Senior Otaku

[CaNz]

So I just noticed I got the cool Seinor rank. I was working really hard to get it for years, but now that I randomly come back and its their I feel like I didn't earn it.

 

I actually took it pretty seriously back then. I would count the senior otakus I surpassed in post counts, and make new goals. 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500... I was planning on going as high as it took. Kinda seems like the american dream... work hard for an unatanable dream, or maybe don't try and get it handed to you.

 

 

[Petie]

I honestly don't remember what iterations the titles went through but, if it makes you feel any better, I can tell you that you're not at the top yet!

[CaNz]

Maybe I should strive for Site Manager!

[Allamorph]

Maybe I should strive for Site Manager!

Edited January 18, 2016 by Allamorph

[CaNz]

It was a joke... Its funny because I couldn't possibly get it through post count, and it would be repeat of the old situation but worse!

 

I know, its painfully funny.

There were a lot of people here I missed talking to AlLa. You were firmly placed on the bottom of that list. ;]

[Allamorph]

[CaNz]

Hey, don't frown! I did still admit I missed talking with you! You could probably hold that over my head and say "wish I could say the same," or just tell me to google something like usual.

[Allamorph]

[CaNz]

I'm not sure if this actually counts as talking tho...

 

Also why did you have to go and get the padded room thread shut down while my back was turned?

[Shy]

On Otakupedia I believe we had a list of all of the various member titles over the years. I'm not sure that page exists.

 

Allamorph was against PRP ever since I banned cat pictures from that thread (not that the banning stuck, mind you.)

 

- Shy

[Allamorph]

That is decidedly untrue. I have always had a neutral stance on it, and actually defended it a couple of times. As for why I advocated its closure...I believe my quote by Petie sufficiently explains my stance on the subject.

Iirc, Shy was against it about ten posts after he created it. Ah, irony.

[CaNz]

I think you might have been putting a little too much blame on PRP for the sites lack of activity. Since it closed there certainly was not a huge turn around. Also now that I am here there is a person willing to defend it. I think PRP usually ended up like a shared status update for most people, things not worth starting a thread for ended up there, and sometimes lead to fun but short discussions. Secondly there was no strive for dominating the spotlight with your semi unimportant post because it was always near the top due to mass participation, and the mass participation lead to more semi important stuff getting viewed. 

 

Without it, you probably pruned out a good amount of short, unsatisfying topics, but I doubt it really generated much more fantastic content for the rest of the board. 

 

The status updates kinda work the same way as PRP, but there is a limit to how much you can write, and they aren't shared. There is also no guarantee people will read or respond to them since it isn't as popular of a thread, nor something that will constantly be at the top of the page when there are 10 or more people participating. Basically I don't think its shoes really get filled by the rest of the forum. GD as a whole seems like it would, but some things just don't seem worth saying if no one reads them. 

 

 

Also good to see you again Shy. I haven't heard from you since The Mansion

[Allamorph]

I'm pretty sure you have no idea what I said.

Part of me wants to tell you to go read it again and figure out what was really going on. But I'm not really in my usual Student, Instruct Thyself mood right now, so let's elaborate.

OB was in decline well before I joined the Navy, and that was over three years ago last October; I received my first Good Conduct Medal the first week of November last year. (Technically it's been four, since I signed my contract in April, but I didn't ship to BT until October, which was the start of my active duty service.) It wasn't really a secret, either. We members just didn't want to openly admit that we were all growing up and moving on, and that we as a collective weren't really interested in putting forth the effort to nurture new young members to follow behind us. By sheer coincidence, around the same time longtime member and well-respected staff Shy created a thread purposed specifically to hold those thoughts which members might want to babble about to other members but which didn't really merit intensive, multi-paragraph essay-style board discussions. Unfortunately, the thread turned into a dumping ground for basically everything that also ends up on places like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, sans the image-hosting capacity, which caused a lot of the more senior, geriatric members to bristle at something that was so markedly changing the way Their Boards functioned.

