blockland: the community that killed the game

Author Topic: blockland: the community that killed the game  (Read 57539 times)

yeah for real im confused as to drendran managed to completely change the topic
Yeah I apologize for getting sucked into arguing with such ignorance.
Interestingly relevant to the OP however, is that his and goth's mindsets are exactly why when I decided to resume brickbuilding I switched over to brickadia. There is much less tolerance by the community for family values and common sense.

i will say this is prob why forums arent as popular anymore, theres no way to like... downvote or get rid of comments that are complete offtopic
This was as much of a (non)problem in 2010 as it is now that it has lost 99.8% of its users.
Yeah I apologize for getting sucked into arguing with such ignorance.
Stuck up attitudes like this may have contributed, however.


If anything, the question should be "how did Badspot manage to make this forum as good and successful as it was for as long as it was?" Getting people to post 10 million times on your website is no small feat.
And the answer was a hands off approach. Not scouring literally every thread for any post that might be slightly off-topic and deleting it, so users who view the thread later are wondering why half the comments are just replying to non-existant posts.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2023, 11:53:38 PM by DrenDran »

so users who view the thread later are wondering why half the comments are just replying to non-existant posts.
You would just delete posts that completely derailed the thread in the first place and any posts pertaining to that derailment so that the thread is just posts pertaining to the thread

If anything, the question should be "how did Badspot manage to make this forum as good and successful as it was for as long as it was?" Getting people to post 10 million times on your website is no small feat.
And how much of that is just trolls and people just barely avoiding breaking the rules while also pushing those boundaries?

Ten million posts would be great if any portion of it wasn't a pure cesspool due to negligence
« Last Edit: January 16, 2023, 12:21:58 AM by Masterlegodude »

If anything, the question should be "how did Badspot manage to make this forum as good and successful as it was for as long as it was?" Getting people to post 10 million times on your website is no small feat.
And the answer was a hands off approach. Not scouring literally every thread for any post that might be slightly off-topic and deleting it, so users who view the thread later are wondering why half the comments are just replying to non-existant posts.
i think colten and many others have made good arguments that the "hands-off" nature has had far more negative impacts than positive ones. it was a forum in the 2000's and we were all teens, we would've posted anywhere, there's nothing "speciall" about the blockland forums aside from connections that could've been made on any forum. Well that and a great ui, which is now gone, rip the blue sky.

also, you posted earlier about the popularity of furry and brony threads implying they were the entire catalyst for creep stuff, but now this was a "good and successful" forum?

And how much of that is just trolls and people just barely avoiding breaking the rules while also pushing those boundaries?

Ten million posts would be great if any portion of it wasn't a pure cesspool due to negligence
You're making it sound like the forums were dominated by a few problem users that were responsable for a good portion of 10,000,000 posts while pushing other normal people off the site.
This is patently absurd.
But better, yet it is demonstrably absurd.
Take a look at this:
https://forum.blockland.us/index.php?action=mlist;sort=posts;desc;start=2610

A statistician's gold-mine. Every user, their register date, and their post count.
More importantly, if you did a tiny bit of data mining, you could come up with a rank-power distribution of user post counts.


This distribution follows the Pareto principle, for sure. But actually doesn't seem that crazy if you were to compare it to say, Reddit's distribution.
But there were like 2700 users that had at least 100 posts, and like 1100 that had over 1000 posts.

For comparison an active day in Blockland's golden age had maybe 500 players on at its peak  (click for full)


If players are views, and frequent forum users are subscribers, this is comparable to a YouTuber who manages to get as many subscriptions as they do daily views. Which would be phänomenal.


