Mastodawn

If #TVTropes has an original sin, it is the refusal to release the source code. A big part of why #Wikipedia got so huge is that #MediaWiki stayed open and freely available, which meant the whole bazaar could improve it, and use it for other entire projects. MediaWiki also has a bunch of APIs, which means that people can build cool things off Wikipedia

2/23

TVTropes was never going to be as big as Wikipedia, but if the code was available, other people would have been able to build cool things on top of it, and I have no doubt it would be bigger, more popular, and more versatile. But the people in charge always chose to keep the blueprints inside a vault in the cathedral, and the site became increasingly insular.

3/23

That's a shame, because TVTropes' wiki engine, which I will henceforth refer to as TropeWiki, has a lot of good features. The site actually adapts to look good on mobile and desktop, instead of just having a mobile stie with lots of padding on the side. Discussion pages are structured as forum threads instead of MediaWiki's standard wiki pages. And the attached forum engine is incredibly nicely done.

4/23

Fast Eddie, the original founder of TVTropes (alongside Janitor and the late Gus) was a revered figure back in the day. His reputation has tarnished a bit since then, but he is still respected. He did all the technical work as well as most of the administration and moderation, and on multiple occasions got in trouble for working on the site when he was supposed to be doing his day job.

5/23

#TVTropes #Fediverse #Moderation

If you look around the Internet (especially Reddit), you'll see a lot of people complaining about TVTropes' moderators. Every moderator has made bad and wrong decisions, but volunteer moderators have a hard job; your instance admins will tell you that if they act quickly on complaints they are accused of being aggressive power trippers, while if they take the time ot investigate they get accused of facilitating predators.

6/23

Also, many of the comments I saw before they got thumped really were rude, angry, or against site rules. A nonzero number of comlainers did actually deserve what they got.

So all I'll say about the moderators is that Fighteer should never have been one, and when he got back after being suspended, he should have been demoted to normal troper.

7/23

But yeah, moderation is hard, and managing a community that size for no compensation was a massive mental burden on Fast Eddie. I absolutely do not blame him for handing over TVTropes to someone else and walking away.

Unfortunately, TVTropes up to then had been formally managed by a nonprofit (which consisted entirely of Eddie and Janitor), and the new owners are a for-profit company.

That was the downfall.

8/23

Eddie was an old-school hacker who casually peppered his speech with terms in the Jargon File and took a minarchist approach to running TVTropes. There were only a few rules, all of which were introduced reactively, and the site was wild, fun, and chaotic. There were definitely too few rules because Eddie *really* didn't want TVTropes to get as bureaucratic as Wikipedia.

9/23

With Eddie gone, TVTropes accreted new rules with way a popular trope accretes examples.

There was a problem with people constantly changing page images, so no the rules is that once somebody has put a picture on a page, it can only be changed by discussion in [one particular subforum](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/conversations.php?topic=images). Not a *terrible* idea, but...

10/23

The image selection subforum has a hard limit on the number of active threads to prevent things from getting lost. But, because *every* page has to go through the right procedure, it's regularly clogged with 10 threads about a single series that has a bunch of subpages, which makes it incredibly difficult to bring up pages with bad images.

TVTropes did end up being as bureaucratic as Wikipedia, but without Wikipedia's "Ignore All Rules" guideline.

11/23

Then there was the crackdown on so-called zero-content examples (ZCEs), which are examples that only make sense if one is already familiar with the work. It's good to make examples comprehensible to all readers, but this coincided with a move towards more descriptive trope names, so you ended up with a lot of boring, repetitive examples like:

Angelic Beauty: Lucia is an angel and is really hot.

12/23

Media namespaces were Fast Eddie's other mistake, but they made sense at the time. back when #TVTropes was just about TV, so the page called Batman was about the 1966 show. Comicbook/Batman was created so that people could talk about Batman comics without linking to the show page, but then medias started getting seperate pages for character, trviia, and subjective tropes, which meant namespaces were insufficient to differentiate between works with the same names.

13/23

So you have Literature/TheWheelOfTime, and the TV adaptation is at Series/TheWheelOfTime2021, which completely defeats the point of having Series/ and Literature/ namespaces!

And don't get me started on how Series'/ and Film/ are just for live action, while all animation and puppets are grouped together under Westernanimation/ or Animation/ (which aren't the same), or Anime/. And that's not even getting into the disaster of how comics are sroted.

14/23

Trope misuse is a perennial issue stemming from the intentional (and correct) decisions not to restrict how many example a trope can have, and that everything from The Simpsons to a webcomic three people read is equally notable. The result is a lot of fancruft as people are very quick to add examples, but reluctant to verify what has already been written (and those who do verify get pilloried on Reddit for being "precious").

15/23

The worst was when tropes like [Getting Crap Past The Radar](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GettingCrapPastTheRadar) became badges of honour, with people intentionally shoehorning in their favourite media to make them look cooler.

16/23

Getting Crap Past the Radar - TV Tropes

Instances in which a writer, artist or other creator puts inappropriate content — stuff that directly violates the censorship standards they are working under — into their material with the deliberate intent to get past this …

TV Tropes

But to come back to an earlier point, the reason everybody liked and to this day respects Fast Eddie is he was a member of the community who interacted and chatted with people every day on the forum.

The corporate owners aren't like that. Kory does (often good!) technical stuff and some moderation, the others just do their office jobs and try to increase revenue.

17/23

Revenue. That's always the issue.

Fast Eddie brought ads to TVTropes because the site is expensive to host and he was paying for it out of his own pocket. But advertising is ALWAYS a [deal with the devil](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DealWithTheDevil). Advertisers mostly don't want to be associated with porn, so porn tropes are out. I don't mean pornographic images, I mean TVTropes can't even describe porn.

18/23