Notes from the Staff RE: "L Threads"

[reinigen]

Recently, staff have been thinking about the Events subforum and how it could be improved. Though it's been a success, there are some issues, mostly revolving around the L threads.

While L threads have been great containment for stuff that has happened related to the companies they've been about, there have been a few common complaints about them.

1) Excessive negativity and blowing events out of proportion.
2) People dredging rrats out of the sewer to have something to talk about when things are slow.
3) Not enough direction or moderation makes events hard to follow.
4) They encourage users to join solely to anti companies or talents.

These are minor issues right now but worth addressing in case they get worse as the forum grows. Staff have been discussing ideas on and off for a while, and with the New Year we think it's time to start putting a few into action.

First, we would like to create a new staff position to supervise the Events section; the Orderlies. These users would have the following powers: 1) Locking & Unlocking Threads, 2) Threadbanning Users, 3) [Tentative] Editing User's Posts.

Orderlies would be responsible for keeping L-threads on-topic, gatekeeping drive-by retards and (if they're given editing privileges) collecting info into OPs.

Each thread would have at least one Orderly assigned to it. Orderlies would be expected to log their activities so we know they're being productive. They'd make judgement calls on when to open and close threads and monitor the general vibe to keep it from getting too unhinged. Users may appeal an Orderly's decisions to the staff if they think they're unfair.

We're also considering renaming the L threads so newcomers understand they are for serious discussion. If users have any suggestions for new names, drop 'em below.

Users interested in becoming Orderlies can also volunteer here. Please state what thread you would like to be involved with so we know in advance.

 

[NotDecatto]

Quick question are orderlies still considered as jannies?

Anyhow I would be interested in helping out the Niji and Phase threads since am somewhat emotionally invested in the going-ons for these two corpos and anywhere else I’d just be a lurker.

 

[El Rrata]

My two cents: Just lock them. Things like "so and so's graduation" and "x vtuber is allegedly a sexpest" are fine as their own threads that have a much more defined purpose and possibly an eventual point of resolution. Having individual threads for the YAB yab and ongoing Aster sex-pest arc would have been more useful than how they are currently: lost in the clutter of the L thread.

The Nijisanji thread was a reaction to probably the biggest thing to happen (at least in the EN sphere) since the holo China incident and had no clear purpose most of the time after around May last year.

 

[Poyoyo & Jill]

On a slightly more serious note, any guest considering signing up would, i imagine, look at the two most active threads of the forum, "General Thread v4mirai: Brought to you by Brave" and "Pippakistan's Psych Ward v3: Fosterhome For Aloggers (And Walmart Night Stockers)" and immediately understand that they're in a place where mature discussion happens

1000% Agree with this feeling that its hard to instantly recognize you are supposed to have civil conversations here instead of just shitpost and schizoid ramblings
It's difficult because you can't identify it at first and this happens everywhere, this problem affects the ENTIRE FORUM and not just those specific threads

 

[agility_]

1) Excessive negativity and blowing events out of proportion.
2) People dredging rrats out of the sewer to have something to talk about when things are slow.
3) Not enough direction or moderation makes events hard to follow.
4) They encourage users to join solely to anti companies or talents.

Points 2, 3 and 4 are all valid. It's point 1 that draws my attention.

When you open the door for policing how people react to an event, which is to say the "how to feel about it", you've introduced an element of orwellian censorship that has, in the past, brought down entire communities.
We are all here precisely because the raw sewage of /vt/ and the double-plus-bellygood moderating of the reddit hugbox do not work for anyone.

 

[Helkar]

The Nijisanji thread was a reaction to probably the biggest thing to happen (at least in the EN sphere) since the holo China incident and had no clear purpose most of the time after around May last year.

The Niji L thread works(barely) because the forum has like three Niji fans in total, people outside of @VSoyBoy almost never bring Niji stuff to General, and the company is such of an L mine that it somehow manages to keep its thread alive and occasionally-relevant.

Holo L thread grew out of Fauna's graduation thread, lingered for some time as people were letting off steam, and naturally died when everyone calmed down and went back to posting in General.
Phase L thread was the same, only with a much less important catalyst.

So yeah, i agree with the Rrat on this, if an event is big enough(or people are sperging about it loudly enough to turn it big) to the point where it starts to pollute the General, split it, make it its own thread, it'll be better for archiving purposes than gathering and dumping all sorts of stuff in a singular L thread.

 

[NeneHATE]

I agree with rat, Niji L thread is really the main culprit of this since both of the other L threads are basically dead because people discuss the good and the bad about them in main or elsewhere.

Niji L really should've been locked ages ago, I know it was made because there was a lot of Niji drama specifically last year but after the Selen termination fires burned out in the summer of 2024 the thread just became a hateboner circlejerk trying to find any and all reasons to keep hating the company or re-treading old grievances, that's the point when a lot of the issues you outline here popped up and when even I, a self professed Holobrony found myself standing up against some really bullshit claims there.

