Thursday, August 14, 2014

TV Tropes is not exactly a haven of quality content.

After seeing some of the popular content on TV Tropes for awhile, I've come to the realization that, honestly, they just don't care so much about quality as they do quantity.

Part of this is understandable: More pages means more pages views and oppurtunities for Fast Eddie to make more money off advertisements, and while greed and SEO are lame motivations IMO, at least they make sense.

However, some of the BS they cover is somewhere to the left of idiotic.

For one, the Unpublished Works landfill, chock full of rotting half finished story ideas that will never see the light of day as proper works. This is retarded because a site devoted to tropes and the works that use them should focus on ACTUALLY EXISTING WORKS. Chalk on a blackboard is well and good, but if the story exists only in your own head, no one can properly trope it or appreciate it as a work, so why the hell would you make a page for something that doesn't truly exist?

Another related thing that is fucking stupid would be works limited to TV Tropes self references, such as forum roleplay game, injokey pages, and some of the more inane bullshit in Sugar Wiki/Just For Fun. One, this has NOTHING to do with the site mission, and two, if you must have humorous pages and injokey stuff, have it be more than just self fellatio about how awesome your site is. Wikipedia has an entire section of the site devoted these types of pages, but they are blessedly absent (in large part) of people extolling the glory of the site itself over and over again like some demented nerd cult.

Entering the realm of works, if only in the loosest sense, would be forum roleplay threads on other forums, of which many are extensively documented and troped, which strikes me as utterly lame. Seriously, I've seen short novels written about forum roleplay games, and bare stubs about actual literature, a fact that tends to be more rule than exception, when it should be the other way round IMHO.

Granted, the above does come off as me being a party pooper and someone who "doesn't get" what an informal wiki is about, but frankly, if I wanted to view an informal wiki where barely relevant material was given lovingly detailed descriptions, I'd go to any number of vapid, pointless as hell wikis, like this pointlessly festering turd, to read about shit nobody cares about. (ED link, NSFW)

1 comment:

  1. I always thought the Loners Are Freaks trope was a dumb exaggeration.

    But that wiki... I... I just... what.

    ReplyDelete

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