>>163313
I'd still say that's debatable. I mean look at how things have progressed - /chat/ is still gone, and other than infrequent shakeups like this, /oat/ is still the same old repetitive /oat/. And the number of serials has bloated, along with the number of people who post in nothing but serials. Now, can that be directly attributed to /gala/? Well, seeing as how these changes started around that time, I think it's fair. Though other factors are in play as well - such as the natural progression of the community and the entropy of the imageboard fandom. However, I feel it has still played a role.

People want to knee-jerk agree with the isolation of serials because they didn't like them, or advocated for the idea of a serial board, without looking back at exactly what effects (positive and negative) that decision has had over the long run. I would ask you to take a critical eye back at it all, to the situation at the time (with how /oat/ and /chat/ were at the time) and how the situation is now (with /oat/ and /gala/) and ask yourself what else might have been done to reach at *least* as 'good' a state things are in now, with less trouble and alienation of people or groups.

Could we have reached the state we're in now by simply loosening /oat/'s pony restrictions and letting serials stay in /chat/? Would we now not still have 2 boards (/oat/ and /chat/ vs /oat/ and /gala/), one a general off-topic board and one a 'serial' board? Yes - and /oat/ would probably not feel as non-pony, and /chat/ would not *only* be serials, and we probably wouldn't have experienced the rush of new serial creation as people holed themselves off even more from the rest of the site in response to their being a board exactly for that. The handful of serials which existed at the time - Love and Advice, /pony/ After Dark, /b/ & Friends, Order of the Insomniacs, and Fellowship of the Pic, would not have been joined by nearly as many copycats all wanting their own little patch of circlejerk chatroom. And this handful of threads would have been more than fine existing on a regular off-topic board with the very minor changes that were suggested as counters to the serial-board - like a lower bump-limit and additional pages. However, management at the time would not consider any of these options, or the long term outcomes, as it had already predecided it's course of action before any discussion had occurred.

And in addition, what I agree with you on was the execution, as it was a less-than-stellar choice executed with incredible hamfistedness on top of it, unable to even stay the course of the decision and arbitrarily switching at the last minute from 'serial board' to 'splitting /chat/ between topical and non-topical' which caused months of confused frustration and dissatisfaction which inevitably, eventually had to be reverted back and the original idea being implemented instead anyways.

>>163300
Literally as long as The Hands doesn't bring up police brutality lol, the ONE topic I seriously can't seem to keep my tables from flipping on.

>>163316
And the catalog only shows the subjects (and only if you hover over the image), so that's a good point.

>>163292
What you want to say or argue doesn't matter to the people in charge because you're completely incapable of raising even a valid point in a way that doesn't immediately cast you as a butthurt kid who can neither give good rationale or be a good representative voice of that perspective. No one with any level of responsibility listens to you because you give them zero reason to, and when they don't (for these reasons) then you go right to what you flat out admit is insincere steam-blowing assholery for it's own sake, which only further alienates you from ever having any impact on things - just like most of the no-fun-allowed cyberbullying-is-real crowd. Sorry. Truefacts.

>>163318
I think that the presence of better options in the light of two years of hindsight does not immediately make it a bad decision. Of course there was a more optimal path. There nearly always is. That doesn't invalidate the decisions made.

Considering the long term outcomes in this case would require nearly prescient foresight. The decision wasn't perfect, but it was good.

>>163319
We weren't asking anyone to be Nostradamus. We were asking people to have a basic level of considering logical outcomes. Every thing listed as something that's happened, was something that was specifically enumerated as 'this is what's going to happen if you take this course of action' - a bloat in the number of serial threads, more isolation, and with the natural entropy of things, redundancy in the other two boards. You don't need to see into the future to 'predict' likely outcomes, especially when you have people telling you exactly what's likely to happen. Instead, the few, persistent voices who reviled the mere presence of serials won out and their crusade to get-them-outta-my-sight was adopted with little thought to the long-term consequences and outcomes. -That- is why the decision was 'bad'; not 'invalid', but that's like saying the Cuban embargo wasn't 'invalid' because a more optimal path existed. It seemed like a good idea to someone, somewhere, but that doesn't make it 'good.' The decision was neither perfect -or- good, in the face of more logical, piecemeal alternatives that had much sounder rationale behind them than 'fucking serials get this shit off my board.'

