The slippery slope of site enshitification

[Grimimic]

You want me to post my concerns in a part of the forum where they can be brushed under the rug and hidden away fine.

TLDR You need a rule that says you can just ban people for whatever and stop letting bad people ruin this place with loopholes

This place is going down hill fast and it’s largely due to how you guys are handling bad actors.

A few years ago we had a guy enter the game jam without being part of the community. The only expansion he was interested in was padding his bank account with the prize money. Some of the other judges and I that year asked to just disqualify him since he entered in bad faith and wasn’t going to score very high anyway. You said something like “where do we draw the line? What defines our fetish?” Having the fetish defines the fetish.

When ai became a thing people asked for it to either be banned from the site or to be put in some sort of quarantine away from the rest of the real games. Now most the topics in the project tab are low quality ai “visual novels”. Filtering Tags only work if people tag things and does nothing for a new user visiting the site for the first time. They see two real games on the front page in a sea of ai shovel-ware and go back to itch. Real creators now look at the projects tab with disdain.

You allowed ai to compete in the game jam. This speaks for itself. You let someone use a plagiarism machine to compete in a competition of skill and creativity with prize money on the line. That’s super fucked up man.

Cheating in the 2024 community choice section of the game jam. WAS NOT AWARE OF THE FULL SCOPE OF WHAT WAS HAPPENING HERE AND WOULD LIKE TO ISSUE A PUBLIC APOLOGY TO JUPITER

There was a project here that said it wouldn’t be started until the creator raised X thousands of dollars. Some of us brought up the discussion of if this was a good idea to allow a new user to show up and take money from the site’s users with nothing but good art and a “trust me bro” to go on as proof that they would be getting what they paid for. It’s been years now with nothing close to a demo (though I do here that the patreon is still updating, but also heard there’s no demo there either)

Now we have this Rose game and it’s ok because he isn’t hosting his weird project directly on the site, but instead just links to it and his patreon? How big is this loophole man? Is the hypothetical DrMinorDiddler420 going to be allowed to post about his project here too because he only links back to his own website and the demo he posts here is only 10 minuets of a knight killing low level goblins?

This has been boiling over in my head for a long time now. I’m an old man and I’ve been a part of this place since I was a young man. I remember what it was like before weightgaming, and I remember what it was like to have no community for games like this at all. I’ve supported the site financially, as a judge, and as a creator. I appreciate Grot and Kilif and all the users who worked so hard to bring this place together. And that’s why seeing the sate of things now has been upsetting me so much.

You guys as admins make the rules. This isn’t a courtroom. You don’t have to follow the laws to the exact letter. You can use your better judgment to stop bad behavior without consulting the weightgaming bible for interpretation.

[clinko_clinko]

i agree with grim. its been harder to come back to this site to try to keep up with certain projects because of those dime a dozen AI projects.

[DolphinsRWeird]

It’s been a while since I frequented this site. I used to take a gander every other day during the peak of the pandemic, but I’ve slowly been migrating to other sites. I do think the inclusion of AI in the projects category really didn’t help when looking for new projects. I understand that want to use such a “convenient” ““tool””, but it just clogs the topic page from seeing other hand made projects.

Something I’ve lamented in other places, and I’ll repeat here, is that I feel like weightgaming has lost a certain “spark” it once had. Now instead of coming here to get a view of new projects, I go to other sites like itch.io and find a pretty decent selection.

I still have found memories of coming to this website and seeing the latest updates for projects like GUT, Some Bullshit, Apostles, etc. But I’ve just haven’t found the reason to come back and look at the projects here in a good while.

[moonslashx]

I second this, things have been getting way out of hand for a long time and we’ve deviated immensely from the sites stated original goal of supporting creators.

This baffling corporate style neutrality does nothing to support much of anyone, and without any kind of vetting or enforcement things have just gotten more and more out of hand.

Even if I don’t fully agree with Grim on AI it’s crazy we don’t have a separate section of AI specific projects. It’s also as equally insane that we don’t have any policy for monetization.

People should not be able to advertise and accept payment for a non existent project. People should be required to disclose exactly what they are selling when trying to sell projects on this site.

