Now let me begin by saying I’m not looking for a fight here, but it’s been bugging me for a while now.

Famous last words, I know.

Today, I’d like to talk about censorship. Ponderous Background

I’ve been with TV Tropes for a while now, since around 2007 and I’ve been a fairly regular reader since then. When I first got linked to it, it took a few weeks for me to finally clean out all the damn tabs from my browser. Best time I wasted that year.

It was refreshing in its candor, everything was discussed, nothing was forbidden. Sick topics with sick examples gave me a better understanding of a lot of topics than a clinical explanation ever could.

It was also a gold mine for sick links I could troll my friends with. Good times.

But even the clean topics taught me a lot and entertained in equal measure, perhaps moreso. The site was fun because the discussions were fun. On Discussions

The discussions were fun because we were free.

Free in the sense that you can scream whatever the hell you want in the woods. Except your friends are with you, they’re hilarious, and so are you.

True, a lot of the replies to any example didn’t always add too much to the discussion, but they were fun, damn you. Taken as a whole, the entire block of discussion pretty much could sum up why a joke was funny by watching the fandom interact with it in a vacuum.

They also could contain moments of loss, sadness, or the kinds of things you only confess on your deathbed discussed with the kind of anonymity one can only dream of now. Admittedly, a whole bunch must have been fake, at least I hope so. Most of those, by the way, are in topics conveniently marked with “No Real Life Examples Please” now and are lost to us. Purge

One day, I visited and saw that the site seemed different. Doing my usual rounds, I noticed there was less talking, less content, less examples. I tried to go to a page and saw that it was gone entirely.

The great purge had begun.

One by one, whole articles disappeared. Eventually the truth came out, Google AdSense didn’t cater to sites with mature topics anymore so they rolled out new posting guidelines and culled all the offending content.

I can understand this decision, I know the cost of running a site. But there are alternatives out there, reddit is still plugging along mostly on the sales of reddit gold for example, and it seems like they didn’t really try very hard before changing the entire dynamic of the site.

At the time I wasn’t outraged about it, I’m still not, just somewhat put off.

We didn’t really need the mature articles, I said to myself at the time. Now I’m not so sure, if we hide discussion of a topic and call it taboo, progress halts on that front. How are we supposed to address anything if we don’t talk about it? This is why there are still people who think AIDS only affects gay people.

Regardless, things changed and we tried to make do with what we had. Unexpected Effects

Eventually though, the discussions petered out, comments were being deleted for being irrelevant so the jokes stopped too.

Unconsciously, I stopped visiting as often as I used to.

A few years ago though, as I was the head writer for a large newsletter that discussed marketing tips and tricks, I decided to spin things up a bit and ran a popular segment that discussed overused marketing tropes and alternatives.

For research I used TV Tropes and I was saddened to notice that it didn’t really grip me anymore. I could look for what I wanted and go without a second thought, a far cry from my first visit. Why wouldn’t I? There’s nothing that would entice me to look deeper, the site is sterile. Formatting Issues

It’s not just the lack of discussion that kills it for me though, it’s the format.

More than 90% of the main content is still there, so why is the magic dead? Simple, streamlining.

Whoever streamlined the articles did it masterfully, there’s a place for everything and everything in it’s place. There’s a section for the Fridge, Analysis, etc so that no page ever goes on to be particularly long. The problem is, this ensures that the link clicking behavior is no longer organic.

The great part of the old format was that you discovered something new while reading and there’s suddenly a very enticing link to all the other things similar to that. It was like finding a dollar bill in a library book, that was the crack/heroin/drug of your choice.

Now, I can finish a page in 5 minutes. I am now at the bottom of the page, my job is done. There are no links to further sections of interest because they’re all at the top. This is a UI fail.

Even if the links were at the bottom though, what’s the point? They don’t have any interesting/funny context that would make you want to click them. So I’m free to leave, and this freedom saddens me because there is a mountain of content here and I have no interest in it.

Say goodbye to the rest of your day? Hardly. Final Thoughts, I swear

Admittedly, my nostagia glasses could just be covering my eyes. The site could have been shit and I’m just getting too old to enjoy the new and improved one. I can’t tell.

If so, then please ignore the ramblings of a crotchety Gen X-er who wants you to get the hell off his lawn.