Post
by Qyot27 » Fri Oct 23, 2009 3:04 pm
For the record, this thread does bring up some good points on both sides, although I truly wonder about the scope of some of it. I still regularly browse AMV Announcements and General AMV, as well as the Video fora. To be quite honest, I don't see a lot of that sarcasm and animosity directed at newcomers (one or two established posters act that way, sure, but not nearly everybody). Maybe I'm not looking in the right threads.
Most of the time these things get the hammer it's because of genuine infractions of the site's rules or due to blindly posting without doing at least some lurking first. A lot of the annoyances that I see end up coming from posts which repeat a question ten or fifteen times a month - and with how slowly some of the areas on here move, that means that that exact question has five or six different threads visible on the first page of the section (case in point is the numerous threads on how to convert something from MKV - nevermind that often there is a point of simply ignoring the fact that it means they aren't using DVDs, but being just a bit more attentive would have shown them the answer without begging for it to be specially handed to them, and it's that attitude which gets on people's nerves; they simply can only handle so much, and then respond in kind, and then it gets nasty).
When it comes to this site, there's a learning curve. Heck, even the tube has a learning curve. In some regards, I feel this is something on the level of Windows vs. Mac in the case of new users - the one you think is easiest is generally the one you first learned to use, and there's a strange effect there whereby you forget the time it took you to learn the system that you're familiar with. And even if the other system is genuinely easy for newcomers to learn also, it endlessly frustrates those that didn't start out on it.
I like the Org's layout. The collapsible menus were a great idea, are a fairly recent addition to boot, and as far as I'm concerned, that's good enough for not showing options you don't need or want to see. I'll admit, the video entry and upload process could certainly be streamlined (I'd personally like to see checksum calculation on uploads because my comp isn't really strong enough to check visually whether my encodes work correctly), but that's a minor quibble. I don't think a lot of the way the site actually works needs to be revised or redesigned, but depending on goals, it might help to do more in the area of what gets presented where. Trying to siphon feedback away from the forum is a bad idea - the only way I could see that being even a remotely acceptable course of action is if the entire forum switched to Off-Topic, and that isn't happening. Individual studios have long had their own forums, and what goes on there is often that kind of balance between randomness and criticism - but individual studio websites don't have the same focus as the Org.
Maybe it would be good to have something like a Beginner's area - not necessarily on the forum, but a workshop of sorts that has the relevant information laid out in a way that doesn't overwhelm people and provide a sense that they can ask for expert advice and not get shouted down (as long as requests are still within acceptable parameters). Let's be straight here - the Org, elitist or not, is still regarded as a kind of authority figure in the hobby, and one that has high standards of quality, whether they know those standards are largely due to the forum here or not. And people are often intimidated by authority or seniority, whether the ones in those positions are visibly cordial or stern. What I'm suggesting isn't an Introduction forum, which has a certain connotation of being frivolous and difficult to moderate, but something more in the vein of a cross between Site Help and General AMV, with an intent of letting newcomers familiarize themselves with this site and more experienced editors, not the other way around. The other idea would be to implement a wait system like Doom9 has, where new users cannot post for a certain amount of time, within which they are strongly encouraged to lurk and get a feel for the community itself before jumping into the pool, as it were.
I wouldn't exactly say that the need to learn FTP is somehow indicative of their willingness to improve on their craft - people get spooked over new things in rather arbitrary ways, just like how I would feel much safer riding in a car than an airplane, even though the chances of being in a car crash are far higher than the chances of being in a plane crash (although fatality statistics may still make a solid argument there). I have no problem using the FTP, and when it comes to learning it, I learned it because I knew I had to. If I didn't want to upload videos, I wouldn't have learned. Perhaps this is something that separates the generations - the value of finding a solution yourself and accomplishing it is lost beneath cries of it being too hard or too inconvenient, when neither are really true (or maybe that's just because of the average age range here; the tube does have a statistically younger user demographic than this site). Just because other sites don't use FTP doesn't mean their methods are inherently better, and in no way is FTP 'outdated' - if it was outdated, you wouldn't continue to see widespread usage of it to host things like source code/FOSS projects or file collections or even as a method of professional file transfer to this day. To be blunt about it, it's because newer users have gotten spoiled on methods that take practically all the control away from them, and when presented with something that does give them that control, it gets denigrated for being outdated or hard to use (reminds of Microsoft's ditching of the Classic Start Menu in Windows 7 because supposedly to them, "it's time to move on"; I find that attitude very patronizing). IRC is scary to beginners as opposed to something like AIM, but it's the same deal.
I uploaded my videos when I first came here fine. Everything about those videos were below average, but I still got them up fine. And all it took was some of my time reading the guides. It's not something hard and if someone wants to leave over something so small then they can. I don't like the idea of rehauling everything because people have trouble reading the guide.
