Board Cleansing and Upholding Standards

Given how the moderation is now taking an active part in policing board content, I'd like to make an appeal to the community for the self-morderation of the cancerous normalfag or tumblr-tier trash and support of industry poisoning practices that is attracting more people with even lesser standards onto this board.
All of this shit had or currently has varying degrees of discussion and admittance of support from posters over the past year or so, ranging from the occasional drop to full-blown daily generals.

You know, maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but before normalfag shits took over cuckchan and started taking hold here, shit taste and support of shit practices used to be mocked and ridiculed in the open. Now that's not to say individuals posters were some incorruptible bastions of taste and wouldn't supporting that shit - no one's taste is perfect everyone's got that objectively bad thing that they still enjoy for subjective reasons - but there was at least a measure of awareness from posters that their personal failings in taste and judgement were just "guilty pleasures" and not something to be openly accepted or proud of discussing. You know why games like Halo are now popping up more openly in discussion when it was formerly either hidden behind spoiler tags or not spoken about at all? It's not that the game's magically gotten better (though recent game releases may make it look better by comparison), but it's lost its relevancy and is no longer a prime example of what's wrong the with industry - that hole's been filled by the CoDs and other big-budget, mass-marketed shooters - therefore, it's not really the worst and not really "taboo" anymore, despite it still having plenty wrong with it.

(cont.)

Now it seems that along with the practice of lurking before posting, people have forgotten about how to self-moderate and maintain board quality - both on cuckchan and here to a lesser extent. I know what the first kinds of responses to this post are going to be:
This isn't about stopping fun, nor is this about keeping up appearances. This is about maintaining standards among posters. As I previously stated everyone has their guilty pleasures and I couldn't care less about what games an individual poster likes, but those posters have a responsibility to keep their board clean. Open discussion and acceptance of these kinds of things is what leads people with far less standards to join in and make themselves feel at home, and from there it keeps tumbling down until eventually you have people unironically starting threads about how they should "get hype" for CoD:Ghosts Remastered being part of CoD:Intergalactic Warfare's deluxe supreme edition. The acceptance of normalfag tastes and shitty practices has already destroyed several other places for game discussion, and imageboards like Holla Forums are the last place where there seem to be people that genuinely give a fuck about games enough to know when something shit is shit. Little by little though, like cuckchan, that seems to be eroding.

Here's a comparison that may better illustrate my point. Imagine a forum for discussion foods, where people are talking about the finest of foods or maybe some lesser heard niche dishes that offer something unique. Now, are all these people "true connoisseurs" that only eat that rich shit and haven't laid a finger on junk food? Of course not, everyone eats junk food or something they know is objectively bad to some varying degree, the only difference is they know recognize it's bad and know there's no real discussion to be had about them. Imagine this now - what would happen to the board if there was a growing trend of posters speaking proudly of their unabashed love of certain junk foods, maybe in places like an "Unpalatable taste" thread. Now most posters would simply laugh at this notion, not because they're just laughing specifically at his tastes, but because he feels that sort of food is worth discussing at all. Unbeknownst to them however, these threads seem to be attracting more people with lower standards, making them think that discussion of said foods is perfectly fine. Eventually more of these sorts of threads pop up - people talking about their favorite fast food chains, threads about the best sodas, a "Deep Fried Food general" pops up. Sooner or later a forum that once scoffed at the notion of discussing "favorite kinds of potato chip" suddenly has regular threads where people are doing just that, because the average poster is now someone that will proudly talk about how they eat cheap, processed junk and go to McDonalds nearly every day. Whether or not that was true of a poster before this change is irrelevant, the change is still seen on the board.

(cont.)

To those that respond in defense of junk food, crying for more discourse about these and trying to talk about why junk is junk, I have to ask you: do you honestly think people enjoying junk care if they know it's junk? Discussion is fine and dandy but regardless of the openness of listener it's an ultimately futile effort. You can't convince through words alone people preordering and playing normalfag games that they're bad any more than you can tell someone eating McDonalds that it's bad, or that someone that sees every Transformers film in theaters that they're bad - taste is something a man acquires themselves through experience, and while discussion of alternatives to their current tastes could sway it (though strangers on the internet are far less likely to do so than those closer to them), you cannot discuss away someone's own subjective enjoyment of things, no matter how objectively bad it is. It's because of this that I say that posters are responsible for upholding quality of discussion, because there's no way to improve on the quality of each individual poster's tastes but only to improve on the overall quality of discussion. To simply ignore this responsibility would be to condemn the board to a future without standards. Where Holla Forums becomes synonymous with the likes of gamefaqs or r/gaming.

