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- Joined
- Jun 1, 2021
I don't think you're later points about IDpol degradation are right, but I think that the core phenomenon that degrades online things so severely over time is a really pervasive culture of "yes, and..." on any sort of mainstream internet community. The initial SCP's were very effective because of their limitations. The found-document form was novel because it so strongly implies the existence of this vast other world but didn't specify it. When done well, this serves to give the reader the perfect amount of flexibility to fill in the subtler blanks themselves, making it more affective for different individuals. This can be a bit of a cheap trick - later entries use excessive censorship to say "something soooo crazy happened it can't be printed!"- but it's still the core of SCP@HatredOfScissors
Josh had quite possibly the absolute worst description of SCP I've ever heard
I used to be super into SCP back in the early 2010s. It was genuinely some of the best shit ever. There was so much creativity and originality. Every kid thought it was real at first because the whole raw creepy aesthetic and scientific government organization shtick was so well done. One of the big things was that there were images with most articles that looked like actual real photos, like 478 and 173. And there were hundreds of articles, and most of them were good or at least interesting. You could spend all day just clicking the random button and reading them. Not all of them were famous so it really had the discovery and exploration feeling to it. There was an article for anything and everything. A vending machine that dispenses any liquid, a tree that will grow anything that touches it on it, the endless staircase, a virus that turns living things into clockwork cyborgs. Not to mention hours of youtube content and discussion and theorizing about it. It was genuinely some of the best horror content on the internet ever.
The yes, and effect destroy this entirely as each new commenter or writer feels compelled to fill in those gaps explicitly for others. The worst case of this is something I noticed in Reddit comments and seems to be somewhat Reddit-specific. Any time someone makes a pun or a joke in a Reddit comment, other's cannot resist the urge to add on with what is essentially the same exact joke but worse. If there's a link to an article about a lobster stealing someone's lunch, the first commenter may say "Stop being so shellfish" which isn't exactly brilliant comedy, but it makes sense and is indeed a joke. The Redditor then sees this comment and is compelled to reply something like "Yeah, I bet that make's him very CRABBY!" Which, being generous, is just repeating the initial comment.
I've gone a little bit off track, but I think it's part of the same phenomenon and is a "type of guy" I've spent far too much time trying to figure out. It's definitely one of the features that makes being online in Current Year feel unsettling