I use to think the site had a sort of "appeal" when I was much younger, but now that I'm much older and looking back, I'm glad I never went too deep in that site. I never even knew there was a forum until now and looking at some of the posts, oh boy...
The thing about quality Tropers is that they're cut from the same cloth as quality Wikiers: They're diligent, more than likely mildly Autistic, and do what they do mostly for love of the craft and because they enjoy doing analysis work. You get a few of these boys working on your Tropes list, and you're golden as to what you can do content-wise.
The thing is, they're not usually managers. They're the brute force and backbone of a communal website. They can set you up with a foundation to work on, but they can't do it alone, and more people, with more options and more ideas can help the result be much better than it would otherwise be. So they need help: other users, people to help manage the product, dudes adding links and tanks and so on, and editors. Good god,
editors.
The problem is that this opens the gate for two very distinct and very destructive breeds of Autist that when they show up, will inevitably cause more harm than good to the entire thing:
First, you have the Warlord crowd. These are your Ryulong types, that stake out a given territory on a Wiki or Trope article and then declare it "theirs." If they ever have any actual power, they will use their position to crack down on people they define as a rulebreaker, anyone who edits "their" articles without asking, and ultimately, anyone that pisses them off. The only solution is to never let them have power in the first place and failing this, kick them the fuck off the website and show zero tolerance to any socks. If they're allowed to stick around in a position of power they metastasize like a tumor and will drive a ton of quality users - especially the critical ones that you
need to run such a website - off the platform.
Then you have the Agitators. These are users whose sole purpose is to force the community writ large to take a position that is beneficial to the Agitators. Something Awful did this tactic a lot during the early days, when TVTropes was less shit, and the result was a gradual shift towards TVTropes being more in line with Something Awful ideologically (at a time when SA was turning into the dumpster fire we know it for now). If a community is united, Agitators will more than likely not get a chance, but if they can ever get a hook into anyone in power, things can snowball quickly and dramatically, as the Agitators gain power over the community and promptly abuse the shit out of it with the intention of forcing everyone to the Agitator's worldview. In rare cases, this can erupt in outright factionalization and a site-wide civil war.
If either one of these shitters gets in and is allowed to stick around, it can be a death sentence for your site. In the case of the former, you wind up with what is effectively a corrupt cop abusing his power with the petulance and irritability of a six-year-old, actively driving other users away and generally being an albatross around the neck of the entire website. In the case of the latter, you find the website increasingly pushed in partisan directions and forced to adhere to a party line that its users, more often than not, never signed up for and are now expected to pull water for.
tvtropes.org
