforce standards while not excluding entire websites just because of negative stereotypes about those websites.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 24th 2022 at 2:57:20 PM

For the record, I'm still against using a single Tumblr post or tweet as a source. I am not against using multiple posts/tweets as a source. Are we about representing fandom opinions or about putting out stuff with which we agree? Obviously we won't allow the really inflammatory shit like "this group thinks this show is a conspiracy to destroy white people" or whatever but is there truly an issue with "a lot of people found this unintentionally racist"?

Also, aren't there some curated sites with articles that basically amount to "here's a bunch of tweets backing up our opinion"? That kind of article makes more sense than like, one reviewer's personal opinion.

Is that really why you think I don't want to use Reddit as a source for UI (and by extension, any other trope that we end up restricting by citation)? Because I have a negative stereotype about the userbase?

Not you, Crazy; while I still disagree with you, I'm talking about other people in this discussion who repeatedly lump non-news websites in with the negative stereotypes about those websites- Tumblr and Twitter especially get considered websites full of crazy, oversensitive nutjobs. Plenty of people on this thread alone have made such a statement as to why we shouldn't trust those sites, especially in Reddit's case, which has always had a really bad rep but also has subreddits dedicated to media analysis. Not everyone used specifics, but bringing up people "being crazy" is just as negative a stereotype of these websites.

I'll admit there's other reasons for not wanting these websites as citations that aren't related to stereotypes, but I can't help but think that it's why such websites were and are constantly being called out when sites like YouTube often pass unscathed. People do have negative perceptions of these websites and are less likely to trust anything posted on them by default, no matter how legit it is.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 24th 2022 at 3:38:46 PM

Am I being referred to here? Because I was a Reddit user for years and I was basing what I said on actual things I saw on the site. The whole site isn't like that, but there certainly are some loony parts.

(Admittedly I was in a bad mood when I wrote that too. I apologize.)

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 24th 2022 at 3:41:00 PM

You're included, but you're not the only person who specifically called out Reddit as being a bad website. I wasn't talking about you and you alone, so no worries.

Every website has some loony parts. I can imagine how many people would refuse our own wiki as a citation because "that site is filled with crazy people who obsess over Joss Whedon and post about their own sexual experiences while also hypocritically deleting sexual works and tropes". And while I'm not saying TVT is the perfect place to cite for... well, most things... All of us here would agree that those are stereotypes of our history and don't reflect on us as we are now. And most of us would agree that we can sometimes be capable of genuine media analysis and discussion.

I won't pretend that most news sites are more trustworthy than Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit are. I won't pretend that a lot of people on those three sites are overreactive and easily provoked and sometimes just looking for things to be angry about. And I'm fully willing to admit that 90% of citations we get from those websites would be complete and utter crap. But if the only reason people don't trust them is because of that 90%, can't we find the few citations worth citing a la Sturgeon's Law? Or, do what Mew's suggesting and look at the quantity instead? That's if we're not just going to make the citations only from reputable news sources, which would make this issue moot anyway, but would again require much tougher curation and policy alongside it.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 24th 2022 at 3:49:13 PM

No that's OK. I was too angry.

I can provide citations for the Russian interference claims though.

https://gizmodo.com/reddit-uncovers-russian-interference-campaign-ahead-of-1840303960

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17081520/reddit-russia-2016-election-ads-organic-content

Edit in response to : If we can find a way to make a list of reputable subreddits (and I do know some exist), perhaps we could use that.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 24th 2022 at 3:51:36 PM

Been following this thread and I just want to say I agree with Way Jay and Mew

I'm just going to stop posting here. This thread is getting too heated for me. If there's a crowner or a vote I'll vote but that's it.

I'll take a step back for a bit and see what other people have to say / where this goes. I'm mostly on here because I don't have a life, but I can find something else to occupy my time...

I'm also in agreement with Mew and War Jay. Of course, I'm a li'l biased, since I have a Tumblr blog I spend a lot of time writing several-hundred-to-thousand word media analysis on.

In my opinion, I'm actually more protective of my reputation just because I don't want people to think I, personally, am an idiot, than I would if I were hiding behind the editorial decisions of my place of employment. And I don't particularly enjoy my inbox filling up with people yelling at me about being wrong.

Not saying that's the norm, but it does happen. And if we can't cite the very own fandom for YMMV pieces, what's the point of YMMV examples at all?