>>163320
The bloat in the number of serial threads and increased isolation were known consequences when the decision was made and I would assume factored into the reasoning as an acceptable price.

If I recall correctly the natural entropy of the other board's collision was never brought up as a talking point by the peanut gallery. If the dozens of users talking nonstop about the change failed to think of it, I can't see how it is anything but the product of hindsight. /oat/ had its independence and its own culture. At that time it was unthinkable that the boards would have become redundant, and similarly, holding up serials as the thing keeping /chat/ from becoming redundant would have been met with derision.

>>163321
If "the consequence of this decision is more isolation and more serials, and therefore, obviously, more serial posters, (whom we know and specifically acknowledge always end up spending exponentially more time in the serial and less time in the rest of the community, which is in fact a part of the very reason everyone seems to think we need to 'do something' about serials in the first place)" was an 'acceptable price' of an idea.... to minimize the effect of serials, that would make the individual(s) coming to such a decision absolutely, mind-bogglingly retarded; I don't see how what you just said in the first sentence doesn't completely jive with the point of how such a logical outcome was easily foreseen - and I would posit is in no way any reasonable person's 'acceptable price.' And I know I specifically brought up board entropy at least once, as a consequence of removing such a large portion of the board's population who would then instinctively have no reason to venture outside their new board's walls, rendering the original board with a dearth of people to respond to threads, rendering /oat/ the only populated place to go. Another logical outcome.

>>163322
Ah, so it is that fundamental of a disagreement?

I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree.

serial threads ate up all of chat at one point and should have just been disallowed tbh

why is /oat/ still anon today. i thought this was for just like a day

>>163324
It started as a joke but has since turned into an experiment.
There will be cake.

>>163325
Except for the ones who are dead.

On the bright side, once things turn anon, you can keep up the pretense that no one really left.

if it becomes permanent then i do understand people complaining because it was done without talking to the community in any way. that's ok for an occasional gag but pretty shitty for an actual change

im assuming that its not going to stay this way though.

>>163318
I can only respond to this post with one thing.

^ This

>>163328
It's not a permanent thing.

  >>163328

If this ever became a permanent thing on /oat/, then I would petition to bring back /chat/. I mean, if forced anon discourages non-serial topic-less socialization, why not have a board for those of us that enjoy the non-serial topic-less socialization?

>>163318
I'm speaking from the perspective of somebody that greatly appreciated a /chat/ board without the clutter and baggage of serial threads. There was absolutely no harm in letting folks create their own little circlejerk serials in /gala/ exactly because it was completely isolated. /chat/ getting deleted and /oat/ turning to shit had pretty much nothing to do with the creation of /gala/.

It might have been reflective of the staff's sense of ideals, and it foreshadowed more hamfisted poorly thought out moves to come, but it is not directly connected to the decisions to open /oat/ up or anything else. The staff could have simply began to make better decisions afterwards. The decision is not to blame, the people that continued to make them (and got progressively worse at their jobs) are to blame.

Running with this train of logic, was the creation of /rp/ not a major factor in killing old /oat/, therefore opening up the doors to allowing /oat/ to post non-pony and killing /chat/? Would you say it's fair to at least partially blame those who wanted to create /rp/ and get all the roleplaying off /oat/ for the death of /chat/? I wouldn't, I just see it as a shaky decision followed by other even worse decisions later on. They might be related in a sense, but in retrospect the creation of /rp/ was a good move, and the only people who would blame /rp/ for today's misfortune either have a shaky grasp on how decision making works or are still bitter about /rp/'s creation.

>>163336
You mean /gala/?

oh, you specified non-serial. I don't see why that matters.

