Darklord Rooke

It will probably change 10 times in the next day or so. Good to see you as well Rooke. Hope all is well.
Hey Kaguya. Still managing the forums and keeping the kiddos in line?
Oh wow...I totally forgot that was a thing. That face was when I owned my 1st two anime figurines ever. It really has been some time.
Hey Funyarinpa. Thanks for the hello! For the most part I’ve been fine. I’ll probably slowly tell more stories as time goes on.

Yeah VNs ruined my life and made me into a salty individual that hates everything now. They frustrate me because of how often potential is wasted, interesting worlds, characters, and ideas all wasted for sex scenes, shoe horned romance, and character tropes to make weebs buy them. 

It should be noted that to have a slow build up, the story needs to be consistently ... well, built up. Stories that dick around for 30 hours can be fun, but it's hard to describe that as "building the story".
Usually I do enjoy a slow build up, where the world is gradually peeled back or new facets and skills of the characters slowly revealed that sort of thing. But only if the scenes had purpose and weren't just "hijinks".

Hello everyone.
My name is OriginalRen and I enjoy Japanese animation. I don't recognize a lot of people on this website, but I used to do some stuff a long time ago on Fuwanovel and met some pretty cool people. It's been a really long time since then.
A friend of mine named @solidbatman mentioned this website the other day and it made me wonder what's been happening. Seeing as he made an introduction thread, I thought I would make one to say hello as well.
How is everyone doing?

good shit. i actually still use pancakes in my stuff as a reminder of that stream way back. even if no one else remembers it. 

you'd have to be more specific 
oh good. Key is still going strong. how wonderful. 

We have an official one now! Here:
Darky's discord is still open and we have about the same amount of members though, so do check it out anyway. 
 

i'm solidbuttman, longtime member of this here website. After many months away (like a year or two?) I'm starting to get back into VNs again and might even read one. A+ if you ask me. I like old space anime, realistically drawn anime titties, and history. I am a couple months away from graduating university and am writing a big ass thesis on some boring american civil war tax crap. I mostly play Final Fantast XIV because i am irredeemable.

I basically recognize no one here anymore so its like joining a whole new website. 
 
ps I was the one who wrote the official Fuwareview for Little Busters! 

I hate its structure because it's upvote, downvote thing promotes a circle jerk community. When people have the ability to downvote an opinion out of sight I immediately become suspicious xD
EDIT:Well, that and I find its threaded nature difficult to hold a sustained discussion on. Might just be me, though.

I was quite surprised how widespread that authoritarian attitude was. My philosophy back then was that we mods were stewards of the community, trying to make it nice for everyone, rather than overseers on a powertrip. I was always happy to discuss why we'd done a mod action, and not just with an evasive "it's the rules," but to explain *why* that rule existed. Anyone who modmailed us got a prompt response within 24 hours, and I was always happy to give someone another chance if they apologised for whatever they'd done. I thought my fellow mods felt the same, so imagine my surprise when I was suddenly on the outside of that process and all my modmails, apologies, and pleas for help went unanswered. They wouldn't even tell me I was banned, they just had automod remove my comments covertly.
As for the regular forum style, while it certainly has its merits, the problem I have is with it having just one chain of messages it's awfully easy to get derailed or have 2 people arguing and drown out the chance for anyone else to chat. Fuwa helps with that though as it has notifications for if someone replied to you etc, so it's easier to continue a conversation in between other messages, but still, I prefer reddit's tree structure personally. 
 
Ah yeah that's a major problem on bigger subreddits with more comments, so much stuff gets hidden. I think generally /r/visualnovels was small enough that comments being hidden was fairly rare, plus we discouraged downvoting except if someone was being rude, but yeah there can be problems with circlejerks.
 
Haha. There was an even older shitpost that used to be famous, one guy posted an AMA (ask me anything) as he'd read 500 VNs (back in the days when the average on /r/visualnovels was 17). The guy went on about how he judged VNs by the quality of their "lighting" in the CGs. I still can't tell if the guy was just trolling, or just really weird (as much as I love the VN fandom, we do tend to attract an eccentric bunch - me included). 
 
Thanks Zedge, it was a pretty soul destroying experience to go through. I don't think she intended any harm, it's just that she was hurt and couldn't deal with it, and with all those around her wanting to protect her, an unhealthy atmosphere built up where no compromise could be considered.
 
Yeah I doubt it'll ever grow significantly, it's a huge investment to learn Japanese. My respect to those who manage it, I don't have that willpower.
 
