Post Feedback in the Discussion Thread
The Asylum is now over two years old, and we're rapidly heading towards 2025. I'm writing this very late in the day, so I won't be particularly erudite.
When I started this forum, I was a complete and total industry outsider. Starry-eyed and very naïve. I'm now jaded and hardened. I've seen the bowels of this industry, and the shit that festers and seethes within it. I've made very good, close friends, but Vtubers I sincerely respected have massively disappointed me, while others I never had high opinions of have been shown to be much better people than I initially gave them credit for.
It's been a serious rollercoaster. I've enjoyed it and found it thrilling, but also found it very depressing. I'm a changed man, and I'm not being hyperbolic. My priorities have altered considerably since starting this website. For quite some time I thought I could be an impartial industry observer, and in some ways I still am, but I am now emotionally involved on a level I never anticipated.
Due to this and the major, ongoing situation related to the increasing incapacity of my parents due to age and the legal battle surrounding our accommodation, my stress levels are high. They are not going to get lower anytime soon. There's no danger of me having a breakdown or anything silly like that, but I have a number of important priorities going right now that prevent me from devoting all my attention to TVA.
Rather than let the website coast along as it is, I've decided to make increasing the size of the staff an absolute priority. Note that 'staff' does NOT equal more moderators. Instead, it refers to people who are willing to do certain jobs for the website on a regular basis, with a level of accountability and reliability that I can put personal trust in. I already trialled this a little bit with the Archivist role, which I'm keeping, but also expanding the scope of.
That said, I am actively considering adding moderators because while our current ones do a very good job, they have also had issues with availability recently, and I think that having redundancy in this department is extremely important.
Before we go any further, here's a quick rundown of the various tasks I see as absolutely vital for a smoothly-running TVA;
In other news, I have active commissions for certain forum assets currently ongoing. This includes assets that could be used for merchandise designs. By mid-late 2025, I expect to have at least a few items either actively ready for production, or in the pipeline for production if there is sufficient interest. I want this to be decent quality stuff as well, not Nijisanji-level junk made by underfed Chinese slaves in a concentration camp. I'm extremely excited at the prospects here, and I think this will be quite a major step towards establishing TVA as a 'brand' that can compete out in the open.
That's about it for now. As a simple summary;
1) I'm looking for up to 5-6 volunteers who can take on a special role to handle assignments and regular tasks related to the bullet-points above.
2) I'm looking for 2-3 new moderators to help cover the forum more effectively as it continues to grow and expand. I have a few candidates in mind already, but am open to volunteers.
3) I'm looking to establish a more reliable communications framework that all of the above people can use to operate with maximum efficiency.
4) I have art-slaves drawing cute things for you to sniff at and nitpick obsessively like the deranged hyper-critical autists you are.
5) I plan to have at least one or two items of TVA-themed merchandise available by late 2025, hopefully much earlier.
The Asylum is now over two years old, and we're rapidly heading towards 2025. I'm writing this very late in the day, so I won't be particularly erudite.
When I started this forum, I was a complete and total industry outsider. Starry-eyed and very naïve. I'm now jaded and hardened. I've seen the bowels of this industry, and the shit that festers and seethes within it. I've made very good, close friends, but Vtubers I sincerely respected have massively disappointed me, while others I never had high opinions of have been shown to be much better people than I initially gave them credit for.
It's been a serious rollercoaster. I've enjoyed it and found it thrilling, but also found it very depressing. I'm a changed man, and I'm not being hyperbolic. My priorities have altered considerably since starting this website. For quite some time I thought I could be an impartial industry observer, and in some ways I still am, but I am now emotionally involved on a level I never anticipated.
Due to this and the major, ongoing situation related to the increasing incapacity of my parents due to age and the legal battle surrounding our accommodation, my stress levels are high. They are not going to get lower anytime soon. There's no danger of me having a breakdown or anything silly like that, but I have a number of important priorities going right now that prevent me from devoting all my attention to TVA.
Rather than let the website coast along as it is, I've decided to make increasing the size of the staff an absolute priority. Note that 'staff' does NOT equal more moderators. Instead, it refers to people who are willing to do certain jobs for the website on a regular basis, with a level of accountability and reliability that I can put personal trust in. I already trialled this a little bit with the Archivist role, which I'm keeping, but also expanding the scope of.
That said, I am actively considering adding moderators because while our current ones do a very good job, they have also had issues with availability recently, and I think that having redundancy in this department is extremely important.
Before we go any further, here's a quick rundown of the various tasks I see as absolutely vital for a smoothly-running TVA;
- Threadmarking. Threadmarks are absolutely critical for smooth, easy collation and tracking of important posts. There need to be enough people dedicated to threadmarking posts on a regular basis that it is easy for a newcomer (and any archivists/analysts/etc) to quickly parse through all the information and identify the interesting points.
- Event Tracking. A lot of stuff happens in vtubing. Big things, small things, etc. Many people in the past have disagreed with my choice of things to feature here or focus on. I understand their perspective overall, but I have always been interested first and foremost with the human element of the various stories that unravel before our eyes. That means I zoom in on small corpo and indie events a lot, often missing large-scale stuff simply because it's not personally relevant or interesting to me. TVA needs to become more reliable at noticing events in general and collating info on them; big, small, etc.
- @'ing Administrators. This is a major issue. I tend to only bulk-read pages in the General thread once every few days or so by now, as 700+ posts a day is simply too much to keep up with on my schedule. But people still act as if I'll see everything they write, when frankly, I don't - not in any timely manner. I had to ask about FLOW_GLOW even existing, days after it was initially talked about. This is not acceptable on a forum that is quite quickly becoming one of the first places outside of Twitter that new events in the vtuber sphere are actively discussed and analysed. However, the solution is very simple; just @ me (or Reinigen, he has similar perms) whenever something is posted that you think deserves a place on the banner, or its own dedicated thread. The worst I will do is politely tell you that it isn't warranted.
- Archiving. In contrast to the above, this is something users tend to be very good and prompt at. However, in future, I'd like people to also Report posts that are not properly archived, so they can be deleted. By establishing a steady rhythm of deleting and notifying posts without archives, I hope to passively encourage people who don't archive habitually to develop said habit.
- Summarizing Content. This has mostly been the realm of @Empty_Inbox's recaps up till now. But it is absolutely not fair to ask one person to recap an entire thread with around 400-500 posts in it every day. I would like a minimum of 3-4 people willing to spend time actively collating links and highlights for recap posts.
In other news, I have active commissions for certain forum assets currently ongoing. This includes assets that could be used for merchandise designs. By mid-late 2025, I expect to have at least a few items either actively ready for production, or in the pipeline for production if there is sufficient interest. I want this to be decent quality stuff as well, not Nijisanji-level junk made by underfed Chinese slaves in a concentration camp. I'm extremely excited at the prospects here, and I think this will be quite a major step towards establishing TVA as a 'brand' that can compete out in the open.
That's about it for now. As a simple summary;
1) I'm looking for up to 5-6 volunteers who can take on a special role to handle assignments and regular tasks related to the bullet-points above.
2) I'm looking for 2-3 new moderators to help cover the forum more effectively as it continues to grow and expand. I have a few candidates in mind already, but am open to volunteers.
3) I'm looking to establish a more reliable communications framework that all of the above people can use to operate with maximum efficiency.
4) I have art-slaves drawing cute things for you to sniff at and nitpick obsessively like the deranged hyper-critical autists you are.
5) I plan to have at least one or two items of TVA-themed merchandise available by late 2025, hopefully much earlier.