The thread should've been closed then, now more than half a year later it's REALLY overdue for getting shuttered, new Niji drama is small and slow enough that new threads can be split off without issue from general. A 600+ page thread which is 50% actual drama documentation and 50% timelooping and pointless bitching is a monstrosity that goes completely against any goal of easy to access archival, and imo should not exist in our site.

 

[Todd's Strongest Howard]

Could call them Negative Press: [Corpo] Edition to give the idea they're for sour news and other such things with actual intent to separate extended looping on actual negative press events when they're sufficient enough to clog general. Sheds the stigma of being a place for shit like "Uki hates white people again lmao" unless he's actually getting dragged behind the shed this time.

I would offer to take a spot managing NijiL but it'd just be locked 96% of the time because there's nothing much worth talking about until whatever's due to happen with Twisty/Aster goes down or there's a controversial termination/graduation. Like looking at the NijiL thread now, the latest page has nothing really worth noting and is largely Pikamee. Could easily be general thread discussion. I don't feel like there's much of a point to instating an orderly to manage the thread when I can tell you flat out that I would just lock it and leave it that way until something happens, and at that point unless we also have power to move posts into containment, main staff would have to shovel the shit anyway, so why get someone else's hands dirty with the shit-stained keys?

 

[shipmate_F]

Repurpose them to only allow corporative mistakes and/or talents' complaints? Then further elaboration over them.
It's a weird line to draw, i.e. Holo appealing to the chinese is a mistake for some and progress to others. I'm pro discussion anyway, it's always entertaining and insightful to know theories that don't enter schizo territory at every given opportunity.

 

[La+ de Central Norte]

I am seriously asking: is that hard to make different threads for each event? Every Holo has its graduation/Termination thread closed when nothing ever happens and seems to work fine that way

 

[Saturnus]

Having individual threads for the YAB yab and ongoing Aster sex-pest arc would have been more useful than how they are currently: lost in the clutter of the L thread.

I agree with this tbh. A lot of the happenings to Nijisanji over the last year are all allocated in Niji Ls and the thread doesn't get threadmarked or anything that easily. You can blame this on the users in that thread not sending notice through reports but there's also the fact the last time I reported something (like a day late) a moderator came in went "wtf are you guys doing in here? Oh it's all good? Okay." Like, as cool as it is to have threadmarks and everything the only people allowed to use it are mods. the OP (typically a mod) and a select few of users with some arbitrary reasoning. Which means for threads like Niji Ls it doesn't really get any real markings. (And it's all volunteer work at the end of the day so everything is much more sporadic).

just became a hateboner circlejerk trying to find any and all reasons to keep hating the company or re-treading old grievances

Also this. Unironically the Niji Ls thread is the only semi-active thread between the 3 because it's basically r/kurosanji (but it isn't reddit and you can say slurs!).

A middle of the road suggestion if you're absolutely adamant on doing something like this: Just make a sub-forum category, could be something dumb and alliterative like "(Big C) Corporate Critiques" (Big C because nobody cares about V-[randomnamegeneratedhere] funded by some dude with half a bitcoin likely from SEA in search of a wife) and then, when something happens with one of the big C Corporations in the General Thread or in that forum's General happenings thread you have these "Orderlies" or whatever be able to move & moderate that into it's own thread in "Corporate Critiques" to properly document them among the rest of the event threads. Finally, when the happening is blown over or has gone dormant, they can lock the thread (until further notice).

The Niji thread is the only one alive and it has successfully become just a Niji news thread.

Unironically there might be more Nijifans in the Niji Ls thread using it as news or at least "ironic" fans because there's some shit in there that isn't even an L. "Nijisanji is hosting NijiFES 2024! (What losers, amiright guys? lol)"

 

[nooternun]

The Niji thread is the only one alive and it has successfully become just a Niji news thread. Example: Sister Claire's announcement should be discussed in the main thread as it's not an L for the company. Generally, this is why I dislike splintering threads.

 

[Sankisei]

1) Excessive negativity and blowing events out of proportion.
4) They encourage users to join solely to anti

Users of the Mikeneko thread:

 

[RestlessRain]

My suggestion: close the "L Threads" and move discussion back to main. If there is an event, make a separate thread specifically for that event. Unless we have another Selen-level event, I don't think we need an "L Thread" for it.

 

[VOtter]

I'm in favor of keeping the L threads open, but reworked. As someone who could not give less of a shit about Hexa/Sayu/Whatever-inside-joke rinse and repeating for five pages at a time, trying to look towards a certain topic (like a corpo) easily gets swallowed up in the main thread and no, the search function doesn't work given how many different names people have for said topics.

 

[The Proctor]

When you open the door for policing how people react to an event, which is to say the "how to feel about it", you've introduced an element of orwellian censorship that has, in the past, brought down entire communities.
We are all here precisely because the raw sewage of /vt/ and the double-plus-bellygood moderating of the reddit hugbox do not work for anyone.

