topic: mal users
when i first joined mal, i didn’t realize i would actually take part in its community. before i joined, i was extremely timid and scared to establish myself on online communities. because i wanted to add furude rika to my favorites list, i timidly made a request for her addition in the long-locked “request a character add” thread. i was so petrified of posting something wrong that i previewed my post countless times before i finally sucked it up and pressed the submit button. she, along with the other characters i requested, were added smoothly, and i didn’t do anything wrong. after that, i decided posting wasn’t so scary and started trying to make friends.
i’m very grateful i took the plunge and decided to reach out to others; i’ve made some incredible friends on mal. however, as mal has grown and changed, the type of users attracted to the site have changed as well. as thankful as i am to mal for helping me come out of my shell and make friends, its forums and clubs have passed the expiration date.
the five types of users i most often see on mal today are:
1. idiots who think they are intelligent
2. flat-out idiots
3. people who think their actions are cute or funny but really only serve to egg people on and/or derail threads and/or increase e-penis
4. trolls who think they are successful solely because they are annoying and know how to ban-evade
5. children under 13 who have not yet learned how to present themselves on the internet, and who shouldn’t even be using mal anyway
all types can be found throughout mal’s entirety, though most can be found in specific places. (of course, intelligent and fun users exist too, but this blog entry isn’t about positive things!)
type 1 tend to dwell in general discussion, posting in pseudo-intellectual threads in which they can show off how intellectual they are. in reality, they don’t really know about the topic at hand at all, but have to post because they’re intellectuals.
type 2 aren’t unique to mal, of course. idiots are everywhere! users who genuinely have no idea what they’re doing sadly populate mal. not knowing where to post certain threads or where to find painfully obvious answers to painfully obvious questions, idiots open up opportunities for people to troll and cause more harm than good. unfortunately, one can’t be banned for being stupid, so we just have to deal with it.
type 3 can be found everywhere. because of mal’s current usability problems, the fun thing to do is to make witty yet exasperated remarks about mal’s newest problem. this increases one’s e-penis and makes one look cool to the rest of the community, dontcha know?
can be found mostly in: GD and support.
type 4, ah, type 4. not naming names here will be an effort. is mal really that fun to troll? do we attract low-quality trolls because of the current state of the community? why is ban-evasion such an amazing feat these days? is posting nudity and stories about interest in furries and lolis really something a decent troll would do? i suppose it works on mal because of our high number of type 5 users. i generally love trolls, but not ones that are completely transparent. lurk moar and then come back.
type 5. it goes without saying that most children under 13 are just not intelligent or mature enough yet to counter some of the ridiculous shit that goes on on mal. this is why one has to be 13 or over when signing up, but nobody reads the ToS these days! these kids are the ones who typically post thread after thread about mal’s current usability problems without understanding features such as forum search, or simply reading the most recent page of threads in support. (for the record, private messages were disabled because Xinil disabled them!!!!!! nobody except Xinil knew when they were coming back!!!!)
threads that shouldn’t exist started by kids who can’t defend themselves is a perfect breeding ground for type 3 users to cause confusion and an outbreak of idiocy. rather than helping the poor kid, (or in some cases, type 2′s) they opt to post completely unhelpful or inflammatory comments.
this got quite lengthy, so here is a cute picture to break up the text.
as i’ve mentioned, mal was the first online community i’ve ever actively taken part in. coincidentally, i joined early enough in its life that i was able to see it grow exponentially. i saw mal when it was just a few people posting in the same threads, and i see mal now where many, many more users of all ages and intelligence levels are posting in the same boards we had back then. of course things would be different. it’s just so interesting for me to note the differences.
ultimately, i now use mal mostly for its list function and character entries. if i’m feeling brave, i venture into the forums and brace myself for what i’ll find. if i’m in a good enough mood, it can actually be kind of fun.
Ah, MAL back during the golden year(s). Was fun times, windy. I remember when I first got on and it was pretty fun. Now, I just use it to keep track of crap I’m watching…sad.
The only time I ever go into the forum nowadays is if I’m linked to it.
It’s only ever linked to highlight someone’s idiocy.
Otherwise I never go on the main site at all, unless it’s to lookup something in the databases. MALU is a great thing.
Now that that’s said,
FIRSTSECOND POST ON THEFIRSTTHIRD ARTICLE FUCK YEAR.slowpoke.jpg
Then there’s the 14 year olds who are tucked away in little clubs, constantly cybering and rping with each other. :(
Four annoys me beyond belief. It’s a classic case of “LOL I TROLLLL U” while everyone else just thinks the person is a desperate idiot.
it seems to me that large communities have a tendency to head down this path. the only large community i’ve ever spent much time in was gamefaqs. people say that there are “good” communities there on certain games’ boards – like super smash bros melee’s – but i’ve never seen one. the metroid 2002 forum was made as a kind of safe haven for people who met on the metroid prime board at gamefaqs, and from the very beginning toozin talked about how the moderation would be set up to try to avoid problems that “large communities” have (of which everyone but me had been a part, apparently). it worked well for a while but then turnover started to go up and even though there were only a few dozen people on the forum per era, most of them were lame or foreigners with insanely bad english they refuse to improve or mentally retarded or all of the above and the administration spent most of their time making fun of them.
so what is the difference between a small community and a large community? thinking about it now i think it mostly depends on the discussion scope. if the scope is allowed to roam to evolution or abortion or console wars and it’s not 100% people who know and respect one another then you’ve got problems. so metroid 2002 forum when it was about sequence breaking and speedrunning metroid games was good, while later metroid 2002 forum (“everything, also video games, also metroid”) was not so good and i pretty much disowned it until it became useful to me again as a taiga guinea pig. i know fork feels the same way. but i mean what has happened in metroid in the last few years? so most people see it as inevitable that way too. mal’s problem i think is more inherent in that the scope is so wide to begin with. it was headed down this path from the beginning and we just happened to be there early on to see it and maybe understand it.
Large forums also have the tendency to develop elitist groups, among older members, which usually include moderators, who like to team up and scrutinize new members for whatever reason, instead of trying to be friendly with them, which doesn’t help the problem much. I’ve seen a lot of online communities torn apart because the moderators show favor towards their friends, instead of being impartial, leading to the banning/ragequitting of new members, causing the community to stagnate and eventually die out, as the older members leave, due to school, work, life, etc. It’s a good thing that we don’t have much of that going around on MAL. MAL just needs a few more moderators under its belt and it should be fine.
great comment. sasuga oniichan. oh and KING OF NIGERIA is birdie, fyi. lol.
Chirp. :V
it’s almost as if i wrote this except that i rarely lurk mal these days enough to give a damn (smirk)
the 5 types users basically describes all communities these days that have lots of weeaboos in them ( ´_ゝ`)
we’re brothas (smirk)
Cute drawing.