And if you're still here and still think this is just about "hating fun" then you're really exactly like droves of newfags that arrived in 2007, confused as to why Holla Forums was making fun of them for liking Oblivion or Halo 3, thinking that it was just a community of people that "hates video games". This is how that meme was born, by the way. The jeering and mocking of junk games that the tasteless outsiders enjoyed lead them to believe it was genuinely a community of people that only shits on games (because it shat on all the games they liked), where really the community was just doing what it took to keep a clean board. And if that's the image the board has to bare in order to keep itself from going downhill, then I can think of far worse fates for it.

Note that this is a plea to the community, not the moderation.
The last thing we need is a small group of people being the tastemakers for the whole community. It's up to the community to cleanse itself and make sure standards are upheld.

TL;DR: Holla Forums has normalfag cancer and needs chemo. MAKE Holla Forums "HATE GAMES" AGAIN.

Holla Forums hating games is a plebian meme

TL;DR

So you want to make Holla Forums more like Holla Forums?

You're not wrong, but casuals won't bother reading all that shit you typed.
Oh, look.

I would really like to see Holla Forums cleaned up, but there's too many people who are only here for shitposting and actually cleaning up the board would drive away a lot of traffic. Not that it would be a bad thing.

Wew lad.

let me make a more accurate TL;DR
STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE

wew yourself

Pretty sure I explicitly said this wasn't about what people liked.

I'm amazed that nobody does anything about all the people who claim that this board is just for shitposting. How can anyone stand for that shit?

It's because enough people are here for the shitposts that it doesn't matter.

Nigger when people forget to change their user agent ids when agreeing with themselves over a vpn literally everyone can see it.

I told you, man, nobody's going to bother reading all that stuff. Things like standards and taste? Too many people here don't care about that like they used to. I don't know what happened, but I do know the only way to fix it is to get rid of all these 4chan and reddit rejects.
I've seen some ludicrous shit in the past month.

I miss when 8/v/ was slow as molasses.

Do you have any evidence for that or are you just trying to shut down discussion?

Too late for that user.
The best thing you can do now is watch and wait until everything repeats itself, just with Mark instead of moot

Then please show me oh wise one how I'm broadcasting supposed samefaggotry. Unless you're just full of shit.

But he had to break up the text across multiple posts because it wouldn't fit in a single one. Besides, why would he let his thread be bumplocked by another vol?

I'm just glad it hasn't infected /vr/

Too late for that

HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAH
fucking faggots

Holla Forums is equally bad at self-moderation. It all went downhill around the time of the second exodus. The strength to fight back and tell people to fuck off was slowly eroded both here and on Holla Forums, just with different tactics. Remember how Holla Forums fought against the autistic pedo spammers until they finally left? That would never happen now and, in the case of Trump threads some might argue, they failed already.

The number of active users has already gone down on Holla Forums. What's the point of coming here if all there is are the same retarded threads about the same retarded games like any other board has? The ability to call someone a tasteless nigger pleb alone doesn't make this board attractive.

Right now the board is both slow and shit. The worst of both worlds.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle. If every thread is full of shitposts and serious posters get mocked for "taking games seriously" they'll eventually either leave or start shitposting themselves.

Eventually the board will lose enough people to where either it's a handful of dedicated shitposters or the people who still cared enough about the topic to stay.

Nah nigga you suck dick, lol.

Shit thread

Reported.

also.

Reddit spacing.

LOL

I don't think you're being realistic here. Don't you realize that the faggots here don't care about board culture or even serious video game discussion? I'd be lying if I said that "serious video game discussion" never happens, because it does, but it's always accompanied with a flurry of shitposting. I don't want to write some overly complicated post, so I'm just going to say two things:
1) You're giving 4chan Holla Forums way too much fucking credit
2) I agree that it's each user's civic duty to IGNORE shitposters, not necessarily encourage worthwhile discussion.

