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bunnyadvocate · 6 years

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An Unauthorised History of /r/visualnovels

As communities age, a mythology tends to build up around their origins, with past eras vaguely alluded to as “golden ages.” I’ve seen this happen with reddit’s /r/visualnovels, a place I moderated during its most transformative stage, so I thought I’d offer my insider’s take on its history: what we’d hoped to achieve as moderators, the unintended side-effects of our policies, and why I think /r/visualnovels is stagnating these days. Given my acrimonious departure from the subreddit, you should take this with a grain of salt, but hopefully it’ll be interesting~

The Birth of /r/visualnovels

The very first posts on /r/visualnovels.

/r/visualnovels was founded in late 2009 by /u/Hpdarkman525 (the former account of /u/gambs), who made one post about the upcoming Umineko ep5 fan translation and then promptly forgot about the sub. At this time, the VN fandom consisted primarily of those who had learned Japanese to read VNs, and those who wished they had. Official localisations were almost non-existent, and the fandom hung off the words of the few fan translators. Knowing about VNs felt like knowing a secret, like a secret handshake to be acknowledged as a fellow western otaku.

This didn’t really change until early 2012 with the release of Katawa Shoujo. We now had a Western VN that was free, easy to install (no fiddling with system locale), pretty well written (no cliche cries of “baka” or “onii-chan”), and handled a delicate subject (disability and self-identity) with a sensitivity that really spoke to a lot of gamers. The optional nature of the adult content helped attract horny teenagers while still retaining an air of respectability. KS managed something no other VN had: attention from the mainstream gaming crowd. It drew a huge wave of new fans to the medium, among which were /u/coldacid and /u/Kuiper who became mods on /r/visualnovels and began to promote it.

While the influx of new members gave birth to the community, with newbies becoming veterans, the continued dominance of KS in the VN scene began to wear thin (it wasn’t until 2016 that the number of /r/visualnovels subscribers outnumbered /r/katawashoujo). Especially grating for veterans was the cry of KS as “the best VN ever written” from those who had only ever read that one VN. The constant stream of “what do I read after KS” and rudimentary technical questions on getting Japanese VNs working drowned out the rare news posts or broader discussion threads. The mod team had a hands-off attitude to it, they’d only remove spam or blatant trolling. This only changed in early 2014 when a relatively unknown user, /u/insanityissexy, requested a mod position...

The Rise of Insanity

Insanityy was a member of the old-guard, being drawn to the medium for Japanese VNs and caring little for what she saw as a pale-imitation in Western VNs. With no regard for the old mods, she singlehandedly brought order to a community that had been lawless. She began with a ban on posts for technical support questions and VN recommendation requests. Instead, they should be asked in the new weekly questions thread so as to clear up the front page for news posts and more substantial discussion threads.

While this move was broadly welcomed by most of the subreddit regulars, it caused some disruption as activity on the sub plummeted. With the western VN scene so small, news was rare and the number of daily posts dropped from 2-4 to just 1. While some grumbled, others were enthused in having an active moderator who cared about the sub. /u/kowzz started a discussion thread on what we could do to improve activity on the sub, and from that discussion he started the weekly Sunday discussion posts and I started the weekly “what are you reading” posts. Unlike the questions sticky, the intention wasn’t to curtail activity outside of these weekly posts, but to provide a supplement to the usual discussions and encourage users to comment more.

With such regular discussion posts, users started to bump into each other more often and a sense of community began to build. On a personal level, I also grew to know insanityy better as we exchanged dozens of increasingly lengthy PMs (so much so that each reply wouldn’t fit within the 10k character limit, we had to send our replies in 3 parts), with us quickly becoming close friends.

Later that year, I proposed an overhaul of the user flairs. The subreddit only offered a basic vndb icon. I wanted to expand that to hundreds of options with a larger profile picture offset to the side of a user’s post as a way to personalise each user. With enough options, I hoped it’d be easier to identify users at a glance and it’d add some character to the subreddit. I was admitted to the mod team to oversee the flair changes, but was soon upgraded to full mod status after a few months on insanityy’s urging.

