| Rant Board |
| GameFAQs is one of the shittiest forums on the internet. |
| From: |
| I'm going to do my best to be illustrative and concise as well as entirely scathing, despite the fact that 4 people will read this and half of those agree. I've been on the GF forums for a while now. Hey you might know me, I'm PG, nice to meet you. I used to be a staunch antinostalgia shithead. When solidsnake and the like would show up back in '02 and whine about how much better GF was back in '00 or '99, I'd laugh. They'd go on about how "<x> user was so great", and "remember when we'd <x>?". It was kind of funny and amazing to me but here I sit 2 years later and realize that even though, apparently, 2002 wasn't the best year, 2004 and beyond are going to get progressively worse and worse until a once great social board looks like the grit at the bottom of an AOL chatroom. It's basically a slippery slope. The boards have grown far too large and can no longer foster creative/witty/intelligent/interesting conversation. Most people realize this about GF, at least subconsciously. Why the fuck do you think all these spinoffs exist? Somebody said "Shit, I gotta get the fuck away from these assholes!". When a community is born it struggles to have an identity. People gather and want to feel like they belong. The smaller the community, the easier it is to feel apart of it. When you make up 1/20th or 1/30th of a pool of regulars, you have a place, people recognize you and get to know you quickly. You can have a kinship even! Smaller communities tend to be easier to manage and handle. People that are blatant troublemakers can be ousted by the regulars and shunned. That's all well and good, but what happens when the community grows larger and larger? Decay. More and more users flood the pool, people get lost in the fray and have no voice and no recognition for their contributions to the board, their ideas and thoughts. When this happens, the poor forum is in trouble. This is where forum death begins. Attention whores are first. People who blatantly pander for the attention of the community. They're always posting topics that contain little stories about the menial adventures of their day and what they did. It leaves no room for expansion by the board regulars. So you drank a cup of coffee, that's great, what am I supposed to say and do now? They also tend to post pictures of themselves, they want you to see and hear them, get the whole experience. They ceaselessly bump topics until their quota is full as well. Attention whores, for the most part, add nothing to a community. They don't create topics that spark conversation or let others contribute. They're about one thing: Getting you to talk about THEM. Every poster is guilty of attention whoring once in a while, but consistent whores are forum shmucks. Trolls and gimmicks/joke accounts come next. These are people who could have fit in easily when the community was smaller but since they weren't getting inducted into the larger community, they took the other route. Trolls and gimmicks are the Attention Whore Deluxe Models. They are pandering for the same thing, but they go about it differently, using outlandish and inflammatory tactics to rile up the board. It's better to be hated than not noticed at all, right? Another symptom of a community growing too large for its own good. I'm not saying that every large community is bad. It mostly depends on the average maturity level of the people who frequent it, but when you got a place targetted at young adults in the teenager range, as GF is, it's going to be bad. Fads are the killing blow. Fads are the worst thing you can have on your community. When they spring up, they should be killed as quickly and harshly as possible. Okay, your community grew very large and now people are saying the same sentences over and over and over again, why? Again, it's the forums being bloated and having no identity. When new users show up they see people using these phrases and they begin to use them to fit in, it's a cycle that gradually eats away all decent communication on a board. Fads infect and smother topics where they don't even belong. People alter them to fit any situation, take the 'D fad on GF for example. It's the standard 1 word reply to just about any topic in which there's more than a paragraph to read and people can't be arsed to form intelligible replies. Fads are literal representation of your board dying. When instead of: A) Creating a new, interesting topic or line of discussion or B) Making a post that's helpful, interesting, witty, intelligent, or anything that'd be worth anything your users would rather spout the same dreadful, tired hokey lines to each other back and forth endlessly, you've got a condition critical. You're on the last lines here and action has to be taken. It's possible to stem all of this and bring your community out of a nose dive, but what it takes is an administrator who is proactive and interested in the boards and their quality. CJayC just IS NOT. The boards are secondary to the site itself. GameFAQs has so much content he has to regulate, so