It's made it kind of hard to trust people again, as I thought I could trust insanityy, I thought she was my best friend. Did I just imagine it? Did I just project what I hoped she felt too onto her? I hope not, but those kinds of fears are hard to shake after your world crumbles and those you thought were life-long friends just abruptly cut contact when you most needed help. I'm glad you enjoy the trend posts, I have a lot of fun researching it. The posts are only so intermittent because it's such a pain writing it up in a long post, but it's always worth it when someone says they enjoyed it. 

I'm glad Ren dropped the project. Those people deserve nothing after the way they acted during that fiasco. The shit they sent to him was just indicative of the disgusting nature of the VN community.

As for the post, my experience with /r/visualnovels was nothing but unpleasant but that could be said for almost every VN community I've seen save my time on Fuwanovel generally. Unfortunate that it dragged you through hell and back, but I'm glad you came out of it and that you are better today. 

 

It should be noted that to have a slow build up, the story needs to be consistently ... well, built up. Stories that dick around for 30 hours can be fun, but it's hard to describe that as "building the story".
Usually I do enjoy a slow build up, where the world is gradually peeled back or new facets and skills of the characters slowly revealed that sort of thing. But only if the scenes had purpose and weren't just "hijinks".

I hate its structure because it's upvote, downvote thing promotes a circle jerk community. When people have the ability to downvote an opinion out of sight I immediately become suspicious xD
EDIT:Well, that and I find its threaded nature difficult to hold a sustained discussion on. Might just be me, though.

I hate its structure because it's upvote, downvote thing promotes a circle jerk community. When people have the ability to downvote an opinion out of sight I immediately become suspicious xD
EDIT:Well, that and I find its threaded nature difficult to hold a sustained discussion on. Might just be me, though.

I hate its structure because it's upvote, downvote thing promotes a circle jerk community. When people have the ability to downvote an opinion out of sight I immediately become suspicious xD
EDIT:Well, that and I find its threaded nature difficult to hold a sustained discussion on. Might just be me, though.

It should be noted that to have a slow build up, the story needs to be consistently ... well, built up. Stories that dick around for 30 hours can be fun, but it's hard to describe that as "building the story".
Usually I do enjoy a slow build up, where the world is gradually peeled back or new facets and skills of the characters slowly revealed that sort of thing. But only if the scenes had purpose and weren't just "hijinks".

This is honestly why I hate Reddit as a whole so much. It's so god damn authoritarian. This doesn't relate to the vn sub-reddit, but once I had a few questions about something really niche. And the only active community I could find to ask these questions was a reddit community. But the mods wouldn't allow me to post my own topic until I had a certain post count and "like" ratio. I mean, wtf!? I just wanted to ask a simple question, get an answer, and leave. That kind of authoritarian structure really bothers me and makes it a pain in the ass for new users. 
The regular forum style like fuwa is way better. Fuwa has good mods that do their job, and they aren't authoritarian. They pretty much never try to control the discourse that happens on the site. Fuwa users are free to talk about what we want with only a few reasonable exceptions. 

Nah, Ren loved doing stuff for the community but I think he just bit off more than he could chew with that project and didn't want to disappoint people. Community response was a bit over the top though, I agree 

A lot of them acted like spoiled brats. They kept saying that they "deserved" the translation, even if it was being done for free and as a fan translation. They were extremely entitled and it just turned me off the community entirely.

Thanks, and yeah, I'm doing better these days. It's taken a couple of years to try and get over, but I'm getting there. It'd be nice if someday me and insanityy might talk and I could get some closure, but that's up to her. As for ages, I'd love to do a more recent census, but in the last one I did the average was around 21 on /r/visualnovels, and the mod team was a bit above that. I imagine it might have changed quite a bit with Discord however, as that seemed to attract a younger crowd.

Hope you're doing better and looking after yourself  
Caught that bit of drama, and I thought they handled that extremely poorly and with an immature spirit. Not surprising because whenever I went over to the reddit community I honestly felt like I was surrounded by a bunch of kids. I mean, I touched on the visual novel community being young in another topic, but I genuinely felt it even more on Reddit to the point where I felt uncomfortable being there. It's kinda creepy for a grown man to be hanging around people that sound like they're in high school. So the immaturity of their response wasn't surprising. 