The two of us fed off each other’s passion as we sought to build a more active, mature, and compassionate community. We never paid any heed to the old mods, mod policy was discussed between us on google hangouts and implemented immediately.

To foster a sense of community, we aimed to have a community event once a month: best X contests, census surveys, recommendation charts, fanart contests, halloween/april fool themes being among just some of the activities we organised. We even got Mangagamer to sponsor some contests with free VNs.

We downplayed the seedier parts of the medium, nukige news was banned and discussions on “fapping” were frowned upon. Neither of us were against porn, we’re both fans, but we feared it’d attract a more neckbeard-type audience.

We aggressively went after trolls, but not by banning them. We had automod automatically remove comments from users prone to cause drama, then we’d manually approve non-trollish comments. That way everyone was able to participate in our community, but bad behaviour wasn’t rewarded with lots of attention.

In the following year, insanityy asked the inactive older mods to resign. Kuiper recognised that he was no longer needed and respectfully stepped down. Coldacid said his inactivity was only temporary and he’d be back, but later left reddit for voat as part of an anti-censorship protest. Gambs asked us to drop the subject as he didn’t want to step down, so we carried on ignoring him.

We also added new members to the mod team: /u/FunwithGravity for his knowledge of Japanese, /u/Cornetto_Man because he got along with everyone, and /u/Avebone because he was active at times when the rest of us were asleep. They were added primarily to approve posts mistakenly removed by automod when me and insanityy were afk and had little input on mod policy.

Everything seemed to be going great, we had a growing community that we got along with, trolls were few and far between, and our moderation seemed popular. Then we got a modmail suggesting we try out a new chat program called Discord...

Discord on Discord

When /u/Kowzz and /u/Arcanus44 suggested creating a Discord server, we were initially skeptical. It sounded just like irc, and the /r/visualnovels irc channel had been comatose for years. However Kowz and Arc promised to take care of it for us, Kowz would create the server and Arc would drum up interest. So in Sept 2015, Arc hosted a “meet n’ greet” in voice chat on Discord. While it was by most accounts a success and quite popular, we got some complaints about inappropriate conduct by a couple of users and decided that if this Discord server was going to be linked with /r/visualnovels, we’d need to take an active hand in making sure it maintained our standards.

Kowz was happy to have us onboard, making us admins on Discord. It all seemed smooth, but underneath the surface, the seed of turmoil had been planted in our differing beliefs on who owned the server. Kowz and Arc considered themselves the owners and we were partners, while we considered them to have created the server on our behalf and that it’d run on our principles. Up until then, we’d not had any disagreements on mod policy. Me and insanityy would talk an issue out, if we agreed, we’d propose it to the rest of the mod team and vote on it. We’d picked mods who generally thought the same as us, so votes were normally unanimous. That wasn’t the case with Discord. Kowz and Arc had different ideals on how to run a community, and our usual resolution process of voting felt unfair to them as we outnumbered them 5 to 2.

The problem only got worse with time as insanityy hated arguments so she avoided the staff discussions on Discord and popped in only to vote. Arc and Kowz felt increasingly marginalised by this and that their opinion wasn’t being heard. This led to a standoff where Kowz and Arc demanded their 2 votes should count for as much as the rest of us combined, while we /r/visualnovels mods threatened to create a new server unless we kept one vote each. Discussions got heated until Kowz and Arc eventually backed down. In protest, they chose to stop participating as mods.

While Discord helped bring friends together, it also brought those that disliked each other together. It’s easy to ignore someone on reddit as its tree structure allows for parallel conversations, but the format of Discord makes that harder. This started to become a problem on the server, especially as Discord attracted a different type of user to the subreddit, those who had little patience for the more verbose and patient discussions of the subreddit. We got complaints from the subreddit veterans about some of the newbies but we weren’t sure what to do. Being disliked isn’t a bannable offense, but it was driving away some valued community members.

