User blog:ChromastoneandTabby/The Problem(s) With BTFF

This kind of blog has been a long time coming, but most people have either been too worried about the potential backlash or just don't care enough to say it (more the latter than the former I assume). Well, I'm a suicidal rebel with nothing to lose on the run from putting a bullet through my goddamn skull and it's the Year of Renovation so to hell with subtlety, I'm getting this out there while I can.

Just a forewarning, this blog is going to be fairly blunt. I'm not gonna be targeting anyone in particular, but I suspect someone is going to end up taking something personally anyways.

Too bad.

Enough buildup.

Let's go.

Quality Control
Ninety percent of BTFF is shit. Pure, unadulterated, 100% garbage of the lowest caliber. This is common knowledge, and it's the subject of many an in-joke, but as anyone who's ever been outside of the BTFF social sphere can tell you, it legitimately damages the wiki's reputation and makes everyone involved with the wiki look bad by association. Most of our older members end up leaving because they don't want anyone connecting them with this embarrassing trainwreck of a site.

Now don't get me wrong, it isn't like this problem is exclusive to the Ben 10 fandom in general. Ninety percent of all fanfiction is complete trash, which is why the medium has such a bad reputation. The thing is, if we want this wiki to be anything more than just another shitty fanfiction website, we need to implement some form of quality control.

At the moment, our quality control consists of "don't make articles with no/almost no content" and that's about it. That's not a bad start, but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that most of the writing here is really goddamn terrible. Even if a page has a significant amount of content, said content is usually enough to make any sane man rapidly eject their stomach contents across their keyboard.

Of course, a big advertising point of our wiki is creative freedom, and is there really any way to implement quality control without damaging said freedom? Maybe not, but I think really basic shit like requiring pages in general to have good English and requiring episode pages to actually have episodes on them would help a lot.

Some people might say that introducing quality control restrictions would create a form of gatekeeping that drives away new, inexperienced users.

Good, because that segues into my next point.

Literal Children
Let's face it, with the Reboot's younger demographic, most of the new members joining our wiki are going to be on the younger side of things. That's fine if they don't act like little shits, but spoiler alert, 99% of the time, they run around acting like little shits.

Children are stupid, that's a given, but we don't have to give them leeway to be egregiously stupid. The entire wiki was made up of egregiously stupid kids when it first started, and almost nothing from those days can be looked back upon without cringing out your back window.

Kids are stupid and annoying, but they're not literally retarded (for the most part), so it ain't like asking them to settle down and think about what they're doing for five seconds is an overbearingly difficult request. Being young does not give you license to be cancer.

Speaking of cancer...

Ben 10
Ben 10 is the Kamen Rider Ghost of cartoon franchises. Plenty of good potential not only just utterly wasted, but shot out of a cannon directly into the goddamn sun. A lot of the fanfictions based on it are basically like that as well.

What makes writing fanfictions for Ben 10 fun and interesting in the first place is being able to take the wasted concepts of Ben 10 and turn them into something unique, whether it be your own idea with an original trix user or a continuation of canon.

What I see happen more often than not, however, is people just straight-up lifting everything from the Ben 10 canon, problems and all, and acting like they've created something good. Obviously this doesn't apply to continuations because those have to work with canon's problems by necessity, but those usually have their own problem of not fixing any of canon's problems as much as they do just continue said problems.

Everyone has a different opinion on what problems the canon has and what makes for a good fanfiction, and I can't claim to be an all-knowing authority in regards to what makes a good fanfic, but for god's sakes people, can we at least try to make shit that isn't an embarrassment? Please? Pretty please? With one of those shitty cherries I don't understand people's obsession with on top?

Yeah this blog is probably gonna get a lot of people ANGERY but I really don't give a shit anymore. Argue with me in the comments if you want, but don't expect to get anywhere.