Lurker > adjl

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


That's not exactly surprising. Pretty much everybody that's paid enough attention to know what Fandom is (and that's not very much attention, given how virulently they've spread in the last few years) has been trashing Fandom since long before they acquired GameFAQs.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

Anyway, isn't it the rule that anybody who's been on the site any time in the past year can still come here? So people who use gfaqs but not CE can still come here?

I'm not entirely sure. If I've posted on CE before this, it's been quite a few years since then, so if it isn't just a matter of having an active account, the limit is pretty generous. The more salient concern is that CE is no longer in the list of social boards, so even if people can post here, the fact that they're only going to end up here by following somebody else's link makes it quite unlikely that they'll end up finding the board to do so.

Lynyrd_Skynyrd posted...

Wait what? I need to hear this story

Dr. Kellogg was a puritan who wanted to cut down on people's sex drive. He developed several of Kellogg's earlier cereals (Corn Flakes being the main one) under the belief that bland, high-grain breakfasts would help with that goal. I'm not 100% sure what his rationale was, whether there was some link between grain intake and suppressed sex drive or just because believed a more ascetic diet would cut down on hedonism in other regards, but that was the logic.

He's also largely responsible for circumcision becoming an American tradition, for the same reason. He championed circumcising men as the default because it would make sex and masturbation less pleasurable and thus less desirable, and that idea took off among fellow puritans and has been the standard for Americans ever since. For female babies, he proposed burning the clitoris with oxalic acid for the same reason, but thankfully that one didn't take off.

No joke, I saw somebody who took a screenshot and "fixed" how flat her butt looked in it by photoshopping in shiny latex pants and a bigger butt. It... suggested some rather interesting things about the person, that they felt that was necessary.

Honestly, I'm expecting this won't even change that much for most social boards in the long run, gradual death of CE aside. For the first few weeks there'll be efforts to close "political" topics, and particularly butthurt posters may be able to get rid of posts/topics they don't like by marking them as political, but long-term I doubt it'll be worth mods' time to actively police boards where nobody has any problems and stamp out political discussions and we can probably just keep posting as normal. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that official policies don't exactly amount to much (like committing to removing problematic ads), and while I expect there'll be a concerted effort to keep up appearances in the early days, I doubt it'll last.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This is more or less what I always say to people who complain that Reddit is terrible.

Oh, I still dislike the site for being a horrible format. Its fundamental design means that threads don't flow like public discussions where people add to the conversation of posts that have come before. They instead end up fragmented into a bunch of sub-discussions (which themselves get fragmented into a bunch of sub-discussions) such that it's largely impossible to follow any single conversational flow. It's like being at a party and bouncing between groups that are talking about different things, except those different things are all actually pretty similar and belong to a single overarching topic but nobody can seem to get together and have the discussions as a larger group so everyone hears everything.

But all the "eww it's an echo chamber" critiques are indeed more a matter of trying to jump into the larger circle jerks. You can find perfectly civil, helpful discussion if you stick to smaller communities that you select on that basis.

https://imgur.com/tIrXUSA

Damn_Underscore posted...

I got sick of reading the reddit front page every day so I made an account and only selected a few subreddits to view, mostly sports

Amazing decision btw, I recommend doing that even if you dont post on reddit very much

At no point have I ever even considered reading Reddit's front page. If I'm on Reddit, it's for a specific sub, not a broad overview of the site. The site as a whole is just too big for a broad overview.

For a site that's moderated entirely by part-time volunteers? Maybe. I don't know how much total work is involved.

Of course, usermap axes for repeat offenders would do a much better job of alleviating the issue while requiring considerably less effort than trying to enforce topicality on all social boards to stamp out an unreliable proxy for the problem, but nobody asked me.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm the same. But we're both still adding to their numbers.

When they go to advertisers and say "We have X unique user hits per day" or "We have X amount of activity on the site", that helps determine how much they charge for ads. Blocking ads will translate to how many click-throughs or views any given ad gets (which also affects ad costs), but simply by posting here at all and generating activity we're still contributing to their ability to make money.

