bakerstreet | Mod Post: No shipping for a day

Thank you!

Could we consider having designated non-shipping days?

Edited 2019-07-22 20:47 (UTC)

Oh man, a Gen Memes Day every two weeks would be rad.

Thanks so much! I appreciate this!

I'd just like to add my two cents to this.

1) I agree with limiting similar memes. This boils down to meme posters needing to be more aware of what's already posting and sucking it up and waiting if their exact flavor of meme isn't up and they have to post in something more generalized or that they have to actually say in it (Hey, I'd like x and y as well). Communicate and you'll get what you want more.

2) I do not, however, agree with the notion of 'gen days only', since I can already see that going badly. There are about a third (if not more) memes that can be used on the front page at any given time that are gen/gen friendly. They just aren't tagged into that often. So making Wednesday (for example) Gen Day is just setting up Wednesday to have the flood of gen memes that also don't get tagged and people being bitter about it and lashing out because 'omg you hate gen'. No one hates gen. I love gen. But I also love shipping and smut and this is supposed to be an open community for all aspects. Fort anon is for anon memes. TLH is for porn only. Bakerstreet is generally for everything. There have been other comms that have been started/tried that are gen only and they don't take off. Because the majority of people that play on this community are thirsty for things they're not getting in their games.

I respect that you want to try this today, even if I don't agree with it. But I would offer advice against instituting it as a daily/weekly thing, because you just can't force people to play gen, and that's what a gen day is going to feel like. There's already petty bickering about shippers vs gen players and we're all basically the same people. Instead, maybe have another discussion about more open meme types, what memes people would like to see, and possibly banning repeat offenders of the 'this shit's already been up five minutes ago, why are you posting the exact same thing' instances. Because it feels like it's a handful of the same posters that are skirting the rules. So punish them, ban them, delete the memes. Open up another discussion post about meme types. Maybe have a monthly or bi-monthly meme request so that meme posters know what some people would like to see and they could either make that meme, blend some together so we're not flooded with five types of x meme, and give some of the players what they want.

But huge nope on limiting. And it's not like I throw myself in every meme every day. But it would suck for me if the one day I have off to play shippy stuff/meme stuff happens to be the day you've picked for gen day. We're all getting older. Our posting is slowing down. Nothing is going to fix that. Please don't punish the people that are still using the site because others are being more vocal about what they want that you can't force people to give them.

Thank you for your opinions. I agree with a lot of points you are making, but there are a few things I need to clarify. I do delete memes every now and then, and so do the other mods. It's just that unfortunately we can't monitor this place 24/7 and always be present at the very second someone posts a meme that shoudn't be posted. I don't feel it's right to delete existing threads. I've done it and I will do it in the future (hopefully not often) but I don't like it. Doing that drives people away from here.

Secondly, if you cannot see a new shippy meme on a day that you want to play shippy stuff, consider looking at older memes. The idea that a meme is 'expired' if it wasn't posted today, is not something I want to promote, especially if we are talking about memes that are only a day old. A 'gen day' shouldn't be any kind of hindrance to people who want to rp shipping.

I actually agree with looking at older memes and tend to be the sort to bookmark the ones I like and look at them through the week to see what sort of play they get, who's a new poster, and if there's something that catches my interest on the next day that might not have when I originally looked at it. I'm a meme poster here myself, so I try to follow my own advice in making sure that what I'd like to post isn't similar or close to what's already up for the last few days. I don't really like repetition, particularly in ideas and possibilities for memes.

But the point still stands about enforced days. There seems to be a lot of enforcing lately and it hasn't really seemed to help in activity. I don't disagree with the extension of memes to two weeks instead of one. That seems to be working out better. Same with scheduled memes, and you guys have been relatively quick to take down memes that have been commented on in terms of someone bringing it to your attention that it's too similar to x that's just up. I've also noticed that you don't take down everything, and are willing to cut memes leeway and slack if they don't follow too closely and if people are enjoying it. Like you said, it punishes the players, not the posters.

It just seems like adding in more limiting moderation on making a day 'gen day' seems like you'd be borrowing potential trouble, as I mentioned in a reply below. It might NOT happen, but it also COULD, so just decide amongst the mods if that kind of stress is worth it. Because I guarantee you that people will come to complain that things aren't going the way they want it and can't you make it two days and if people are playing smut on gen days, can't you ban them? It becomes petty.

I’ve got to disagree with the anon above me, as a meme poster myself who’s just tended to post non-shippy memes/gen memes the past few years.

1. “Gen meme” doesn’t bar players from stating in their preferences that they want shipping
2. Shipping-specific memes won’t magically disappear from bakerstreet on gen-only days

Memes I’ve posted that could be considered “gen”, like the PacRim AU Meme, the post-apocalyptic meme, the bathing meme, etc, all of those you can ship in. I’ve written ships in them!