So we move forward, and I push myself through the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Training Program, often with very little time to devote to heavy community involvement. I notice that other members are likewise disappearing, some more obviously than others. Many of us lurkers who still retained some (possibly petulant) form of nostalgia, or who just couldn't bring themselvse to remove the place from their Bookmarks tab, felt bothered by the now obvious decline in activity, and various attempts to counteract it were taken. Around this time, the opinion started circulating that casual posting style of the PRP was contributing heavily (singlehandedly, according to some) to the reduction in activity, while others held that by consolidating all the tiny unimportant threads into one giant deliberately unimportant thread it had merely removed the illusion that there was any significant activity at all.

But nobody did anything about it. A couple of people put slightly passive-aggressive slogans regarding the thread in their signatures (for what reason I can't fathom), but beyond that the conversation concerning action about it stagnated—as did the Boards. This cycle of descrying the thread and defending its existence continued at random but broad intervals, usually when more than two old members happened to be lurking at around the same time. And each time produced the same result, except that the next time there was typically less and less of a community response defending it, until most recently when all voices in its favor have essentially died out. And even then, those who didn't want it closed weren't really in favor of the thread itself, just against actually doing anything to it. I'm not sure why. Regardless, whether or not the PRP had any perceptable impact on the Boards whatsoever isn't the issue. The issue is that the opinion of the community as a whole ranged from neutral to negative on it.

Beyond that, to make an accurate decision on the thread's effects on the Boards, one has to step back and observe the pattern surrounding it from a social-engineering standpoint. To bring OB to this point today took a minimum of five years. The thought that a complete turnaround to a burgeoning, member-swollen, discussion-intensive message boards is possible in a mere two months after half a decade of apathy and obscurity is beyond unreasonable. OB may one day flourish again, but it's not going to happen overnight.

As for myself, I specifically wasn't bothered by it either way. I feel no different about it now than I did before. In fact, I believe that all the vitriol directed towards it by other members, blaming it for "destroying the boards", was entirely misplaced. So me stepping up to be The Guy Who Killed It served a dual purpose. The thread has been killed, removing what has been dubbed the most glaring unsightly blemish on the Boards today—and in doing so, the giant overinflated scapegoat for the Boards' waning has been removed. Because, no, it wasn't the PRP that killed OB.

It was us.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Allamorph

[Desbreko]

I doubt the PRP had a significant impact on the decline in activity. It was already well on its way down about a year before the PRP was created, and although we got a boost in activity around the launch of theO's redesign, it wasn't enough to turn things around. The PRP probably didn't help, but there were much bigger factors at work.

To actually reply to the topic at hand, I think the requirements for the ranks got overhauled when we switched to IPB. Under vB, it used to be entirely based on post count, but I think there are other requirements now. So it may be that you already had enough posts but you hadn't been a member for long enough or something like that.

I'm too lazy to log into the admin cp and check, though.

[CaNz]

AlLa, when you aren't in teacher mode I learn far more. I only read Petie's quote at the end because I couldn't find the original post. (navigating on the xbox browser can be tricky) but unless the post contained all that background info I doubt I could have possibly infered that. Most of what you talked about seems to predate myself greatly. Now that I think about it though, even back then I rarly talked to James, Adam, Shy, Gavin, Dagger, and even Petie was much harder to find until he dawned the crown. Your story fills that mystery up very well.

 

I do not see how my arguement is totally off though. I was blaming you, which was wrong since you merly said the majority thought it was site cancer, not specificly you yourself. I made the grave error of asuming you supported the polocy that you were invoking. However, as you yourself said, it was probably just a scapegoat.

 

I also think having it being a shared status update place, or as you said, another facebook is a good thing. I have quite a few 0B members FB accounts as friends. I think I may have even sent a freind request to you once, but that was after years of talking and new members could never get that. The first week I got here I was posting on PRP, testing the waters of OB.

