So last night I ventured into despair... · 9:37pm Nov 6th, 2015
...by visiting fanfiction.net again after... uh... I don't know how long.
I know. I know. It's okay for you to roll your eyes and condemn my idiocy. To be fair, whenever one of the very few fics there that I have on watch updates, I do read them exclusively, but the actual navigating trying to find something? Well... it's been a long time.
At first, we would publish fics in our own free (pre-yahoo geocities ftw!) pages and mailing lists. Your stories would be read mostly from word of mouth, your own promotion of your page in your 72-characters-per-line emails, and these little cute things we called "Webrings". Webrings were awesome in just... their simplicity. Then there were the pages that started organizing the links to your page... such as the Anime Web Turnpike. I saw that thing grow from 10 links to hundreds... and then they got owned by fanfiction.net.
Fanfiction.net has been the same monster for a long time. It's pretty much the Mos Eisley of the written word online, and that some people here actually wish fimfiction was like that place staggers the mind.
But, anyway. Just visiting it reminded me of just how good we have it here. And I don't mean just because of how superior Fimfic's design and implementation of social networking is in comparison, but the sheer amount of quality stuff we have here.
Yes, we have people with horrible, regrettable "grammer" skills, and sure, not everyone is a master story-teller here either... but honestly? I think our mentality of actively engaging authors with (sometimes) constructive criticism, offers for editing, hell, even some grammar lessons right there in the comments, or the kindly PM approach with a list of needed edits has really created a space where people actually want to not write like some grotesque reject from the dark depths of modern teenage text-code communication has saved us from going into the gutter with them.
And sure, some of you might argue that fanfiction.net has a lot more users and what not and that we're more of a niche. But, are we? I mean, really?
When you browse fanfiction.net you don't just go in blind and read a list of all the fics that have been added be it Twilight fan fiction, Twilight 50 Shades of Gray fan fiction, Mario Bros. fan fiction or whathave you. (And if you do, I-I don't know what to tell you. Celestia bless your heart but you need assistance before you go AWOL.)
You go into the category of your choice first, reducing the amount of possible results. Then you go into the series of your choice, reducing it again. There you might or not toggle the filters to reduce the story list again. But, by then your experience in fanfiction.net is not so much different than the front page here, sans the Feature Box of course.
And yet, in those 5000 stories listed, you will be really hard pressed to find something that doesn't have a description that makes your eyes bleed. And when you do find something with okay grammar and maybe paragraphs, the storytelling itself is so bad it just... ugh. The comments will have some pointers sometimes, but because they're always separate, there's no interaction and therefore no sense of ownership for the author to take a hard look at their story unless they are exceptional and actually make an effort.
When you look at the front page, sure you might cringe at the 'crap' you see there. But let's be honest, just because I dislike anon fics doesn't mean they're crap in how they're written, or their grammar, or even their storytelling. It doesn't mean they're bad stories. A lot of times we just call crap something that we don't like to read... and if we ignore that dislike of the theme or maybe even the author, we can see that, for the most part, our 'crap' here, is generally better written, edited and enjoyable than an equal amount of the crap that you find in fanfiction net at any given time.
So yeah, I just had to share my frustration with just how bad stuff is there.
I went and reread a few of my old favorites a few weeks ago...I'm disappointed that my 15 year old self had such poor taste in grammar.
I hear you man, even if you search the mlp section on their website, most of the stories are bad, and the few that aren't? they are also on this website so what's the point. there are some good stories on that website is true, just have to search harder for them, and the bottom of the barrel there seems to be lower then it is here.
I made an account there a while ago. After like 5-10 minutes of switching between it and FIMFiction, I got irritated and tired of the shear appearance of the site. My account is currently still there, occupying internet space with nothing in it.
Heh, I went and reread my fanfictions from when I was 10... why was I on there? And what's more... people loved them. And most of the stuff I read was WORSE than 10 year old me's writing...
While I never really visited FanFiction (I heard first about FanFiction AFTER FimFiction), I completely agree that FanFiction is a terrible monster of a site. It's just too big with too many different fandom's without a easy way to search or read through them. You need to know about a story if you want to find it...