If you really want to hurt them, not coming here at all hurts worse than being an active user who just uses adblock. Because you're both no longer directly contributing to site activity statistics, but the more people leave, the more it encourages other people to potentially leave because they no longer have anyone else to interact with.

I'm not 100% certain of the mechanics, but I'm fairly sure advertisers have the ability to differentiate between a page view and an ad view. One of the main reasons anti-adblock measures are a bad idea (aside from the fact that they piss people off) is because they decimate click-through rate, given that people currently blocking ads are overwhelmingly not going to click on them if they're forced to view them, but that would only be the case if page views were counted differently from ad views. Fandom can still use their total viewer numbers to attract advertisers, who will expect that the proportion of ad views to page views will be roughly consistent with other sites (I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse, given how egregious GameFAQs ads are, but that's also true of every Fandom site because they're trash) and can extrapolate from there, but my activity still isn't going to be valuable.

I'm half curious what would happen to their statistics if people left refresh bots (by which I mean a mouse macro that hit F5 every five seconds, which is perhaps stretching the definition of "bot") running. They wouldn't count as unique hits, obviously, and on a large enough scale it could translate into a DoS situation, but if they're counted as page views then blocking ads on those views would likely skew the stats.

Hard to say. Dikitain was saying that before Politics was shut down, the most heavily modded boards were Politics, CE, and the PS4 board (which he presumed has since moved to the PS5 board, but he's not a mod anymore so he doesn't have current data). That Politics got shut down and CE got LUE'd is likely a response to the amount of mod resources each one consumed, whereas PotD isn't currently on that level. It stands to reason that the next one on the chopping block will be the next-most heavily modded (presumably after things like system boards that kind of need to remain fully open for the site to be able to host gaming discussions, especially if they want to attract new users), and I don't think PotD fits that bill. With the exodus from CE, however, and social boards in general getting shaken up, we may see enough of a change in PotD's userbase to change that calculus.

streamofthesky posted...

That RFK Jr. topic that was created 6 f***ing days before the dumb f*** announcement is closed and TC is "not an active member".

To be fair, I don't recognize the user and I can't think of any other active posts they have, so there's a considerable chance that the TC being banhammered is unrelated to the topic being closed.

Mine hit 21 in September. Kind of wild to think about, really.

In that case, I can tell you that you're within the normal range for the sake of quelling your anxiety until you can talk to your doctor about it tomorrow. Again, talking to a doctor who can interpret the result in the broader context of other results, your symptoms, and other factors I can't know is important and you should listen to whatever they say over my analysis, but just for the sake of saying "don't worry you're not dying" until tomorrow, you're normal.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The easiest way to defeat Fandom would be to just stop using all of their services.

If people stopped posting here entirely it would hurt their bottom line. Then if enough people did it they'd either shut the site down or sell it off to someone else.

I'm already pretty much the most harmful a user can be to them: I use the site and its bandwidth, but I block all of the ads and therefore generate no revenue to pay for that. I'm sure they still make something off of the various other browsing data they gather and sell, but I expect I'm still taking more than they make off of me.

SomeUsername529 posted...

That's what makes this funny. Like who the hell is even on this site that's getting scared away from posting by the hot political takes of a bunch of 40 year-old weirdos that haven't just migrated to reddit or whatever?

I think the idea is to make sure that anyone looking to come talk about games isn't put off by trolling or controversial topics and discouraged from joining the community, with political arguments being a significant part of that, but what happens on social boards also does nothing to affect that because social boards aren't going to be showing up for people searching for game discussions. Maybe the theory is that by trying to contain it to one board, that will free up moderation resources to clean up system/game boards that are more likely to be, but I don't know that a blanket ban on a certain topic (which means every instance of that topic on non-CE boards will need moderator attention) is actually going to help in that regard.

Personally, though, I'd be more put off by the aggressive ads than by any off-topic discussion or trolling that might be happening on the game board I was looking at. This site is honestly half the reason I use uBlock, and my understanding is that it's only gotten worse in the years since I swore off browsing it unprotected.

FrozenBananas posted...

alright, form a line over there! Everyone have their PotD green cards out please.

we are lockin this shit down!

Build a wall! Build a wall!