That’s not a barrier to entry, that’s a bare fucking minimum. And not having clear enforcement only makes for a bigger problem.

[Korota]

I’ve also been really disappointed by the direction the site has gone. Most of all, condoning the use of generative AI images in people submissions is spitting in the face of people who put actual time and effort into these things only to be drowned out by slop “text adventures” and “visual novels” made by lazy and untalented people who are admitting their writing can’t stand on its own merit by shoving plagiarism-birthed garbage pictures to farm likes from horny lurkers with no standards. This is a community that was built by REAL ARTISTS and REAL CREATORS, and allowing this AI trash churned out by slackers and grifters at all is a slap in their faces.

[AimiIsFat]

I can agree with a fair bit of this, though some of the more controversial parts I don’t have the full story on so I don’t want to form an opinion on just that.

I think the forum needs a major redesign overall in the way categories and tags work. Mandatory tags are already a feature in the Discourse forum software, so I think we should make groups of mandatory tags such as forcing a choice between ai or no-ai among other things such as project status (at minimum: released or unreleased).

You can block tags. Go to Preferences → Tracking and go set what you want to see.

However, this means AI is default visible to everyone, and most people probably won’t even touch their preferences. In that case, it may warrant a full separation of categories, especially with how much everyone seems to be upset over all the AI.

I don’t agree with a full site-wide AI ban, but I do agree it should at least be mandatory to label and thus easy to block. To be clear, I would never use AI in my projects, and I am an artist myself who finds it highly immoral, but I understand why others who don’t have the skill or patience to draw would use it. I would, however, agree to ban projects where the majority of writing is AI, since the ones with images-only might at least have good writing, as I’ve seen a couple times.

EDIT: Also, yeah, ban AI in the Gain Jam. 100% agreed there.

[Korota]

Why should writing be protected from AI use but pictures aren’t? They’re both ART. I’ve done a fair bit of writing off-site, and it’s insulting every time I see someone who doesn’t even use capitalization or punctuation slap some AI-generated coomer bait into their unfinished and quickly abandoned Twine game and be praised for it. People who write AND draw are both harmed by the use of AI in either way.

Using AI images in your writing project is just saying that your writing isn’t good enough to stand on its own. They should submit it without the art and ask for feedback to help them improve, not bury it in AI slop to garner approval.

[moonslashx]

I understand people are pissed about AI, I get that, I really do. We need to focus on actionable things that separating the categories and disclosures of content

If this becomes an argument over AI ethics Grot will just use that as an excuse as to why his stances are neutral in the first place.

I encourage everyone to pour their anger into something we can definitively all agree on. Poorly made shovel ware being sold regardless of origin should not be something we support or allow on the site. Grifters looking for pre project donations should not be featured on this site.

I know people want to argue about AI, believe me I know. Do not derail this and lose any momentum. The game that led us all here wasn’t even made with AI but we can stop it, and other games like it if we just keep on target here.

[AimiIsFat]

Honestly… kinda changed my mind after thinking a little more into it. Thanks.

My main point was games like FATACLYSM. INCREDIBLE writing in my opinion, though I’ve never played more than the (quite long!) demo, honestly, because the monetization is overpriced and kinda sketchy plus AI bad. If we banned AI entirely, well, RIP to one of the biggest most well-written games on the forum.

Why ban AI images exclusively? Because there are at least some good games with AI images. AI writing is ALL slop, and it’s less common so you receive far less backlash for its ban.

But anyways, yeah, I can kind of get banning AI entirely, now. If a game is really good enough and with enough effort, they could really easily just, you know, do what everyone else does and actually hire an artist. It isn’t as hard as it looks. It’s just that I’ve met plenty of people who don’t realize that is a thing you can do with relative ease.

My only disagreement would be to give maybe a 1-2 month “grace period” where anyone would be allowed to go and remove all AI from their game and preferably replace it with real art. Also, probably extensions up to 6 months for games like the aforementioned which have so much content that just 1-2 months isn’t reasonable.