“But you can just play gen in shipping/smut memes too!” The issue here is that there are a lot of niche shipping memes that both overlap in content (how many h/c &/or impregnation/pregnant sex memes are out there and spammed to exhaustion?) and only have that shipping element to it. Marriage, courting, dating, pregnancy, you can’t just readily add a gen element to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I get that most memes are interchangeable, but to your 2., they would if they were enforced 'gen only meme days'. And like I said, it's a slippery slope. Because at first you'd have 'this meme has a smutty option and it's a gen day, delete it' to 'this meme could have shipping in it, delete it', to 'this player is playing shipping/smut on a gen day'. You might shake your head and say that it couldn't happen, but I promise you, it could. Considering we have people going to the mod contact post to complain about 'this person is musedumping, ban them', people pay far too much attention to what other people are doing or having fun in ways that aren't fun for them. MOST people wouldn't give a crap and would likely not have anything to do with picking on someone for wanting ship/smut on a 'gen meme', but there are people that are feeling inanely entitled over activity that doesn't have anything to do with them.

I get that there are characters and players that don't want to play on shipping memes. As I said, I agree that there are too many of the same types (dear god, how many arranged/accidental/fake marriage memes do you need in 2 days???), but I also genuinely don't think that that's the kind of moderation that's going to make this place more open and playable. It's an open comm. That means that a lot of things aren't going to ping for everyone. And just because there's a meme we love/want to play in (and this happens to me a lot and I throw my characters in and pray), doesn't mean you're going to get any tags or tagged back. Limiting the scope of when/who/where you can play on here isn't going to help keep it active. And I'd LIKE it to be active. We have new players from Tumblr coming over. I agree there should be more open memes, more widely open memes, and yes, more gen memes.

But I also disagree that there should be enforced days. We've had plenty of gen memes that get no play and that get reposted and reposted and reposted. And anon comms whine about everyone's a whore and it's all about smutting, but maybe people just don't want that specific niche pirate beach meme and reposting it isn't endearing it to anyone and it's become the new courtly love meme.

I guess I just really don't want to see people start to avoid Bakerstreet because it's becoming too strict, too whiny, or too moderated over things that it doesn't need moderation over. It's one thing to delete double memes and ban people that are harassing/stalking people or enforce rules that have been in play forever. It's another thing to try to turn a comm that's been here for almost a decade into something that kills it.

(Please note, I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything. Just trying to engage in a debate.)

You seem to have seriously misunderstood #2. No one is deleting shipping memes posted on other days and/or barring players from utilizing them on gen-only days. Bakerstreet will not suddenly morph overnight into a wasteland of anti-shipping hordes out to force gen-compliance, c’mon.

Look at the meme round up. If, on Wednesday, only gen memes are posted, you can still play in the shipping memes posted on Tuesday.

And, back to #1, having looked back through the gen memes I’ve posted, nearly every last one has people playing out shipping.

ETA: and if people are playing smut on gen days, can't you ban them?

This kind of fear-mongering behavior doesn’t help. No one wants that.

Edited 2019-07-22 23:08 (UTC)

It's not fearmongering if there's truth to it. Go to the mod concerns post. There are already people asking about banning musedumpers. It might just be for the one in particular they were annoyed with, but it's one person being mad about another person playing characters in a way they don't approve 'and they're shitting up the memes I like'. However many characters a person wants to play has no bearing on anyone else's fun in any given meme, yet someone thought it was okay to legitimately ask the mods to moderate that. People can be jerks. I make it a habit to expect the worst behavior, and in places like this and where people can be anon about it (like the contact post), I'm rarely surprised.

You don't have to like it, but there's a potential for it to happen and ignoring that it exists won't make it not happen.

I’ll just repost the mod reply to that:

You just have to learn to scroll past them, just like you would if those 14 characters were posted by 14 different players.

I’ll start flipping my peruke when the mods start moving toward extreme measures like that. In the meantime, they aren’t, so there’s no point in getting antsy about it or inventing a problem that doesn’t exist.

As someone who enjoys both shipping and gen, I really don't see how the solution fits the problem. From the mod post, the problem seems to be there's a flood of shipping memes and a lot of them are similar to each other. Going 'okay, no shipping for a day' doesn't solve that problem. It just means that people are going to post a lot of shipping memes, some of which will be similar to previously posted memes, on July 24 and subsequent dates.

I wasn't under the impression that this one day solves the problems into eternity. Not at all.

Some people liked it, some didn't. That is always going to happen whenever I/we make a new decision and even if we don't. This time I wanted to listen to those who have complained about the abundance of shipping memes. All the times that I've not done anything when they've complained, I've catered to those who like ten shipping memes a day.

I don't think that 'keeping things the status quo' is the same as catering to people who prefer shipping memes. (In contrast, 'banning shipping memes for a day' is 100% catering to people who prefer gen memes.) At the risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a pretty simple solution to people complaining about the abundance of shipping memes: those who complain should be the change & post more gen memes instead or actually tag out in the gen memes that are actually posted.