There are two types of content on the internet: TRENDING content and EVERGREEN content. The vast majority of our board is made up of TRENDING content (GamerGate, current happenings in the industry, new game developments), and it's just this way for better or for worse. TRENDING content is easy to procure because the media still churns it out for you. It's easier to made a thread about, "LOL GUIZE PHIL FISH HAD A HEART ATTACK" or "LOL THE NEW BATTLE OF DUTY FAILED TO HIT ITS SALES TARGET" than it is to try and think of an interesting and topical OP that will make people think.

This is why there are so many generals and "gimmick threads" like Fullderp. It's because people don't want to work to make the board better. They want to shitpost with their anonymous friends. It's the nature of our board, and there's nothing you can do but ignore bad threads while resolving to contribute to good ones.

Holla Forums just shouldn't allow threads about games or memes that aren't from before 2006, that's when everything became shit anyway.

It used to be that trolls were allowed to go on a general and insult a game. This was beneficial for two reasons:
Those people who actually know what they are talking about would shut that troll down. And those people who are idiots posting about a genuinely shit game were constantly forced to face the fact that the game they post about every day is shit. You see, trolls would come to the Mountain Blade threads all the time and we would just insult them. We didn't care. However Overwatch and Undertale faggots were always very bothered by the trolls. Why? Because they can't defend the games they like because those games are genuine shit. You see, banning trolls has made the people with shit taste more comfortable here. When, before, they clung to their generals out of fear for their feelings, now they freely roam the whole board, posting their cancer everywhere. Now the Morrowind thread is overrun with Skyrim fags and shill threads get bumped endlessly by users who don't know any better and the board quality drops as numbers rise because stupid people are simply less timid about posting. We really need to bring bullying back. If you can't handle someone coming to your thread ans saying "this is shit" then you don't belong here and it's ridiculous we started banning people for that. Alternatively, we should ban people for liking shitty AAA. Ban everyone who admits they like Overwatch. Permaban them.

Ehhh, we shouldn't make "old Holla Forums" into something it never was (like a place for deep intellectual discussion) but the main reason most people came to Holla Forums was to escape the unbearable blithe gaming industry cocksucking you see in pretty much every other community.
A state of non-cocksucking should be attainable at least.

Nice downvote

Of course I do. I already know there's no reasoning with them. I'm speaking to the people that do care.
I may have romanticized it, but what I said was generally true of the community when it came to actual discusssion - its shitposting, which was more or less just stupid fun.
I'm not sure what this has to do with my post. Yes, it's easier to just talk about recent events. My post wasn't necessarily just about the content of the threads but also about discussion surrounding it. See, a thread about preorders wouldn't be bad if it was people mocking and criticizing preorder culture. A thread filled with people defending past preorders and proudly claiming they're going to preorder the collectors edition of "Battlefield 2: We Wuz Nazees n Shiet" would be incredibly worrisome. Thankfully we're not there yet and whenever someone says they've preordered a game you get at least 10 replies calling them out as an idiot but its becoming more frequent to see people post like that (and sometimes indignantly).

Holla Forums is shit, the mods are shit, rule 8 is the most inconsistently applied bullshit i've ever seen, and mark is a fat kike.


i second this
ban cancertale too

I very much agree with this.
And it's only getting worse with how these whiny faggots call for Rule 8 when somebody is shitting on their games.

By the way, this is entirely bullshit.
Pre-maddox era Holla Forums allowed any game to be discussed, nobody gave a fuck.

The collective taste of the board emerged simply because some people would be like "hey look at this" and other people would be like "that's pretty cool" and thus less known titles would surface and knowledge about those games would be shared among the regulards.
Guerrilla shitposting, aggressive shitposting against certain games, cynical, jaded, contrarian behaviour, none of these things were part of original Holla Forums.
Every single suggestion OP made is post-Maddox Holla Forumstard immigrant shit that wasn't part of what the board was originally about day one.

So if you want this, go ahead, but don't delude yourself into thinking you are what "made Holla Forums great".
You're not even remotely what the original userbase was like, regardless of how much you fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
There was no need to ban shit or discourage video game discussion in order not to trigger your kind, discussion naturally flowed in any direction the regulars wanted it to flow, shit happened naturally.

Well, that's a new one. What does that mean?

Then shitting on shit games should be allowed.

It's not new at all, most people simply forgot.
Most of the original userbase got old, killed themselves, got a life, and so on, so nobody remember.
There was a faction of Holla Forumstards that worshipped Maddox and his character, aka being a huge raging asshole jaded towards everything and very openly insulting everyone.
This faction left Holla Forums, and joined Holla Forums.
They then shaped Holla Forums in their image, basically what they wanted Holla Forums to be.
What i'm talking about is original Holla Forums, before that migration, original Holla Forums was just a place where people discussed video games.
However, it was slow as fuck and the userbase was small, so perhaps that's why it worked.