I'm still hoping that Knighty will make version of FimFiction without the Fim. All fanfiction needs a good site to get published and read on, and FimFiction has the perfect structure to give fanfiction of every fandom a chance to get seen. Don't know if that would work with the current tag-system, maybe instead of tags of every possible character in a fandom, it would need tags of every separate fandom. And separate possible frontpages for separate fandoms (examples; www.readfiction.net/STU, www.readfiction.net/HP and www.readfiction.net/naruto).
I believe I once heard that Knighty had plans to make a second FimFiction without the pony but I'm not sure if I remember that right...
I just remember a wonderful conversation I had with someone who refused to use FiMfic because apparently the mods are a bunch of Nazis and the users are unduly mean. He actually preferred Fanfiction.net because of their lax standards...
Only been there to read my immortal.
I really can't say anything xD
This is why I bypassed Fanfiction.net entirely. I don't even have an account. If I write for other fandoms, it's LiveJournal or AO3 all the way. (I even have invites for AO3, so I can make sure other people aren't left to the wolves of Fanfiction.net.)
In summery, pretty much anything is better than Fanfiction.net.
On the topic of constructive criticism, I think this sentence is a run-on. It's certainly confusing past the point of "dark depths."
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It's... intentional?
It's not. Intentional, that is.
The only thing I wish we did was being able to post stories and chapters dorectly to the sote instead of having to go throigh GDocs. But other than that, yes, Fimfic is much superior.
3525814 It's being made, it's just a long process.
3525772 There are very good stories on there, but they are exceedingly rare, which is disheartening.
Still, when you do find a story that's written well, it makes the effort worthwhile sometimes.
Christ, that site makes my brain/eyes/mouth bleed but shit, man, where the hell else can I get my hands on all my NonPon fiction anymore?
eh, I gave up hope on many of those fics I once followed there of ever updating. Hell, a few of those people moved to Fimfiction like in the past year and a half anyways so even less of a reason to go there. Yet, there are still people who exclusively post their pony fics there. It boggles my mind too.
Still, for both readers and writers, using a tag system for characters with pictures is nice and all, but that just adds more time and frustrations to both readers and writers where a system that just let them add character names in written form tends to typically be a far more superior form of finding what you want to read as well as the ease of just having the freedom to write whatever and whoever you want without being stuffed into obscurity. This is why as nice as a visual tag system is, it's like 2 years too late.
Hell, if it wasn't for The Great Character Purge of the P. days. I mean who knows how many more Lyra's and Octavias, Vinyls and other background ponies and foals could have been developed into fan favorites? All I saw since then was the inevitable stagnation of overused premises of people just writing what personalities the Progenitors came up with that simply took off with fans. Sure, one can argue those older fics and writers aren't as good as some people now a days, being lucky to have been on the pony ride before all the new kids started pooping in the pool, but there is no denying the explosive effects those works had on the community with art and music often inspiring the other to produce better works. It was a nice yet delicate balance.
There is no doubt though that we are niche though. This site alone has chased away some good talents. But people grow tired of the same old stuff and eventually move on. Show changes in drastic ways or basically starts feeling like the writers aren't even trying anymore, many just call it quits and continue on with their lives as if the fandom was never a thing.
This site has offered a lot. But it still as it is now honestly doing things that should have been approached years ago. Better late than never I suppose. Still, a limited system is still limited. Readers want new experiences and with every good decent story that baits a reader in only to shit all over them with a "I got bored. Read my other story that I'll never finish though" the more the whole "I'll ignore everything without a complete tag" becomes a thing.
And that mentality ends up as a snake eating its own tail, because they either aren't faving or liking a story since they aren't reading it or won't rate it until its completed. The writers on the other hand who feel their story isn't popular and thus abandon a story because they don't get the feedback on or the likes and favs they would like to feel validated in continuing the story, just ups and abandons them.
I don't know dude. I still enjoy fanfiction, people do good stuff. Some people don't even care about the ratings and continue to churn out fun fluffy stories or big epics. But yeah, lets not kid ourselves. If we weren't niche we wouldn't be trying to go into other markets, and this system now just feels like it's a result only because of the want and need to branch out beyond ponies. Which is good because many of my friends have been wishing for something fimfiction-like for their non-pony stuff so I'm not against that idea in the least. It's just, what the staff wants and what the fandom needed just didn't mesh well I feel and this is our end result.