there's a giant moderation staff in his stead. The moderation staff is, without a doubt, the biggest collecton of pussies on the site, with CJayC as Head Vagina. Trolls are protected by the ToS when good users are irritated and flame them. Fads spiral out of control and unchecked until every fucking topic has a Linkin Park lyric or some other flavor of the week. The posters are too lazy to aspire to be more interesting and intelligent. Posting a fad says "Hey, I know what goes on at this board, I belong here." and nothing more. In conclusion, the reason I'm able to write so much on a subject so meaningless is because I find it fascinating for the most part. It's almost like a sociology experiment gone horribly wrong and I'm enjoying watching the community tumble and fall in on itself. True, I do miss the better days partly, but there are still enough interesting people and the occasional decent newbie to make the board worth posting at, but man does it ever stink like shit and death these days. I shudder to think of what it will look like 2 or 3 more years from now unless CJayC becomes a righteous smiter of stupidity. Only time will tell but the future looks bleak. --- Bad guy |
| From: |
| You should put up a site on xmission.com. <_< --- Faster then a bullet Terrifying scream Enraged and full of anger He's half man and half machine. ~ |
| From: |
| You should get more than 1 virtue for that. --- Stop by sometime... http://icegargoyle.com |
| From: |
| *silent nod of approval* |
| From: |
| Who the fuck cares? You'll have a lot more fun online, PG, if you stop fucking analysing everything to death, with your imaginary standards for forum decency and such. |
| From: |
| Who the fuck cares? You'll have a lot more fun online, PG, if you stop fucking analysing everything to death, with your imaginary standards for forum decency and such. I don't "analyze" everything to death, this is just the way I see things. I didn't sit down with a crack team of scienticians in lab coats and crunch numbers. Also this was a writing exercise, usually I toss these because I do 5 or 6 a week but decided to post it since it came to be about internet forum fuckery. Secondly, fun is relative. I honest to god believe that people have "fun" being idiots on the forum, that's fine, but they're still the minority turning the place into a shit heap for the majority that gets "fun" out of decent conversation and wit. --- Bad guy http://mexicanvengeance.cjb.net |
| From: |
| You should post more of them PG, if they're anything like the rest of them, they're damn good. --- Crimson Ghost - Giving Emo Kids something to cry about since 2001. |
| From: |
| That second virtue should set things right. --- |
| From: |
| The System works. Kinda. I still think PK should have lost V for that dumbass post. --- Crimson Ghost - Giving Emo Kids something to cry about since 2001. |
| From: |
| [This message was deleted at the request of the original poster] |
| From: |
| You like the SA forums, right? |
| From: |
| You like the SA forums, right? Yup, probably one of the better run communities on the net. --- Bad guy http://mexicanvengeance.cjb.net |
| From: |
| Hey there, PG. I totally agree. And it's not just CE and LUE and all that you'd expect. The sports board has simply tanked in the last year or so with all the trolls/joke accounts of respected users. --- It makes me shake, I know it's not for real The lightning starts, I stand oustide |
| From: |
| yeah its going down the shitter. --- The Army Needs More Blue Boxes www.2600.com |
| From: |
| Except for the legions upon legions of elitists. I'll take silliness over elitists any day of the week. |
| From: |
| I agree. |
| From: |
| You forgot the fact that self-confessed pedophiles are still allowed on he GameFAQs mod staff instead of being banned for the sick fucks they are. After all, why is CJay allowing these Pedo mods access to a forum with a large, if not massive, number of children on them? CONSPIRACY!!1 --- [Kseh-koh-shee Oh-mee-gah] - Xexxhoshi Omega Chaos/Order: Of Clockwork and Chaos Magick |
| From: |
| The only place on GameFAQs where I have been able to have intelligent conversations with other people is on the NCAA board during football season. --- You may know me as Texas Football. |
| From: |
| Wait, what? Which of the mods is a pedo?.. |
| From: |
| So, these are the Outboards, huh? Haha, PG; I got IP banned. |
| From: |
| I'm pretty sure you only got axed Bon, making new accounts has been a chore lately with the crappy ISP standing bullshit. --- Bad guy http://mexicanvengeance.cjb.net |
| From: |
| Best rant ever. It's all true as well. I've noticed all of these things occuring on one of the GF boards I've frequented for quite a while now. I'm pretty sure it's doomed unless some good users start going there to make it better again, like it was a year or more ago... --- Roar. ~GreatGospel~ |
| From: |
| GameFAQs needs a huge purge to get ride of those little pricks. --- The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often burried with the bones-William Shakespeare / Winner of The Most Annoying Poster Award! |