Poll of the Day > Is PotDpedia still a thing?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm bored and would like to read it.

no i don't think so

Hi

Hi SpeeD. How are You? :)

It might still be out there (it got moved from one site to another at one point), but if so, it hasn't been updated in years.

So it might be interesting as a viewpoint into what PotD was like years before the current crop of terrible posters came along and ruined everything, but it's going to be obsolescent as fuck.


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No it stopped being a thing around 2010.
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I'm a sucker for nostalgia. I enjoyed PotD much more when I spent embarrassingly amounts of time posting here. I always felt it never really gets crappier. We just tend to be more biased towards the times in the past.

I just did a search for "Secret Consortium of Shadowy Power Brokers", which is a phrase that I know for a fact was on my PotDpedia page, and which I suspect no one else in the history of the world has ever said in exactly that fashion, and nothing came up on either Yahoo or Google.

So if there's a copy of the PotDpedia still out there somewhere, it's isn't anywhere either search engine can find it.


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Nah, PotD has definitely gotten a lot worse. I barely even bother to post here anymore.
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That's disappointing. It feels like a part of my nerd history has been ripped away.

Why does that phrase sound familiar and at the same time so ridiculous? Was that one of those 500 post long topics?

GunslingerGunsl posted...

I always felt it never really gets crappier. We just tend to be more biased towards the times in the past.

No, in this case, it really has gotten crappier though. The lack of constant influx of fresh users and the slow decay of quality users while terrible posters and trolls seem more or less eternal means that the overall signal-to-noise ratio has been dropping for years now.

I'm the one who always used to defend the board and dismiss the nostalgia-blind people who were like "The board used to be better!", but honestly, it's not even really a question now. The board DID used to be better, because the board (and the site as a whole) have been slowly sliding into obsolescence ever since other forms of social media came along and took over as the new hotness.

We're like Usenet was in 2000.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm the one who always used to defend the board and dismiss the nostalgia-blind people who were like "The board used to be better!", but honestly, it's not even really a question now. The board DID used to be better, because the board (and the site as a whole) have been slowly sliding into obsolescence ever since other forms of social media came along and took over as the new hotness.

Reddit really is the "culprit" of this. It did a very good job at killing "smaller" forums and social meidaized gaming to the point where some subreddits are moderated by the game devs themselves.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

GunslingerGunsl posted...

I always felt it never really gets crappier. We just tend to be more biased towards the times in the past.

No, in this case, it really has gotten crappier though. The lack of constant influx of fresh users and the slow decay of quality users while terrible posters and trolls seem more or less eternal means that the overall signal-to-noise ratio has been dropping for years now.

I'm the one who always used to defend the board and dismiss the nostalgia-blind people who were like "The board used to be better!", but honestly, it's not even really a question now. The board DID used to be better, because the board (and the site as a whole) have been slowly sliding into obsolescence ever since other forms of social media came along and took over as the new hotness.

We're like Usenet was in 2000.

Makes sense. I haven't been back long enough to really notice. I was just talking to a friend yesterday about how internet meme culture has become so mainstream. When I was in middle school and high school, I can remember all those little jokes that felt so exclusive to message board nerds like us. At some point, when social media blew up, I remember seeing Never Gonna Give You Up be performed by Rick Astly at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade and thinking "Oh God, my internet life has started to bleed into my actual life." Now the two are practically the same. Probably why I never feel the need to come here anymore. I have the phone numbers of the posters I used to talk to most anyway.

GunslingerGunsl posted...

Why does that phrase sound familiar and at the same time so ridiculous? Was that one of those 500 post long topics?

It happened during one of the PotD Presidential elections.

It was always traditional for the outgoing President to run the election for the next batch, and I'd been elected like 2-3 times at that point, but I'd always sort of thought the entire thing was kind of ridiculous (and I usually ran as a joke when I ran - like the time I had "celebrity endorsements" backing me and had badly photo-shopped pictures of fictional characters like Optimus Prime giving me thumbs up), so the one election I ran me and... I forget who my VP was - either Majin or Drudge? - basically set it up as a fixed election.

So we did the vote as usual, but at the end we told everyone that the Electoral College had overruled the popular vote and that Wario was President now (at least I think it was Wario - it was whoever the most hated poster was at the time... if it happened now, it would definitely be Icoyar).

