"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." - Thomas Brackett Reed

I think the time's about right for this.

When you're participating in a forum with low standards for discussion, there are two options you can pursue. One, you can attempt to change them directly or indirectly, and two, you can leave.

I think it's almost undeniable that Gotwoot has low standards for discussion. Let's be honest here - anime fans are a low-quality group of contributors to base a forum around. The demographic is skewed to young people more concerned with being inactive participants - i.e. sitting on their asses and watching television. Their age makes it more likely that they're at a low reading/writing level, and it really shows in the dozens and dozens of content-free posts in episode discussion threads. The vast majority of posts in those threads are vapid one-line shitposts expressing basic like or dislike with a smiley attached, that serve no purpose at all - if you aren't giving a detaild impression of something, why would we care whether you like or dislike it, since you're just some faceless internet nobody defined only by your writing? It'd be a fucking miracle if most of those posters could even capitalize their one-line posts, much less put more thought into them.

If these kind of posts were frowned upon, it'd be one thing. If a high standard of posting was trying to be enforced, it'd be one thing. But God knows that's impossible in this situation. For one, the sheer volume of worthless or detrimental posts is impossible for the mod staff to keep up with. Each of the main anime forums accumulates several hundred no-content posts on a day of release, not counting the ones that actually have some content but have horrible spelling, grammar or other flaws. Then you get the Anime Downloads forum, where I wrote a sticky that answers literally 95%+ of all threads posted in the forum since I wrote it - which of course didn't do anything to stop the endless flood of morons. Jesus, how many people have posted to ask where to download Naruto? Moving onto other forums, note that the BT support forum has six posts asking the same question on the first page. Anime Support has almost nothing but questions answered in kAi's sticky. General Discussion is dominated by no-content posts like the 3 word game. The amount of shitty posts is absolutely impossible to stem.

"Why fools are endowed by nature with voices so much louder than sensible people possess is a mystery." - Hertzler

Furthermore, it isn't as though there is an isolated bastion of good posters railing against this constant stream of bullshit. If anyone responded directly to the tons of shitty posts in the anime forums they'd get warned for flaming. As a mod, if I started removing every no-content or worthless post from any given forum I'd get removed due to complaints from users who want nothing but standards lowered to their level. Admin intervention is nonexistent since Wilik has turned his attention to better projects and krb contributes to the problem by removing any possibility of a thread on subjects relevant to reality like politics, religion or philosophy (though philosophy threads aren't directly banned, any one of them would be dragged down instantly into a flamewar between immature morons with positions they cribbed from their parents and emo punk music). Not that I can blame the guy - God knows that no discussion on those subjects could succeed on Gotwoot.

So, from the beginning, I knew the odds were against me - debate threads are almost impossible, the poster base is the root of the problem, etc. For a time I tried to set up a decent example. Yes, I am a pretty negative poster, because there is a lot to be negative about at these forums. I don't post no content posts (my one emoticon replies, of which there are several, encompass all that I feel needs said on a subject when I use them). If you can't directly stop the flow of awful shitposts, maybe you can beat them with a better quality example to work up to (modesty is never something I've had too much of).

That, as is readily obvious, is a fucking pipe dream. Most of the halfway decent posters either migrated to IRC or left. The new blood coming into the forums mostly consists of 1 post members repeating questions already asked in the support forums. This, combined with my growing disinterest in keeping up with shitty ongoing Japanese cartoons, has led to this post. It's a shitty community full of people who don't care whether they're contributing anything worth reading, and it's going downhill. The spiral downwards that kills all Internet discussions has been going on for a while here - the original members disappear, are banned or give up on the forums, the staff vanishes due to disinterest, the new blood produces little of value.

I'm absolutely sure that most of the responses to this post will be "Fuck, Y, if you don't like it so much why don't you leave!" Hell, even though I'm about to answer that question, you'll still post it - I don't expect that everyone who responds will bother reading. The answer is that this is my last post here at Gotwoot for the forseeable future. If I stayed here I'd just start banning the shit out of people who shit posted in my threads. Ironically, getting the mods was probably the final straw and not Mut's banning, because I'll eventually just start abusing them for the hell of it - simply because it isn't worth it to try and prop up the community.

The bans I placed on a few of our more worthless members will get undone almost immediately, I'm sure. And really, it doesn't matter, because they've won in the end, haven't they?

The first post in this thread will be Mut, using my backup account, to post his last account of things, and then krb can do whatever the fuck he wants with both my accounts. Note: I don't necessarily agree with any of the statements Mut posts using my backup, I'm just letting him air out his dirty laundry.

Well, that's that. If you have any comments you can find out where to contact me easily enough.

See you on the other side.