The slippery slope of site enshitification

Wish granted. However, making threads and getting likes on them gives you more points to put into reading threads, resulting in people posting more slop to farm likes so they can read more.

This is already the second site feedback this year of this nature, about people wanting to ban/limit tell others how to post on the fourm, because it does not adhere to their standards/expectations.

Hot take but i would rather hear from everyone rather than ban people simply because they have a differnt view of things or post in a different style from what i do, or like. Avoiding the 4 ai games posted this year doe not warrent banning ai alltogether so that no one can enjoy those games.

the same way that i said earlier i don’t expect vore or furry content to get banned.

@cheddar you and others are act like this is some commercial site run with he big bucks, but it is a small site, supported by patreon and a few adds. Stop acting like its google with a dev team that has the time and money to custom build you a forum. The number of open source full feature forum hosting software is few and far between. Discourse is arguably the best and most prevalent option.

Such high expectations as ‘don’t run at a loss’.

Most prevalent is meaningless if that prevalence doesn’t lead to anything good. Old as balls phpBB is better than this as a platform and is still under active development.

Way to take what i said out of context.

phpBB is not what new forums are using. I see more old forums switching from it rather than to it. it is under active development in the sense its being actively maintained. Discourse itself is now old enough that its not being developed so much as maintained.

It should be stated regardless of data, that if there weren’t an issue this topic would not exist. People are largely venting feelings, and those feelings are valid even if the data isn’t fully there. Mostly because these issues can’t be reflected in data. There is no metric for bad vibes.

We can however, instead of trying to invalidate people’s perspective, collect the feedback and turn it into actual action items.

Looking at what everyone is saying, here’s what I’ve gathered:

1. Many feel (and rightly so) that AI is a threat to artists and writers. The response by the WG team has not been sufficient to alleviate those fears and concerns. The ultimate solution does not have to be an outright ban, but it’s been an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed with more than just tagging. There are many options here, the team needs to just pick one.

2. Scams and shovelware. There aren’t a lot of them, but the total amount of scams on this site should be zero. The response by the WG team has been to make sure they are ok from a liability standpoint but has not enforced to a degree that satisfies most assembled here. This needs to be addressed, preferably with a set of rules that forces anyone trying to sell something to very specifically list what they are selling and to provide a playable demo.

3. The structure of the site in general has been an ongoing grievance since its creation. We’ve been waiting for the ever persistent second coming of Christ in the form of WG Itchio but that frankly needed to have been released 2 years ago to be relevant. Unclear on the potential solutions, ironically Grot likely has the most knowledge and very likely knows what needs to be done but to my knowledge has never really communicated this openly except for saying things about the Wiki or the Itchio clone.

4. Content moderation. Many have expressed here that the team has not done enough to enforce rules or what they believe should be the rules. I put this last because much of these issues are resolved by fixing the above problems then actively enforcing those rules. Then, if the issue was in any way a big deal, the WG staff should tell the community about it and why they did what they did.

These are problems that fundamentally need to be addressed pretending they are not issues is what got us here in the first place.

While agree with most of your points the op’s post and many following it were not as well worded, and not said in such a non toxic way.

As has been argued before in other site feedback though what people consider a scam and what is a scam are two totally different things.

In going through the ~92 posts for this year most contained either a patron or itch.

if a gaems development stops or is slow are the majority of these scams?

When you actually look at thes i think maybe 2 could be actually be seriously considered as a scam, vs just someone wanting to give the whole game dev thing a try. And those 2 topics also got zero traction.

Many of you are screaming scam at the person next to you who is trying their hand ad being a dev for making a patreon, when they have never developed a game before, and dont do it to your standards and expectations. My point is the comunity needs more empathy, and instad of constantly creating topis berating new posts and how they post, try to help in a more constructive manner.

I’ll address some of these as best as I can, to the extent that I can, as soon as I can. You’re going to have bear with me on a response as most of this kicked off while I was asleep. What a thing to wake up to

Please continue to talk and vent. As long as it stays civil, it’s not a crime to talk smack about Weight Gaming or to voice your genuine concerns. I’m charitably looking at this as people’s passion and care towards the site’s and community’s ongoing wellbeing rather than an angry mob.

I’m a bit curious how this would work. would it be a “1 drop rule” or something like +50% and you get the ai tag

The position of Discourse is a byproduct of two things independent of its quality.

