by Aqueous! » Mon Aug 07, 2023 8:23 am
Oh wow, believe it or not I've actually read the entirety of this thread top to bottom (in separate bursts of course, I'm not crazy!) and there are so many interesting points and I'm SO very glad people are using this as an outlet to discuss it, I think it's super important and while I'm not 100% for every idea, there is knowledge and VALUE to be taken through reading every single person's ideas and opinions to see the perspective and overall feelings, it helps us find the common consensuses and what actually needs to change. These are topics that we could not build off and brainstorm on our own, with our own separate threads. Discussions are a good thing! I've been on the site in total since 2013 (having forgotten logins on my first account LONG ago,) and though I haven't been around since the very beginning, I've seen a lot of it's highs and a lot of it's lows.
For the tone tag discussion, I am definitely in the party of feeling like it's not quite all-inclusive as there is a HUGE gap between generations and overall understanding of their intentions. /lh and /nm (Lighthearted and not mad) tone tags have a sort of passive aggressive undertone for me, which would ultimately end us up in the same issue people experience with current staff replies.
I think there IS 100% value in perceived friendliness, even if it is "sterile" or "customer service adjacent," as it is in line with the professionalism that comes with being in a position of authority. A simple smiley face, exclamation point, or thank you goes a very long way and serves as an excellent middle ground. I had scary encounters with staff way back when I was little too, and while I certainly know it's never anyone's intention to be mean, perceived bluntness can serve as a bit of a gap in tone when we're dealing with something as curt as text over the internet, especially towards younger users. We certainly wouldn't even sign off our emails without a "Much obliged," "Thank you," or otherwise, regardless of any reprimandings taken place prior. Children and teens deserve the same level of respect as anyone else.
The culture of the internet has changed drastically, and while nobody should be inauthentic to their true selves, it's important for us to bridge generational gaps, especially in a community that we WANT younger members to feel welcomed and included in, even moreso when the site is struggling to pull in new users or retain it's older ones (as life stuff always comes up for us, after all!) It feels like we shouldn't be having our cake AND eating it too, if we want the site to remain safe and INCLUSIVE for children, it's also important for us to be catering to THIS generation's kids and teens, not just the teens that we once were, who no longer exist at all. Of course, I'm not saying to ditch the old school vibes or rapidly uproot the culture this site has, but to build a greater understanding of perspectives that differ from our own and understand where we CAN compromise without being so averse to changing or being set in our ways. We don't have to include tone tags, but we have to understand how and why this site is not interesting, beyond it just being "because it's a forum site." Toyhou.se, a website still wildly popular with the youth of today, is largely a classic forum-style website.
I'm impartial to the "no personal information should be shared" rule discussion, because while I LOVE the focus on child safety that this site values, it just feels odd to neither cater to the adults wanting more freedoms (abilities to have off-site ages linked or otherwise,) nor the younger generations wishing to be spoken to more kindly (rephrasing warnings to feel less threatening for younger audiences.) I mean really, while I wholly disagree with this, it is incredibly commonpractice for people to share their age or age range online and some even consider it weird not to in this era! The web's culture is evolving, indeed...
Thank you so very much to the staff for making this site a safe environment, and an especially huge thanks to staff that have taken the time to read and consider the suggestions offered. Thank you very much to anyone and everyone who has felt comfortable enough to share their feelings, thoughts, ideas, and time, to help us create a healthy discussion thread with so many wonderful ideas. So many, in fact, I couldn't possibly pick them all apart!
Now, to end this off, I have a bit of an idea of my own. I think it could be incredibly beneficial to ultimately use the data gathered from this discussion to hold a survey. Whether this survey must be user-ran or if a moderator would be able to/willing to organize it, I am uncertain, but I think that a survey asking questions and building from the concepts and discussions that were had here, and releasing it to the larger site masses, could be an awesome way to boost discussions for how we can make this site better and come to the perfect compromises. If it were staff-ran, for example, there could even be a little pet or item reward for filling it out!