Last edited at Sun, Dec 28th, 2014 14:57

>>163340
oops, name field

>>163340
>>163340
>somebody that greatly appreciated a /chat/ board without the clutter and baggage of serial threads
You mean what /oat/ exactly is right now? Yeah.

>>163346
If you see no difference between post-/gala/ /chat/ and modern /oat/ then what can I do but assume that you never went there?

>>163341

It's leads to less sense of obligation, and feels a lot less cliquish, in my opinion

>>163349
Topicless socialization on ponychan is almost exclusively between the same group of friends responding over and over like a skype room. How is that not cliquish?

>>163347
They are functionally identical. The differences in people and personalities is not a function of that, but other factors.

>>163340
Running with this train of logic, was the creation of /rp/ not a major factor in killing old /oat/, therefore opening up the doors to allowing /oat/ to post non-pony and killing /chat/? Would you say it's fair to at least partially blame those who wanted to create /rp/ and get all the roleplaying off /oat/ for the death of /chat/?

That doesnt even make sense since /rp/ was around long before /oat/ was even a thing.

That was actually the huge problem people had with the oat roleplay, since there was literally a place for it that people refused to use for whatever reason, yet they wanted to have roleplay on oat 24/7

>>163351
"Because anyone can join in" despite the fact that because it's just a lot of people talking amongst themselves the chances of anyone wanting to join in are next to nil when compared to threads that have actual topics.
It's like going to a general job fair for a job in computers versus going to an IT workshop for networking.

Chances are, you're going to easily more people to your liking in the workshop and be able to relate to them more easily than the people who are at the job fair simply because you know for a fact that they share at least one of your interests.

To use an actual comparison, compare /mlp/ to /oat/

Every fucker who visits /mlp/ is either a troll or likes some facet of My little pony, be it the show, the fan art or the porn.
There are some people who visit /oat/ who dont watch the show at all anymore, only come here to talk to people and dont even like ponies or talking about them.

>>163351

Skype chat rooms require invitations. Serial threads are created to be formal communities, typically attached to other boards. If cliques form in topicless, non-serial boards, they feel more organic and a little less formal.

>>163352
Functionally identical in that they both don't have serials, but that's as far as relevance goes as a response to what I said. Sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough; when I said I appreciated a "/chat/ board" without serials, I meant that I appreciated /chat/: the board without serials.

>>163354
I know the issue that you're talking about, which has been present since very recently, and I know the forced migration of roleplayers to /rp/ that killed old /oat/ and eventually inspired the mods to open the board up. My bad if I got the timeline wrong, but it WAS just an analogy and you didn't really address any points being made.

>>163355
An organic clique is not as cliquey as a formal one to those on the inside, but the effects are the same. It encourages discussion between the same isolated group of friends and discourages topics and content.

Last edited at Sun, Dec 28th, 2014 16:02

post deleted, shoe eaten. I misread if anyone saw that.

>>163363
I won't tell anyone~

>>163355
You do realize serial threads started from cliques formed in normal threads? Don't even try to say /oat/ isn't cliquish.

>>163362
"old" /oat/ was killed when they killed off-topic posting and forced everyone to /chat/. The /oat/ that came after that was horrible and stayed horrible until they killed /chat/ to save it.

Also the only difference between post-/gala/ /chat/ and modern /oat/ are that there are ponies and more autistic people. They serve the same purpose besides that. The people and rules(things like no porn, etc) are the only things that make it different from /ef/ or MLPchan /oat/ or /GET/. They are all for the same random circlejerking threads.

>>163362

So what ? My whole point in the post I made in this thread was that some of us want a board that allows for less formal, topicless non-serial threads for socialization.

Now, while in my experiences here I generally find that the lack of formal serialization and named communities leads to less cliquishness, I admit that it inevitably occurs to a degree. But here's the thing, in /gala/ and in the skype chatrooms, multiple cliques form withen the same serial thread/chatroom, often time competing for the same time in the same threads. When those same cliques do pop up in a place like /oat/ or like they used to in /chat/, they typically have their own threads.