When people (expectedly) flipped their shit, I mentioned that PotD had always been run by a Secret Consortium of Shadowy Power Brokers who controlled everything (and who had thus fixed the election), and used that phrase a lot after that because it amused me. I also used to bring it up whenever people asked how they could "become" PotDers, and we'd talk about the secret initiation they had to do.

That was the same election that led Wydrah to pull out his old PotD_President account and where I made PotD_Senate and Supreme Court accounts to gimmick post as to "justify" how the election was 100% valid and binding, just to fuck with people even more.

Then the Shadowy Consortium and all of those accounts came out again when we did the thing where the acting President (I forget who - might have been me? Might have been Drudge? One of the old regulars, anyway) abolished the Presidency entirely.

I mentioned the Consortium in my page on the PotDpedia, and gave them their own page (where the picture was basically a generic picture of a group of people on a beach where you could only see their shadows on the sand), so I know that phrase is/was in the PotDpedia, and it's distinct enough that the PotDpedia is probably the ONLY place you'd find it online.


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Judgmenl posted...

Reddit really is the "culprit" of this. It did a very good job at killing "smaller" forums and social meidaized gaming to the point where some subreddits are moderated by the game devs themselves.

I think the slide started when LUE got locked and 4chan started to rise as an entity, though it took a few years for that to have any real visible impact. The rise of sites like Digg and later Reddit definitely helped, as did the fact that game hints and walkthroughs are almost always better on sites like Youtube or individual game Wikias now (I rarely use FAQs on this site at this point, and haven't for years).

But things like Twitter also hurt, because it meant the sort of people who would gravitate to a general social board on any site now had an alternative outlet to go to.

Every website that has ever existed has always benefited from an influx of new blood to refresh the pool (while the older posters would ideally help "socialize" the newer ones into Internet etiquette and make them less assholish), but GameFAQs has been "stagnant" for years now because the incoming new user flood has diminished to a trickle, while the loss rate probably remained constant (or even increased).

So we're basically like a slowly evaporating lake, with all the gunk and impurities being left behind turning the water more and more toxic because there isn't enough fresh water getting in to offset the loss.

And it's not even as if this is a GameFAQs-specific thing or a PotD-specific thing. The same sort of social dynamic applies to every website that's ever existed (and even Usenet and BBSes before WEBSITES existed).

It's just natural evolution at work.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I think the slide started when LUE got locked and 4chan started to rise as an entity, though it took a few years for that to have any real visible impact. The rise of sites like Digg and later Reddit definitely helped, as did the fact that game hints and walkthroughs are almost always better on sites like Youtube or individual game Wikias now (I rarely use FAQs on this site at this point, and haven't for years).

At that point, I was only beginning to post on GameFAQs (an it would have been a few years before starting to post on PotD). But it definitely does seem that around that time smaller forums (I was a member of several) started to dwindle down as more and more people started using Myspace, and inevitably Facebook in the last few years of the decade.

There was still activity, but not nearly as much activity as there was in the early 2000s (Most of which I frequented ezboard and invisionfree as GameFAQs was blocked at school, which was where I spent most of my internet time.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But things like Twitter also hurt, because it meant the sort of people who would gravitate to a general social board on any site now had an alternative outlet to go to.

Oh god don't get me started on Twitter. I remember when Twitter first started becoming a "thing" around the 2008 presidential election, that was when I was when I started getting interested in Politics. I swore off TV after CNN did nothing but repeat Tweets for hours a day.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Every website that has ever existed has always benefited from an influx of new blood to refresh the pool (while the older posters would ideally help "socialize" the newer ones into Internet etiquette and make them less assholish), but GameFAQs has been "stagnant" for years now because the incoming new user flood has diminished to a trickle, while the loss rate probably remained constant (or even increased).

I would say this is more or less the same with every site that's not "big". GameFAQs might as well not even have a domain name at this point because we're not going to get many new visitors when there are other sources of discussion and information available.

