# Changes & Sub-Forums for Lolcow



## Null (Mar 15, 2014)

Hey all,

It's getting a little crowded in here. I'm considering adding two new forums and changing the dynamic of the boards. After reviewing some statistics, I've come up with these ideas.



Spoiler: The most popular threads by post number in Lolcow












There's three parts:

*Part 1 - Operation Splitting Hairs*
I've noticed two trends in threads. Groups, and individuals. A specific lolcow would be someone like Rika, while a group (lolherd? anyone?) would be the entire concept of Social Justice Warriors and their activity over Tumblr. I think that by splitting out the threads into different forums, it would increase breathing room one Page 1 and allow for more topics to be in scope at a time.

*Part 2 - Operation Cross-Hairs*
So there's two groups which are overwhelming popular at the moment. Parkourdude91 and the Love-Shy/Wizardchan threads. I think we could add two new boards for them.

Parkourdude91's forum would be the first instance of a non-Chris board about a specific person, and would operate much the same way 'Chris' did before the Update forum. Any time content is posted, released, a stream happens, etc a new thread may be created.

"Blue Pill Communities" would be a subforum for groups, and pretty unique for this place. By Blue Pill I mean any community that whole-heartedly devotes themselves to their social inadequacies. I kinda of want a better term for this, but as it stands I see it fitting. This would also be a place for threads like "I'm a wizard -- ask me anything", if we decide to continue allowing those.

*Part 3 - How Now Brown Cow?*
I want to get away from the word Lolcow. I feel that it is inherently insulting and is implicitly dangerous to the people on the board. It has an aura of cannibalism to it that I want to get away from. It also breeds a superiority complex. I feel that just because someone is _interesting_ and worth watching, that doesn't automatically mean that everyone is better than them or that their life is merely a tool to churn out laughs at their own expense. The term appears to have outlived its usefulness and expresses a less desirable connotation, like the word "atheist".

I propose "Person of Interest" / "People of Interest" as its technical and official replacement, but I would not word-filter "Lolcow" or "Lolcows" respectively. I do use the word in this post but it's to avoid confusing people as to what the message is about.


All feedback is welcome -- thanks for participating.


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## MysticMisty (Mar 15, 2014)

Didn't mean to vote for "I don't like any of the ideas". Actually it all sounds pretty good to me. This is a pretty popular section of the site, and some organization would definitely be good for it.


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## hm yeah (Mar 15, 2014)

i have nothing against the word lolcow as i use it a lot myself among other coonoiseurs of silly people, but i never thought of it that way.

i do use person of interest as a euphemism all the time, so i guess i like that term more.

im fine with however you choose to split the forum.


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## kagayaki (Mar 15, 2014)

I'll go for the first two choices, with ParkourDude91 & Pixyteri under the Individuals subthread and Wizardchan under the Group subthread.


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## Saney (Mar 15, 2014)

I'm fine which all of these changes, they seem like good ideas.


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## Duke Nukem (Mar 15, 2014)

I'd be all right with any of it, I just want to discuss these weirdos.


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## José Mourinho (Mar 15, 2014)

1 & 3 for me, but I'm fine with anything.


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## Pikonic (Mar 15, 2014)

I second the term Person of Interest/People of Interest. Lolcow implies there's trolling involved and the DF01 thread is mostly art and literature criticism (though that makes us sound way too classy). 
I agree with making ParkourDude his own subforum since he actually is pumping out more than pictures and writing (unlike Pixy and DF01)  and interacting with people online. 
I've gotten used to all changes you've made before this, I'll get used to this.
I'd only ask the Parkourdude forum be moderated a little more strictly than Discussion. I want updates and not "What if Jace liked this movie?", "Does weed make Jace stupid (aka the weed debate tread)"  threads.


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## Big Bob Pataki (Mar 15, 2014)

i'd say a subforum for loveshys/wizardchan/sjw would be the figurative tits


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## sparklemilhouse (Mar 15, 2014)

Black Sonichu said:


> I'd be all right with any of it, I just want to discuss these weirdos.



Can we call the sub forum that? "Weirdos"?


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## José Mourinho (Mar 15, 2014)

Internet Nobodies?


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## Golly (Mar 15, 2014)

I like all of these ideas, but the first two are the best. I sometimes feel like I have to get into threads on Lolcow early on because otherwise, I'd have to dig through 100 pages of stuff to suss out the highlights. This is especially true for Parkourdude, the wizards, and the loveshies.  
I could go either way on changing the name. It's all semantics in the end.


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## exball (Mar 15, 2014)

Or we could just shit ourselves and do nothing.


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## The Fair Lady (Mar 15, 2014)

I never liked the term 'lolcow' either.


