All The Tropes talk:Why Fork TV Tropes

About this board

Not editable

Umbire the Phantom (talkcontribs)

While discussing articles on here off-site with another friend group, they mentioned the use of "hugbox" as something that didn't exactly give them confidence.

I'm personally inclined to ask for a change in phrasing there, not solely because of that one person being put-off (not that I remotely blame them), but because it got me to thinking - it's an artifact of an era I feel like we collectively should be long past, and while the conflict between the userbase and administrators is an important part of that, framing it this way sets the wrong tone IMO.

HLIAA14YOG (talkcontribs)

Umbire, I will describe in three ways why we are describing TVT as such:

1. They exclude any talk about certain sites(like Encyclopedia Dramatica) because ED attacked TVT once.

2. They excluded any direct reference to the person of Christian Weston Chandler because, well, for motives which we can define as "Chandler is such a disgusting person we don't want to be reminded he exists". Incredible for a site which contains pages about criminals.

3. They excluded all pages about pornographic material.


TvTropes has defined itself as a safe space which excludes anything that personally offends the administrators. That we consider bad not because their views are bad on a personal level, but because a wiki about media must store information about media, it's a principle.

I think it should stay to make clear to new users which we not delete controversial pages because of their controversies. To make them both aware and to make them not afraid of creating trope pages about that controversial material.

Umbire the Phantom (talkcontribs)

...I don't think you understood my query.

I am not contesting the reasons ATT split off from TVTropes to begin with. The only thing I'm contesting here is the choice of words with which we make our goals clear - the use of "safe space" and "hugbox" as pejoratives gives off (among other things) the impression of a lack of diligence on harassment, given that those usages are employed to justify behavior towards users in communities any reasonable admin would find unacceptable.

HLIAA14YOG (talkcontribs)

I think you're making a classic "a chick without feathers is a man" kind of analogy. Ask for a third man's opinion, but I will still think it's a foolish analogy.

Umbire the Phantom (talkcontribs)

That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

HeneryVII (talkcontribs)

I'm not touching THIS one.

Utini501 (talkcontribs)

Keep the phrasing, not a fan of changing it because some random outsiders take issue with it.

GethN7 (talkcontribs)

Concur. We cover everything from Sesame Street to Mein Kampf. While the latter is noxious, vile, and about a hideous ideology the world is better off without, denying it's existence or censoring it's contents would be to the detriment of our goals of academic freedom and discussion. As for the words at hand, I see no issue with them in the context @HornyLikeIAmA14YearOldGirl has described and frankly concur with their take.


@Umbire the Phantom I want to make clear I am not blind to your concerns, I do understand the risks you are bringing up, but in this case, the context is clear and just because others off this wiki may find it offensive, that alone is not grounds for preventing certain usages of terms unless they break an on-site policy, and I do not see, at present, any policy that is currently being broken, especially since I had a hand in writing much of it.


As for wanting to sanitize terms from an era which, as you described, is one you feel should be moved past, fair point, but by that standard, one would have to sanitize the writings of Mark Twain because of his use of words considered vile racial slurs today that were largely acceptable in his day. Values change over time, and just because some things are offensive now, that does mean it's an excuse to retroactively censor things on the grounds of contemporary offense, we need firmer cause it has caused actual harm, mere "it rubs me the wrong way" is not sufficient.

Umbire the Phantom (talkcontribs)

"As for wanting to sanitize terms from an era which, as you described, is one you feel should be moved past, fair point, but by that standard, one would have to sanitize the writings of Mark Twain because of his use of words considered vile racial slurs today that were largely acceptable in his day."

We don't have control over Twain and his writings, nor do I wish for us to - what we (as in, ATT) do have control of is how we present ourselves to others, and I feel the word choice is slightly counterproductive to that end - enough to want to discuss it with the rest of you, anyway, but not nearly enough to warrant a nonsense comparison like that.

GethN7 (talkcontribs)

I apologize you felt my point was nonsense, but one person's offense without firmer cause than "I don't like it" is not grounds for us to change things. For the record, I reiterate my own stance and see no reason, on procedural grounds, to change things.


If a consensus emerges to change the item in question, then I will respectfully bow to the majority will, but there is no cause for automatic removal by policy, so I would suggest going that route on this topic should your disagreement still stand.

Umbire the Phantom (talkcontribs)

I'm not asking for an automatic removal or trying to circumvent The Process™ - as I said, I wouldn't have made a point of tagging people if I didn't want to at least discuss the idea first. I got what you're saying well enough and your point was coherent, I just think the comparison wasn't exactly apt.

GethN7 (talkcontribs)

Fair enough.

Robkelk (talkcontribs)

While discussing articles on here off-site with another friend group, they mentioned the use of "hugbox" as something that didn't exactly give them confidence.

Perhaps they would be good enough to present their concerns directly, rather than going through an intermediary. That way, their concerns can be made clear and debated, and perhaps somebody cam be persuaded to change their position.