We didn’t want to create a separate server that split the community, so our misguided solution was the creation of a hidden channel: #sub_regs (a.k.a. the fanclub) that was invite only and accessed via the tableflipper role. The hope was that it’d serve as a backup channel for when #general was annoying and that it’d keep the community veterans on the server. However it ended up encouraging an elitist attitude that divided the community further.

The Fall of /r/visualnovels

With many of the friendly conversations and community atmosphere moving to Discord, the subreddit began to suffer. Inside jokes that were incomprehensible to those not on Discord were frequent, and the community split between those using Discord and those not.

There was also a degree of burnout among the mods. It’s inevitable for all mods, you spend long enough dealing with the worst of the community, the trolls and the spammers, and you begin to develop an us-vs-them mentality. You retreat from the community and draw closer to your fellow mods, looking down upon the normal users. We mods gradually stopped being members of the community and instead became overseers.

Then there was my messy departure from the sub in April 2016. Due to a range of factors: financial difficulties, gender dysphoria, and some toxic “friends,” I became deeply depressed and tried to commit suicide. My fellow subreddit mods (and best friend insanityy) decided the best response was to out me as transgender, block me on social media, and ban me from the subreddit I’d loved so deeply. Insanityy never spoke to me again.

The rest of this is speculation, I was no longer an insider, but from my perspective it looked like this event accelerated the emotional distance insanityy felt from the subreddit as she stopped caring about the community. She tried to carry on as normal at first, running a few contests, maintaining the animated banners I’d once made, but her heart wasn’t in it. She resigned later that year.

With her went the desire to innovate, to improve the community. The remaining mods were followers, not leaders. They could maintain some cosmetic updates and copy the old contests, but they were unable to do anything new. They enlarged the mod team with an additional four members, but it only increased the sense of inertia and made it even harder to get anything done. The subreddit began to feel stale.

The mod team had also become unbalanced, where once me and insanityy spoke up for minority tastes in EVNs and otomes, now the mod team was dominated by Japanese VN fans just as the VN scene was increasingly embracing EVNs. The subreddit felt more elitist than ever just as the medium had never been more diverse.

Unintended Side Effects

While our policies may have made sense at the time, some of the decisions me and insanityy had made began to have a detrimental impact on the subreddit:

We’d brought on Automod to help remove posts when only me and insanityy had to manage everything. We found having a bot leave the removal comment sparked fewer arguments with OP than if one of us did it, and it was more effective at catching spam. But while we strived to reapprove mistakenly removed posts promptly, sometimes OP deleted their post before we could. Psychologically, it also made it dangerously easy to leave some content removed. As we mods burnt out over the years, our standards for what counted as a worthy post kept getting higher with fewer and fewer posts being approved. The end result has been a severe drop in discussion posts on the sub.

When recruiting new moderators, we sought people who thought as we did so mod decisions would be consistent and there wouldn’t be arguments in the mod chat. Modding is stressful enough without the stress coming from within the mod team. However, as you add more mods who agree with you, you can start to have an inflated view of how widespread your opinion is. A circlejerk mentality builds and outside opinion is increasingly easy to dismiss. This can leave users feeling like their opinions don’t matter to the mods and builds resentment.

Insanityy was a kind soul and hated conflict, she avoided disagreements as much as possible. As a friend, this was fine, but as a mod it meant she avoided openly discussing mod policy on the subreddit as inevitably there would be some disagreement. This lack of discussion with the sub made it hard for users to object to the direction the sub took, allowing the mod team to grow out of touch with what the userbase wants.

Hopes for the Future

While I may have been quite critical of the current state of the subreddit, I think the community is a good one and there’s hope for improvement. A smaller, more motivated mod team would help, as well as scaling back some of the restrictions like the question and image-post ban. Let activity on the subreddit explode. Should low-quality content grow to become a problem, perhaps /r/visualnovels should split just as /r/gaming and /r/games have, or perhaps a split between Japanese and English VNs would help?