As communities age, a mythology tends to build up around their origins, with past eras vaguely alluded to as “golden ages.” I’ve seen this happen with reddit’s /r/visualnovels, a place I moderated during its most transformative stage, so I thought I’d offer my insider’s take on its history: what we’d hoped to achieve as moderators, the unintended side-effects of our policies, and why I think /r/visualnovels is stagnating these days. Fuwanovel isn't /r/visualnovels, but there's a lot of overlap in the fandom and I thought that given Ange's recent "state of the fandom" post, you guys might find it interesting. Given my acrimonious departure from the subreddit, you should take this with a grain of salt, but hopefully you'll get something from it~
The Birth of /r/visualnovels

The very first posts on /r/visualnovels.
/r/visualnovels was founded in late 2009 by /u/Hpdarkman525 (the former account of /u/gambs), who made one post about the upcoming Umineko ep5 fan translation and then promptly forgot about the sub. At this time, the VN fandom consisted primarily of those who had learned Japanese to read VNs, and those who wished they had. Official localisations were almost non-existent, and the fandom hung off the words of the few fan translators. Knowing about VNs felt like knowing a secret, like a secret handshake to be acknowledged as a fellow western otaku.
This didn’t really change until early 2012 with the release of Katawa Shoujo. We now had a Western VN that was free, easy to install (no fiddling with system locale), pretty well written (no cliche cries of “baka” or “onii-chan”), and handled a delicate subject (disability and self-identity) with a sensitivity that really spoke to a lot of gamers. The optional nature of the adult content helped attract horny teenagers while still retaining an air of respectability. KS managed something no other VN had: attention from the mainstream gaming crowd. It drew a huge wave of new fans to the medium, among which were /u/coldacid and /u/Kuiper who became mods on /r/visualnovels and began to promote it.
While the influx of new members gave birth to the community, with newbies becoming veterans, the continued dominance of KS in the VN scene began to wear thin (it wasn’t until 2016 that the number of /r/visualnovels subscribers outnumbered /r/katawashoujo). Especially grating for veterans was the cry of KS as “the best VN ever written” from those who had only ever read that one VN. The constant stream of “what do I read after KS” and rudimentary technical questions on getting Japanese VNs working drowned out the rare news posts or broader discussion threads. The mod team had a hands-off attitude to it, they’d only remove spam or blatant trolling. This only changed in early 2014 when a relatively unknown user, /u/insanityissexy, requested a mod position...
The Rise of Insanity

Insanityy was a member of the old-guard, being drawn to the medium for Japanese VNs and caring little for what she saw as a pale-imitation in Western VNs. With no regard for the old mods, she singlehandedly brought order to a community that had been lawless. She began with a ban on posts for technical support questions and VN recommendation requests. Instead, they should be asked in the new weekly questions thread so as to clear up the front page for news posts and more substantial discussion threads.
While this move was broadly welcomed by most of the subreddit regulars, it caused some disruption as activity on the sub plummeted. With the western VN scene so small, news was rare and the number of daily posts dropped from 2-4 to just 1. While some grumbled, others were enthused in having an active moderator who cared about the sub. /u/kowzz started a discussion thread on what we could do to improve activity on the sub, and from that discussion he started the weekly Sunday discussion posts and I started the weekly “what are you reading” posts. Unlike the questions sticky, the intention wasn’t to curtail activity outside of these weekly posts, but to provide a supplement to the usual discussions and encourage users to comment more.
With such regular discussion posts, users started to bump into each other more often and a sense of community began to build. On a personal level, I also grew to know insanityy better as we exchanged dozens of increasingly lengthy PMs (so much so that each reply wouldn’t fit within the 10k character limit, we had to send our replies in 3 parts), with us quickly becoming close friends.

Later that year, I proposed an overhaul of the user flairs. The subreddit only offered a basic vndb icon. I wanted to expand that to hundreds of options with a larger profile picture offset to the side of a user’s post as a way to personalise each user. With enough options, I hoped it’d be easier to identify users at a glance and it’d add some character to the subreddit. I was admitted to the mod team to oversee the flair changes, but was soon upgraded to full mod status after a few months on insanityy’s urging.
The two of us fed off each other’s passion as we sought to build a more active, mature, and compassionate community. We never paid any heed to the old mods, mod policy was discussed between us on google hangouts and implemented immediately.

To foster a sense of community, we aimed to have a community event once a month: best X contests, census surveys, recommendation charts, fanart contests, halloween/april fool themes being among just some of the activities we organised. We even got Mangagamer to sponsor some contests with free VNs. To foster a sense of community, we aimed to have a community event once a month: best X contests, census surveys, recommendation charts, fanart contests, halloween/april fool themes being among just some of the activities we organised. We even got Mangagamer to sponsor some contests with free VNs.
We downplayed the seedier parts of the medium, nukige news was banned and discussions on “fapping” were frowned upon. Neither of us were against porn, we’re both fans, but we feared it’d attract a more neckbeard-type audience.