You can argue that anyone here is the result of post-maddox Holla Forums and thus, to them, that is the only Holla Forums they know and it might as well be the "original" Holla Forums in their eyes, but i never accepted that.
To me, they've always been external invaders bringing into Holla Forums shit that never belonged.

You can shit or anything you want.
You know what happened back in the day when someone came in a thread of a game they didn't like and shitposted it?
People reacted in 3 ways:

-Got angry
-Played along and turned it into a joke
-Ignored it

That's it.
It's not rocket science, nor people sperged out to literally ban shit they didn't like from the entire board just because it triggered them.
It was that simple.

Ah, I figured as much. Everyone wants things to go back to the way things used to be for them instead of looking to improve the future.

Fuck off. Under your same proposal all it takes is someone to spam and say something is shit and it will no longer be discussed.

Thanks, have another :^) you fucking faggot.

Behold: the problem made manifest. How convenient, now we don't have to leave the thread to find any examples of what's wrong with Holla Forums.

Funny, I don't recall suggesting any of that. In fact, I don't really recall much of any kind of method or solution to the problem stated, I just drew awareness to said problem. What I suggested was people to recognize that junk food was just that, junk, and that encouraging discussion of it attracts more people who think otherwise.

In fact, none of the your really responds to what I'm actually saying - especially since I explicitly said I didn't want to ban shit yet you claim otherwise.

My bad, i didn't check the IDs propely and assumed you made this post


All i can say is that original Holla Forums didn't have these standard problems.
Shit was discussed, popular games ended up being discussed less because people got bored of them, they were already discussed everywhere else ad nauseam, so the flow of the board naturally gravitated towards smaller, lesser known games.
But as as i stated before, the userbase was smaller, and in a way even the gaming landscape itself was different, there were less games you could just discuss forever.
Shit like Overwatch and so on can be discussed forever because each patch there's something implemented in it that rekindles discussion over and over, we had less of that back in the day, discussion started, ran it's course, and then died naturally.

Overwatch will die too eventually. Did we ever have a Diablo 3 General? I can't remember seeing one, despite it being a) a casual AAA title and b) made by muh Blizzard.

Shitposters follow the path of least resistance. Trending topics are easier to worm your way into and shitpost over. Therefore, if you want to make Holla Forums a better place, you need to figure out a way to provide some EVERGREEN content. Content that will be good all year round. This is a terrible idea currently, because the act of acquiring what could be considered evergreen content is only half the battle. The other half of that battle is drumming up enough interest for whatever you'd like to talk about, and then relying on your regular posters to act as antibodies to shitposting. There's too many shitposters here for that to work. Additionally, take a look at that catalog. If you just arrived off the boat from Reddit, judging by the catalog alone, what could you learn about general board taste? If you asked me, I'd say that this board has shit taste or doesn't understand what makes vidya great. There are so many shit threads sprinkled around generals for specific game genres (/ogc/ /gsg/ /fightan/ etc), that it's difficult to come to any conclusions about what the denizens of this board enjoy.
>okay they enjoy fighting games, so maybe is acceptable
>okay they enjoy racing games, so maybe is acceptable
you get the idea.
I'm just pointing out that the nature of video game discussion is inherently going to attract some degree of cancer and I don't think there's anything that can be done about it, which ties into what I said in my previous post, "that it's your civic duty to ignore shit threads and post in threads you consider good"


This. It's still possible to go into any general and shit on whatever you want. However, to the dismay of OP, you'll likely find that your shitposting is ineffectual, given the sheer number of people who genuinely enjoy whatever you're shitting on. You can't win. This is why I say that your effort would be better spent actually contributing to threads you find worthwhile.

I'd also purport that Holla Forums is wholly reliant on the state of the video game industry, and is therefore a reflection of the current state of the medium. In other words, if games are shit, and people within the industry are shit, then it is only natural that someone will want to discuss those things, and doing so will attract shitters who want to find a place to shitpost as well as find ammunition for future shitposting.

In halfchan Holla Forums there wasn't a D3 general because /vg/ was made.
/vg/ made it so each general would be it's self contained ecosystem with it's own rules, and generals would be for the most part removed from Holla Forums and thus contained and self regulated in /vg/.

