OTW doldrums
Jun. 14th, 2012 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foxinthestarsFirst, on the anime viewing front, I got caught up with all the current-run stuff on my plate except Kids on the Slope, which I've been neglecting horribly and might just let slide until later. I'm also starting to worry that Hyouka blew its wad on the first five episodes; they are indeed awesome, and I recommend them if you haven't seen them yet, but ep five played so much like a series finale with a wonderful satisfying climax and omission of ending theme and such that I actually had to go check that it wasn't a 5-ep series. Which it's not; it's scheduled for 21 eps, IIRC, but so far nothing has measured up since that first arc... Kuroko's Basketball continues to be awesome and a highlight of my week. Still delinquent about having promised myself Natsume Yuujinchou tho...
But the main topic, I've been meaning to post about it for awhile. I finally took the OTW news feed off of my dwircle and my (reading-only) twitter feed, because I admitted to myself that it was just vaguely depressing and alienating, and whether this is just my own issue doesn't make it any less true. But yeah, they were constantly posting news link roundups that had absolutely nothing to do with anything I cared about, but there was an insinuation that this was supposed to be about my proverbial home country, and so, like I said, just vaguely alienating.
And then this happens. Mleh.
I am still a tag wrangler, but my honeymoon period has long since ended and I'm pretty much phoning it in (to the point that this whole thing was announced on the Tag Wrangler e-mail list and I didn't notice); my fandoms are sleepy enough that maintaining them is frankly less effort than quitting. I am nothing of a coder (earned my white belt in HTML back in college and that's pretty much it), so I can't comment on that, but have been agreeing more and more withbranchandroot about how misconceived the whole thing is, despite tempting sparkly bits. I actually knew going in, I am not ideal tag-wrangler material; given my hermittish tendencies I will be the very last person to know fanon from a hole in the ground, I'm just relying on Google/Wiki/IMDB/etc. and noting the fact that nobody else was doing it. So before you even get to the code, there's the whole idea that for the tag wrangler system to work ideally, you have Ao3 which is open to every weird, tiny, obscure (and wonderful, don't get the Psychic Force fan wrong here) fandom under the sun --- hell, the un-(admittedly)-official sponsorship of Yuletide amounts to a recruitment drive for the world's most arcane fandoms --- plus of course the sprawling megafandoms in all their thriving, chaotic diversity, and you expect to recruit a volunteer expert on every one of these texts and their fandoms to den-mother the things? As my own case demonstrates, you can operate with far short of that ideal, but I still feel that there's an element of "get real" even on that level. And as others have pointed out, it seems rather like a waste of the volunteer experts even if you could find them.
So yeah, I'll still wrangle tags, and I still plan to keep my dues paid if only so I can vote and chip in on Legal, but the whole thing is really just leaving me cold at this point.
But the main topic, I've been meaning to post about it for awhile. I finally took the OTW news feed off of my dwircle and my (reading-only) twitter feed, because I admitted to myself that it was just vaguely depressing and alienating, and whether this is just my own issue doesn't make it any less true. But yeah, they were constantly posting news link roundups that had absolutely nothing to do with anything I cared about, but there was an insinuation that this was supposed to be about my proverbial home country, and so, like I said, just vaguely alienating.
And then this happens. Mleh.
I am still a tag wrangler, but my honeymoon period has long since ended and I'm pretty much phoning it in (to the point that this whole thing was announced on the Tag Wrangler e-mail list and I didn't notice); my fandoms are sleepy enough that maintaining them is frankly less effort than quitting. I am nothing of a coder (earned my white belt in HTML back in college and that's pretty much it), so I can't comment on that, but have been agreeing more and more with
branchandroot about how misconceived the whole thing is, despite tempting sparkly bits. I actually knew going in, I am not ideal tag-wrangler material; given my hermittish tendencies I will be the very last person to know fanon from a hole in the ground, I'm just relying on Google/Wiki/IMDB/etc. and noting the fact that nobody else was doing it. So before you even get to the code, there's the whole idea that for the tag wrangler system to work ideally, you have Ao3 which is open to every weird, tiny, obscure (and wonderful, don't get the Psychic Force fan wrong here) fandom under the sun --- hell, the un-(admittedly)-official sponsorship of Yuletide amounts to a recruitment drive for the world's most arcane fandoms --- plus of course the sprawling megafandoms in all their thriving, chaotic diversity, and you expect to recruit a volunteer expert on every one of these texts and their fandoms to den-mother the things? As my own case demonstrates, you can operate with far short of that ideal, but I still feel that there's an element of "get real" even on that level. And as others have pointed out, it seems rather like a waste of the volunteer experts even if you could find them.So yeah, I'll still wrangle tags, and I still plan to keep my dues paid if only so I can vote and chip in on Legal, but the whole thing is really just leaving me cold at this point.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-15 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 01:38 am (UTC)They might get more people interested if reasonably intelligent people didn't spend five minutes trying to make sense of the site and wander off with a brainache. Though, given that it now takes six months or more to get invited to join the site, perhaps they're better off if people can't make sense of it and wander away.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 02:01 am (UTC)And it's very sad because it has so much potential. Of course I'm easy to please after FF.net, they had me when they declined to randomly eat punctuation and typographical scene-break markers...
The tags and warnings are neat in their way, but in another way I'm reassured that they're not used consistently, because they can be kind of onerous on an overly-conscientious user ("am I a bad person if I don't tag for every possible thing and thus give away the stuff that happens?"). That is admittedly easy for me to say because I haven't had a lot of problems with being triggered by fic content...
no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 02:14 am (UTC)I just get the feeling that the people setting up the site fell into the "everyone knows what we know" trap and didn't realize that maybe there should be some up front explanations of things. Which might also have helped on the tagging front, I suspect. Add in the apparently bizarre way they set up how searching worked and the fact that things went blooey because of it, and it's actually amazing that there's so much fandom - that is willing to put in the effort to make sense of Ao3 (possibly because FF.net suffers from punctuation and scene-break nomming) - that the wait list goes out 6+ months.
Though your idea of encouraging people to join as tag wranglers for tiny fandoms so they can make sense of the place sounds like a good one, for both the joinees and the site.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 12:35 am (UTC)