Out of pineapples, of course. Because we only discuss pineapples here.

Whichever doctor ordered the blood work will be able to interpret your results for you, including telling you where that result sits relative to the normal range, what the significance of that result is in the context of everything else tested and the symptoms you're presenting, and what actions you should take to correct it if there's something wrong. You can find normal ranges for a variety of blood work indicators with a simple google search, but I'd still recommend talking to your doctor about it instead of asking PotD or trying to do your own research as a medically ignorant layperson.

https://imgur.com/S8pQQbA

Knowing that Allen is still a Lead Mod makes me wonder if he was able to unlock his own topic.

Nice.

The government? THAT'S POLITICAL B7

Make sure you've got your waterproof sheets out first.

Though given what happened to LUE, we can make some guesses about CE's future. Not that I expect the site as a whole to last long enough to see out the full duration of a death as slow as LUE's.

The only reason Fandom owns GameFAQs now is because it was bundled with the rest of the CNet assets they bought. I doubt they'd have actually paid for it directly.

https://imgur.com/Y4X0uYW

I hope you made sure none of the tubes in your hole were tied, otherwise I think the political association might be impossible to avoid.

Colonel_Lingus posted...

Literally anything can be considered political or touch on politics in some way...

That kind of political statement is not welcome here. Please take your rabble-rousing elsewhere.

bruplex posted...

As one of the original mods on this site, it's a shame we couldn't have stuck to the original ToS (or something close to it).

What's changed? I know there was the general loosening of some of the more stick-in-ass interpretations of the rules a few years back (like no more automatic banhammers for "I'm 12 and what is this" and significantly less strict autoflag rules), but I don't really remember any changes much further back than that because that was like 20+ years ago now and 13-year-old me likely wouldn't have been aware of any changes that happened before I created an account.

Dikitain posted...

I know exactly what they are doing. Want to know what the top 3 boards were for marked messages?

1). Politics
2). Current Events
3). PS4 (or whatever the top system board is at the time, probably PS5 now)

They killed Politics, they just "killed" CE. They are basically trying to reduce moderations by killing the boards where the trolls go. Completely forgetting that just getting rid of the troll boards is going to make those trolls go to other boards.

Even as a person who doesn't talk about politics on public forums, even I know that the solution isn't "ban all political discussion and delete any place where people could potentially do it".

Should be interesting to see what happens when the PS5 board remains a problem. They can't lock down that board like they have CE while still maintaining any pretense of being a place to discuss games, since that would destroy any chance of getting real new users in (what little is left), but at some point it's going to be the worst one.

Oh, MTG is easy. Just refer to her by her initials and slip something about mana costs into everything you say and no one will be the wiser.

Lokarin posted...

How are we supposed to make fun of stupid politicians now?

We just need to come up with a clever euphemism for politics so nobody ever clues in to what we're talking about. From now on, we call them pineapples. Please ensure that disagreements on pineapple issues remain civil.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

are you saying this board is just as bad as ce?

No, I'm saying that there's considerable middle ground between "we don't want political discussion on game boards because it interferes with game discussion" and "we only want political discussion on CE." Any social board should be fair game for political discussion, given that it won't interfere with game discussion.

The whole post reeks of an executive who understands nothing about the site and its problems and therefore doesn't realize that CE isn't the only social board.

Revelation34 posted...

Andrew Jackson was the racist then.

Did it occur to you that perhaps one half of that sentence was referring to one of the two non-FDR presidents named, while the other half was referring to the other, and nobody was suggesting that both applied to either one of them?

I view the current SC with approximately the same attitude as the current SC would view gay Superman.

What could possibly go wrong?

Leroy.

streamofthesky posted...

Other: Ressentiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

EDIT: I should've just searched "ressentiment trump", lol

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/commstudiespapers/223/

I didn't know there was a term for it, but this is roughly what I was going to suggest. Trump blames something else for their problems, and without the political literacy needed to evaluate how valid that blame actually is, that's more appealing than less straightforward efforts to identify the cause and effect solutions (solutions that usually don't yield immediate results and are too complex for downstream effects to be obvious).

Colonel_Lingus posted...