[MuckMage]

I definitely understand wanting to keep the site open to a large amount of people. It helps the community grow and helps the site to keep running. But if there really is stuff that needs to be cracked down on, then it needs to cracked down on. There’s being cooperative and welcoming, and then there’s rolling over when real problems are happening.

AI isn’t really the issue here tbh (even though there could be much said about it). There is some real messed up stuff happening, and not at least pushing back properly is worrying.

[Zenthicks]

Not allowing AI should be the bare minimum for any creative community that wants to be worth a damn. I don’t even bother looking through the projects here anymore because of how much AI slop gets posted.

Anyone who says they need AI to make art assets is being lazy. Some Bullshit started off without an artist and still caught traction because Nerds gives a damn about writing and game design. The only people AI is “empowering” are people who don’t want to put in any effort. This is why AI slop games never have decent writing or mechanics either.

Taking a look at the “Rose” game Grimmick mentioned really boiled my balls. This is a game that’s using AI to manipulate content from real people without their consent, and the mods here let the dev rules lawyer it instead of immediately fucking banning him? You can ban people for being fucking annoying. You’re not the government, your job is to make a community that’s safe and fun to be in, not follow your rules to the exact letter like it’s the Ten Commandments. There’s a reason most online communities have a rule that just reads “Don’t be a dick.”

When I started making Apocalypse XL this was the first place I posted the game to. Now I’m not sure if I’ll even make a thread for the game I make after it. Y’all are slipping and you could be doing better but you’re not.

[GellyCannon]

Here as the Other One who got @'d in that thread. Benefit of the doubt with this section choice, as it’s still in “latest” topics for whoever uses that primarily (I do!). Hoping my text wall isn’t too unreadable, but I have a lot of thoughts that are poorly organized:

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Grimimic’s covered most of the things I would want to! (And thanks, I was typing my own starter.) I’m not nearly as privy to the inner workings such as the Game Jam results, so instead I’m going to focus primarily on what it looks like to someone who circulates the forums nearly daily among my usual logins but ISN’T as deep in the circle.

I think the elephant in the room with content that gets posted is that niche fetish games ARE profitable. Definitively. There’s enough people under the umbrella of “gamers that like growth and expansion” that it can and WILL work.

And frankly I feel we all ultimately want them to be? Not to make all costs go up, no games free, but to increase the amount of games able to be made. Real ambitious titles.

A lot of games from the Game Jams, whether completed later, continuing development, or formerly abandoned, garnered a lot of attention due to their thought processes that exceed the usual fare through true passion.

When the average person is willing to toss a dime at a promising project, whether it is a Kickstarter, Patreon, or even a straight-up full itch/Steam release, I see it as a genuine show of goodwill between people! Heck, for all it’s worth half the people who barge in for "next update when"s, are aiming to show enthusiasm.

IMO this forum is a fairly nice place overall! I think a lot of its early appeal was been feeling like a grassroots community tethered directly expansion related fetishes!

But you lose that infectious energy a quite a bit when the disingenuous opportunists come to town, seeing the same thing I see but twisting it to ONLY be about the dollar signs. The scammers, rule evaders, the people who really have no interest in the artistic side of the matter.

And to call it how it is, I feel like the site is primarily losing touch with that initial grassroots audience that actually cares, rather than any one else.

And I think this matters a lot to the site’s health!! The argument of “AI is less expensive/more efficient” whatever- I do not think this itself is actually relevant as much as it’s continued existence here, and I’m going to say why:

There is very little that happens here these days that cannot occur on another site.

There’s not as many posts about how to do XYZ or what it should be like either, most are from the incredibly indecisive rather than full discussions on game design. More and more games, big and small, are getting posted first to other sites despite the initial uptick from this place’s creation, whether it is also itch or even just announced through socials. Itch inherently has more AI games too, so you can’t beat them at that. (I’m not going to make any claims about Discord servers for games here though, because I’m not even in WG’s)

I did not think much of it initially, but the most recent mini-game I made was partially not posted here because of this, but it’s on the Wiki without my doing. That isn’t bad (such is the purpose of a wiki!) but I hope that makes it clear that stuff really does exit the stratosphere of the site these days, even when people do browse here.