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## Holdek (Mar 15, 2014)

If we change from "lolcow" to "person of interest," does that expand the criteria for people that can have threads started about them?  Or will it just be a semantic change?


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## NobleGreyHorse (Mar 15, 2014)

I have the same question as Holdek. I found some of the "personal lolcow" threads interesting enough (depending on who's posting what, of course) and "personal person of interest" sounds like you're trying to date them but not come right out and say it.


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## MysticMisty (Mar 16, 2014)

What about "Weirdos you know"?


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## Holdek (Mar 16, 2014)

To me, an lolcow is simply a person (or I guess group) who keeps giving lulz.  I think I've created two threads on lolcow, "Losethos" and "Furries."

With Losethose the guy himself is mostly sad because he's schizophrenic, but the OS he develops is lulz-worthy itself, and more than that, his personal story and programming efforts are just kind of "WTF" interesting.

With furries I don't presume that "everyone is better than them or that their life is merely a tool to churn out laughs at their own expense."  Hell, we even have some on this board that I like personally.  But that doesn't mean that furies in general aren't funny for doing what they do.

Maybe it would be good just to extend the "no a-logging" rule to lolcow?


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## Bgheff (Mar 16, 2014)

I think you should just nuke it.  The whole subforum is an ocean of troll shielding and a-logging.


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## CatParty (Mar 16, 2014)

I kinda don't like the "personal lolcows". There was a post a while back that seemingly was just someone complaining about someone bothering them and it just seemed like they were trying to build a personal army.


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## BT 075 (Mar 16, 2014)

I'm fine with the term lolcow and don't see the problem with it. It's not the most positive of descriptions, sure, but I fail to see why that would be bad? They're amusing people and therefore get discussed on a board that has "lol" in it's name. I say it's fairly accurate.


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## Pikonic (Mar 16, 2014)

Alan Pardew said:


> Internet Nobodies?


Citizens of the Internet?


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## champthom (Mar 16, 2014)

I don't think lolcow necessarily has a bad connotation - it's supposed to be just someone who constantly generates lols. I acknowledge that this is used with a strong connotation, but I don't believe that's necessarily the case. I think it's futile to try and redefine a term that's widely used. 

I don't really hangout in Lolcow. I'm not a big fan of Lolcow as I think there are plenty of places where you can discuss lolcows other than Chris. HOWEVER, I've come to realize that there's a demand for this, that there are people who would like to talk about other lolcows on here too and that's why we have the subforum. I'm not crazy about creating subforums to specific groups, as I don't want to draw ire from these groups to seem like we're targeting them, and I don't want to get too sidetrack from our mission to be a Chris forum, BUT I also believe in giving people what they want. The love shy and wizardchan threads are like, ungodly long, I don't think any Chris forum thread is as long as them, it might make sense to at least make a subforum to dedicate to those people, not so much to target them but simply to give people a less crowded place to discuss them. 

As always, my concern is to avoid a cannabalistic nature to the lolcow forum. I don't want it to be a place for people to put out personal army requests. The problem with /cow/ is that people come there with an personal vendetta and often times troll shielding themselves. Extending the A-Logging rule to Lolcow wouldn't be bad.


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## Surtur (Mar 16, 2014)

We're pretty good at keeping the troll shielder's out for the most part.


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## CalmMyTits (Mar 16, 2014)

I wouldn't be against creating two separate forums. one for single lolcows and one for lolherds. Personally I don't think options 2 and 3 are neccessary. I'm not personally bothered by the word lolcow, but if many others want to change that word, then I'm ok with it. What I do feel is that we would benefit from splitting up the lolcow thread to groups and individuals, I think that is the simplest way of addressing the situation.

What I propose is that we do just that, and see how it works out. If necessary, in the future, to add one of the other options to the first.


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## Jewelsmakerguy (Mar 16, 2014)

I think the only change I can understand is splitting the lolcows and lolherds into individual sub-forums. Partially because it's getting a little _too_ clusterfucked. But also because the Love-shies and Parkourdude don't need their own sub-forums on a message board about OPL and his family.


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## John Titor (Mar 16, 2014)

I suppose lolcow is also inaccurate. Lolcow implies that they'll make you laugh. Some of these people usually just cause eyebrow raising.


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## Null (Mar 16, 2014)

champthom said:


> I don't think lolcow necessarily has a bad connotation - it's supposed to be just someone who constantly generates lols. I acknowledge that this is used with a strong connotation, but I don't believe that's necessarily the case. I think it's futile to try and redefine a term that's widely used.


