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Thoughts about novelty accounts on Tildes
Hi folks,
The question is pretty straightforward. How would people feel if we had our own resident “shiitywatercolour” or another equivalent?
Hi folks,
The question is pretty straightforward. How would people feel if we had our own resident “shiitywatercolour” or another equivalent?
But why? That's the first question that comes to my mind, and I think it's an important one. Why would we want novelty accounts here? What value would they bring to Tildes?
There are lots of different types of novelty accounts.
I could create an account called @Multivac, and then use it to reply to every comment containing the word "entropy" with the phrase "There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer." That's a novelty account. (Whether I make a bot to do it automatically or do it myself manually is irrelevant: it's a novelty account either way.) I've also seen accounts that reply using movie quotes. Is that the sort of novelty account you mean? If so, my answer is a very resounding "Fuck no!" That sort of novelty account just creates pointless clutter.
If you're talking about stuff that's a bit more creative, like an account that always replies in haiku, or an account that creates watercolour pictures based on stories, that's at least adding something original and valuable to Tildes. However, my next question would be: why does someone need to create a separate account to do that? If I have the urge to start writing my comments in limerick form (I'm actually not bad at spontaneous limericks), why would I create @LimerickWriter to do it? Why not write those limericks under my own account, and get the credit for being a witty and clever writer - and also take the blame for writing silly and noisome comments? Using a separate novelty account hides the authorship of those comments, which removes responsibility and accountability.
I'd need to see a strong case being made for using a novelty account. If it's just adding pointless clutter, it's a big N.O. regardless of what account is being used. If it's adding something creative and valuable, why does that need to be done under a separate account?
I think branding, reputation and identity can be be important and beneficial, which having a recognizable name directly referencing your most common form of contributions can help with. And I also think that giving people some freedom to experiment without that experimentation being tied directly to a main account can also be beneficial by encouraging diversity and allowing for more spontaneity.
However, overall I agree with you, most novelty accounts are low effort and/or annoying, and even the high effort ones can be grating if that novelty behavior is all they ever do, especially if done to excess. So I definitely don't think they should be encouraged here overall, but I also don't think they should be banned outright either... because who knows, maybe one will appear here one day and surprise us all with valuable original content contributions like Shitty_Watercolour has on reddit.
If we want experimentation and spontaneity, I think novelty threads are a better approach than novelty accounts.
I enjoyed the four-word poetry challenge that @cadadr posted - and, seeing as it's still active nearly 2 weeks later and has the second-highest number of comments of any topic in the history in ~creative, it looks like other people are enjoying it as well.
I think that's a better approach to creative and spontaneous content than having a single account do the same gimmick over and over again. Get everyone engaged. A thread like that is a safe space for everyone to play around with the form being suggested. Anyone who wants to play, can. Anyone who doesn't want to play, doesn't have to. If people want to see that novelty content, they can open the thread. If people don't want to see that novelty content, they can skip the thread. It becomes opt-in for people to participate and for people to see that content, rather than having an account post that content all over the place, where people may not want it.
That thread was real fun, tho I initially intended it seriously and didn't expect the great amount of contributions---thanks ~, you are really cool! I now want to try something similar with a different limitation but IDK if it has been long enough that we don't accidentally turn ~creative into a house party games subreddit. And I was wondering if it would be considered fluff, this now is reassuring, so, thanks!
A brainfart: should we do proper recurring writing prompts over at ~creative? Would anybody be interested in running them?
I believe most people did take it seriously. And, it can still be fun to write a serious 4-word poem, and to read other people's poems.
Yes, we should. Absolutely.
A few people tried this many months ago, but the threads died from lack of interest (I'll confess that I helped kill one, because the idea was that the person who posted the best response in the current thread should host the next thread, and I just wasn't interested in hosting that sort of thread).
Finding hosts for these things is hard. And I think Tildes isn't quite large enough yet to have enough people who want to participate, so the hosts will get quickly discouraged.
This is a "later" thing. It's definitely something we should do... but later.
That's fair and again, I largely agree. But I do think novelty accounts, much like throwaway accounts and dissociated comments, may have their place as well... since they make people feel far more comfortable experimenting, as at least that way it isn't directly associated with their primary account.