1. Providing a UX more familiar to people that didn’t grow up with webforums
2. Being promoted far more vigorously (in order to generate a return for the venture capital behind it despite being FOSS)

The most relevant comparative sites to weightgaming are forums like tfgames and they don’t use discourse. I don’t care what ‘everyone is using’. I am not a herd animal. I care about the optimum solution for the site’s needs. It doesn’t have to be phpBB specifically, but the ‘everything-is-a-constant-scroll’ layout, entirely tag-reliant system isn’t working for our use case where there’s just too many different kinds of content under a single umbrella, with a steady daily trickle of activity across them all.

If we HAD to try and make tagging work, there would inevitably be multiple tags because of the different ways LLMs can be part of a workflow. EG;

1. Proofreading and editing
2. Code generation
3. Writing
4. Image editing (altering an existing image that wasn’t itself ‘AI generated’)
5. Image replication (creating an image without original art)

I would classify 1 and 4 to be ‘partial AI’ use since the developer/s are still creating original material in their workflow, whereas 2,3, and 5 use an entirely generative workflow from prompt to output. Then the question becomes like you’re implying, ‘how much was it used?’

For 3 and 5, I think you have to use a singular tag of ‘ai writing’ and/or ‘ai art’ because you cannot easily determine as an outsider which is generated and which is not. Decompiling a game to check its images is prohibitively time-consuming, and writing is even harder to analyse unless you deliberately filter for ‘AI Slop’ ie; common sequences in LLM responses that are rare in human writing. This varies from model to model.

All of this to say that tagging is a clunky system that becomes worse the more tags you need.

Ok, but what alternative, phpBB and discourse are the two big names, phpBB made ti to 3.3.x back in 2019 and has not had a major update since, where discorse is still getting new features even if its at a slower pace than in previous years 3.4.0 just release February of this year.

And what does phpBB do exactly that Discourse cant. Both have fourms, subcatagories, and tagss. Both can filter by these, both allow sorting of topics by various metrics. My observation is that outside of look, both do the same thing, display posts one after another(ignoring the whole pages vs continuous scrolling when it comes to count of posts on a page). Both have search. I’d argue discourse has way better post creation tools out of the box.

I guess what i’m really getting to and asking is how do you thinl phpBB is going to better handle this? Im intentionally leaving the subjective looks thing aside for the moment.

There are clear and obvious divides within the forum community about certain topics, such as use of generative LLMs, monetization, and game quality/legitimacy. The most obvious ways a webforum might address that is;

1. Completely separate non-game use of LLMs from anything game-related. All those duplicative convos about whatever 2-3 sentence prompt a dude put on caveduck? Banished to the chatbot subforum.
2. Mandate that any games launching with monetization systems (including patreon builds) goes through a probationary status of say, a month or so on a subforum before being moved to where it would otherwise be. A month is generally long enough to verify if a game is a scam or not.
3. Having site content sorted based on primary content (ie; male/female WG, Fur-only or mostly non-Fur content, Non-WG-centric games etc), then by genre if needed (VNs, etc) dramatically lowers the number of times users see content they don’t want/like, thus reducing tension and hatred within the community since tagging on its own obviously hasn’t worked. This is highly important for sites with fetish content given how subjective that can be.
4. Makes teamwork possible within the forum community rather than discord. Discourse can’t be used effectively for intra-community conversations due to how it broadcasts everything to everyone until the user opts-out. If I wanted to start a dev chat for a gamejam project, I have to do everything offsite which can be frustrating if not everyone uses discord, or whatever other issues can arise.

e: I would also point out that weightgaming’s discord channel is an indictment of how bad Discourse is, since discussions that should be on a webforum are being had there instead.

I’d like apologize to you right here. I’ve been given more information about what actually happened and not only did you not do anything wrong you also worked with staff to root out the real problem. The proof I had seen before painted a very different picture but now with all of the other information I can see that I was wrong and have changed my original post.

Also I know that some of these issues for some of you have been stewing for awhile but please remember that we all want the same thing here. We all want the this place to be a good safe place for all of us. Raise awareness of your issues not your voice. Don’t yell at the admins or each other because that isn’t going to help anyone.

Ok, but it is already sperated, Games are in the projects, projects &ideas, and curated projects fourms. If you scorll those fourms you will not find many chatbot topics, they have for the most part been banished from the games area. This sounds like your not filtering to the fourms you want ot look at.

