TVTropes kerfluffle?

[seawasp]

Recently I heard some people saying there was a major shakeup at TVTropes, with the comments being basically "The site owner's deleting everything he doesn't like". Anyone out there know anything? Given how TVTropes had been designed around the idea that there was no such thing as notability, no need for cites, etc., it would be terribly damaging to its usefulness if someone's taken it upon themselves to eliminate large chunks wholesale (as opposed to occasionally taking down NSFW material).

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

First time I've heard of it, though I'll admit I don't hang about the forums.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Okay, checking the Page Restoration Petitions page, it looks like there was a mass deletion of the Hentai index back in April. Maybe that's what is being referred to?

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

The only place I saw a TVTropes shakeup being discussed was a few weeks ago over at wank_report, in this thread. It appeared to begin as a kerfuffle over advertisers pulling out due to NSFW content, but perhaps snowballed into something else? Difficult to parse; could be a storm in a teacup.

[pedanther]

Official statements are here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TheSecondGoogleIncident

and here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=kiqoyj58taihfp8hpbezck0s&page=2#46

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

To my view it's not so much what was done, but how it was done. Which is to say with announcement coming in the form of scolding people when they would notice that a page had been taken down. That and the site owner referring to anything he didn't approve of as, "Pedosh**" (not censored in the original). Calling anyone you disagree with a pedophile, or at best a pedophile supporter, doesn't seem a good way to bring about rational discussion.

I'm not by any means claiming there would have been no dissent if the owner and admins had come forward and said, "Here's the problem, our advertising provider doesn't like these pages and is no longer willing to accept the former compromise that prevented the advertising money from being yanked last time. That means we will be doing X, Y, and Z. If you don't like this then *you* can do the footwork of finding and advertising source that will pay for the hosting without objecting to content -- but, even if you do we're still taking action Z because we've decided that content doesn't fit with out mission." But, I believe their would have been much less dissent, and more of it would have been directed at Google rather than the site owner and admins.

Or in shorter words, the site owner and admins went, "Fire! Ready, aim." and were then surprised to discover they'd put a bullet in their shoe.

[kjn]

Agreed. Not that I've been active much on TVTropes, but I came very close to deciding that I would never contribute to the site at all anymore.