This is literally every NMB topic tho because the dude is either trolling or very ill-informed or both

Pretty much. He's not exactly neurotypical, at least as far as having an accurate picture of the world and people around him goes, and he tends not to respond well to people pointing out that the obviously false things he says are obviously false. I'm guessing he's just going full echo chamber and blocking everyone that's ever put him in a position of needing to rethink the things he's said, though at that point I'm not sure why he's bothering to post because there can't be many active users left after doing that.

Most social media sites have profile pictures, which are basically the same as avatars. Not so much signatures, though. Those have definitely fallen out of fashion.

faramir77 posted...

The revelation that Link isn't a Kokiri but is actually a Hylian was one I enjoyed as a kid but now just seems flat.

Yeah, it blew me away as a kid, but it's not really a particularly meaningful plot twist, looking at it as somebody with a bit more experience with game stories under my belt, it really doesn't amount to much. It just means that "in some mysterious way, Link isn't a normal Kokiri and therefore can leave the forest and also grows up" isn't actually all that mysterious because he's just straight up not a Kokiri and can therefore be expected to work the same way as any Hylian. If anything, it takes the foreshadowing that there was something weird about Link and just defuses it with "nah, he's just a regular dude" instead of any deeper story twist.

Muscles posted...

but printing so much during covid came back to bite us in the ass too

And do you think Biden was unique in needing to spend money to deal with Covid? That some other option could have miraculously solved the problem for free?

This is what I mean when I say that the things that are most remarkable about Biden are more a matter of circumstance than anything he can/should be credited with. Anything related to Covid? It was a global pandemic, not anything unique to America or his administration. The global inflation crisis? Again, that's a global thing (it's in the name), driven largely by corporations trying to recapture some of the highs they had during Covid's peak and/or make up Covid-induced losses (with a little sprinkling of oil companies using the Russia-Ukraine war as an excuse to double the price of gas for no reason). Biden's stuck managing these crises, and there's plenty of room to praise/criticize that handling, but to suggest that he's responsible for OPEC jacking up gas prices is too myopically naive to even belong on Fox News, let alone coming out of the mouth of anyone that wants to pretend they know what they're talking about.

I liked Quest 64 well enough when I rented it, but I didn't have a controller pak so I was only able to get through the first couple areas and just kind of did that a couple times over the course of the week. One of these days I'll acquire a copy and play it properly.

Yellow posted...

the time that Israel shot up a crowd of people clamoring over flour on a truck, killing what, 60+ civilians?

100+, with 700+ wounded.

In that case, being frustrated to the point of physically lashing out over occasionally hearing an annoying sound you're otherwise able to avoid isn't healthy for you or anyone around you. The conclusion doesn't change.

"We're going to attack you, but deliberately cause and suffer no actual harm in the process" is actually a pretty considerable flex.

EclairReturns posted...

What do you message-board folk suggest I do, besides get therapy for my misophonia?

Just get therapy. Being frustrated to the point of physically lashing out over having your music momentarily drowned out in a public setting isn't healthy for you or anyone around you.

As a stop-gap measure, noise-cancelling headphones may help, but don't stop there.

"Biden is the worst president" is such a hilarious take because it immediately outs the person in question as having "Biden replaced Trump" as the sum total of their political knowledge. Like him or not, Biden is a thoroughly unremarkable president. The only things that stand out about him are that he took power after one of the most controversial presidents ever (two impeachments, an attempt to overthrow the election to install him undemocratically, and over a hundred indictments - whatever your opinion on his political stances, it's undeniable that he's made quite a stir) and during/after the worst public health crisis in a century, both of which are more a matter of circumstance than anything that can really be attributed to him.

Revelation34 posted...

Would it be better if he didn't pay back the loans?

His rationale is that because the loans were paid back, no harm was done and therefore Trump shouldn't be punished. Obviously, if the loans weren't paid back there'd be no question of his liability for whatever damages were incurred, but in this case it's less a matter of punishing him for causing damage and more a matter of punishing him simply for breaking the rules (rules which need to exist).

Here, we see Jen's tubes before they get tied.

https://imgur.com/Frpmw7p