Television Without Pity

There are just a lot of...aggressively stupid people on Previously TV.

TiffanyNichelle wrote:I keep running into a mod who's so delighted that there's no longer a "no boards on boards" rule and I want to post so badly that I actually miss that rule. Yeah things at TWoP could get really annoying but some of those rules were actually a little nice.

Also you want to read some first class slut shaming and misogyny, check out any episode post in the Food Network Star forum and search out Giada's name.

I definitely miss that rule, even though sometimes I used to ground my teeth in extreme pain sometimes back when I wanted to call someone out on their obvious bias and I couldn't. But it kept a lot of other-poster-bashing to a minimum.

I'm trying to remember a piece of Miss Alli history from the first season of Amazing Race (which I'm just now watching for the first time ever.) Was there a pair of racers that she loved all season and then they were mean to her at TAR-con OR a team that she hated and then they were nice to her and she became a rabid fan and punished posters for saying bad things.

Did this happen? I can't imagine why I would make this up, so I sure hope so.

Was there a pair of racers that she loved all season and then they were mean to her at TAR-con OR a team that she hated and then they were nice to her and she became a rabid fan and punished posters for saying bad things.

I think Team Guido came across as bad guys during the season (sneaky, scheming), but turned out to be lovely in real life. Maybe that's the team you remember?

A rant:
So I'm doing a Farscape rewatch and I meandered over to the old TWoP recaps and just, what.the.frell. Look, I like philosophizing and analyzing a show via a metaphysical lens as much as the next woo-woo girl, and I do love me some good literary-type criticism. But Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I seriously do not understand some of the Farscape recaps. Words don't seem to mean what I think they mean? I am now seriously confused as to the actual definition of "Grace" is. At first I thought that I didn't get it because I wasn't an English major or because with two young kids at home, the high brow stuff I read is basically just E rated fan fiction with multi-syllabic words and angst, on my phone at night. But I'm not a total philistine. I do have a master's degree so I should be able to figure things out in context at the very least. Sometimes I feel like I missed an episode- was Jool in love with D'argo? How are they alike? What?

I just can't.

That's Jacob for you. He could be funny at times, but was usually a little too high-brow. Or maybe he thought he was. And he was big on reading into things. Perhaps seeing things that weren't actually there.

On another note, the forums over at PTV. One great thing about TWOP, they didn't like list threads. At PTV, all that seems to be forgotten. If you're just going to reel off names, I can't be bothered reading. Please say something about the bands you've seen. An anecdote. Anything!

I knew Jacob primarily from American Idol recaps, which I sometimes checked out even if I hadn't seen the episode yet. I quickly learned that was a bad idea: he was hard enough to follow when I knew what he was talking about--the level of rage, projection, and ranting made him incoherent, and not in a fun way. I quit on Idol in about season six, but I quit on Jacob's recaps a lot sooner.

Oh, Jacob! His Battlestar Galactica recaps, towards the end, were total word salads of pretentiousness. And long! On and on and on about Grace and whatnot without ever talking about, you know, the plotline. One of the last-season recaps was something like 40 pages long for a regular one-hour show.

Does this mean that the recaps are available again on TWoP? I tried accessing them a while back and kept getting a weird error.

dreago wrote:A rant:
Sometimes I feel like I missed an episode- was Jool in love with D'argo? How are they alike? What?

There definitely was "a thing" between Jool and D'Argo that was never quite textual and made you feel like you missed an episode.

Yay necro!

I really wish I could find a populous place to talk about tv without insane over- or under-moderating. At first I enjoyed previously.tv, but many of the shows I follow have these crazy aggressive moderators who shut down discussion if a particular point from an episode is discussed for more than four or five posts in row. One show I follow has a "no fan discussion" rule, which I find just insane. If anyone writes something as innocuous as, "Oooh, I feel sorry for fans of X-ship after this episode" you get warned, edited, etc.

Reddit sucks for tv talk, too. So many memes, so much "live episode" twitter-style shitposting, and also weird and inconsistent rules for moderation.

I stopped talking about tv on the internet for a long time after TWoP turned into a cesspool and was shut down, and after dipping my toe in at previously.tv and reddit I think I'm just kind of done now. Sadface.

xyzzy wrote:Yay necro!