We aggressively went after trolls, but not by banning them. We had automod automatically remove comments from users prone to cause drama, then we’d manually approve non-trollish comments. That way everyone was able to participate in our community, but bad behaviour wasn’t rewarded with lots of attention.


In the following year, insanityy asked the inactive older mods to resign. Kuiper recognised that he was no longer needed and respectfully stepped down. Coldacid said his inactivity was only temporary and he’d be back, but later left reddit for voat as part of an anti-censorship protest. Gambs asked us to drop the subject as he didn’t want to step down, so we carried on ignoring him.
We also added new members to the mod team: /u/FunwithGravity for his knowledge of Japanese, /u/Cornetto_Man because he got along with everyone, and /u/Avebone because he was active at times when the rest of us were asleep. They were added primarily to approve posts mistakenly removed by automod when me and insanityy were afk and had little input on mod policy.
Everything seemed to be going great, we had a growing community that we got along with, trolls were few and far between, and our moderation seemed popular. Then we got a modmail suggesting we try out a new chat program called Discord...
Discord on Discord

When /u/Kowzz and /u/Arcanus44 suggested creating a Discord server, we were initially skeptical. It sounded just like irc, and the /r/visualnovels irc channel had been comatose for years. However Kowz and Arc promised to take care of it for us, Kowz would create the server and Arc would drum up interest. So in Sept 2015, Arc hosted a “meet n’ greet” in voice chat on Discord. While it was by most accounts a success and quite popular, we got some complaints about inappropriate conduct by a couple of users and decided that if this Discord server was going to be linked with /r/visualnovels, we’d need to take an active hand in making sure it maintained our standards.
Kowz was happy to have us onboard, making us admins on Discord. It all seemed smooth, but underneath the surface, the seed of turmoil had been planted in our differing beliefs on who owned the server. Kowz and Arc considered themselves the owners and we were partners, while we considered them to have created the server on our behalf and that it’d run on our principles. Up until then, we’d not had any disagreements on mod policy. Me and insanityy would talk an issue out, if we agreed, we’d propose it to the rest of the mod team and vote on it. We’d picked mods who generally thought the same as us, so votes were normally unanimous. That wasn’t the case with Discord. Kowz and Arc had different ideals on how to run a community, and our usual resolution process of voting felt unfair to them as we outnumbered them 5 to 2.
The problem only got worse with time as insanityy hated arguments so she avoided the staff discussions on Discord and popped in only to vote. Arc and Kowz felt increasingly marginalised by this and that their opinion wasn’t being heard. This led to a standoff where Kowz and Arc demanded their 2 votes should count for as much as the rest of us combined, while we /r/visualnovels mods threatened to create a new server unless we kept one vote each. Discussions got heated until Kowz and Arc eventually backed down. In protest, they chose to stop participating as mods.
While Discord helped bring friends together, it also brought those that disliked each other together. It’s easy to ignore someone on reddit as its tree structure allows for parallel conversations, but the format of Discord makes that harder. This started to become a problem on the server, especially as Discord attracted a different type of user to the subreddit, those who had little patience for the more verbose and patient discussions of the subreddit. We got complaints from the subreddit veterans about some of the newbies but we weren’t sure what to do. Being disliked isn’t a bannable offense, but it was driving away some valued community members.
We didn’t want to create a separate server that split the community, so our misguided solution was the creation of a hidden channel: #sub_regs (a.k.a. the fanclub) that was invite only and accessed via the tableflipper role. The hope was that it’d serve as a backup channel for when #general was annoying and that it’d keep the community veterans on the server. However it ended up encouraging an elitist attitude that divided the community further.
The Fall of /r/visualnovels

With many of the friendly conversations and community atmosphere moving to Discord, the subreddit began to suffer. Inside jokes that were incomprehensible to those not on Discord were frequent, and the community split between those using Discord and those not.
There was also a degree of burnout among the mods. It’s inevitable for all mods, you spend long enough dealing with the worst of the community, the trolls and the spammers, and you begin to develop an us-vs-them mentality. You retreat from the community and draw closer to your fellow mods, looking down upon the normal users. We mods gradually stopped being members of the community and instead became overseers.
Then there was my messy departure from the sub in April 2016. Due to a range of factors: financial difficulties, gender dysphoria, and some toxic “friends,” I became deeply depressed and tried to commit suicide. My fellow subreddit mods (and best friend insanityy) decided the best response was to out me as transgender, block me on social media, and ban me from the subreddit I’d loved so deeply. Insanityy never spoke to me again.
The rest of this is speculation, I was no longer an insider, but from my perspective it looked like this event accelerated the emotional distance insanityy felt from the subreddit as she stopped caring about the community. She tried to carry on as normal at first, running a few contests, maintaining the animated banners I’d once made, but her heart wasn’t in it. She resigned later that year.
With her went the desire to innovate, to improve the community. The remaining mods were followers, not leaders. They could maintain some cosmetic updates and copy the old contests, but they were unable to do anything new. They enlarged the mod team with an additional four members, but it only increased the sense of inertia and made it even harder to get anything done. The subreddit began to feel stale.
The mod team had also become unbalanced, where once me and insanityy spoke up for minority tastes in EVNs and otomes, now the mod team was dominated by Japanese VN fans just as the VN scene was increasingly embracing EVNs. The subreddit felt more elitist than ever just as the medium had never been more diverse.
Unintended Side Effects
While our policies may have made sense at the time, some of the decisions me and insanityy had made began to have a detrimental impact on the subreddit:

We’d brought on Automod to help remove posts when only me and insanityy had to manage everything. We found having a bot leave the removal comment sparked fewer arguments with OP than if one of us did it, and it was more effective at catching spam. But while we strived to reapprove mistakenly removed posts promptly, sometimes OP deleted their post before we could. Psychologically, it also made it dangerously easy to leave some content removed. As we mods burnt out over the years, our standards for what counted as a worthy post kept getting higher with fewer and fewer posts being approved. The end result has been a severe drop in discussion posts on the sub. We’d brought on Automod to help remove posts when only me and insanityy had to manage everything. We found having a bot leave the removal comment sparked fewer arguments with OP than if one of us did it, and it was more effective at catching spam. But while we strived to reapprove mistakenly removed posts promptly, sometimes OP deleted their post before we could. Psychologically, it also made it dangerously easy to leave some content removed. As we mods burnt out over the years, our standards for what counted as a worthy post kept getting higher with fewer and fewer posts being approved. The end result has been a severe drop in discussion posts on the sub.
When recruiting new moderators, we sought people who thought as we did so mod decisions would be consistent and there wouldn’t be arguments in the mod chat. Modding is stressful enough without the stress coming from within the mod team. However, as you add more mods who agree with you, you can start to have an inflated view of how widespread your opinion is. A circlejerk mentality builds and outside opinion is increasingly easy to dismiss. This can leave users feeling like their opinions don’t matter to the mods and builds resentment.

Insanityy was a kind soul and hated conflict, she avoided disagreements as much as possible. As a friend, this was fine, but as a mod it meant she avoided openly discussing mod policy on the subreddit as inevitably there would be some disagreement. This lack of discussion with the sub made it hard for users to object to the direction the sub took, allowing the mod team to grow out of touch with what the userbase wants.


Hopes for the Future
While I may have been quite critical of the current state of the subreddit, I think the community is a good one and there’s hope for improvement. A smaller, more motivated mod team would help, as well as scaling back some of the restrictions like the question and image-post ban. Let activity on the subreddit explode. Should low-quality content grow to become a problem, perhaps /r/visualnovels should split just as /r/gaming and /r/games have, or perhaps a split between Japanese and English VNs would help?
Not every idea will work out, but what’s important is to be trying new ideas and be responsive to change rather than clinging to an outdated format.
As I said at the start, please remember this isn’t an impartial view on the history of the sub and that this isn’t meant to downplay the hard work of the current mod team. Modding is exhausting, it’s a constant burden with little praise. Even if I consider them poor mods, it doesn’t make them bad people.
I know she won’t ever read this, nor will she care what I think, but I still believe insanityy was an inspirational mod and a wonderful friend. It’s incredibly hard to go it alone like she did when she first took over /r/visualnovels. She stood up for what she thought /r/visualnovels could be and put in so much effort, every day, rain or shine, she never shirked from her responsibilities. I miss her every day.
If anyone wants to know more or say hi, you can contact me here on Fuwanovel, tumblr,, twitter, or Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616)

That and the word "theme" which was then clarified later on to reference to homosexual characters. Classifying homosexuality as a degenerate theme is most definitely an unfortunate choice of words

Your casual linking of homosexuality to degeneracy is not welcome on the forums. Either you were memeing like Kaguya says, or you were serious and broke rule 6 of the Fuwa guidelines. Kaguya's being nice and giving you the benefit of the doubt, I however don't and think the forums can cut you and not lose a second of sleep over it.
Lucky for you I'm not a mod.

K
The fanbase is very young, Fuwanovel, Reddit, and Lemma have all done surveys where the average age of the community is 21ish. Compare this to the average age of a video gamer who's easily in their 30s. There are certain side effects to this dominance of youth, imo.