Yeah, I've noticed that you never post here and there was a strong initial disagreement about the board. The problem is that it's going to come to a make or break point: Either this area of the board can grow to compensate for Chris' deflation, or the community will just start to die. I think the amount of average users has at least doubled since this time last year, and that's due to a higher retainer rate. We have about 1900 registered members and on average 300 people visit the forum every day.

There were 2 big changes I was keen to make last year:
1. Venue for talking about other people. This was in clear demand because threads would exist in General already, but a lot of Chris threads arose with titles like "Pixyteri: _The female Chris?_"
2. General/Off-Topic became visible to everyone (although not readable). This is a big deal because when I first joined I saw the boards as sort of creepy because there was no real socialization aside from the Chris. After General opened up to me I felt more comfortable, but up until that point I thought it was 100% Chris All Day Every Day.

I think both of these factors increased livelihood.



champthom said:


> As always, my concern is to avoid a cannabalistic nature to the lolcow forum. I don't want it to be a place for people to put out personal army requests. The problem with /cow/ is that people come there with an personal vendetta and often times troll shielding themselves. Extending the A-Logging rule to Lolcow wouldn't be bad.


I think we're inherently less predisposed to attack each other because of the innate nature of forums. We have identities here, and when problems arise we deal with it. We've learned from PvtRichardCranium and know that we need to take care of problem users sooner. I'd like to encourage more use of the report feature from general users when they encounter a-logging/troll-shielding/general faggotry. I think that both users and mods mistake any use of the report / warning system as a be-all-end-all and we never take care of issues until after they've already blown up. Learning to spot shit like that ahead of time would make life easier.


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## c-no (Mar 16, 2014)

Regarding lol-cows, I don't mind the term but I do feel it would be nice be nice to separate individual lol-cows such as ParkourDude91 from lol-cow groups such as love-shys or bronies by placing them in a lol-cow sub-forum.


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## exball (Mar 16, 2014)

Lolcow is an okay term.


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## Holdek (Mar 17, 2014)

Just going with option 1 will free up room for more threads to rotate through on page one, but won't really solve the problem of threads themselves being too long.  So I'd go with options 1 and 2 together I guess.  Just so long as Chris continues to get a higher level of recognition than any other specific topic, as he does currently.


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## champthom (Mar 17, 2014)

I don't think it's an awful thing that people want to talk about lolcows here, again I agree with Null that we should be responsive to the demands of the community and that there clearly was a demand for lolcow threads. My thing is that I ultimately want this to be a place where people talk about Chris, even if it's not what's primarily done here. 

People don't realize but on PVCC, nobody really talks about Chris anymore. I'd say 90% of the discussion is in the many general forums (there's like a dozen different subforums), 9.95% on the trolling board (like our lolcow forum, but they talk about trolling), and the remaining 0.05% is Chris. Discussion about Chris is mostly relegated to someone posting an update and a person or two saying "Huh, no idea Chris was still doing stuff" or someone posting something indepth and a few people calling said person a sperg for doing so. PVCC is an extremely tight knit community but my issue is that there are people who join the board who have no idea who Chris is - they just heard from a friend that it's a tight knight community and they want in. I at least want people to know that the focus is Chris, even if it's in name only. 

It's very well possible that one day, the regulars here will get bored about talking about Chris. PVCC got bored around 2010, /cwc/ became /cow/ in 2011 because people were getting bored about Chris. I think though that ultimately, there are going to be people just discovering Chris and I made the forum to provide such people with a place to talk about Chris without being drowned out in other threads. Perhaps we'll become a public version of PVCC, one of my goals was to provide people a place to talk about Chris that anyone could join and I think maybe in that respect, it'll become a public PVCC where it's Chris related in name only pretty much. Not that that's a bad thing.


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## Holdek (Mar 17, 2014)

I'd like for Chris to be kind of the core course, and then everyone branches out into their own interests, but they maintain that shared commonality of interest in, and familiarity of, OPL.


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## sparklemilhouse (Mar 17, 2014)

a lot of the (non wizard guy?) loveshy posts are gone.


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## Null (Mar 17, 2014)

sparklemilhouse said:


> a lot of the (non wizard guy?) loveshy posts are gone.


I moved a lot of posts from the Loveshy thread into the Wizard Watch thread. Did I fuck up?


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## sparklemilhouse (Mar 17, 2014)

yeah the last loveshy post was from march 7th-ish.


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## Saney (Mar 17, 2014)

Oh God, we lost like 20 pages...


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## sparklemilhouse (Mar 17, 2014)

lost that post about that weirdo who worked at my college I saw dressing like a fool at that Christmas party ;(


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## Null (Mar 17, 2014)

I just scrolled through the Wizard Watch thread (which was split from LoveShy) and I don't see any posts not involving him. If there are they're totally lost in the mess.

