Poll: What is your opinion on tvtropes?

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

I HATEHATEHATE TVTROPES!!

I CONSUMES HOURS OF MY LIIIIIIIIIFE!!!!

That is to say that I freakin love it. I LOVE to see what tropes my favourite games/books use, and it's great to learn about new tropes (especially seeing as how I'm the main writer for a game project at the moment) But I hate how much time it takes. ;_;

 

[Soviet Heavy]

This thread might read like my descent into madness, but after hearing about the issues with ED and SomethingAwful, I did some research.

Nice to know that the same website I use every day is run like a fucking police state behind the backs of most people. Christ almighty, the mods go into a paranoid lockdown at the first sight of trouble.

 

[requisitename]

I like it alright. It's neat to find out where certain "givens" come from.

The only thing I have against it is that they can't seem to explain anything without dropping links to about 400 other tropes in the process. It gets confusing if they're trying to explain one by saying it's like "this" and "that" if you're not familiar with "this" or "that", either. Because when you go to THOSE links, it's the same thing.. more links as explanations.

It's called wikipedia syndrome.

"There's a trope for that." Haha.

I've been indoctrinated by school that Wikipedia is evil and otherwise awful, so I don't know anything about how it's set up. That seems fitting. I've noticed it all over the net, though.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

I have a love/hate relationship with it.
It's a cursed site. Every time I go on it, I lose half a day without knowing it. It's a curse, I tell ya!

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

I love reading through it.

I don't really know how many hours of my life I've lost just going through it, and quite frankly, I really don't want to know.

It's great if you've got time to kill, and kill, and kill, and kil-oh look it's dinner!

 

[redisforever]

I just got off it, after reading all the High Octane Nightmare Fuel stuff. At 11PM. I came here so that I could sleep later. Also, dailycute.net helped.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

The only thing I have against it is that they can't seem to explain anything without dropping links to about 400 other tropes in the process. It gets confusing if they're trying to explain one by saying it's like "this" and "that" if you're not familiar with "this" or "that", either. Because when you go to THOSE links, it's the same thing.. more links as explanations.

If you think that's bad, you should try reading about math on Wikipedia. Anything beyond high school-level stuff (and even some things at that level) is aggravatingly over-complicated by the way it's written. I understand the need for accuracy, especially in the body of the article, but it's like no one can even give a straightforward explanation even in the summary. Sometimes I can't even understand what they're saying about topics that I know well enough that I could teach a class on them (if I just try to read what's written there as an exercise, as opposed to filling in the blanks with my own knowledge), that's how heavily they lean on academic jargon and cross-linking to other articles. If you don't already have a degree in the subject, good luck, which isn't going to do a whole lot of good even to someone in a related field (e.g. physics or engineering) who happens to be curious about it but doesn't have experience with that particular type of math, much less someone from an unrelated field.

Anyway, off-topic ranting aside, while TV Tropes has its share of issues too, it's easy to get sucked into it wandering from page to page and discovering new things to watch and waste time on. I don't read it on a regular basis, but there's a pretty good chance that I have always had at least one tab with a page from it open in the background that I'm meaning to go back to when I'm bored or have some free time ever since I first discovered the site, and that was years ago.

 

[ThatLankyBastard]

I love it...

I mean, it's a collection of all the things you never thought about.

that's where I learned about Gainaxing, Word of God, Improbable Weapons, EpicFlail, and so much more!

No one thinks about these things until you read about them on TVTropes! And then you can't stop reading about them! Needless to say, hours of precious study time are wasted there...

 

[AntiChri5]

This thread might read like my descent into madness, but after hearing about the issues with ED and SomethingAwful, I did some research.

Nice to know that the same website I use every day is run like a fucking police state behind the backs of most people. Christ almighty, the mods go into a paranoid lockdown at the first sight of trouble.

Elaborate?

 

[Muspelheim]

I voted "meh", since all the obvious cliches it catalogs are the reason I have a low opinion of fiction.

Sadly, there's no getting away from it, mate. There's nothing new under the sun.

I do treat it a bit like a useful tool. It's a good place to start for some inspiration, and it's very useful towards keeping the tropes and scenarios you have fresh.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Tvtropes is easily my favorite website ever. It not only is very entertaining and is a great time waster, it also has got me to be interested in comics, books, tv shows, and video games I never would have even know about, much less touched otherwise.

 

[isometry]

I voted "meh", since all the obvious cliches it catalogs are the reason I have a low opinion of fiction.