>>163365

>The /oat/ that came after that was horrible and stayed horrible until they killed /chat/ to save it.

no, /oat/ died twice. first they ran everyone to /chat/. then more people came to the ruins and they ran all of -those- people to /rp/ or mlpchan and after that it just sort of stayed dead until /chat/ was kilt

/gala/ is a bad situation because on one hand a lot of them are confined on that single board and never leave. but on the other hand if you pour /gala/ back into /oat/ at this point it would just smother everything else because that's what serial threads do and in the end the only traffic increase would be inside said threads. so there really isn't anything you can do about them at this point

>>163362
If your point was that mods can make shitty decisions, then as one of said mods that was promoted to admin, i can safely say that i agree with that.

I do try to learn from mistakes though, and i dont think i've repeated all that many, feel free to point them out to me though since i cant fix shit if i cant see a problem.

>>163365
Forced thread moving was a problem, but the roleplaying was a totally separate issue.

On paper you're right about their similarities, but in practice they are worlds apart. I didn't think that needed to be said.

>>163366
That's an awfully specific breed of harmful pandering you're asking for to justify a whole board when there are so many reasonable compromises. But since this is all reliant on something that the mods have confirmed is not permanent, I digress.

>>163368
Nobody's perfect or psychic or whatever, I'd just rather not blame shitty decisions on other shitty decisions from the past like a chain of dominoes because that doesn't make sense to me.

>>163367
I know, but the only people that cared the second time were the gross /rp/ers so that one wasn't a big deal. I know thats what ultimately ended /oat/ and made them have to kill /chat/, but the /oat/ before that was just as dead as far as I'm concerned.

/gala/ shouldn't have happened in the first place, but now that it has you can't remove it.

>>163370
In practice they really aren't that different. I know cause I go to all of them. The difference is the people, not the topics.

>>163371
>In practice they really aren't that different. I know cause I go to all of them. The difference is the people, not the topics.
iktf bro

>>163370

How exactly is it harmful ?

>>163371
Were we strictly speaking about the topics?

>>163373
see >>163362

>>163371

>/gala/ shouldn't have happened in the first place, but now that it has you can't remove it.

something had to happen, though. /chat/ up until the change had become an absolutely miserable place to post. finding threads was a massive massive hassle and half the time when you did it was either extraneous serial thread drama that spilled over or just nonsense. the main reason /ef/ was so fun was because it didnt have any of that (of course when it became efchan it just fell backwards into itself and turned into a mess) and since they deleted /ef/, something needed to be done

>>163374

I'm aware of that post, what I want to know is why you think that would be harmful.

>>163376
Reviving a dead board dedicated to /oat/ cliques just talking amongst themselves that don't want to use skype or /gala/ because they're "too formal" is an awful redundant idea, and nothing good would come of it even IF /oat/ was permanently anonymous, which it supposedly isn't.

>>163377
>Reviving a dead board dedicated to /oat/ cliques just talking amongst themselves that don't want to use skype or /gala/ because they're "too formal" is an awful redundant idea
I agree with you there, but only because that's pretty much what /oat/ is right now.

Theres no rhyme and reason to it beyond "The oat community."

>>163374
So what? Atmosphere? Cause outside of /oat/ which has more fedoralords the atmosphere is mostly the same too.
>>163375
I think there were other things that could have been done. Like mlpchan has serials but they aren't all over the front page. But when you make /gala/ people made even more serials and now theres way too many to even thing about merging it back.

>>163379
That's the weirdest part, forced anonymous has done very little to discourage non-serial topic-less socialization in the first place, so why is this even being brought up?

>>163380
I'm seeing a mix of selective interpretation and bad opinions here, not entirely sure where to take it.

>>163381
>bad opinions
>just label someone's else's perspective a bad opinion, no need to discuss it
pls

>>163382
Yes

>>163381
I was talking about /oat/ as it is now in general, not during these shenanigans.

As for your question, because pony related threads popped up within minutes of tripfag genocide.

>>163381

>>163387
>>163387

*tips dubs*
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Last edited at Sun, Dec 28th, 2014 16:58

>>163388
good meme

>>163299
>recently