If you want to find a specific post, open the thread, enter your own name as the author (or whomever the author was), and check the "Search this thread only" box. You'll find it. PM me the URL.


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## c-no (Mar 17, 2014)

sparklemilhouse said:


> yeah the last loveshy post was from march 7th-ish.


Would this be it? I'm sure it is.
http://cwckiforums.com/threads/wizard-watchs-thread.3283/page-18#post-189988


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## WWWWolf (Mar 18, 2014)

Voted for 2&3, though I don't mind any other solution as long as it makes things more manageable. I really see no problem of making sub-forums insprired by particularly popular threads. I'm not _that_ opposed to the "lolcow" term - not particularly liking the negative connotations either, but I can't offer a better term, really. "Curious manifestations of Internet culture"?


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## DeagleDad420 (Mar 18, 2014)

The problem with lolcow is that it's already the only universally accepted term to describe this phenomenon, regardless of how "icky" it's connotations are. There's really no word for it otherwise. Trying to change it to some other, more politically correct term isn't worth the effort and isn't really going to do much anyway. I understand that you're a big advocate for treating lolcows like human beings and such and not sideshow attractions and that's great but you have you realize that:
1. you're a minority in this regard
2. you really can't_ force _anyone to adopt this more enlightened, more humane view, as nice as that would be
3. trying too hard to suppress "cannibalism" can only ever lead to homegrown lolcows like PvtRichardCranium getting away with being toxic lunatics forever and bringing everyone down with them, forcing everyone to put up with their shit because nobody is allowed to be mean to anyone ever or call anyone out for anything because mean isn't a real word in CWCville, we use the term "Flesh-Entity of Negatively-Connotated Disposition" here thank you

tl;dr You're not going to change a culture  by changing the word that represents the culture, because words are just that: representations. They hold no power by themselves. People trying to get rid of the word "nigger" didn't really obliterate racism, they just made suburban white people say it in private instead and complain on Twitter that it was a violation of their rights that they couldn't say the word. I don't want this forum to become suburban white people


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## Null (Mar 18, 2014)

Well I didn't mean actually forcing people to use other words. I just meant changing the title of the forum itself.

But, as far as a Parkourdude91 forum goes, do you think there's enough happening to warrant it?


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## PopOfColor (Mar 18, 2014)

Special snowflakes


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## Saney (Mar 18, 2014)

Null said:


> Well I didn't mean actually forcing people to use other words. I just meant changing the title of the forum itself.
> 
> But, as far as a Parkourdude91 forum goes, do you think there's enough happening to warrant it?


 
I don't.


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## DeagleDad420 (Mar 19, 2014)

Null said:


> Well I didn't mean actually forcing people to use other words. I just meant changing the title of the forum itself.
> 
> But, as far as a Parkourdude91 forum goes, do you think there's enough happening to warrant it?


Yeah. The activity's been pretty high in the last few weeks. I've had to update the Wiki each time something major happens, and it's been keeping me hella busy. Practically every day he gets on twitter arguments with Tyce, and he's doing weekly streams now to boot.


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## Null (Mar 21, 2014)

So after some thought I've decided to give PKD91 and Blue Pill a trial run. I think it'd be best not to fuck around with the "groups" versus "people" distinction right this second.


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## Bgheff (Mar 21, 2014)

Parkourdude91 isn't interesting enough for a subforum.


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## Null (Mar 21, 2014)

People said the same shit about Chris. I want to give it a chance because I find Jace fascinating as all hell.


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## CatParty (Mar 21, 2014)

chris isn't interesting either


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## José Mourinho (Mar 21, 2014)

I say give the PKD91 subforum a try for a while. Read his wiki and it's getting interesting so far.


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## LM 697 (Mar 21, 2014)

Bgheff said:


> Parkourdude91 isn't interesting enough for a subforum.



Yes I agree.


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## Null (Mar 21, 2014)

It's absolutely trivial for me to merge all threads in a subforum into one and put it back in Lolcow. The worst case scenario is I do exactly that. The best case scenario is worth the gamble.

If you're not interested in Parkourdude91's activity, ignore it. I do the same exact same thing with Discussion.


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## Holdek (Mar 21, 2014)

CatParty said:


> chris isn't interesting either


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## Foulmouth (Mar 29, 2014)

I find the term "Lolcow" greatly offensive.
I propose it be replaced with "Lolnigger".


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## Holdek (Mar 29, 2014)

Foulmouth said:


> I find the term "Lolcow" greatly offensive.
> I propose it be replaced with "Lolnigger".


lulzniggo


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