 

Personaly, I have fond memories of that room, and I am certain I would not have made half the connections I made here without it. The mundane thoughts frequently spewed along those padded walls were a clear reflection of our real lives... and I feel like it brought me closer to an already well established group than I could have hoped to find by any other practical means.

 

You do have a valid point in there though. 2 months probably means nothing, but maybe we could decide on a good amount of time to decide on if its death had a positive impact or not.

 

 

DES! I'm glad you are still around. There are a few animes I was hoping to get the chance to talk with you about.

As for now though I am glad you are on the side of reason.

 

It would make sence if I needed more years. I think I did all 2000 posts in around 2.5 years. No need to check though, times have changed.

[Boo]

PRP is dead. Long live Señor Otaku CaNz.

 

... Please could you give that title to Shinmaru?

[Allamorph]

Shinmaru can only be a Señor Taco.
 

 

 

Edited January 18, 2016 by Allamorph

[Boo]

Señor O'Taco?

[CaNz]

We have a winner!  If we can't change it for ShIn just make everyone an O'Taco!

[James]

I was trying to what Des said about PRP, but the quote function doesn't seem to be working (is that the case for anyone else?)

Anyway, I think Des is right. Activity was declining well before the PRP started. For a long period of time, I'd guess that the PRP was actually one of the few things keeping activity alive on OB generally.

 

I have some theories about why OB has not been able to maintain the kind of activity it had during its peak. It would be hard to summarise all of them, but here are the key ones that come to mind for me:

 

- myOtaku/theO Worlds (prior to this we'd only had chat, which couldn't replace OB per se - but once we had other forms of messaging, the activity was more easily fractured)

 

- Strong emphasis on quality (I think we had a focus on quality for a good reason - OB was a huge spam fest prior to version 3.0 - but I think it took too long to ease that focus, which turned away a lot of people...I think that OB became a more mature place than the rest of the community, which made the barrier to entry too high)

 

- Rise of social media/etc... (I think that when more and more alternatives appeared, web forums generally - specially dedicated ones like this - started to struggle. Many web forum communities that used to thrive have died out long ago. These days, unless you're a Reddit or something...I think it's hard to survive. There are newer, often better, alternatives.)

 

Also, I think that theOtaku.com probably became less significant over the years and it hasn't kept up with the times. So, although OB suffered the biggest decline the quickest, there's no question in my mind that our entire community is in atrophy generally.

[PiroMunkie]

So a happy birthday message from CaNz brought me back here. I'm an OB Superstar apparently, and honestly it feels pretty great! The weather up here is excellent.

[CaNz]

I was trying to what Des said about PRP, but the quote function doesn't seem to be working (is that the case for anyone else?)

Anyway, I think Des is right. Activity was declining well before the PRP started. For a long period of time, I'd guess that the PRP was actually one of the few things keeping activity alive on OB generally.

Well I can still use the quote feature on my xbox browser, and its not the most functional app.

 

In terms of trafic, having 100 people per day seems great, but forums like that all have the same taste. Its usually a bunch of people typing impersonal statements or general opinions. No one puts much effort in because half the time your post goes unread if you are on page two or beyond.  

 

The thing I liked most about OB was how everyone was paid attention to. Even new members have a chance to make themselves known. I like the idea of OB being active again, but I want to see people stick around, not develope a great revolving door. PRP definitly doesn't provide much content, but it was another thing active members could participate in.

 

Anyways its good to hear from you again James.

 

 

I can't say I remembered it off my own memory PiRo, but when your name pops up on the front page it makes sending pms easy! ^~^

You can consider superstar status a present from the boards... that you paid for with time...

Edited February 5, 2015 by CaNz

[Petie]

We have a winner!  If we can't change it for ShIn just make everyone an O'Taco!

 
I'm pretty sure he can change his own title and is welcome to do so if he wants. But Shin, if you can't and want to change it, let me know.
 