People would not be censored for their own feelings and expressions, that is never my intention. However, there is very much an opposite problem that needs to be taken into account; the tyranny of the masses. It was noted way back at the start of the NijiL thread that this would drive off people who genuinely liked Nijisanji from the discussion, and there were indeed people who posted there to correct actual misinformation and exaggeration who got shouted down and insulted, to the point they gave up on even trying to contribute to the discussion at all.

I don't like Nijisanji, I don't watch Nijisanji. I used to watch some of them, but I stopped after recent events. However, it's not my place to tell other people not to like Nijisanji, nor judge and condemn them publicly for liking Nijisanji. Otherwise productive users have expressed privately to me that they feel as if they cannot even mention Nijisanji anywhere outside of the L thread without being condemned as a 'Nijisister' or company shill, and they blame that atmosphere primarily upon the attitude fostered and enabled by that first L thread.

I don't want to censor people over this, nor do I intend to begin doing so. But there needs to be a moderating force that's willing to tell people off for openly antagonistic and tribalistic behavior. Nobody should ever feel they can't contribute to a discussion because of the atmosphere that surrounds it, and we should be as critical of the anti-Nijisanji crowd as we are the pro-Nijisanji crowd.

If anything, the Nijisanji L thread is a massive case of suffering from success. When it started, we had absolutely no idea how deep the rabbit-hole went. We thought things were bad, and then they turned out to be apocalyptic. We dug for unexploded ordinance and found one of the USA's lost nuclear weapons. All the people saying 'hey wait maybe we should be more critical of this...' were proven wrong, and summarily dismissed from the conversation as more and more sub-sub-basements beneath the bottom of the barrel were dug out. It taught us that intense negativity and doomsaying were the right courses of action, and to be suspicious of anyone who didn't share our pessimism.

I'm not innocent in this either. Everyone knows I'm deeply anti-corporate, for what I think are very good reasons. But when you debate something, you have to argue against the strongest points of your opponent, not just their weakest. Otherwise you haven't proven anything, except that you can take advantage of your opponent's verbal slip-ups in a manner that entertains the crowd. I think we need more of the former in the community, and a good way to do that is to make sure there's room for all sides in an argument. Orderlies are a step towards enabling that kind of environment.

Quick edit: Just to clarify something as well, there will be a referendum on this system within 2025. So if it is a failure that does result in censorship despite our best efforts, it will be reviewed and modified as needed further down the line. It will not be a permanent arrangement until it has been properly tested.

 

[NeneHATE]

People would not be censored for their own feelings and expressions, that is never my intention. However, there is very much an opposite problem that needs to be taken into account; the tyranny of the masses. It was noted way back at the start of the NijiL thread that this would drive off people who genuinely liked Nijisanji from the discussion, and there were indeed people who posted there to correct actual misinformation and exaggeration who got shouted down and insulted, to the point they gave up on even trying to contribute to the discussion at all.

I don't like Nijisanji, I don't watch Nijisanji. I used to watch some of them, but I stopped after recent events. However, it's not my place to tell other people not to like Nijisanji, nor judge and condemn them publicly for liking Nijisanji. Otherwise productive users have expressed privately to me that they feel as if they cannot even mention Nijisanji anywhere outside of the L thread without being condemned as a 'Nijisister' or company shill, and they blame that atmosphere primarily upon the attitude fostered and enabled by that first L thread.

I don't want to censor people over this, nor do I intend to begin doing so. But there needs to be a moderating force that's willing to tell people off for openly antagonistic and tribalistic behavior. Nobody should ever feel they can't contribute to a discussion because of the atmosphere that surrounds it, and we should be as critical of the anti-Nijisanji crowd as we are the pro-Nijisanji crowd.

If anything, the Nijisanji L thread is a massive case of suffering from success. When it started, we had absolutely no idea how deep the rabbit-hole went. We thought things were bad, and then they turned out to be apocalyptic. We dug for unexploded ordinance and found one of the USA's lost nuclear weapons. All the people saying 'hey wait maybe we should be more critical of this...' were proven wrong, and summarily dismissed from the conversation as more and more sub-sub-basements beneath the bottom of the barrel were dug out. It taught us that intense negativity and doomsaying were the right courses of action, and to be suspicious of anyone who didn't share our pessimism.

I'm not innocent in this either. Everyone knows I'm deeply anti-corporate, for what I think are very good reasons. But when you debate something, you have to argue against the strongest points of your opponent, not just their weakest. Otherwise you haven't proven anything, except that you can take advantage of your opponent's verbal slip-ups in a manner that entertains the crowd. I think we need more of the former in the community, and a good way to do that is to make sure there's room for all sides in an argument. Orderlies are a step towards enabling that kind of environment.

Quick edit: Just to clarify something as well, there will be a referendum on this system within 2025. So if it is a failure that does result in censorship despite our best efforts, it will be reviewed and modified as needed further down the line. It will not be a permanent arrangement until it has been properly tested.

Bible-tier post aside, this is a really respectable position to take, and it shows some nuance and thought put into how the site deals with controversial topics beyond "Nobody likes it so let's just label it as evil" Kudos bossman.