this is a sort of letter to the staff, but anyone can jump in with their two beans if they like. The video that got me thinking about this is here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRW4KRPKgQU (caution, swearing, for those who care)
in it he talks about several things
1. youtube's inability to promote new and upcoming content
2. youtube's abhorrent copyright and flagging system
3. opinions.
so first of all, I want to congratulate tapastic on actually being proactive in content discovery, it's been virtually woven into the very being of the site and every aspect of it. Also out of curiosity, what balance do you strike between promoting the various levels of popularity among viewers? What percent is given to the newest of the new to be found, rising stars everyone is subbing to, established monsters that are basically on everyone's sub lists?
next the question. what do you plan in the future? in terms of site moderation, it's easy enough to make a positive environment with a small base, and the existing members certainly do their best to keep it so, but I can't help but feel the general ponscum of the internet is eventually going to find their way here. The ones looking to make a dubious profit, cause a sensationalist ruckus, and generally be nuisances are just an inevitable percentage of the human population.
Are there plans to switch to a more automated system, or hire on more full time staff? Or will you do what riot games (makes LoL) does (and plans to stop doing) is have a smaller group of trusted players review the flagged content/games and cast their vote. And how strict do you intend to be on this issue? Depending on how severe it may get, would the first and biggest priority be proper moderation at all costs, or would a little bit of the privelage we have on tapastic to say pretty much anything we want need to be reined in?
related but side point, my theory on this amazing community is that comics simply aren't viewed as a way to make money, or make it big in the world. To most, it's just a mini culture with its own little passions and people. I've been into webcomics my whole life (almost), so I never really saw it as small, but before tapastic, what did we have? smackjeeves? project wonderful? not much. So what I'm talking about may not happen for years, 10-20 or even more. In a way it's like the gaming culture used to be, nobody played games, now everybody does, and with that popularity has come all the big controversies like gamergate and the SJWs. The only thing that makes me doubt this theory is my experience on other sites, there's ALWAYS those few that are just there to put the comic down on whichever site it's on, even some that are also on here. But tapastic has NONE of that, zero, not even the statistical amount that should be there, which could be from an entirely seperate factor, such as a big positive communal momentum, in which positivity just breeds positivity. That's interesting to me that a community could be "engineered" as such from its inception, and makes me wonder how tapastic's example could be applied to other start ups, but that's about as deep as I've gotten to that.