Edited by Eiryu on Jan 24th 2022 at 3:37:47 AM

I'm in favor of the restrictions staying. My personal opinions on audience reactions aside, I'm in the camp of "I'd rather let a few 'good' entries go than open the floodgates to random Twitter and Tumblr posts."

Like Tonwen, I also don't mind if less well-known works don't have enough citations from reputable sources to get an Unfortunate Implication entry if it means that the Unfortunate Implication entries that remain have more curated citations to ensure better quality. The site doesn't really lose anything of value by not allowing entries that only cite random Twitter and Tumblr posts.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jan 24th 2022 at 2:43:52 AM

Yeah, I have to say I'm in favor of keeping restrictions too. It's not hard to find a few people supporting whatever opinion you want once a fandom reaches sufficient size, and on sites that are completely anonymous (including but not exclusive to Tumblr and Reddit) its also very easy for someone dedicated to getting their opinion documented here to make sock puppet accounts to post about the same thing: requiring multiple sources wouldn't stop people from being able to just cite their own blogs and opinions for a UI entry.

I basically agree with the school of thought that if there's no oversight that would stop someone from posting misinformation about the work in their post or from using the account as a sockpuppet, then it's not a credible source.

Exceptions should be made for a writer's own accounts, of course (I think Neil Gaiman has a tumblr? If he made a post about UI in something he wrote, that should be allowed as a valid citation.)

It sucks that this means some opinions won't get documented, but YMMV tropes have always been in the 'nice to have, but secondary to the site's goal' for me.

Heck a good example of sock pupetting like that is that most covid misinformation only comes from 12 people.

You will have no idea if the blog posts or Tumblr posts aren't from the same person and they have made sock accounts. Especially if their using the same points. So no multiple social media posts isn't proof that multiple people believe something. When people are agenda based they will want to spread it by any means.

We just live in too volatile a world where people like to get their own points through any means necessary

Edited by miraculous on Jan 24th 2022 at 6:02:06 AM

Having read through this thread, I'm inclined to agree with WarJay.

For one thing, as I read her posts, she is not advocating for opening the sluice gates—and I don't agree that allowing sources from Twitter, Tumblr, etc. will necessarily do so.

Now, if there were no curation ongoing, then that might indeed be a problem. But since the Unfortunate Implications entries are already being curated, entries from Twitter, etc., would presumably also be curated.

For another, a well-argued—perhaps even cited—Twitter-thread or Tumblr post seems like a workable source to me. If the arguments are good, and especially if evidence is given, how is that not reasonable to use?

For a third, it has been argued that one can find a Twitter-post or suchlike for just about any position. And that may well be somewhat true. However, would curation not likely filter out at least some proportion of such sources?

And finally, sites with editorial staff are stated to be more reputable, and thus more reliable. And... for the most part they might be.

However, they're far from invariably so: editorial mandate doesn't always align with accurate reporting, after all. See, for example, the matter brought to light of some years ago in which (if I recall correctly) it was claimed that game-reviewers were required to eschew giving low scores to games, for editorial fear of no longer receiving review codes from publishers.

A Twitter review, however, may not have that pressure, and thus may actually find it easier to review openly.

Now, I'm not saying that Twitter, etc. sources are necessarily better than others. Far from it!

Rather, I'm saying that Twitter, etc. are not necessarily bad sources, and that more-traditional sources are not necessarily good ones.

So, given the various points above, I'm inclined think that allowing sources from Twitter, Tumblr, etc. seems like a good idea—given the presence of curation.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jan 25th 2022 at 10:02:53 PM

The curaration idea has one kinda issue. The thread has only been removing examples that don't have a citation and is easily one of the least active cleanup threads in the site. (Partly since you know its not a very popular concept for people).