If the core group that made your community leaves, people who want to change the landscape with new games, then all of your potential does too! If you want this site to thrive then you’re gonna have to bring back what made it in the first place: People who actively care about improving their work bit by bit, and learning how to do it!

This part following is speculation, not to be taken as directly as my above thoughts but one I want readers to see if they agree with:

I have the AI tag muted. Have since it was made into a tag. Ever since the gradual rise of AI being more prominent there’s been less new games actually getting made and posted here that don’t use it, and it has felt like an absolute graveyard.

I do not think this just because more devs are using AI, but because it is literally scaring off those who do NOT want to use/see AI material.

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To end, I want to highlight that I was not part of the AI discussions when that was new! I let The People squabble. But I was part of the one recently because it’s a type of infraction far beyond that of “Is AI ethical for games??”

There isn’t even a argument related to games anymore, it’s literally just Stop Using Pictures of Actual Real People for Your Profit Without Consent. This just feels concerning for management period and pretty indicative of the direction the site is going, and frankly it’s leaning away from any actual community members at all, regardless of AI stance.

EDIT: Sorry about that one @moonslashx, I’ve been typing since the thread started. You make a good point in your posts about AI as a topic here, but I DO hope the closing part of this post is concise enough to make it smooth.

[moonslashx]

To be clear, the Rose game didn’t use AI, he literally took the pictures off of Instagram and Facebook.

[Jupiter]

Even when there’s an entirely separate issue, you can always trust Grim to air out the dirty laundry with AI. I don’t really care to debate the ethics of it here, since it’s been a moot point on the site that people can’t agree on for a while now. All I’ll say is that people should probably be focusing more on the actual shovelware/grifter devs that are doing reprehensible shit and getting away with it instead of just rehashing “AI bad”.

Also, the blatant lie about the jam directed at me is a new one. The mass brigading campaign the first time around wasn’t enough, I guess. I can only hope that the mods will set the record straight on the misinformation that you’re spreading in that regard.

[GellyCannon]

Regardless of whether or not you cheated (again, not part of the excavation team on that- I have no claims) the statement that the management was supposed to clear this one up is a big management concern, if true!

[AimiIsFat]

@Jupiter

The mass brigading campaign the first time around wasn’t enough, I guess.

A little off-topic but what was this mass brigading campaign? If someone was brigading then that SHOULD be a bannable offense. To clarify, I haven’t heard about this controversy before. Which community sent people over to harass you and who incited it?

[laphometsu]

Without reiterating much of the points said here by commenters above. I will say that I’ve personally had plenty of artist friends who have been turned off from the site due to the rampant amount of AI that’s been infesting WeightGaming.

Add in the fact that some submissions slide by without a proper AI tag, and it’s easy to become weary of any new game that releases onto the site. It feels like there is no longer any genuine passion for the art, and the community is just full of sleazy opportunists who will put out a 15 minute long demo, lure people in with an appealing enough thumbnail, then leave those unfortunate enough to subscribe to their patreon with scraps as they leave their project in development hell as they move onto the next grift.

In order to address this problem, there needs to be a SERIOUS discussion with the moderation of the site, perhaps a reform in their process, and address this growing issue. It seems as though they would not like to get their hands dirty, and it is hurting the platform in the long run. Ultimately…

I do not see this place lasting if this continues, honestly.

[Jupiter]

The whole situation was dealt with a while ago, but Grim decided to dig it up again. Frankly I’d rather just not think about it at this point, which is why I’m not happy with being directly attacked on this thread when it was sparked by a completely separate issue.

[grotlover2]

Long story short there was a lot of tomfoolery on both sides and Juptiter’s team was targeted by an external group which lead to the incident Grimmic talked about.

Ill explain in detail once everyone gets a chance to voice their opinions here. I would like to respond all at once.

[RussianInternet]

Who cares? It’s clear at this point that you don’t really care about what anybody has to say and are determined to continue on this path of strange, corporate indifference which is the complete opposite of what anybody in the community actually wants