Anime-relatedness of 4chan memes on Danbooru

Right of in the start, I'm really sorry if i'm jumping the gun and posting where i'm not allowed.

NWSiaCB, you fighted so much that you got my attention. I was really worried that you, somehow change our standarts in our images(lol, i could simply just see the profile and see User Level). That made me think "well these recent events maybe will change Danbooru! It is a bad thing?"

Some topics:

"GG" like pictures, "Shitstorm Menace", etc... : I think you must give more credit to our comrades. Danbooru is a pretty calm, decent community. We could have got much worse uproar many other times. I'm sure we all can keep being civilizated, and on topic (art), regardless the theme on the content uploaded, because we must (and will) evaluate it artistically (of course we will exclude prohibited content like said in the rules).

Vivian images: I like Vivian. A lot. But she do not belong in Danbooru "per se". If she's draw in a good, anime style, yes. We do have good Vivian Art.

Rules: I think that reworking DA RULZ must be something in our minds, yes. It's not like they are inutile, but they could be a lot more helpful. Of course, none can replace human revision, but if newcomers had a better "clue", something that reflected more precisely our "actual" standart, there would be less job for our moderators, admins , janitors, etc.

What i think that is the most important all these days are: We are okay? i can say "sure!". Now, It's possible to improve, even more? Maybe. Changes are really unnecessary? I don't know.

That can be discussed right?

And i'm pretty sorry, Mr. Wypatroszony. You gave me a decent answer back there, when i really was sure that would recieve none, and yet i didn't replied before, and i feel ashamed (reallifesuxsometimes). Well, saying that here: Thank you mate.

@Kikimaru

You've been posting a lot of Mass Effect images as of late, many of which are far from looking Anime-style.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're doing that out of spite.

Uh, no, kikimaru always posts whatever floats his boat and always has.

I've been replaying Mass Effect.

I don't see why anyone thinks my uploads are ever for anything other than I think it's cute and/or well drawn.

Also, typing @username doesn't notify.

Kikimaru said:

I've been replaying Mass Effect.

I don't see why anyone thinks my uploads are ever for anything other than I think it's cute and/or well drawn.

One can only wonder how in the world did you manage to become a builder...

Also, typing @username doesn't notify.

Yeah, I figured as much. Speaking of which, why not add such a feature?

D'Eye said:

One can only wonder how in the world did you manage to become a builder...

Because I tag obsessively, edit wikis, watch out for vandals/new users, and try not to shitpost in the comments.
Presumably.

It's not like my posts aren't moderated.

Leaving the content of the rules themselves aside, we shouldn't be documenting one set of acceptance criteria, and actually using another. This is very unfriendly to users who haven't been around long enough to understand the unwritten standards. I don't see a problem with changing the rules in itself, and of course approvers will always have to make judgment calls on quality and suitability. If we can't be bothered to accurately describe even the broadest of our criteria, though, we shouldn't be surprised when people complain that they're applied inconsistently or at random. Even "it's entirely up to the whims of the janitors" is better than what's written in the guidelines now, if what's written now isn't true.

uxw said:

Leaving the content of the rules themselves aside, we shouldn't be documenting one set of acceptance criteria, and actually using another. This is very unfriendly to users who haven't been around long enough to understand the unwritten standards. I don't see a problem with changing the rules in itself, and of course approvers will always have to make judgment calls on quality and suitability. If we can't be bothered to accurately describe even the broadest of our criteria, though, we shouldn't be surprised when people complain that they're applied inconsistently or at random. Even "it's entirely up to the whims of the janitors" is better than what's written in the guidelines now, if what's written now isn't true.

The problem with updating the rules is that no one can agree what to put there. Something one person might consider completely fundamental might be more of a general suggestion according to another person. So we wind up not doing anything and just using the outdated rules.

Replacing all the rules with just "it's entirely up to the whims of the janitors" may technically be more accurate than the current ones, but I don't know if that would give new users a better understanding of what does and doesn't get approved than the current rules do. If anything it makes it sound even more random than it really is.

Apologies for not responding in a while, but I haven't had as much time to type lately. Still, it's probably for the best, since I hardly want this thread to be all about me, or, for that matter, Kikimaru.

NWF Renim said:

NWSiaCB, I'm curious to see where these images stand in your vision of what is and isn't acceptable on the site.

Sorry, but I can't go into too many of those in detail for reasons of time right now, but just glancing at some of them, the first few are decent quality, but obviously not related to anime. The Battletech one, however, is, I believe, the Japanese version the Timberwolf, since the original Battletech 'mechs were literally ported straight out of Macross as a fan game, and when Battletech was sent back to Japan, they had to redesign the 'mechs, so their art was always different.

Others include the likes of really terrible scribbles, like the To Heart one I saw.

I'll try to give a more thorough blow-by-blow one later, if you're still honestly interested.

