Some of you may have noticed that chat has been very quiet recently. I checked out the forums a while ago, and they weren't as active as back in 2016. I remember when hurt and heals started, everyone was having fun voting on them. In this blog, I will attempt to outline a few social activity issues and offer a solution.
Chat[]
I spoke with Korra a while ago, and we discussed chat for a bit. He mentioned that many people were finding chat too empty and only wanted to join if they saw other users. I've also seen a lot of users complain about an empty chat, and leave shortly after.
Vicious cycle: a chain of events that are continuously ongoing, causing a problem to continually worsen.
If everyone was always waiting for other people to join chat instead of joining themselves, chat would never be active. I think that if we have spare time, we should join the chat to encourage other people to join, even if it doesn't appear to be very active. Too many people have been waiting for the summer to boost activity, when it can be the other way around, because people want to go outside more.
In 2016, chat was always very active when someone started a "chat game" or if an important event was occurring, such as a convention. Even drama, something that we all know should be avoided, was bringing users together into the chat and making it active. Chat was sometimes so active that it was chaotic, which is extremely rare nowadays. Some events that caused large activity in chat include:
- The 2016 convention
- Chat games like SpongeBob trivia, naming emojis, real world trivia.
- Celebrating an anniversary of the wiki
- Large debates about wiki managements
We should definitely give some of the activities above another try today to boost the chat activity.
Drama[]
What exactly is drama? Is it a genre of literature, a school subject, the worst thing a wiki can have, the reason why people are leaving ESB, a play, or, as the online dictionary and the policy say, an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances?
What if I told you that it is also one of the biggest misconceptions on the wiki? We all know that no one wants to see heated arguments that escalade to insults, or people getting angry over debates. I believe that this is drama, but people having civil debates is not drama. Drama isn't good for a community, but people arguing about policies and voicing their opinions are. The only reason change happens is because people speak up about their own thoughts. Everything that is in the policy and even in society today was only made possible because someone decided that it was a good idea to try something else.
I think that the only reason we think that debates are drama is because drama usually happens with debates. Granted, there have been situations where arguments turned into insulting matches in chat to the point where moderators had to stop the entire chat to deal with the problems. However, why let one bad apple ruin the whole bunch? If it's unfair to punish a collective number of people for someone only one of them did, why are we doing the same thing with drama?
The number of people who want to argue their opinions are too often waved away for starting drama, and this has to stop. What's the point of giving us oppose and concern templates if we can't use them to disagree?
Forum Games[]
A long time ago, I took over a Hurt and Heal restriction proposal that eventually passed, giving stricter rules for hurt and heals. I do not believe that it was a bad decision on my part, because I never saw activity decrease. In fact, the main reason for me choosing to use the proposal wasn't to ruin the fun for people, as I was accused of, but rather to help hurt and heals. I provided many examples of hurt and heals that died down because of too many contests, too long a wait time, etc, but they fell to deaf ears.
Too much of a good thing becomes bad, and this is the case for Hurt and Heals and other forum games. Reusing the same type of forum game over and over again onto 10 different threads makes them boring.
The reason why the initial hurt and heals were so population because they were fresh. Remember the first Boss Battle hurt and heal? That was very creative and popular too, but it got carried onto too many threads, and it stopped being unique.
Don't get me wrong: I still don't want to single anyone out for anything. I just want to tell the community what I think should be done.
Relaxing the amount and frequency of the same type of forum game, and even trying something new, is the only way to bring up Forum activity to before again.
Thank you again for reading this blog. The most expensive boss, Alex.sapre (talk) 00:27, June 17, 2018 (UTC)