Not every idea will work out, but what’s important is to be trying new ideas and be responsive to change rather than clinging to an outdated format.

As I said at the start, please remember this isn’t an impartial view on the history of the sub and that this isn’t meant to downplay the hard work of the current mod team. Modding is exhausting, it’s a constant burden with little praise. Even if I consider them poor mods, it doesn’t make them bad people.

I know she won’t ever read this, nor will she care what I think, but I still believe insanityy was an inspirational mod and a wonderful friend. It’s incredibly hard to go it alone like she did when she first took over /r/visualnovels. She stood up for what she thought /r/visualnovels could be and put in so much effort, every day, rain or shine, she never shirked from her responsibilities. I miss her every day.

If anyone wants to know more or say hi, you can contact me here on tumblr, twitter, or Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616)

#visualnovel #visualnovels #visual novels #visual novel

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fyperia · 7 years

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why i am angsty™ this week

@questionably-gay

so there’s this guy i’ve been talking to. we go to school together, he’s a year ahead of me in the same major so we’ve had a number of classes together over the last few semesters. we’re also both huge nerds (expected in a game dev program) and play a lot of the same games so we were what you might call “friends”

i will say, we’d been getting pretty close over the last month or two; he’s fairly attractive, responds to being sassed with equal or greater sass, is pretty good at overwatch and wow (but not better than me, so i can still shit talk him), and Definitely Not A Neckbeard. or so i thought? not sure on that one anymore.

tl;dr boy i was moderately interested turns out to be kind of an ass, freaks out that i don’t answer his message and deletes me from everything.

i won’t bore you with the details, but here’s a list of the offending topics i failed to connect as they happened, under a nice readmore because holy hell it’s long:

-when i said i was reporting someone after a sexual assault joke was made during a match of overwatch, asked what i was reporting him for

-his brothers made a lot of Not Funny ‘jokes’ while we were on discord (that I heard over his open mic) and he never really responded to them but he did always laugh at them

-didn’t understand why blizzard “had to go and make tracer gay, i mean was it really necessary for them to do that?” until i was like well i’m bi and i think it’s pretty cool that they did that (he shut up about it and then got quiet whenever people would be excited about it in front of him)

-when symmetra was confirmed as autistic, he told me this. conversation was basically: “so symmetra is autistic” “people didn’t know that?” “i dunno, but they just announced it” “yes and?” “she’s autistic” “ok so?” “i dunno, she’s autistic” “what’s your point?” “the character, not the people who play her” “....” (someone else changed the subject at that point, i was just too caught off guard to respond)

-not really an Offense™ but some more explanation before i get to the end: i’m really terrible about answering messages. always have been. i have a lot of things going on with my brain so if i am not in messaging mode/mood i just will ignore non-essential messages, especially when i’m trying to catch up on school work i’ve fallen behind on due to said brain things. for a week or so i barely answered his messages, though i always made an effort to at least reply with like a sticker or a gif whenever he sent me something. after a few days of that he sent me The Dreaded Message: “hey are we ok?”

-i did not answer this message. i did not open this message. this message gave me way too much anxiety (and it was a weekend that i had someone visiting from out of state, so i was not prepared to deal with it right then.) less than twenty-four hours later, he sent a followup: “guess not :/”

-so i was pressured to explain the state of my mental health, why i forget to answer messages and then get anxiety about answering them late, why i am often too depressed to answer, etc. so that he would not feel personally targeted by my lack of response. it was honestly the most open i have ever been with anyone who is not one of my closest friends or s.o. about my mental health. because, i figured, we were friends so he deserved to know why i was being unresponsive.