Basically:
  • The Blockland forums were as active as they possibly could have been, given the game they were centered around. (The game not being more active due mostly to not keeping up with Roblox or Minecraft technologically.)
  • There is no reason to think that any additional moderation could have done anything but lower the activity on the forums.
  • Furthermore, thousands of people frequently used and enjoyed the forums every day for years.
  • Most people who casually enjoyed the forums moved on silently, leaving only those who couldn't let go of the nostalgia or who were just here for drama.
  • These people, being kinda weird and neurotic, were pretty much the only remaining members after 10 17 years.
  • These members represent a severely skewed sample of users. Also, like all humans, negative memories stay in their mind more than mundane ones. The fact many of them experienced unpleasant things is not representative of how the forums were 10 years ago for the vast majority of users.

also, you posted earlier about the popularity of furry and brony threads implying they were the entire catalyst for creep stuff, but now this was a "good and successful" forum?
None of this is to say the forums didn't have a weirdly loveual bent that I'd personally rather not have been there.
A good few outright creeps and abusers for sure, and a ton more people who casually posted their special interestes or had cropped research avatars.
I didn't like this, and for some it may have been genuinely really stuffty, but I do not believe it was representative of the average experience, or the cause of the death of the forums.
That said, it was mostly contained during the golden era to a few megathreads and off-site interactions between members.
It wasn't until the drying up post 2012-2013 that it seems like the forums got way more political and even loveual. 
« Last Edit: January 16, 2023, 01:21:04 AM by DrenDran »

Dude really just wrote a whole novel and brought up the statistics just because i said any portion of the forums' posts being a cesspool was a bad thing

Dude really just wrote a whole novel and brought up the statistics just because i said any portion of the forums' posts being a cesspool was a bad thing
Eh, it's not really in response to you only.


tl;dr All your bad experiences are just confirmation bias. Everyone who had good clean fun on the forums with no issues already moved on.

Basically:
  • There is no reason to think that any additional moderation could have done anything but lower the activity on the forums.
Regardless of whether or not more moderation would've made the forums more or less active, the point is that Badspot's style of moderation, which was not only lasseiz-faire but also outright hostile, lead to a toxic environment, and is embarassing in retrospect considering how much actually heinous stuff went on unperturbed.

  • Furthermore, thousands of people frequently used and enjoyed the forums every day for years.
  • Most people who casually enjoyed the forums moved on silently, leaving only those who couldn't let go of the nostalgia or who were just here for drama.
  • These people, being kinda weird and neurotic, were pretty much the only remaining members after 10 17 years.
  • These members represent a severely skewed sample of users. Also, like all humans, negative memories stay in their mind more than mundane ones. The fact many of them experienced unpleasant things is not representative of how the forums were 10 years ago for the vast majority of users.
Not to give too much import to being a degenarate poster, but being here for 10+ years also gives one a perspective on the entire history of the forums, a breadth of knowledge that all those thousands who came and went might not have. I can tell you that having been here for my entire teenage life, as well as being privy to plenty of other game forums, barely anywhere was as cloistered and hostile as here. It's nuts. And it wasn't the fun, cute, lego sandbox game that was the cause for that.

Look, it's true that trolls and predators pop up on any internet space. No matter how child-proof your website is, if there's kids and teens involved, predators are gonna try and get in. And it's also true that 99% of the grooming, abuse, etc. is done on a secondary site - in chatrooms usually. But that doesn't mean that having more moderation would've been beyond the pale. All the stuff I hear about grooming, and I just imagine "man it would've been nice if there was a  roper way to actually issue complaints and get people banned for external stuff, rather than everything being funneled into the gaping maw of the Drama thread".
tl;dr All your bad experiences are just confirmation bias. Everyone who had good clean fun on the forums with no issues already moved on.
Bonkers take. There's no way to glean that from some activity charts. It's just as empirically possible that many people moved on after having a horrible time, and why wouldn't they when 90% of the drama threads were just kids being dunked on for being cringe?

brown townogy wise, there's a co-op house and one day you show up and all 15 roommates have clawed each other to death, and you're like "well eventually all humans perish, such is the natural state of life", and like sure that's true, but what happened there was patently abnormal. The BLF experience is not how forums for indie games usually go, and I don't think it was the radiation coming off of the digital lego bricks that was doing it.