Sadly, there's no getting away from it, mate. There's nothing new under the sun.

I get away from it by reading nonfiction. Philosophy, computer science, physics, mathematics. The theoretical sciences are especially creative.

Each generation makes the difficult research questions of the past look simple, using unbelievably creative tools. Imagine working with roman numerals all the time for arithmetic, and then having someone invent the arabic numerals we use today: all of a sudden unmanageably large numbers become no trouble at all. The arabic numerals are a truly creative solution, not just recycling past ideas. Similarly, relativity and quantum mechanics were new ideas in theoretical physics, long after guys like Sophocles and Shakespeare opined on the lack of new ideas in literature.

 

[Risingblade]

I honestly don't see the appeal, I find it quite boring myself.

 

[Muspelheim]

That is a point. I still can't quite wrap my head around how simple yet complex a concept like, say, 0 really is, and what it ment to us when it was discovered. However, I find it difficult to believe that it, and the Arabic numerals, just sprang out of nowhere at all. You always, always have to start somewhere.

The thing is, there is no such thing as a bolt of inspiration out of nowhere. In the same way that you can't pull something "original" (or any good) out of your arse, I do doubt that a mathematician could do the same. Both a writer and a mathematician base their ideas on older ideas. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

 

[El Dwarfio]

I love it, although I'm not obsessed with it, every few weeks I might have a burst and spend 2 hours or so brousing it XD

I mean it has pages for Dwarf Fortress and the Yogscast!

 

[spartan231490]

I like it, but the tend to shoehorn a lot of things into tropes that really have no business being such.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

This thread might read like my descent into madness, but after hearing about the issues with ED and SomethingAwful, I did some research.

Nice to know that the same website I use every day is run like a fucking police state behind the backs of most people. Christ almighty, the mods go into a paranoid lockdown at the first sight of trouble.

Elaborate?

Tvtropes moderators HATE Something Awful, and outright ban people who they suspect are "goon spies" because they happen to post on both sites.

One goon from Youtube started mocking TVtropes for some of their more questionable content. The result? Instead of cleaning the articles up, the moderators decided that the best solution would be to obliterate them completely. So instead of actually working towards fixing their public image, they instead decide to do a fucking Stalin-esque purge to act like the offending pages never existed.

 

[Xenowolf]

This thread might read like my descent into madness, but after hearing about the issues with ED and SomethingAwful, I did some research.

Nice to know that the same website I use every day is run like a fucking police state behind the backs of most people. Christ almighty, the mods go into a paranoid lockdown at the first sight of trouble.

Elaborate?

Tvtropes moderators HATE Something Awful, and outright ban people who they suspect are "goon spies" because they happen to post on both sites.

One goon from Youtube started mocking TVtropes for some of their more questionable content. The result? Instead of cleaning the articles up, the moderators decided that the best solution would be to obliterate them completely. So instead of actually working towards fixing their public image, they instead decide to do a fucking Stalin-esque purge to act like the offending pages never existed.

Err, what? I used to be active on the forums a while ago and I've never heard of the "goon spies" thing before amd the "Stalin-esque purge" of the "more questionable content" wasn't because of that person on YouTube, it was because it was, well, questionable content. Seriously, where did you research from?

 

[Soviet Heavy]

This thread might read like my descent into madness, but after hearing about the issues with ED and SomethingAwful, I did some research.

Nice to know that the same website I use every day is run like a fucking police state behind the backs of most people. Christ almighty, the mods go into a paranoid lockdown at the first sight of trouble.

Elaborate?

Tvtropes moderators HATE Something Awful, and outright ban people who they suspect are "goon spies" because they happen to post on both sites.

One goon from Youtube started mocking TVtropes for some of their more questionable content. The result? Instead of cleaning the articles up, the moderators decided that the best solution would be to obliterate them completely. So instead of actually working towards fixing their public image, they instead decide to do a fucking Stalin-esque purge to act like the offending pages never existed.

Err, what? I used to be active on the forums a while ago and I've never heard of the "goon spies" thing before amd the "Stalin-esque purge" of the "more questionable content" wasn't because of that person on YouTube, it was because it was, well, questionable content. Seriously, where did you research from?

The Wiki talk page. Look at it. Fast Eddie decided to go on a cutting spree that looks more like he's trying to cover his ass than trying to fix the site.

As for the Goon incidents, SA keeps tabs on TVT as well, documenting everything they see to laugh at. Both sites hate each other.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3470622