Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Arx]

...and MLP got banned. Or was that later?

[Kagus]

...and MLP got banned. Or was that later?

That was part of it. The ponies used to live down there, where they belonged. Then they started trying to breach containment, and things got a little ugly. When VN was finally removed, they raised their hooves higher in rebellion, and things got even uglier.


And now we don't talk about that anymore.

[scriver]

Nah I believe that was long before MLP rebooted

[Vector]

Yes, it was long before MLP. The problem with the MLP stuff is that the thread devolved into weird smut, much like the fanfiction thread, which is why we are no longer allowed to have threads dedicated to those topics.

[TamerVirus]

In somewhat related news, The Indianapolis FedEx shooter has been linked to brony culture

"There was a post timestamped less than an hour before the shooting that read, "I hope that I can be with Applejack in the afterlife, my life has no meaning without her," and it featured an image of the cartoon pony Applejack."

[Frumple]

Wait, when did fanfic discussion get nixed? It hasn't been posted in for a good long while, but the fanfic rec thread still appears to be there and unlocked, as are other ready-things with fics mentioned therein.

[Vector]

I think we can mention fic, but there was a fanfiction thread at some point that devolved into erotica/RP stuff. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the stuff we link/talk about on this site needs to be more on the gen side.

[methylatedspirit]

If you were to define a couple of variables in C++, but not initialize them at all...

Code: [Select]

int a, b, c, d, e;
and then print them out (doing the obligatory "#include <iostream>" first, of course)...

Code: [Select]

std::cout << a << "\n" << b << "\n" << c << "\n" << d << "\n" << e << "\n";
I get this output (GCC 10.2.0, Windows, x86_64):

Code: [Select]

0
0
0
4198400
1

Thing is, where is it getting these numbers from? What part of memory is it pulling these values from? Like, memory management's been a thing since the 386; you can't just read memory from any old address and expect it to end in anything other than a segfault. (And 4198400 converts to 0x401000, which must mean something to a computer if it's such a clean number in hex.)

[WealthyRadish]

It's just whatever arbitrary garbage was physically in memory when the OS allocated stack space for the program, left by another program that was previously using that space. And you can do so much more than just read it...

[methylatedspirit]

I gather that leads to a lot of fun in the right/wrong hands. Or !!FUN!!, depending on how vital it is.

[King Zultan]

The problem with the MLP stuff is that the thread devolved into weird smut,

Why does that always seem to be what happens to fandoms that kills them off or at least ruins them for most people?

[Egan_BW]

The problem with the MLP stuff is that the thread devolved into weird smut,

Why does that always seem to be what happens to fandoms that kills them off or at least ruins them for most people?

It's always there is you look deep enough. If you want to keep enjoying things, you need to either get used to it or avoid looking that deeply into things~
(Of course, here's not the place for it.)

[wierd]

Rule34 is/was/ever shall be.

[methylatedspirit]

I'm bullshitting heavily here, but I'm guessing it's some combination of the "Nazi bar" and "vocal minority" ideas. "Nazi bar" (a term I'm stealing from Tom Scott), I'll use here to mean a place that is so tolerant that it ends up tolerating the intolerant (or rather people you wouldn't ever tolerate), and driving the good people away from it because of it. Same way in which you won't go to a bar if you knew it let Nazis hang out in the basement. You wouldn't tell your friends, at the very least.

Fandoms tend to be very tolerant, often to the point of becoming a Nazi bar; you see this in spades in the furry fandom, where you have these, uh, "Nazi furs", which are exactly what you think they are. At least there, most furries upon seeing someone so pridefully propagate hate, are rightfully vehemently against these groups. The furries are mature enough as a fandom that they're able to drive out the Nazis (and each other, I think?). They do exist, of course, but they haven't overtaken the fandom.

In a younger (audience maturity-wise) fandom, though, they don't have that drive-out mechanism. That's how you can end up with total weirdos in a fandom. They come in, they're fans of the work in question, but they have this thing about them that's extremely unacceptable in modern society. Just, like, imagine the things that would instantly repulse you from a person if they were that. So you have these weirdos, and they're rising through the ranks of the fandom's society (insofar as a fandom is a society) over time, right? Wouldn't their weirdness, their extremely-unacceptable thing(s), eventually spread throughout the fandom as a whole?

And when the weirdos are in charge, that's where all sorts of shit can go down. King, you've mentioned the MLP fandom, that's a prime example. I think the thing that drives the normal people out (the people who don't have the extremely-unacceptable thing about them), apart from the Nazi bar effect, is a vocal minority. Even if they're only a minority numerically, weirdos tend to be really good at being vocal about their weirdness. The normal people in there bail out of there because they don't want to be associated with the weirdos that share a fandom with them.

So now you reach peak weirdoification of a fandom. The normal people who formerly occupied that space have ejected long ago, and in their place are like-minded weirdos, (fantasizing about) doing unspeakable things to the characters they appear to idolize. At that point, all you hear about that fandom is just the escapades of those weirdos. You go on DeviantArt to look it up, you just see... things. Unholy things. There's still normal people in there, doing normal things, but if your first experience was that, I think you're justified in writing off the whole fandom at that point.

Strangely enough, I think it's a reversible process. I heard that the Undertale fandom actually became normal again after a while, after it stopped being in the public eye. I'm speculating (as if this whole thing isn't speculation enough) that it's a demographic shift. All the young kids moved out because it wasn't "in" anymore, so the average fandom maturity shifted upwards over time. This let them drive out the weirdos in the fandom (because you don't get all these kids going "but we have to be friends!"), and I think it's mostly normal people now. So I've heard, anyway.

[scriver]

It's very simple:

Fandoms are generally nerd things

Nerds are generally social outcasts

Nerds generally spend too much time on the internet and too little time interacting with real people, thereby losing their grip on reality

Fandoms (these days) are generally on the internet

People who spend too much time on the internet have a correspondingly larger presence on the internet than normal people and because they're on the internet all the time they automatically also gain the ability to respond to and direct all discussion. Put a bunch of them together and they'll dominate the fandom even if they're a numerical minority.

That parts isn't just true for fandoms but for all discussion on the internet, see Reddit, Tumblr, 4chan, Twitter, etc etc

But then we return to nerds being social outcasts because because of this they also tend to develop a host of inhibitions, fetishes, and other mental hangups which they must turn to the internet to get an outlet for. This in combination with losing their grip on what is appropriate (from spending too little time with real people) leads to a spiral where the inserting of their fetishes grow more and more common until everything they interact with is viewed through a lens of their fetishes which then leads to it becoming part of how they interact with others.

Combine that with their comparably bigger presence in the fandom (from spending too much time on the internet), if you only have two out of a hundred fans who are creeps, but they are among the ones who view and respond to every topic first, you can be damned sure that they are going to fund every opportunity they can to turn every discussion to be about or centered around appealing to their own fetishes.

Which also means that more creeps will come out of the woodworks and reinforce the pattern and so on and do forth

Tl;dr: The internet was a mistake