Basically, I don't see why "there's too many shipping memes!!1!" is something the mods should be addressing in the first place, especially when it's something that those who feel it's a problem can solve themselves.

There's a difference, imo, between deleting duplicate/too similar memes and slamming down the gates on specific meme types for x hours/days. That's not equal listening time. That's not even listening. Those feel like two completely different dynamics. A solution would be to offer more gen meme types up. Or ask for brainstorming on gen meme types that people actually want to see, because as I've noticed, it's not that there's a lack of gen memes around (there are plenty on any given page), it's just that there isn't the same kind of activity in them that the people being most vocal against shipping/smut memes want.

Offer more gen memes up. Ask for ideas. The option of having monthly or every other month meme discussion posts is okay too. But this feels unnecessary. And as you said, there's nothing that stops gen-only players from going to find a gen meme that they like that just wasn't posted on that day. Some of the most popular memes we have are gen memes (as listed via a question on wg: rain meme, snow meme, au memes, random scenario memes, dare memes, seasonal memes...), and they get posted at about the same frequency as each category has. Smut, shipping, gen. Those are the three main categories and anyone will tell you that they're different creatures. Shipping only players don't always play in smut memes because it crosses a line for them (makes them uncomfortable/isn't what they're looking for), and gen players often lump the two together, even though you can play out a platonic or underage ship without it going past G rating.

If you have a Gen only day, then you'd have to, to be fair, have a Smut only and Shipping only day. Also, making that day fall on a day that's scheduled with a sex/smut meme type is kind of redundant.

This isn't a comm that needs a ton of moderation, tbh. Ban people that are being harassing/stalking/abusive, occasionally delete a meme if it breaks the rules. There's no need to keep trying to slap new rules onto a comm that doesn't need them. If you want something that's more restrictive, I sincerely suggest opening another comm.

Let's just agree to disagree. Some people want more rules, others (like you) don't. No one is more right than the other. There are differing opinions. I'm trying to navigate in the middle.

I don't know why you assume I want more restrictions when I've said just the opposite in the past. People have asked moderation queues and banning people who musedump, and just recently, locking the posts to members only, to name a few. If I wanted stricter rules, I would have jumped at those opportunities, and many others.

'No shipping' lasted one single day and was more like an experiment, not a huge restriction, let alone a new rule.

Changes occur when people ask for them. They don't come from me out of thin air. If you want us to ask ideas, then you also have to accept that there will ideas that you don't like and we might implement them nevertheless.

I guess we'll just have to disagree. It's not about less rules, it's about the right rules. This comm has always had a way of doing things. The few rules that have been added over time have been done so to help maintain the community. Disabling anon was done to keep the people who were dragging trolling and harassing behaviors from anon comms onto the memes and being terrible with it. Banning people that have been harassing people is also a good rule. But the main tenets of the comm have been in place since it started up in 2011. Moderated posting/queueing didn't work out well. Expanding the limitation between memes from one week to two weeks barring the scheduled ones aren't doing too badly. But, and this is where I think we disagree, it feels like you're trying to keep adding new rules that aren't opening the comm any more. If anything, it's limiting it.

This isn't 'your' community. The original mod of this place went AWOL. I'm glad that you and korofel and thelongcon have stepped in to help keep it running, but this isn't something you created. As I said, if you have an idea for something with more rules and limitations, I sincerely suggest you open a new comm and apply those rules there. The concerns posts should be for concerns. For pointing out when rules are being broken. Not for petty whining and bickering over musedumping and too many gen memes/shipping memes. If it doesn't apply to rule breaking or harassing or something along the lines of a legitimate concern, then ignore it. Just because people are complaining about something doesn't mean it needs to be catered to.

That includes this comment. I'm not right. This is just my opinion, and maybe some people agree, maybe they disagree. But this is no more my comm than it is yours, and we all need to remember that we're here as a group.

I'm more hesitant than you to talk about 'the right rules'. Who would be the authority on them? Things change. What worked before doesn't always work later and I see no permanent harm in trying things like 'gen day' or even a 'smut day'.

I've never tried to make this 'my community', or imagined that I created this (quite the opposite). To say that I'm trying to enforce stricter rules is not true.

I find your comments contradictory, to be honest. You say we're here as a group and that I should ask for ideas. People have suggested 'gen only' days before. I listened to them and gave them one day. Your verdict: I did wrong.

Let's pretend my opinions were exactly the same as yours. Would you still say I'm trying to make this comm "my own" or would you just be happy that Bakerstreet is the way you want?

I am 100% in support of the idea of a weekly gen meme day, but I don't think that will be a solution to this particular problem. Why not issues warnings, strikes and bans for repeat offenders?

No, it doesn't solve it but I doubt banning people will either. Creating new journals is too easy.

that's a fair point. Hopefully someday there will be a better option.

Mod Post: No shipping for a day

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