I really wish I could find a populous place to talk about tv without insane over- or under-moderating. At first I enjoyed previously.tv, but many of the shows I follow have these crazy aggressive moderators who shut down discussion if a particular point from an episode is discussed for more than four or five posts in row. One show I follow has a "no fan discussion" rule, which I find just insane. If anyone writes something as innocuous as, "Oooh, I feel sorry for fans of X-ship after this episode" you get warned, edited, etc.

It depends on the show, but AVClub is pretty solid in terms of populous-but-not-crazy.

xyzzy wrote:

I really wish I could find a populous place to talk about tv without insane over- or under-moderating. At first I enjoyed previously.tv, but many of the shows I follow have these crazy aggressive moderators who shut down discussion if a particular point from an episode is discussed for more than four or five posts in row. One show I follow has a "no fan discussion" rule, which I find just insane. If anyone writes something as innocuous as, "Oooh, I feel sorry for fans of X-ship after this episode" you get warned, edited, etc.

Reddit sucks for tv talk, too. So many memes, so much "live episode" twitter-style shitposting, and also weird and inconsistent rules for moderation.

I stopped talking about tv on the internet for a long time after TWoP turned into a cesspool and was shut down, and after dipping my toe in at previously.tv and reddit I think I'm just kind of done now. Sadface.

I miss the basement forums at TWoP and the way they were arranged by genre. The alphabetical list format over at previouslytv makes it more likely that you'll only post in exactly the thread you were heading to, whereas I might have gone to post about one comedy show and noticed an active thread of another show I like/watch.

The very few threads that I do frequent over at previouslytv aren't terribly overmodded and in some cases, are undermodded. Such as the episode thread for Survivor, which when left unlocked prior to airtime, fills up with 50 posts of guesses before the show even starts and then live viewing comments that are super fun to wade through later, like "wow at that challenge!" "Go [castmember]!"

Honestly, those are the comments that don't have to be made at all but it's especially annoying to have a thread full of them to read through before you get to anything related to the fully aired show.

I did like the "episode thread is locked until the episode is done airing" rule at the old TWoP. It was rather annoying going through thirty pages of live-tweeting the episode before they instituted that.

mayram wrote:
The very few threads that I do frequent over at previouslytv aren't terribly overmodded and in some cases, are undermodded. Such as the episode thread for Survivor, which when left unlocked prior to airtime, fills up with 50 posts of guesses before the show even starts and then live viewing comments that are super fun to wade through later, like "wow at that challenge!" "Go [castmember]!"

Yeah, that's another thing I hate about previously.tv. Every single freaking show subforum has its own rules. I have to mentally review them every time I want to write something. "Is this the show that doesn't let you post about fans? Or is it that other show? Wait, is this the show that requires you to pretend that the comics/books don't exist in any thread *but* the comics/books subthread? Oh yeah, this is the show where you aren't allowed to discuss ships or relationships between characters in episode threads even if the ship/relationship is the main topic of the episode."

Infuriating.

I'll check out AVClub. But I'm still sadface.

xyzzy wrote:

mayram wrote:
The very few threads that I do frequent over at previouslytv aren't terribly overmodded and in some cases, are undermodded. Such as the episode thread for Survivor, which when left unlocked prior to airtime, fills up with 50 posts of guesses before the show even starts and then live viewing comments that are super fun to wade through later, like "wow at that challenge!" "Go [castmember]!"

Yeah, that's another thing I hate about previously.tv. Every single freaking show subforum has its own rules. I have to mentally review them every time I want to write something. "Is this the show that doesn't let you post about fans? Or is it that other show? Wait, is this the show that requires you to pretend that the comics/books don't exist in any thread *but* the comics/books subthread? Oh yeah, this is the show where you aren't allowed to discuss ships or relationships between characters in episode threads even if the ship/relationship is the main topic of the episode."

Infuriating.

I'll check out AVClub. But I'm still sadface.

Yeah, some of the rules are big-time conversation killers, people aren't going to jump from thread to thread to finish a thought.