I was trying to what Des said about PRP, but the quote function doesn't seem to be working (is that the case for anyone else?)
Anyway, I think Des is right. Activity was declining well before the PRP started. For a long period of time, I'd guess that the PRP was actually one of the few things keeping activity alive on OB generally.
 
I have some theories about why OB has not been able to maintain the kind of activity it had during its peak. It would be hard to summarise all of them, but here are the key ones that come to mind for me:
 
- myOtaku/theO Worlds (prior to this we'd only had chat, which couldn't replace OB per se - but once we had other forms of messaging, the activity was more easily fractured)
 
- Strong emphasis on quality (I think we had a focus on quality for a good reason - OB was a huge spam fest prior to version 3.0 - but I think it took too long to ease that focus, which turned away a lot of people...I think that OB became a more mature place than the rest of the community, which made the barrier to entry too high)
 
- Rise of social media/etc... (I think that when more and more alternatives appeared, web forums generally - specially dedicated ones like this - started to struggle. Many web forum communities that used to thrive have died out long ago. These days, unless you're a Reddit or something...I think it's hard to survive. There are newer, often better, alternatives.)
 
Also, I think that theOtaku.com probably became less significant over the years and it hasn't kept up with the times. So, although OB suffered the biggest decline the quickest, there's no question in my mind that our entire community is in atrophy generally.

These are definitely some good points. While I do think threads like the PRP can have a negative impact on a community as a whole (I've seen it happen first hand a few times), those of you who are saying it isn't the main (or even a significant) reason are absolutely right. There are a large number of factors that came together that lead to decline in activity here, most of which have been mentioned so I won't re-list everything. That being said, it is still nice to reconnect with old friends here so OB still has a purpose, even if it's vastly different than what it was way back when.

[Boo]

- Strong emphasis on quality (I think we had a focus on quality for a good reason - OB was a huge spam fest prior to version 3.0 - but I think it took too long to ease that focus, which turned away a lot of people...I think that OB became a more mature place than the rest of the community, which made the barrier to entry too high)

 

I think this probably had a lot to do with people leaving, and stuff. At one point, everyone was trying so damn hard, and the rulers of the boards were all over 18, with near-perfect spelling, and inclined to write 5 paragraph posts. Allamorph would have fit right in, if he didn't have such bad spelling. At this point there was a stronger contrast between hyper-quality-führers and snarky trolls (hello.) than ever, and the worst people were the people who would mix these features, and come out as spiteful essayposters. 

 

It didn't help that, with most things, cliques were formed (based on the above) - worst of all, the ones consisting of mainly moderators. Though for many it adds just another good element of community, for many it just creates a lot of us-vs-you mentality.

[Shy]

- Rise of social media/etc... (I think that when more and more alternatives appeared, web forums generally - specially dedicated ones like this - started to struggle. Many web forum communities that used to thrive have died out long ago. These days, unless you're a Reddit or something...I think it's hard to survive. There are newer, often better, alternatives.)

 

This is the big one. The best stuff on OB wasn't specific to anime usually, and the rest of the world started having these kind of interactions on Facebook/Twitter/etc.. TheOtaku's soft decline and the decline of anime's mainstream representation in English speaking countries certainly hasn't helped. In addition, increasingly uptight members (myself included, I guess) turned people off sooner than they might have been turned off otherwise. 

 

I remade the Padded Room Party to give OB a home for non sequitur , context-less posts that have since overrun the internet. I understand why people feel like it "broke" the boards, but that's simply not accurate. If anything the PRP was life support for this place for *years*. Quality of life for the site is another matter entirely...

 

No matter what happened or how many events we made eventually the core membership was going to start growing up, making babies, and/or maintaining our nuclear stockpile. Many great memories, and many great friendships, are the direct result of my time here. It's nice to pop in and revisit the old threads. I hope I'm able to do that for as long as possible.

 

- Shy