I believe most novelty accounts are in the genre of comedy literature, and comedy can be very enlightening and valuable in its own right. Voltaire, Monty Python, Charles Chaplin, Woody Allen, Jonathan Swift, Gregório de Matos, Randall Munroe, and Stephen Colbert are examples of this. Besides, I don't share the aversion with entertainment that is clearly hegemonic on Tildes. I'd like Tildes to have quality content of all kinds, including non-argumentative contributions. In other words, let the silliness come!
For the same reason the Portuguese poet Fernand Pessoa wrote under several pseudonyms: it's enticing to have different personas that embody a certain way of reacting to the world. It liberating your creativity. It also creates a character that readers learn to identify and react to independently of the author's main identity.
Furthermore, if I follow your line of reasoning, I could very well say: "why do actors need to use different names, clothes and make up for every character? Couldn't they simply say the lines as themselves?". Which is absurd.
Most of the ones I've seen in this vein merely quote movies and books. I don't really want some novelty account popping up with a random quote from Monty Python or Jonathan Swift in response to one of my comments. I don't see how that adds anything to Tildes.
Is Tildes a performance space, though? I mean, leaving aside the deeper issues involved in us all presenting filtered personas via these usernames, do we really want people playing silly characters all over Tildes?
Right now it is not. It might become one, and It wouldn't bother me at all. But I think the novelty accounts I encountered were of higher quality than the ones you saw, and maybe that's the reason why I'm in favor of them and you not so much.
Do you have any specific existing examples of what you consider high quality novelty accounts?
I don't like the idea of novelty accounts, unless they're able to contribute in an angle that substantially improves or adds to the discussion.
If there was a novelty account that'd, say, drop Foucault quotes and sufficiently related them to posts in a way that'd spark discussion, then I'm totally all for it.
That just sounds like high brow elitism that doesn't actually add to the discussion any more than if it was Spongebob quotes.
I would totally make a "Relevant SpongeBob quotes" account and drop in randomly on philosophical and critical discussions if I had the time.
Sometimes buzzfeed comes through. Not often, but sometimes.
Good quotes really add to a discussion, if a respected, reliable philosopher agrees something, that's quite a good citation for the ideas presented. Classifying philosophical knowledge or quotes as "high brow elitism" is quite an anti-intellectual position to take.
"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."
Did that quote add to this discussion?
The point of novelty accounts is that they do what they do regardless of the context they're doing it in. A novelty account which posts good quotes from philosophers will posts those quotes in threads randomly and disruptively.
You have some gravely incorrect conclusions here.
offtopicand/ornoiselabels, and suffer moderation for its failures.Even though I'm not against the idea, I'm not necessarily the biggest proponent of novelty accounts either. But making a strawman argument is a bad look for your perspective.
This thread was partly inspired by the high-profile novelty account /u/Shitty_Watercolour. The gimmick that made him famous was to draw cartoon-style pictures depicting a scenario described in a random comment on Reddit.
Noone asked /u/Shitty_Watercolour to do these drawings. He would merely see a comment that interested him, draw a cartoon, and then post it in the middle of a thread without warning. Here are some random examples I found by scanning his recent posting history: one; two; three; four. In all cases, this was an unexpected and surprise intrusion, which did not contribute to the discussion. In some cases, it even disrupted the discussion by suddenly diverting that discussion to the picture rather than the topic previously being discussed.
That's not a strawman. That's a real live actual novelty account in action.
You might expect a novelty account to not be random or disruptive, but they are random and disruptive. That's the point. If they were contributing to discussion, they wouldn't be a novelty account. The point of a novelty account is to have a gimmick and post that gimmick in unexpected places. That's the supposed "novelty".
Oh sure, I meant that in a general sense, not in the novelty account sense.
Oh boy, the idea of relating Foucault and Spongebob on a level playing field is immensely amusing to me.
I disagree. I think your reply twists my comment into something that it's not, and possibly comes off as a tad anti-intellectual. The operative point of my comment was not to reference Foucault—sure, guilt me for devising a silly concept that could work here—but rather that if a novelty account could substantially contribute to the discussion, I would welcome it.
If your novelty account is @MakesGoodComments then I think you're fine.