One of the few, overzealous rules in the Survivor forum is no discussion of the preview for next week...even though that preview airs at the end of this week's show so anyone who watched the show also saw the preview. So if you're commenting on something that happened this week and want to tie it into a comment about the preview, you have to copy that part of your post over to the preview thread. It's stupid and at odds with any spoiler rules I've ever heard.

Wow, that's interesting. The only very active forum I follow on PTV is for Arrow (and Sleepy Hollow, to a lesser extent), and yeah, they have the no-fan-talk rule there. And it is...annoying sometimes, especially when stuff is going down in fandom that ties into stuff going down with people involved with the show, but I do see the value of the rule insofar as it keeps people from making stuff personal to other posters. I think it should just be a site-wide rule. (The no-ship-talk thing I haven't come across and that sounds like nonsense.) They are upgrading to a new forum platform, and when that happens, I hope that maaaaybe they'll just make some more general site-wide rules/guidelines because it is confusing/frustrating to deal with things that only apply on a show-by-show basis. I think that Dave/Glark actually didn't like the Draconian TWoP rules, so he was trying to avoid them with an overall Don't Be a Dick mantra, but you know humans. That's not gonna cut it.

Carrie Ann wrote:And it is...annoying sometimes, especially when stuff is going down in fandom that ties into stuff going down with people involved with the show, but I do see the value of the rule insofar as it keeps people from making stuff personal to other posters.

I would be more forgiving of draconian rules to protect the sensibilities of forum participants if the people posting in the Arrow threads weren't already full of hate and barely contained vitriol. There's so much "uhm" style snarking and passive aggressive backtalk that I fail to see how not being allowed to comment on how writer fanservice is harming a show has an effect on the perceived friendliness of a particular subforum. For example, how is "I hate Olicity and the relationship is ruining the show" any less "aggressive" towards Olicity fans on the forum than "I wish the writers hadn't abandoned Laurel due to the unforeseen popularity of Felicity among the fans." I'm paraphrasing here, but this is why I find the moderation so nonsensical.

Oh yeah, people get away with way more snottiness than I'd prefer. But basically I think the no-fan-talk isn't trying to fix the overall tone on the forums--that's a bigger issue, of which fan-talk is only one facet--but simply trying to cut down on personal attacks and the ensuing back-and-forth.

So the difference in your examples is that while the first is full of vitriol and the second is calmly stated, the first is directed at and places the blame on a thing on the show/its staff, and the second includes the fans of the thing in the blame. I might bristle at the first statement, but it doesn't actually call out the fans for Olicity's existence or their story, so I need to check my response to that.

"I wish the writers hadn't abandoned Laurel due to the unforeseen popularity of Felicity among the fans," criticizes the writers but also draws the conclusion that their neglect of her character was the result of another characters' fans. So one of those fans might not only disagree but take that personally as a member of the group addressed in the comment, and turn it around to make it personal in return, and then OP or allies will come back with more personal attacks on Felicity fans, who will respond to those comments, and so forth.

So what they're really trying to prevent is the last part--the spiraling of making it personal. I think they're just trying to keep the conversation on-topic--the show, not the fans--and limit personal attacks, and thereby pre-moderate the discussions. If everyone has to make sure their comments are about the character or the story choices and not about fan influence/reaction, it prevents a lot of aggro.

Example: "I felt like the writers sort of abandoned Laurel once Felicity became such a breakout character, and I wish they'd found a way to just write for them both." That would still get pushback from people who disagree with the premise, but it doesn't actually say "fans" ("breakout" to me implies her media coverage as well), and it doesn't present it as fact. I do think the rule, and the public and private enforcing of it, improves the general tone by preventing people from directing their rage at fans versus the show staff (and ultimately the banning of some of the worst posters who can't help themselves).

Yeah count me as fan of the leave fandom out of it rule/guideline. I do think there should be more leeway about that in threads that discuss social media/news & media since how shows engage their fandoms generally and their subsect (largely shipper driven subsects) is going to come up.

In surprising news, it's coming back from the dead. No word on what kind of content it will have. There's about a billion sites out there that do both recaps and forums nowdays, will this one succeed based on its old name and reputation? I'm skeptical.

Red Wolf wrote:In surprising news, it's coming back from the dead. No word on what kind of content it will have. There's about a billion sites out there that do both recaps and forums nowdays, will this one succeed based on its old name and reputation? I'm skeptical.