It's partly because its so inactive (being maybe not as popular as some others) that the curation you speak off will be really difficult in the long term. (People have lives and usually other stuff to do. For example before the 21st of this month. The last time the thread got a bump as the 7th in december. And before that before that was the late November period. Than after the 28th we only get one at 9th of Nobemeber before it. And before that the previous one is October 6th. See an issue. For a curation thread barely anyone actually curates for long periods of time? I don't think anything will change here as it just seems no one posts here for long periods of time)

It will also be hard to determine what an "objective evidence" within the work is. As pointed out due to this being a subjective trope meaning you could write something like I'll use the first example here. Like I have seen this used before and could...get sources from Reddit and some of the....youtube channels but like do really want an entry with The fact that two Jewish actors made an entire series making every Christmas character absolutely awful. Some viewers have even gone as far as to accuse them as making this series just to spite Christians. Like the sources would attract the worst possible people to the site and that's kinda a reccuring issue here that with the duration so slow and disactive it will now be linking extremists onto the site and it could take months to find and remove the entry through the thread.

Edited by miraculous on Jan 25th 2022 at 2:10:27 AM

Okay, that's a fair point: if there's no significant curation then there might indeed be a problem.

But conversely... It looks from the link that you gave that people are looking at the actual content of the entries?

Sure, and perhaps that shouldn't be part of the criteria.

As to allowing... ah... "Unfortunate Unfortunate Implications" entries, well, if there's no real curation then does that not remain an issue, if perhaps a lesser one? I would imagine that someone could produce a citation from some extremist-aligned news site that's not familiar to the people in the thread, for example.

Unless there's some list of approved news sites that may be cited, or a process of vetting news sites, or some such thing...?

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jan 25th 2022 at 5:31:04 PM

For news sites, mediabiasfactcheck.com is a great tool for vetting various news sites by credibility and political affiliation.

Evaluating the quality of an argument takes much more time/effort than checking the source of the argument. That's all the citation policy asked; is the source from, essentially, someone who represents several people instead of one person. A reporter will have sources, and even when writing an opinion piece where they don't cite anyone else that agrees with them, they are held responsible for their content by their superiors.

The citation is valid if the author is reliably held accountable by the website they post it on. YouTube, generally speaking, does as much content-curation as Tumblr does. Some channels have a decent-sized team of creators working together to create the content; that's different than a one-person, one-camera channel.

If the author of the citation isn't being held accountable by their host, then the host is not a reliable source.

I feel like some people in this thread are vastly overestimating the amount of accountability, care, and editorial oversight a lot of news sites have regarding this kind of thing. I have seen a lot of worm-brained nonsense on news sites, especially regarding media which the assigned authors of the article are not familiar with and don't care about. At best, the site will just throw up a correction in the footnotes sometimes with an "oops, anyway."

I distinctly remember an article on Banana Fish when it was airing on Anime News Network that claimed the anime was trying to make a rape scene sexy, and basically everyone in the fandom went, "If you thought that was remotely sexy, that was a You Problem, because it absolutely did not come across that way."

And yet, that would be considered a valid citation for unfortunate implications, when the fandom at large went, "???? What are you smoking???"

It's been over three years, and the article remains online, unchanged.

(Meanwhile, if I had gotten that level of pushback on something I said on twitter, I would've deleted it posthaste in hopes it gets people out of my mentions about it)

Edited by Eiryu on Jan 25th 2022 at 12:52:32 PM

I think this comes down to what we want this trope to be. Do we want this to be about prevailing fandom opinions or do we want this to just acknowledge criticisms of a work by prominent voices? Because if it's the former, then the focus should be on the quantity of the citations. If it's the later, then it should be about the credibility of the citation.

Re: The cleanup thread is slow, but it doesn't just delete non-cited entries (in fact, you don't even need the thread to do that). We do in fact curate cited ones as well. That's how this entire discussion started in the first place. It's slow, but that's just a reason to start posting there more, not to discount it entirely.

I'll also agree with Eriyu that news sources can be just as biased and inaccurate as any personal blog can be. Sometimes accuracy and respect isn't what drives clicks. Some people just want to stir outrage or gain controversy so they can increase their ad revenue. Quality doesn't always matter to a news publication, but since they're more mainstream people tend to trust their claims more when it comes to lesser known media, and that can be damaging to the works they target.

Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer exists for a reason. And if we cite an opinion that relies on factual errors, we can, ideally, still note that the opinion exists and that it relies on some factual inaccuracies.

The question also is how do you get people to do that. It seems to not be a thread people are interested in. (cleanup threads work best when people want to and like to cleanup that trope). It has 770 posts over like 3 years with huge gaps in between. This would leave like only a few people once in awhile to be curating and that kinda feels wrong in another way if one or two people are goig to judge what counts as a valid citation or not.