It's great to quote Foucault when it's relevant to the conversation, but it would be a bit much to shoehorn him into every comment.
In my experience, most novelty accounts on Reddit are well written out and highly entertaining. It's a form of literature and I enjoy it very much.
I suppose that depends how you define what is and is not a novelty account.
I've seen a bot which randomly comments using quotes from the movie 'The Big Lekowski', I've seen a bot which answers comments that mention "entropy" with the quote "There is insufficient data for a meaningless answer". Automated or not, these are novelty accounts: they are accounts which have a single gimmick and present that gimmick over and over again.
These simple shallow novelty accounts far outnumber the "well written out and highly entertaining" ones you talk about, if for no other reason than simple shallow content is easier to produce than well-written and entertaining content.
You're talking about the good novelty accounts, but they are much in the minority.
I would not consider a bot a novelty account, but rather a "bot account".
If the bot presents a gimmick, isn't that just an automated novelty account?
Regardless of what the accounts are called, I do take the point that original creative content is good (and much preferred to automated content). However, I still don't see the need to post that original creative content using an account which just does that one thing. As I've said elsewhere already, if I want to be original and creative, there's nothing stopping me from doing so under this "Algernon" account. I could start posting poetry and prose and paintings and photographs in ~creative to my heart's content. Some people already do.
Why do they need a special account to perform their trick randomly throughout Tildes? If I started a hypothetical @LimerickWriter account (as I mentioned elsewhere), would you really want me to use that account to start posting limericks randomly in ~tech and ~news and ~science? I suspect you'll answer "Yes, let the silliness come!" but I'm not sure that sort of commenting really adds much value to Tildes.
They have their place, and that place is Reddit.
Novelty and troll accounts are among some of my favourite posters because some of the comments they post can be downright hilarious. The problem is that there are far too many novelty accounts on Reddit and most of them aren't even amusing.
I wouldn't want to see Tildes go that way.
I think this falls under a similar principle as what Deimos said about self promotion: "it's fine to be a Tildes user with a website, but not to be a website with a Tildes account"
It's okay to be a person who sometimes does creative/unique stuff, but don't make it the entirety of your account.
I am against it as the overall quality of novelty accounts is just not present and it only drowns out signal for the sake of noise
Novelty accounts are fun on Reddit- which is already a cesspool in many ways- but they don't have a place here.
I'm against them being on Tildes. They don't have enough potential value to make up for the potential drawbacks.
If you can find a sufficiently valuable and non-spammy way to do a novelty account, then sure. I don't know what that would be, I can't think of many novelty accounts from Reddit that would fit that criteria (maybe the drawing / art ones?)...but I don't see why it should be a flat-out no.
i think novelty accounts of some varieties have some sort of place on this website, but i'm struggling to think of what that space would be and in any case they're not necessarily something i think we should prioritize or encourage since they are often kinda annoying and a lot of the ones that dominate on reddit for example would be woefully out of place on here.
How about something like nicknames instead? Let somebody reserve an extra name or two. Let them post under it, and on clickthrough/hover/whatever of their name it shows the original account.
Some novelty accounts are absolutely brilliant, just like subs such as writingprompts. It’s a form of art and I have nothing against it.
What would they be, for the uninitiated?
A novelty account is an account which posts only one type of content. There are a few examples:
The account responds only using quotes from a particular movie (or group of movies), or in a particular movie character's style.
All comments by the account are in haiku form.
The account posts hand-drawn cartoons to depict stories providing by other users. Users can request the account owner to draw their story.
The account posts a variety of long-form comments that all end with the same unexpected phrase at the end. (People read what seems to be a legitimate story from a person answering a question, and then find themselves reading the same punchline they saw in another thread.)
The common theme to all novelty accounts is that they do one thing over and over and over, whether it's write haikus or draw cartoons or provide the same punchline or whatever. If you look at the account's posting history, all its comments will follow the same pattern.
The account name often reflects the account's gimmick, such as: @StarWarsQuotes, @OnlyHaikus, @IDrawYourStory. However, this is not necessary. Some novelty accounts require generic names, in order to surprise people with an unexpected result.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Cc @Nivlak: I feel neutral about this as long as it does not distract from the purpose of the website. I would not really find it amusing tho, if I am honest.