-he sends back an equally large wall of text explaining why he gets anxiety about being ignored or w/e and how unlucky he’s been with relationships in the past and he just doesn’t want to screw it up because he always thinks it’s something he did. i’m like ok, i understand, but you need to bear with me because i usually just Can Not from february to april. he agrees. we’re good again. at this point when we’re in the computer lab at the same time he begins sitting next to me instead of across from me as we play my horse prince together (amazing game btw, check it out for mobile devices, a+++ localization)

-at some point he discovered i’m ticklish and decided it’s funny to tickle me. i don’t really think it’s funny! poke me in an area that i’m ticklish, sure, ok, that can be funny, but do not continue. that’s just rude. especially when i constantly tell you to not do that please. jeez.

-here’s the event that was my actual last spoon for this shit. i was in the middle of an all-weekend meeting for the rules design for the larp i play. (he knew this, because i talked about it a lot with him, as a fellow nerd, and he recently played an event with us.) i had also recently posted a humorous status update on facebook (which he saw and liked) making fun of myself for wanting to talk to people but never answering any messages i receive. he sends me a message like “can i ask you something?”

-although i am busy i fire back a “sure what’s up” assuming i can get to it whenever i have the chance as per our previous agreement. this was apparently not the case. he asked me if i wanted to go do a thing that i was just not prepared to be asked. (nothing major, this one actually wasn’t any fault on his part. knowing my interests, you would assume it was a thing i want to do.)

-however, i had/have been recently in a slump about a certain person who i miss very dearly unfollowing me on tumblr and just generally not talking to me ever. as this was a thing she and i had promised we would do together, but never got around to before falling out of touch, i got really upset about it. like had to compartmentalize to finish my meeting but had like three complete breakdowns over the next few days about it, i was an utterly inconsolable mess, missed work and class the next day, i don’t know how i managed to pull myself through class on that tuesday, i think i told everyone i was sick? i don’t often go out without at least filling in my eyebrows, but i was an Unshowered Mess for a few days. it was gross. i felt gross. (i stopped feeling gross after the person in question accepted my insta follow request and i just decided to tell myself she probably unfollowed me on tumblr when i wasn’t posting for a while. i still have not fortified to message her. i am a weenie but i will get there eventually. baby steps?)

-every other hour for about thirty six hours, i got a “?” or some derivative thereof from this boy in question. like “you there?” “hey you’re cute” “tooooori” etc. but i was legit super busy and ignoring literally everyone, and also trying to not have a panic attack about the last bullet point up there^. it was really obnoxious but i didn’t really know how to say “hey your question triggered a very bad response from me so that’s probably not something i want to go do with you” for whatever reason. probably because i knew in my brainspace that he would not take anything with the word “triggered” in it seriously.

-and then the glorious last straw: because i hadn’t answered (in under forty-eight hours, mind you, it was still the weekend) he sent a message that was just “*autistic screeching*” and i was like ..............................................

-i did not know how to answer this. i did not know how to list this entire rant i have written here and be like “wow, are you secretly an asshole?” because wow. i was literally stunned. so i didn’t answer.

-cue me skipping school on monday because of aforementioned response to the question and not wanting to interact with him. he did not show up in my computer lab (which i work in) for the last three weeks.

-cut to yesterday morning: i got a text from one of the officers in my wow guild (and a very dear friend) asking why he quit the guild. i was like huh, that’s weird. i also noticed he had left a facebook group chat that he was in with me, though the chat had served its use and was done with weeks before. so i go and check around, to discover he’s unfriended me on facebook, unfollowed me on insta, deleted me from battlenet, and of course quit the guild. (he joined only a few months ago, at my encouragement to switch servers and raid with us. should've known not to trust him, he’s horde.) he probably blocked my number too, though i haven’t checked because honestly? i don’t really care. i explained this all to my friend who asked me about it and we made fun of him for like half an hour. we had a good laugh about it. very therapeutic. i’m not even upset, i think it’s hilarious that we’re apparently in fifth grade.

#not all of my random personal posts are related #i am actually also super fucked by a crush right now #rip in pieces me #//#////#personal #long post

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