A bit of unofficial Althanas research

[Ebivoulya]

Nothing quite wrong with smut. Granted, it does seem to take up a large quantity of currently active threads.

Exactly, and we're giving people a 65 score for it. Some people don't even have to pay the AP. Bargain.

I can understand the frustration of seeing the place you had many memories change. But the way it also reads is you're upset that the vast majority of content just isn't content you prefer.

Things change, and I've never been afraid of change on any level. But this isn't change - this is eradication of our identity on an industrial scale. I don't prefer one style of content to another as long as its creative and free thinking. I just don't think smut for the sake of smut qualifies.

I believe these to be symptoms of the AP system's implementation.

The base scores for No Judgements and Workshops were put that high specifically to make fewer people request full judgements, due to the backlog. You basically have to be shooting for a JC to have any reason not to just make it a workshop, and if it's going to be a workshop anyways, there's no reason to worry too much about the writing. The system incentivizes this 'go big or give up' mentality.

The gap between the automatic JC score of 80, and the base workshop score of 65, is too small in my opinion. Even if it is increased, though, I don't think it alone will stop this trend of No Judgements and Workshops. From the number of 'nj this one?' comments I see in chat, it seems like most people just want to write for fun. We've cycled in quite a few new members over the last few years, and they are the new majority. Reducing the workshop base score will probably convince a few of them to try regular judgements, and they might find the more focused feedback makes them want to try to improve more, but none of us can control the type of threads they want to write.

The workshop system complicates this problem. It seems like most of the people who submit threads for workshops, do not themselves post in other people's workshops. Unless this stigma of a 'feedback bar' that needs to be met disappears, they won't ever have enough AP to start requesting bigger judgements anyways. Not to mention, if most of the workshop submissions dry up because people moved back to regular judgements, the entire AP system withers. It's practically built on the lack of confidence of the majority; unless you're confident you can get near a JC, you just workshop it and stay stuck propping up the system by creating the main source of AP, without ever gaining enough of it yourself to move up to better judgements.

We really need extra sources of AP to be able to untangle any of this.