The fact many of them experienced unpleasant things is not representative of how the forums were 10 years ago for the vast majority of users.
Respectfully, this statement is full of stuff.

You can ask anybody who used these forums in the 2000s/early 2010s and they will tell you how much of a stuffshow this place was. The toxic creep culture this forum harbored existed across all boards...so even if you weren't roped up in the stuffshow, almost everybody was at least a bystander

Regardless of whether or not more moderation would've made the forums more or less active, the point is that Badspot's style of moderation, which was not only lasseiz-faire but also outright hostile, lead to a toxic environment, and is embarassing in retrospect considering how much actually heinous stuff went on unperturbed.
I mean if the fundamental point is just that Badspot should have banned the few dozen at most posters who were admitted creeps or who had multiple people going to Badspot with inappropriate DMs to minors on and off site then I can't really disagree.

I didn't get the sense this is what people in this thread were saying should have happened though.
It seems like they wanted Badspot to ban people or thread owners to delete other users posts just for being insulting, or even just being off-topic. (ref. pixel)
That is, Badspot needed to fundamentally change the evil toxic culture of this website.



I dunno man, I honestly can't help but feel sad reading through this thread.
I don't have a great memory for events even a few years ago, so my memory on stuff that happened like 10+ years ago is admittedly sparse.
But I was on these forums constantly from like 2009-2014 in my formative years when I was lonely.

I've got 56 pages of private messages from other people. My first PMs in 2010 were from some guy accusing me of being a Plaz alt. Hundreds of PMs of people asking when my servers would be up or offering to help me work on an add-on.
The dozens of add-on threads I've posted where people thought to download my work and put it in their servers even though it was probably of stuff quality. PMs from people years later asking if I still had a copy of some dumb script I made in like a weekend.
Even the 12 drama threads made about me where I did something stupid and acted like an starfish and people tried to call me out on it.
I was probably introduced to much of the edgy politics I had back then here but also had the opportunity to think about my positions though the constant bickering and debating.
Hell, I was introduced to some of my longest friends on here. We're (hopefully) not the same people we were even like 6 years ago, but nevertheless I probably wouldn't have people I talk to constantly to this day that I share a 12 year old cache of memories with if it wasn't for this site.

As much as some people may have disliked me, or even had a good reason to dislike me, I never recall the atmosphere being toxic such that I felt I had to be forced to participate. I was in skype calls, then teamspeak rooms, then at the very end discord servers with literally like 3 digits worth of people I talked to. I never got the feeling any of those people hated being here and were only here because they were forced to be here or groomed into it.

If you're still here, years after new account creation has been disabled, if you have thousands or even tens of thousands of posts here you choose to make...
I really do believe there had to be something fundamentally decent about this place to keep you coming back.




Hey, I have tons of positive memories of the forums. I used to climb into bed and post long into the night on my busted ass psp 3000. Made friends, shared art, acted like a dumbass, good times. I personally never got groomed, I did get sent nsfw stuff when I was too young tho, but it was from fellow kids.

My frustration stems more from coming back and viewing the entire forums history as an adult. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, when viewed as a whole. Look, we're not filing a class action lawsuit against Badspot, we're just calling out some of his stuff. The man is not beyond critique, no one is.

Personally, when I go to the "blocklanders you remember" threads that have popped up as of the mass exodus, I feel a palpable sense of regret, because I see that at the end of the day, the people who are really remembered are the ones who spread fun, hosted servers, made builds and add-ons. I feel like I wasted so much of my young life posting inane stuff when what really would've made me happier was y'know... playing blockland. And as time has gone on, and friendships I made through blockland have seemed more tenuous than ever, I personally don't know why I come back.

