They kept the pseudointellectualism, elitism, and absolute jackassery and didn't even keep the good writing that came with it. It used to be the price to pay for the quality the site was known for.
I'd actually say it began with the creation of the first tools that measured the total upvotes of authors. I think the first one was a chat bot called Nala or something like that, and then in 2014 or thereabouts scpper.com was created with a leaderboard for the most upvoted and prolific people on the site. There's also Crom, a Discord bot that does the same thing. When authors became able to easily keep track of their upvotes and compare their totals with each other, having a lot of meaningless Internet points on your writing became a status symbol to a lot of people. This is where the elitism and endless thirst for upvotes that plague the wiki today began, and it's also how people like Kaktus got such inflated egos over being popular on the wiki. The rating module is a necessary evil if the wiki doesn't want to leave quality control up to the subjective tastes of whoever is in charge, but taking those first steps towards viewing upvote counts as high scores was the worst thing they ever did. That mentality is the source of most of the biggest problems with the wiki's culture today.
I can see that, though I do think that if the ego-fluffing behavior stopped at just creating a rating system the problems on the site wouldn't be nearly as bad as they are today.
It tells you their priority is with popularity. You can sure as hell bet that if nationalism were the big "in thing" on the net in the '10s instead of PC culture, SCP would be drowning in thinly veiled anti-immigration articles.
A lot of this is due to there not being a definitive SCP canon. They decided early on that trying to make every article fit within a central canon would be too big of a pain, so they let authors interpret the universe however they want. Personally, I have no problems with this, and I imagine a central canon would be a nightmare to enforce now with the sheer amount of articles being published daily, but it can create some confusion for new readers who don't realize that two articles aren't necessarily taking place in the same universe.
It's easy enough to handwave as the SCPs themselves and things the Foundation has done creating multiple alternate timelines in which the Foundation exists, so nothing has to be consistent. I always thought there should be some tonal consistency though.
That might have worked for Lovecraft and the Inklings and other writing circles throughout history (at least until fanficcers tried to force a meta-narrative), but it doesn’t work for a collaborative wiki that explicitly advertises itself as a shared universe. That defeats the whole point of using wiki software.
It’s a creative writing site. The Writing should exist to be creative, not to fill a quota. A Syfy movie monster that only merits any mention because you haven’t figured out a way to kill it? (Which doesn’t even make sense in-universe because of the multitude of creative containment methods I alluded to above.) Why does that deserve an article? Why is that even popular? At least something like the infinite lightless staircase isn’t a known existential threat but is still able to be scary by playing on the audience’s imagination.
They have six main ones:
Yeah, the naming conventions seem so arbitrary to me. This is definitely an area where I think RPC improved upon by using Greek letters. As always, YMMV.
Because it was a really good example of its form. You can raise writing quality criticisms of anything, including Lovecraft's own prose, which was susceptible to excessive adjectivitis and his habit of sometimes just refusing to describe something at all. Sometimes this worked but sometimes he just threw a bunch of adjectives at something and it came across as retarded.
They're kinda stuck with Euclid because it was used in the original SCP-173, and Keter was made up in one of the early /x/ threads, so I can excuse those two. I think Thaumiel was also conceived in those early threads, but was ditched in favor of the original three until it was made popular again by SCP-2000. Some of the new original ones seem pretty arbitrary and weird though.
682 is interesting because it got people thinking about ways of killing it and how it would survive extreme conditions. The log of termination attempts attached to the main article is massive, and I've seen countless new readers talk about the ideas they have for things to throw at it. Plus, it's a Gears article, and literally everything he wrote got popular in 2008-09.
It's a bit late for Roget to be regretting her constant upvote-whoring. The wiki's authors are far too deep into the numbers game to start caring about helping their peers improve now. They'll do it if it makes them look good, but the rating module is still going to come first for the foreseeable future.
Roget only started crying about being an upvote whore because she saw this thread. This goes hand-in-hand with Magnus retiring too, I feel. They're both buddy-buddy Inner Circle mates, why the fuck wouldn't they be spying on us? Especially Roget, whatever relevance she was able to sap out of the wiki before is being questioned by us and the people on Tumblr. Not saying she decided to transition deliberately, but her little essay is only her crying crocodile tears about needing to be better, while Kaktus and Rounder quietly tell her to shut up for their own sakes. It's quite beautiful, really.
If I was being scrutinized by this thread and I wanted things to change I probably wouldn't get on an alt and start fighting people, but I guess that's just me. I can see why she might be inclined to blame herself for the problems with the wiki today if she was an early upvote whore since obsession with the rating module is infectious, but all the sad essays in the world won't undo the damage done to the wiki's culture, and at this point I don't think anything ever will. The wiki sold its collective soul to a small counter years ago, and getting it back is going to take a lot more than one irrelevant former Admin crying about how much worse everything is now.
IMO, Ouroboros Cycle was just a 3-hour crossover of all the SCP Greatest Hits leavened with artsy-fartsy pseudointellectualism. Nothing about a cycle repeating itself.
There's some stuff about a cycle in there, but you have to sit through a needlessly-long action movie script before anything cycle-related happens. I don't understand why Kaktus felt the need to write a novella about this shit, it could've easily been condensed into the length of an average Kaktus article and nobody would have complained. He would've gotten just as many upvotes too, which is his real priority.
"I've finally finished my masterpiece and I'm ready to go. I love you all. But also delete everything I've ever written and have sole rights to and remove any trace of my former identity from the site please and thank you."