I've often said that the main reason it succeeded at the time was because it was an oasis in a vast wasteland of early internet, a lone outpost in the frontier of the old west. People flocked there because there was nowhere else like it. Now it's a dime a dozen, and nostalgia won't help if it doesn't deliver in content.

Wow. How utterly random.

River Thames wrote:
I've often said that the main reason it succeeded at the time was because it was an oasis in a vast wasteland of early internet, a lone outpost in the frontier of the old west.

For sure. Prior to TWoP your only real option for tv discussion was mostly limited to genre tv on Usenet. Recaps were just... not really a thing. UO, but I never cared about recaps and I kind of actively hate them now. I rarely find any that set the right tone for me. They're either crazily irreverent and memetastic or super-cereal narrations for the blind with Deep Commentary(tm). I think my favorite recaps are the ones that focus on a specific theme or aspect of a show. The comic backstory explainers for people who don't read comics but watch DC and Marvel teevee are pretty cool, as are the Easter egg recaps people put out for various universe (BrBa/BCS, comics, sci-fi, etc.) shows.

But honestly, I don't really see how reviving TWoP is gonna improve the tv community landscape. And I say that as someone who sees this landscape as pretty bleak. The truth is that I am not the audience for this kind of thing, not really. I'm too old, too cranky, and too actively bitchy to fit in with all the younguns liveblogging non sequiturs at each other and feeling all personally attacked and triggered by forum posts written by strangers about television series. (See?!? Crotchety!)

There's about a billion sites out there that do both recaps and forums nowdays

I freaking hate the format of most discussion areas on recapping sites, aka Disqus or Disqus like, threaded discussion has sucked since the dawn of the internet and it still sucks. The forums were always the bigger draw and lets face it in the time of Peak TV there might be enough room in the tv review/recap/discussion market for just as many sites as there are shows.

RiverThames wrote:

Red Wolf wrote:In surprising news, it's coming back from the dead. No word on what kind of content it will have. There's about a billion sites out there that do both recaps and forums nowdays, will this one succeed based on its old name and reputation? I'm skeptical.

I've often said that the main reason it succeeded at the time was because it was an oasis in a vast wasteland of early internet, a lone outpost in the frontier of the old west. People flocked there because there was nowhere else like it.  Now it's a dime a dozen, and nostalgia won't help if it doesn't deliver in content.

Based on that article, it doesn't sound like it's coming back in its original form. The tone of it sounds very corporate. I'm interested to know if the original founders get anything from the revival and if not, how they feel about it.

For sure. Prior to TWoP your only real option for tv discussion was mostly limited to genre tv on Usenet. Recaps were just... not really a thing. UO, but I never cared about recaps and I kind of actively hate them now. I rarely find any that set the right tone for me. They're either crazily irreverent and memetastic or super-cereal narrations for the blind with Deep Commentary(tm). I think my favorite recaps are the ones that focus on a specific theme or aspect of a show. The comic backstory explainers for people who don't read comics but watch DC and Marvel teevee are pretty cool, as are the Easter egg recaps people put out for various universe (BrBa/BCS, comics, sci-fi, etc.) shows.

I loved the recaps from the original crop of writers, but by the end of the site, I wasn't reading any of the recaps anymore. My hatred of Jacob's long-winded bullshit is well documented in this thread and many of the other recappers were a bit on the bland side. But the era of Shack, Jessica, et al was a fun time for recaps.

Yeah count me as fan of the leave fandom out of it rule/guideline. I do think there should be more leeway about that in threads that discuss social media/news & media since how shows engage their fandoms generally and their subsect (largely shipper driven subsects) is going to come up.

Yeah, I don't find much value in discussing fandom within a show thread itself (watching fandom train wrecks from afar? Absolutely!) I had to laugh when I popped into the American Idol series finale thread and found a much diluted, but still familiar strain of fanwars still popping up. "Adam Lambert wasn't there?!?! OMG, what a snob and way to bite the hand that fed you..." "Nononono, he is very successful and doesn't have time for this silly show!!!!!!!" Etc, etc, etc. It's NOTHING compared to the heyday of Adam vs. Kris, Claymates vs...everyone, but the AI fanwars will never die.