As for the complaint... I decided to refresh my memory on what "hugbox" means. Merriam-Webster does not define the word. Wikipedia has an article about a literal box that hugs someone, with this hatnote:

For metaphorical "hug boxes" in media, see Echo chamber (media).

The first sentence on that page is

In discussions of news media, an echo chamber refers to situations in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.

As far as I can tell (having never had an account at TV Tropes, I'm going by secondhand accounts), the term appears to be an accurate description of the site at the time of the fork.

Is it pejorative? That depends on the definition of "pejorative" that you're using - "having negative connotations" or "tending to disparage or belittle". (Both definitions are quoted from Merriam-Webster.)

I agree that the term has negative connotations, and I submit that it is being used specifically to invoke those negative connotations. It describes a major distinction between TV Tropes and All The Tropes as of the time of the fork, and any group is by nature unconsciously or consciously biased toward itself.

I dispute the idea that the term is being used to disparage or belittle. It is simply a statement of opinion based on the experiences of the people who wrote the page, and those people did have accounts at TV Tropes. The proposition is that, by refusing to allow dissent, the moderators of TV Tropes at the time turned that wiki into an echo chamber - the sentence merely uses one word instead of two. As far as I know, there is no equivalent term that does not have the negative connotations that "echo chamber" and "hugbox" share.

As for this setting a particular tone... well, I can't speak for the other mods on this, but I personally like that particular tone. If somebody is going to be so offended by the use of a single word that they don't want to participate at All The Tropes, then in my opinion and by my experience they are not sufficiently mature to be able to respect other people's points of view. And respecting other people's points of view is a core policy of All The Tropes.

My vote is to leave the wording as it stands.

Looney Toons (talkcontribs)

Rob beat me to the pedantic response!

My vote is also to preserve the existing language. Anonymous nonspecific "people" offended by a single explicitly-non-offensive word, whose collective opinion is relayed entirely second-hand, is a disturbingly suspect justification for an edit. If they are users here, they should step forward and make their own cases why this is such a horrible, terrible word to use to accurately describe TVT circa 2012. And if they are not users of the wiki, why should they have any input at all? And as long as they remain hidden and using Umbire as a mouthpiece this boils down to Umbire appearing to be using Appeal to Popularity to effect a change.

(And unlike Rob, I was there at the dawn of the third age of mankind on TVT in 2012, and I was sideswiped by the hugbox on more than one occasion -- being the oldest continuous non-admin user on TVT and being told I was a "troublemaker" by Fighteer simply for disagreeing with him was just the start of it.)

I also second Rob's final point and further note for irony's sake that if a simple edit had been made to change it to an allegedly "less offensive" term, I suspect no one would have noticed or cared. But by making a fuss about it beforehand, as if it were a genuine issue of significant import, it became one, because it awakened the memories of those of us who were there and actually experienced it. I doubt such a simple edit would pass now; one of us would probably revert it in a second.

Robkelk (talkcontribs)

and further note for irony's sake that if a simple edit had been made to change it to an allegedly "less offensive" term, I suspect no one would have noticed or cared

To be fair, the page is currently protected so that only administrators can edit it.

Looney Toons (talkcontribs)

Ah, point. I forgot we were talking about a page in the project workspace.

Umbire the Phantom (talkcontribs)

@Looney Toons @Robkelk

As I explained in the forum thread not hours earlier, this person wasn't making any demands of me - I brought this issue up of my own volition, and did not do so with the expectation of anything changing immediately, if at all, let alone appeasing this one person who didn't even dwell on the matter for more than 5 minutes. I simply thought about it myself and thought it'd be worth at least bringing up with you.

Looney Toons (talkcontribs)

That's not the impression we got, of either the request or the number of people involved. Your odd phrasing "another friend group" read to me -- and very clearly also to others -- as more than one person was involved.

Umbire the Phantom (talkcontribs)

Yeah, that was bad word choice on my part - it was one person within that friend group, and I'll take the blame for not clarifying that initially.

Fast Eddie's comment

2
SirMoogle (talkcontribs)

The post links to something on Encyclopedia Dramatica that Fast Eddie said, but the link is now dead.

Robkelk (talkcontribs)

Thanks for letting us know. I've found a copy of the page in the Internet Archive and have replaced the dead link with a working one.

(And in the process I've read the thread. Wow. Fast Eddie really did not understand either the license that he was using on his website or the benefits of collaborative working. If he hates that kind of work that much, I wonder what operating system he runs on his computer - because Windows, OSX, and Linux all make use of collaborative working.)

Improved Search Engine

2
Chemtrail Morgellons (talkcontribs)

"We have an auto-completing search box, to help you find pages faster." TVTropes has a terrible search function. It doesn't work with adblocking browser addons and I generally used Google to search in it. Older versions of it were worse than the current one.

There are no older topics