This discussion followed the Katie meme-mangling when it was still on the old forum. I've added in a little more of what I have to say about certain behaviours on the net that really irritate me.
JHunter: ! I do hate chain letters, hopefully we can really make this big, it should be!
Ocean Elf: Hehe! Thanks! *Grins Yes! It's great to have another active member, and hopefully it will eventually catch on with more people who are like-minded, however long that takes, I'm willing to wait and be patient about it.
I was never frightened by dealive or good/bad luck chains, but the ones that got me as a net newbie were viral jokes *wince* the odd glurge *grimace* and the odd warning about this or that about to happen, which, of course, never did, but when I eventually came to realize every last one of those items from friends and email list members, forum members, etc. were stupid 'friend of a friend' memes, *facepalm* But the ones that really got me to come out swinging into this mission were the sick kid hoaxes, the religious fraud chain emails, the friendship spam.
JHunter:! Yeah, how long has this been going for? Same here! I was frightened by these kind of ones to be honest.
Ocean Elf: Officially as a site, I'd say since around 2009, but back then, it was on Ning, and called CBCF for Christians Breaking Chain Forwards.
Ning kicked all free social network creators out, then I moved to Groupsite, still as CBCF, and that worked well for a year, until Groupsite went pay, and drastically limited free networkers, so much that I had to look elsewhere again. I created CBCF and then CBCL Christians Breaking Chain Letters on Mixxt, but mucked up the way those sites displayed, and didn't know how to change them back. They served as experimental so if I was unsure about changing anything once I finally got the nicest looking network Chainsmashers going, I could test out my ideas on the backup/experimental networks.
So, I had to come up with another name. Couldn't think of any but Chain Smashers, since BP and I had started calling it "smashing" as opposed to merely "breaking" since the Ning days.
Since then, it has undergone another name-change, due to a silly like/love/crush KIK status meme that used the word "smash" in one of its questions; that prompted me to check for any possible other meanings I was not aware of. Unfortunately, the word is sometimes used to describe a rough sexual encounter.
With the word 'meme' coming into vogue, it is interchangeable with 'chain letter" and 'mangle' has no other connotations as far as I could find.
So, while 'smash' is still accurate in a pure sense, I don't wish to give meme-lovers the idea that we are a meme fandom.
So, now it is MTM for "Mangle The Memes".
Even before Ning, I had put rants up here and there on sites like Wordpress - but wasn't happy with their setup. But since even earlier, I had a sizable pile of meme-mangles from me and from others that I had collected. I decided to start keeping them because I got sick of having to write them out again when some poor sap sent me another copy of the same forward that some other poor schmuck had sent me the year before.
I just never even considered spending any time on the forward-or-dies AKA dealive chain letters before probably 2009 or 2010, because 1, they weren't the sort of chain letters I was seeing from my contacts, friends, and fellow email listers, and 2, I always thought they were far too stupid for anyone past age 8 to even sort of believe. I simply don't get or empathize with fear of this stupid hooey past 5th grade. Come on. We should all know by then enough of the basics of reality, such as, fairy-tales are just that. Therefore, we're grown up enough to know these chain letters are nothing but corny rot. Just a darker, far more ridiculous version of the fairy-tale.
JHunter: Ah right fair enough! So ... I see! We need to get this out more, what methods are you guys using to advertise?
Ocean Elf: *Grimace* Uh, no, we don't do that here. We mangle all memes, including annoying ads for things.
Poster: We don't really advertise... Advertising is spam anyways. People mainly find out looking up the names in the Jenny chain letter
JHunter: I understand your point about advertising being spam but this is, you could say,
Ocean Elf: Don't even.
JHunter: 'good spam' it isn't like all those crappy chain letters you see online which I class as 'bad spam'. You are all doing a good cause, it deserves to be known!
Ocean Elf: *Grimace, rolling eyes* Eckh! That's exactly how good causes get wrecked.
Poster: The only thing we would succeed in is irritate. While I see your point, spam is never a good thing even for a good cause.
Ocean Elf: We definitely don't spam. There is no such thing as a good spam, even for a good cause. We would be putting ourselves at the same level with those we oppose, and shooting this mission right down as the most hypocritical imaginable.
I've even revised the faq/rules to explicitly state that we don't want to go viral, but let ourselves be found out honestly, hopefully by people we actually want being here.
Here is the link. And man, I had no idea when starting this venture that I would have to make such a lengthy post of guidelines and mission objectives.
I once had to request a FB page shut down when someone, well-intentioned, created a "Chain Smashers" FB page, and reposted some of our smashes there. It was there attempt at promotion in the hopes of getting us more members.
Sure, it might've been done out of Good intent toward us, but I want quality members over quantity. And after the ongoing disasters with members who turned out to be nothing but fan-brats and lurkers, I'm not too keen on that happening again.
We'll just have to be patient, direct people to various things on here when the subject comes up with them, and I'm even glad to have this site at all considering how many moves I've had to make since Ning. Even Geocities. Anyone remember Geocities. In the late 90s, I'll bet no one ever thought it would close down. But it has.
There used to be a blog platform, great little place called Posterous, until Twitter bought it out. It too, folded.
Poster: Oh yeah, the thing with the fangirls was definite proof that quality is better than quantity.
Ocean Elf: Ugh That's for sure. I was too careful, too nice, for way too long, hoping it would get better on its own.
JHunter: Fair enough, I was looking at the members list and I don't see other people putting up any posts, are they inactive?
Poster: It's a common phenomenon in this site. People join but don't contribute. We do the occasional cleanup though. So if you see a bunch of people have quit, it was just Ocean Elf doing that
JHunter: Ah right I see. Why bother joining if you don't want to contribute? Alright that's good, there is no point having inactive members.
Ocean Elf: Hehe. Yes. And I'll admit I've joined many a site without contributing. Usually because I've said what I wanted to say, and eventually the conversation dies, while other subjects I know little about or am not interested in makes up the rest of the activity.
But - having a few or several active members and tons of lurkers is common to pretty much every internet community.
Yes - I usually give people a fair amount of time before they get booted for inactivity, and that's if they have already contributed something worth while. If someone hasn't even logged in since 3 months ago, yeah, bon voyage. Then there are those who claim they want in to contribute and get into the action, the last one claiming to want to "revive this amazing site" yeah right. I gave her a day to get in on the action. Nada. Out she went. Didn't trust her motives in the first place, there was just too much off about her application.
Poster: And here we are talking about stuff that have nothing to do with the chain letter the conversation started with :P
Ocean Elf: That's fine. I only get annoyed about that when a discussion gets derailed by otaku and the like, who turn it from talking about the chain letter to their annoying fandom obsessions.
When a general conversation meanders naturally from one subject to another and we're all still having a good time, don't spoil it by whinging about it going off-topic. I can't count the number of times fun was wrecked on email lists by topic whiners. Almost nothing short of a troll can derail a good internet gab faster.
Poster: *cough cough* Anyways, yeah it is cool, I like talking too
Ocean Elf: I'm a firm believer in letting good conversation flow naturally and meander. Some of the best times I ever had on email lists were when the discussion went off-topic and turned to fun chitchat and laughter. And then some gosh darn stick-in-the-mud would kill the whole good time by whining that we'd gone off-topic. Not quite so annoying when a moderator/admin gave a gentle reminder, but when it was someone else who just seemed to be anti-social, argh.
Poster: I understand what you mean. Not fun at all. I mean it is ok if the conversation is something like hating on something for no reason, but when someone does that it is really annoying
Ocean Elf: Yep. Not sure about your context, was the hating the actual subject or was it the off-topic stuff?
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