Kikimaru said:

I don't see why anyone thinks my uploads are ever for anything other than I think it's cute and/or well drawn.

If you find this "cute and/or well drawn", then... well, I already knew you were beyond reasoning with, but still...

At least most of the worst examples aren't getting approved... yet.

Still, if you are trying to do this out of spite, I only used Mass Effect as an example purely as something off the top of my head of a non-anime-related game. I'm not going to be offended if you actually find some quality and anime-related works. The only one I found was this one, but hey, that's something, I guess.

It does make me wonder why we have a /10 versus /4 for what determines the amount of posts users can upload at a given time. The fact that someone can maintain a 20% deletion rate, but still have functionally infinite uploads is, itself, questionable.

Anyway, the real issue at hand is this:

Toks said:

The problem with updating the rules is that no one can agree what to put there. Something one person might consider completely fundamental might be more of a general suggestion according to another person. So we wind up not doing anything and just using the outdated rules.

Replacing all the rules with just "it's entirely up to the whims of the janitors" may technically be more accurate than the current ones, but I don't know if that would give new users a better understanding of what does and doesn't get approved than the current rules do. If anything it makes it sound even more random than it really is.

It goes beyond just that people don't agree what the rules are. It's that the janitors are apparently in conflict over what the standards are.

Apparently, they want to mostly keep this to PMs, and not show that much overtly, but when there's this kind of conflict over the direction the site as a whole should go, then it's obviously something that begs for the actual leadership of the website to address.

All I can see, looking at this, is that the ship is left rudderless without the admins or mods coming back to correct the course once in a while.

NWSiaCB said:
It goes beyond just that people don't agree what the rules are. It's that the janitors are apparently in conflict over what the standards are.

Apparently, they want to mostly keep this to PMs, and not show that much overtly, but when there's this kind of conflict over the direction the site as a whole should go, then it's obviously something that begs for the actual leadership of the website to address.

It's been this way forever. Getting janitors to agree on policy is like herding cats. I don't think most janitors even read the forum, much less communicate over PM.

The truth is the site has no leadership. Albert has always been hands-off and jxh seems too busy to get involved in forum debates these days. Effectively policy questions on Danbooru don't get settled unless there is 100% consensus, which rarely ever happens.

Yeah, gotta agree with you this time. It's almost impossible to get stuff done here.

I do read the forums but my free time is very limited as are my interests. I only really come here anymore for Kantai Collection art, I rarely browse the porn or anything else so I hardly noticed any influx of meme art until I saw this topic. I think if it's drawn well it should stay (but the majority doesn't seem to be) but I sort of do my own thing anyway ¯\(°_o)/¯

Toks said:

Replacing all the rules with just "it's entirely up to the whims of the janitors" may technically be more accurate than the current ones, but I don't know if that would give new users a better understanding of what does and doesn't get approved than the current rules do. If anything it makes it sound even more random than it really is.

I was being flippant, but I do genuinely think it'd be better — it wouldn't be actively misleading, at the very least, if not actually useful. It'd probably be the clearest concise and accurate statement we could get, short of albert, jxh2154, or some hypothetical admin appointee writing and enforcing new rules, as forum #101345 implied.

I'm not about to suggest that anyone actually change the wiki page to say this right now, of course.

OK, I had a little extra time, so I sat down and tried to give a look-through. I didn't quite feel I was about to go to sleep, anyway...

NWF_Renim said:

NWSiaCB, I'm curious to see where these images stand in your vision of what is and isn't acceptable on the site.

Also, I forgot this last time:

Naumahagtos said:

"GG" like pictures, "Shitstorm Menace", etc... : I think you must give more credit to our comrades. Danbooru is a pretty calm, decent community. We could have got much worse uproar many other times. I'm sure we all can keep being civilizated, and on topic (art), regardless the theme on the content uploaded, because we must (and will) evaluate it artistically (of course we will exclude prohibited content like said in the rules).

The problem is, it takes no effort at all to have people sign up and start commenting.

One image about Gamergate isn't enough to bring people in, but if this starts becoming a place where all sorts of 4chan art is all over the place, it starts attracting the sort of people who come to look at Gamergate art. That's the whole point of the Eternal September references. (And I saw it happen before with the likes of Ecyclopaedia Dramatica, which was originally about Live Journal users, but got turned into a 4chan wiki.)

Conversely, you find peaceful communities when the number of people participating are so small, or the community is so focused upon a narrow topic that nobody particularly has reason to fight. Things like Dwarf Fortress's "Upper Boards", related to the game, tend to be civil, while the fighting takes place in the "Lower Boards" that are the general forums, and where people who don't even play Dwarf Fortress tend to stay. I don't play them, but the communities around things like Train Simulators are supposed to be some of the best, just because the sort of person who would go trolling generally isn't going to have the patience to play that game.