If you're still here, years after new account creation has been disabled, if you have thousands or even tens of thousands of posts here you choose to make...
I really do believe there had to be something fundamentally decent about this place to keep you coming back.
not really, it's just comfortable. i can't really name a single explicitly good memory i've had through these forums, just neutral and bad ones, and i continue to talk here because i know the people here; i've encountered far better people, potentially lifelong friends and some of the most charismatic people i think i'll ever meet in other spaces, but i don't know them inside and out like i do these forums and some of the people on it. obviously i am an outlier here with an almost exclusively negative experience, though.

i wouldn't really be talking here if i was on my lonesome, though, as nearly all of the remaining users here have had plenty of negative experiences with it and, like me, only realized a lot of what happened to them as an adult. even for the users who left, there's plenty of evidence of people leaving and never coming back or just having bad times here in the drama board.

Also I don’t think anybody brought up clans. Clan culture was probably the best thing to happen to this game in terms of community, IMO. Im sure there is probably a rabbit hole we could also go down about how some people were victimized through clans, but for the most part, there was so much fun in making things with your clan mates or just being there for the competitive nature between clans.

I was not intending to say the entire experience was stuff either. I had lots of fun at the time and have some fun memories. All the shenanigans with fish posting (spam). The Anagaia RP in community projects. The time I talked exclusively in third person thereby causing Badspot to filter "Ladios" to "me" causing endless confusion and people accusing me of hacking their posts. I again will point out there's quite a few blocklanders i still talk to not just counting the ones to move to brickadia. And as Khaz mentioned the clan scene was quite fun if chaotic.
And that's just the forums.
In game all the way back to v0002 and rtb1.045 I had so much fun playing and building. The eventual retail version that I bemoaned for it's strict on-grid building (no more editor wand D: ) eventually won me over for it's modability and I loved creating content for other users to enjoy. Some of my slate edits even became default maps before the shaders update. I have people asking me if I'm going to remake the volcano speed cart map for brickadia when vehicles are released. The community remembers things you've done and it really feels like you've made an impact. While I could maybe have been studying more or whatever, I don't really regret all the time spent making those fond memories.

All that is true. It can be true even at the same time that I say I left the forum when I was suicidal and having people literally telling me with sincere hostility that no one likes me and I should kill myself Absolutely had an impact on my mental health. (I am not calling these individuals out directly since they have since apologized to me personally, but it doesn't negate the damage done at the time.)
It can be true even at the same time that A Moderator Of This Forum sent me pms asking for pictures when I Was Still In Highschool.
It can be true even at the same time that the pre-alt-right tribals and family men had conditioned me into hating gay and trans folk and people of color and a self-declared "anti-feminist" before I even understood anything about politics or race or loveuality or gender identity. (And hating myself for being bi.)

These things can exist simultaneously. They didn't necessarily have to. They didn't necessarily have to be ignored or even Encouraged By The Owner Of The Forums. But they were.

That is the point I'm trying to get across.
I am glad some of you had such a perfect experience.
I can only hope you have enough empathy to accept that your experience was not monolithic.

Yeah I apologize for getting sucked into arguing with such ignorance.
Interestingly relevant to the OP however, is that his and goth's mindsets are exactly why when I decided to resume brickbuilding I switched over to brickadia. There is much less tolerance by the community for family values and common sense.
i'm not homophobic or sensible jeez dude. as a matter of fact, there are homo & trans that I am friends with whom I talk to semi-regularly and have even bought games for - not going to mention any names out of respect but im sry u feel that way

Also I don’t think anybody brought up clans. Clan culture was probably the best thing to happen to this game in terms of community, IMO. Im sure there is probably a rabbit hole we could also go down about how some people were victimized through clans, but for the most part, there was so much fun in making things with your clan mates or just being there for the competitive nature between clans.
clans were awesome especially the ones doing a lot of building/eventing for big events - fond memories doing group builds


what the heck happened on that day that spiked the player count so drastically??