The loss of uses is definitely a thing, I think it started around 2011. That year had a lot of people on here start to trickle away (this was around the time my second account got banned). I remember returning a year later and the people here were very different.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And it's not even as if this is a GameFAQs-specific thing or a PotD-specific thing. The same sort of social dynamic applies to every website that's ever existed (and even Usenet and BBSes before WEBSITES existed).

Which is a bit sad to be honest. Seeing the internet "die" in favor of social media depressing having been invested into this (in one form or another) for over half of my life.
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Doesn't look like it.
I can't find either of the wet paint ones or the wiki one.

Yeah it feels kinda sad that some parts of the Internet is dying just because of reddit and other social media : (

I only ever use FAQs on this site when it's an old and probably forgotten game I need some info on.
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PO, you can probably recreate most of PotDpedia from memory. Lol.

Guys, B8's pedia is still up and running.
We suck.

Judgmenl posted...

Oh god don't get me started on Twitter. I remember when Twitter first started becoming a "thing" around the 2008 presidential election, that was when I was when I started getting interested in Politics. I swore off TV after CNN did nothing but repeat Tweets for hours a day.

The real problem with Twitter was that, in the old days, you'd gravitate to a newsgroup or a message board or a chat room, and the older regulars were there and would slowly shape your behavior so you'd be less annoying, whereas Twitter is like standing alone in a room shouting as loudly as you can and occasionally someone will reply. It skewed social normalization as a process, and once "Twitter culture" started to emerge on its own organically, it was kind of terrible because of how loose the imposed socialization was. Basically, everyone became the asshole newb, and asshole newb behavior became the norm.

I'd say the same problem applies with Tumblr, though other sites like Reddit actually do sort of mirror the older pattern of having newer users learn from older ones.

But again, none of this is really NEW, per se:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September



GunslingerGunsl posted...

PO, you can probably recreate most of PotDpedia from memory. Lol.

I never read it, honestly.

Apart from my own page (which I wrote mostly to keep other people from writing it), and a related article or two (like the Consortium one, and maybe one or two others I'm forgetting), I mostly ignored it. A lot of it was people posting articles about other users or events I didn't consider all that noteworthy, so it always seemed like a bit of a waste of time.

Though I'm not even sure I could recreate my own page from memory at this point (though knowing me, I might have it saved as a text file in one of my old archives). I'm getting older, and I've already noticed that memory isn't what it used to be.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

The real problem with Twitter was that, in the old days, you'd gravitate to a newsgroup or a message board or a chat room, and the older regulars were there and would slowly shape your behavior so you'd be less annoying, whereas Twitter is like standing alone in a room shouting as loudly as you can and occasionally someone will reply. It skewed social normalization as a process, and once "Twitter culture" started to emerge on its own organically, it was kind of terrible because of how loose the imposed socialization was. Basically, everyone became the asshole newb, and asshole newb behavior became the norm.

Wow, I just had some major deja vu. I swear you've used this same exact analogy before.

On another topic, what would you think the "notable" events of PotD's history are?
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Judgmenl posted...

Wow, I just had some major deja vu. I swear you've used this same exact analogy before.

I'd be surprised if I did because I don't really talk about the sociological implications of Twitter all that often, but it's entirely possible I did and just forgot.

It's not like certain other analogies, metaphors, or verbal crutches I'm very much aware of using quite often, so I'd definitely know it was something I said before.



Judgmenl posted...

On another topic, what would you think the "notable" events of PotD's history are?

At this point, I've probably forgotten most of them, because I don't consider anything that happens here all that notable. Almost anything that seems major in the moment tends to fade away into something no one really cares about when you're looking back at it from a few years later.

I usually bring up Ail in "remember the old days" topics, though, because her insanity definitely permeated the board to a pretty significant extent, and sort of left shockwaves that lasted even after she was gone. She was also the last real "supervillain" we really had here, that we could all turn against and hate to keep us from eventually turning on each other.

Some other posters here have inspired similar mostly-universal disdain, but I don't think anyone's ever really managed to match her level of nuclear-grade hate.


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That must have been something, It's been several times now I've completely blown up this community and hearing that I'm not at levels of "universal disdain" really makes me feel slightly better.
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No one's doxxed you, found your home address and phone number, and driven you to psychosis and (possible) death, so you've still got a ways to go before you're Ail.


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This topic got me nostalgic.
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