This would be almost every game, and is a lot of moderation work so people don’t have to have any common sense. Not saying its a bad idea just a lot of work vs flagging offending topics or games, which is the current method. Consider that the topic/game that sparked this topic was flaged so many times in its first 24 hours it as auto paused multiple times, and had the moderator/admins attention a lot. I’d say the current system works just fine, it’s not like anything slips by us, in terms of flaging.

ok this is something admins could help with by giving us the appropriate subcategories, and is a great idea

Ok but none of these are fixed by using phpBB vs discourse, and none answered my question of why switch from discourse.

Looking past ESL spelling issues, as previously stated by many, many people, the tagging and filtering system Discourse uses is inefficient, doesn’t work, and due to both inefficacy and not being properly explained, is underused.

Then why are paywalled games that have been inactive for years still on the site, with links to ghost patreons still up? The rule on not asking about updates makes this worse by penalising attempts to query or contact developers.

Even if it was more than a handful of games, a ‘new games’ section would still be useful for separating older and newer projects, rather than the disingenuous forever-scrolling feed of Discourse.

Also worth pointing out that most games AREN’T fully paywalled. I am comfortable stating that most have either a free version or are free to play.

Flagging is not a substitute for due process. If the site wants to be better, it has to do better.

Wow, that was catty.

Well I had said my piece already on the Rose thread, but it was removed (shocker). While I won’t rehash it entirely, since I am confident Grot at least read it before deleting it, I want to reemphasise the most important points, tweaked slightly to fit the context of this thread.

The fact that that it took a direct callout of the site’s management to get any form of public response from an admin there is quite honestly pathetic. Not the dozens of angry comments. Not the horrendously scummy behaviour of the developer. Not even that thread being reported so many times that the auto-mod locked it. Only when the site’s management was called into question did someone actually wake up, then proceed to fall exactly into the moderation trope that GellyCannon had mentioned previously.

This, for context

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It took 9 days for that to happen.

But the line that really pissed me off was the exact reasoning why no action was being taken:

Holy shit.

So to keep this on-topic, I’ll jump straight to the wider ramifications of this sentence.

Where do you draw the line?

What level of moral or actual crime do you consider to be okay for someone to commit off-site before you restrict them here? Theft is apparently fine, what if I made a game with extremist political messaging? Or some underage characters? If I then made a “blindfolded” edition removing that specific content, then put it on this site, would that be okay? Of course it fucking wouldn’t, but the fact that I can even make that rhetorical question with any sort of seriousness is utterly insane.

I don’t like being so openly critical of this site, because I have overall enjoyed my time here. I’ve discovered tons of amazing games, genres I never thought I’d be interested in, and until this point never even had a problem with the staff.

Normally when something is reported, action is swift, even if the reasonings for that action isn’t always clear. So I just don’t understand why it’s taken this long for anything to happen in this case, especially when this was arguably the most clear cut case we’ve seen in years. And for that eventual action to be “we’re not gonna do anything”, wtf is even the point in having rules and moderation powers? People are making a mockery of your enforcement, but so long as nothing directly illegal is posted here you’re just gonna let it slide?

As for all the other points raised in this thread, I’m gonna let that stew for a while so I can come back with a more reasoned response and not just a gut reaction. I do 100% agree with banning AI in the gain jam though. I don’t care about anyone’s “but I’m not an artist” arguments, it’s a competition of skill with real prize money attached. Generating AI images is not a skill.

Also, I did make this prediction initially but please, this time, prove me wrong everyone. I want some actual change to come from this, not just another forgotten burial.

And btw, we all know how that Site Feedback thread would go. It’d get 100+ replies in 24 hours, everyone would get angrier, some insane individual would find a way to mention fascism and the thread would get locked, with no lessons learned. Rinse and repeat, every year.

In almost no time, I immediately found 6 games with AI assets, and there would no doubt be more AI games if I did more searching, since I searched by looking in the AI tag and checking 7 of the threads to see which were posted this year. Your statistics are wildly inaccurate.

Ok, im going to assume you followed the same criteria of topics only started this year, in the projects board.

I probably did miss some or failed to control click open some, and also could have failed to sort some. It was a fairly hasty spot check. So i will be the first to say im not surprised if the number i provided are off. There was a reason i asked if admins had better tools.

With that said, the tone of the conversation implied that over half the games posted are ai, and its this wide spread problem, lets just assume 9/92 have ai. Thats about 10% thats still not “wide spread” or “every other game is ai slop”. The numbers grounded in actually doing at least a minimal effort count of what has been posted since the bringing of the year was aimed at bringing the conversation closer to reality.