A lot of people got pissed off at this, but i mantain that it wasn't a bad decision.
It "robbed" video game discussion from Holla Forums, but it was discussion many regulars didn't want anyway, while at the same time not outright banning discussion of certain games, giving people that want to discuss them forever a separate board in self contained threads, and allowing Holla Forums to discuss other games.
However what happened is that the people that were left in Holla Forums were less interested in discussing video games and more interested in baiting, shitposting and trolling each other into oblivion (plus cocksucking certain companies, pushing for console wars and so on).
So, smaller games and their threads didn't recieve any benefit from the split.
So even if i suggest that we make a separate /vg/ for THIS Holla Forums, i'm not sure it would help video game discussion here, it already didn't work the first time it was tried.

tl,dr

Finally an excuse to post this ancient image. I have nothing further to contribute to this thread.

Rule 8 has it's purpose because of dedicated thread derailers and the occasional raid. However 99% of these trolls can be thwarted just by knowing more than them about the game they are shitting on. If you have no answer for somebody that says your game is shit, then it's very possible that your game really is shit.

Well yes, because as you yourself stated
There wasn't as much mass-marketed, blockbuster, casual shit going around because gaming had just hit the mainstream during 6th gen. You also didn't have to ward off against hordes of normalfags looking to talk about games here either because Fox hadn't made their big take on "Anonymous" and exploding vans yet. The issues I stated only became relevant post-2007. It was during 2008/2009 when that "Holla Forums hates video games" meme started gaining traction, because even those anons not shitposting didn't want to talk about Modern Warfare or some other shit.

"Old Holla Forums" didn't need to shit on video games because they didn't have quite as many terrible video games taking up attention and being brought onto the board to shit on.

Well talking about video games that aren't the latest AAA slop would help.
Creating an air where cancer is actively discouraged and warded off by posters would help. Like I previously posted, things like publicly laughing at posters admitting to support of things like preorders, etc.
I don't know about that. A cursory glance would show that shitposting seems to have almost completely taken over OW generals. Possibly because moderation stopped getting triggered by it or giving enough of a shit. Plus, it's not like posters couldn't both contribute to threads and shit on others. Things like UT are almost completely taboo thanks to the crusades certain shitposters set out against them. If there are enough people with enough dedication, they can remove anything.

We need Kung pow back

...

go to hell

...

RIP OP's thread. He never scored.

You should take up shilling for stormfront and natsoc, your formatting and post length are a perfect fit.
All I got out of your posts are that niggers with bad taste who do stupid shit like preorder deserve bullying, which I doubt anyone would really disagree with.
As for the rest, you should be aware that the only truly wrong opinion is one that has no support.


The problem there is that there's no good source from which to find games that are both small and worthwhile, and on top of that some games are just not as conductive to conversation as others.
Besides, the /vg/ board split came with its own problem of changing who held the power to make a thread immortal from a plurality of normal users to a sufficiently dedicated in-group 3212 THREADS AND COUNTING


Second exodus Holla Forums is the worst thing to have happened to Holla Forums, if only because it gave rise to the modern Holla Forums crossposting retard assuming that the crop came from retardation on Holla Forums and not malice from Holla Forums anyway

...

This is the only usefull thing to come out of this thread and OP, as well as any of the other "self-moderation" pricks, should read and meditate on that shit.

Yeah, there's games being discussed in this board you don't particularly like. So what? Clearly some people still want to talk about them since they start threads for them and actively post on them. This gives them legitimacy to keep doing it since fundamentally they aren't breaking any rules of the board and the topic is relevant to Holla Forums.

Going to those threads and posting "this game is shit, lol" doesn't do anything. The threads don't go away because someone is triggered, they go away when there's no more interest in them and autistically shitposting on them does not speed that up, much on the contrary.

Also, keep in mind that we can have up to 250 threads up at any time. There's no scarcity of space for whatever thread you can think about except in your head as a bad justification for why you or someone else is not starting one and much like Holla Forums's retarded idea about "remove X to make the world better", removing the things you dislike from the board does not increase the amount of things you like or makes them appear out of nowhere.

You are responsible for making your garden greener, complaining that everyone is having a barbeque in your neighbors garden when he's grass isn't as green as you know yours could be does not help the neighborhood.