Danbooru's generally pretty peaceful because, barring some uproar over some guro thing that was uploaded, there's not really that much conversation that needs to be done. Danbooru's not really a social media site, and the forums are for strictly maintenance-related topics to help keep it that way. You come here for the art. The major reason I look at the comments section is just because it tends to clue me into what other people are looking at, since anything that gets a lot of traffic might be something I'm interested in, as well. (It also favors doujins over porn.)

That's why this sort of uploading of things that invite these controversies to Danbooru need to be discouraged.

If all that separates this place from being 4chan's drawfag art collection and another extension of the crap that comes with it is the fact that this place is for generally foreign-language material, then that line in the sand needs to be maintained. As several others are commenting, it's just subjective "what passes for this janitor" where there aren't any hard rules, so if there isn't any pushback on this, they'll be running roughshod over the rules, and the basic reason why people come to Danbooru will change.

I don't think there will ever be enough volume of drawfag images to ever change the site culture. There is a grand total of one #GG related image and the vast majority of the 1,000 or so drawfag images are anime related.

also Encyclopedia Dramatica isn't really a wiki about 4chan. Its got overlap in community but its focusing on the internet at large and shitposting.

Ironically, if you haven't made it a big point in images related to 4chan that its not acceptable, there would have been absolutely no impact whatsoever. You're creating a perfect environment for drama by your actions, unfortunately, whereas just ignoring the offending content would be more productive towards maintaining a peaceful atmosphere.

While I do read the forums, I haven't commented on this particular debate, because I don't feel like I have anything concrete to say about it yet. There's still a small number of images under vivian_james, so I don't think their presence is going to have much effect on the site.

Saladofstones said:

I don't think there will ever be enough volume of drawfag images to ever change the site culture. There is a grand total of one #GG related image and the vast majority of the 1,000 or so drawfag images are anime related.

This is where I stand. If something #GG related really turns into an issue on the site, we'll deal with it on a case-by-case basis. But I don't see any particular problems at the moment. Even then, let's take post #1822339, the only image under the gamergate tag. I don't think it's any good and I doubt most other Janitors did, yet it gets approved anyway by Not One of Us, as usual.

It's one thing for any disagreeable image to be uploaded, but that's just a pre-approval process, so they're not fully active on the site yet. With that in mind, shouldn't there be more questions directed towards the individual Janitors and up that approve such images in the first place?

I think so, especially in cases where the person completely ignores any criticism and keeps doing the same thing.

But on what basis do you make that criticism if not adherence to some existing guidelines? Without some foundation, it just becomes "I don't like what you're approving." It's just another form of majority vote at that point, albeit among approvers.

uxw said:

But on what basis do you make that criticism if not adherence to some existing guidelines? Without some foundation, it just becomes "I don't like what you're approving." It's just another form of majority vote at that point, albeit among approvers.

The quality standards listed in the wiki and whatever the test janitor phase is. It'd be up to someone like Albert to state what he thinks is/isn't appropiate.

evazion said:

It's been this way forever. Getting janitors to agree on policy is like herding cats. I don't think most janitors even read the forum, much less communicate over PM.

The truth is the site has no leadership. Albert has always been hands-off and jxh seems too busy to get involved in forum debates these days. Effectively policy questions on Danbooru don't get settled unless there is 100% consensus, which rarely ever happens.

Both points here are very true. Moderation has been this way pretty much since there has been moderation (in the very beginning Danbooru actually was pretty much no-rules, as evidenced by the amount of early stuff Albert himself posted that now gets flagged). There is a somewhat loose, but general consensus on what is approvable based on the posted rules. People who become janitors or higher are ostensibly screened in or out based on their general compliance with those rules (with the aforementioned wiggle-room to bend them permitted). The rules really are guidelines though and each janitor or mod has had different priorities for how strictly certain rules get enforced or have their own guidelines in addition to them. For example when I was more diligent at clearing the mod queue, I would pretty much auto-hide comics and doujin, since I felt the individual strips very rarely passed muster in isolation.

The second point is also increasingly true. A few years ago Albert, Jxh, and all but a couple of the current moderators were super active and we debated and hashed out policy changes, implications and aliases, etc all the time in the forums. These forum threads I think are a better overall description of "the rules" as they are executed, though they'd be too convoluted and nitty-gritty to compile and adequately document. Also I'm not sure how many sets of janitors have been appointed since most of these discussions stopped. Unless they were active forum users in the past, they may have missed a lot of those discussions (and again even these more nuanced policy decisions are guidelines and precedent more than anything else).

As for the site's leadership, I think in all likelihood life happens and most of those people probably have more pressing issues competing for their time and/or their interests have changed. If I do a spot check, it seems like most of them are still active to some degree as evidenced by approving things, favoriting things, or posting things, but much of the active forum posting and commentary seems to have ceased (myself included). I don't know if that means things are more set in stone now than they once were, but in any case they don't seem to have changed much from what they had always been, even if the description of them may not make perfect sense to a newcomer.