Bias is ruining the site

[Godbrand]

Biased means favoring one person, group, side, or idea over another in an unfair or one-sided way.

Core Meaning

• Unfair Favoritism: Leaning toward a specific choice because of personal feelings rather than facts.

• Lacking Objectivity: Unable or unwilling to look at an issue in a neutral, balanced way.

• Statistical and Scientific Use: Producing skewed or inaccurate results because data or testing samples were not collected fairly

Common Examples

• People: "She was biased toward her own son during the contest."

• Information: "The news article presented a biased view of the political debate."

• Systems: "The test was found to be biased against certain groups."

 

bias is ruining the site and scaring people away

Anyone who faced bias usually leaves and never returns

Bias chases off any new user who actually wants to be an active member.

 

What can we do to fix this? I want this site to live again! 

 

[ashley_]

A lot of things are ruining & killing this site, actually! And while I'd love to hear you elaborate on what exactly you mean by "bias," I somehow doubt that whatever you're thinking of is one of those things that's doing this site in.

For one, foums like this are themselves a slowly dying medium. The advent and continual growth of Discord & similar platforms, plus the ubiquitous influence of social media sites like Facebook or The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, makes forums the clunkiest and least convenient option for online communication. This makes getting new members and keeping old ones difficult for any forum. Retaining old members gets especially difficult as years continue passing and everyone's life circumstances begin changing.

We're not primarily a collection of teens/20-somethings with nothing better to do anymore. People get lives, jobs, families, and the forum inevitably gets put to the side, maybe forever. Even on Neocardmaker, the vast majority of the forum activity is RP posts, while actual discussion about the RPs themselves - which is itself at least 90% of the RP-related activity - happens over Discord.

For two, the only person who can make functional change to this site has all but outright stated he's leaving the place to rot. Instead of fixing the spambots plaguing this website, or updating the forum software, or fixing the several bugs in the cardmaker, or really doing literally anything that can improve the website in any conceivable way, the only things YCMaker has done since 2021 is add AI slop to the cardmaker and make it impossible for the mods (all one or two of them) to do anything on his behalf.

The site itself has been on the decline for years, and while YCMaker can't do anything about the social end of that, he won't do anything about the functional side. His blatant disinterest in doing his job and refusal to let anyone else do it for him was a significant part of why we had the YCM/NCM split in 2019, and it can be hard to want to stay on a website that even the owner seems to want nothing to do with besides an ad revenue paycheck. Obviously, new members aren't gonna be privy to all that information, but it's a significant factor all the same.

For three, YCM has itself become an extremely unwelcoming place to browse. Not because the people are assholes (usually), but because the site is infested with temu spambots, and no human is really doing much of anything except occasionally lamenting how nobody really does much of anything. And you're no exception to this yourself. When's the last time you engaged with anyone's content here besides your own? The last time you welcomed a new member to the forum, or reviewed a card someone submitted, or explained the faults in some crazy idea you saw someone post? You speak of wanting the site to live again, but you also don't make any personal effort to contribute to that revitalization.

And everyone is more or less guilty of, or at least complicit in this. Look at any forum section. Most of the threads on this site have a whopping zero replies, and the ones that do have something rarely get more than like, four or five replies. Nobody is willing to engage with each other, turning this forum into less of a public space to share and review ideas, and more of a chain of solitary bubbles.

All that is what's chasing off new members. What's the point of sharing my card here if the rest of the site's example shows that all I'm really doing is throwing a thought into an empty vacuum? Do I want to hang out here if there's so many obvious spambots that aren't being kept out? Why would I even use a forum at all when I can use Discord or Bluesky?

And I'm not sure if anything can be done about all that at this point.