Still, an update is an update. Just glad something is finally being done for tags. A most welcomed day. Now that this stream of consciousness rant is done, off to make dinner.
3525824 The lax standards are possibly why that site looks like an absolute mess. I really can't stand the 1k's and 1k's of gary/ash fanfics I have to cycle through to get some decent pokemon stories, or the *shudder* ramna/male character stories.
That being said, the site takes a while to figure out, and while this one does as well, I've come to prefer Fimfiction for many reasons.
1: also liked/similar/author's stories lists
2: groups created and managed by users.
3: Blogs. Easy to keep track of what your favorite authors are doing
4: Feed. More ways to keep track of updates and authors!
That being said, there are still a few over there that made me happy. Tales of the Foxcat always made me happy, as well as a few Ranma SM crosses.
3525931 Fair enough, although this blog wasn't intended to be about tags and fimfic updates. To be fair tho, even if takes a while, unlike fanfic.net, fimfic actually has improvements made on it beyond a change of server or a cleanup of spam mail.
I actually still visit FF.net fairly regularly. After several years of it, I think I've gotten the hang of sifting through the piles of crap for the stories that are actually good.
I do think it's worth it, finding the gems that are there, but yeah, it can get pretty darn bad. I guess it just all comes down to how much you can tolerate browsing through that stuff.
I also actually feel like it's a lot better for people starting out, because the hardest part of learning to write isn't the grammar, the storytelling, or any of those other things that we all focus on here. It's learning to write. So the fact that a place exists where you can put your terrible first attempts up for all to see, and have people who will actually say nice things about that, I think that's important.
Don't worry, It just means you're an Elitist snob.
Seriously though, Fimfiction has a proper rating system and detailed category search and a questionable moderation process.
Fanfiction.net has none of that.
But don't fool yourself D, There is PLENTY of rock bottom scum here on Fimfiction.
Plenty of Fics here deny the existence of plot, English language, basic grammar, and the existence of the site theme.
Plenty of Fics here also deny the existence of common decency and international laws.
Just go looking for the red lightsabers.
But, if you think Fimfiction doesn't still suffer from the same things as Fanfiction.net, you're blind.
Fimfiction just has more ways to prevent it, but even those methods are imperfect.
3525893
I've considered writing non-pony stories in fimfic, and just linking it off site (say Spacebattles or something) to use Fimfic's pretty nice UI (in comparison to FF.net. Bloody hell that thing is crap).
This might piss people off with all the used up slots tho, so I decided that this might not have been the best idea.
3526005 Oh, no, I acknowledge that. There's no question about us having some really awful crimes against literacy here in these sacred halls of Pony Words.
I'm just saying, collectively it's less here than there. One of those instances where the grass is greener at home.
I think you're being a little bit unfair to the people who post on fanfiction.net. Your UI complaints are accurate, but the terribleness of the cite navigation doesn't reflect on how well the community there writes. There are plenty of terrible stories on fanfiction.net, but there are also plenty of terrible stories on fimfiction. It's easy to think that the fiction here is better written, but that's just due to the cite, which, again, is designed much better and makes it much easier to actually find the good stuff. 90% of everything is crap, as they say. And with ~ eleven million stories to fimfiction's ~ eighty thousand it's not surprising that the ten million they've taken on as baggage weighs them down more than the seventy-two thousand here.
Personally, I've found the people on fanfiction.net to be much more helpful people then the people here. They've at least offered to help me, something no one has ever done here. I wouldn't say that they're nicer – the people here are as nice as it gets – but more helpful, definitely. I've actually had conversations with other authors on fanfiction.net, but no one has ever really talked to me here on fimfiction.
Oh, and your comment on textese: there are actually many studies that suggest that the teenage trend towards constant texting is actually improving literacy scores. There are even more that suggest that it improves certain skills and has very little negative impact on others. Very few actually show negative correlations between writing ability and use of textese. I point you to these sources:
Verheijen, A. J. P. "The Effects of Text Messaging and Instant Messaging on Literacy." English Studies 94.5 (2013): 582-602. Web.
Grace, Abbie, et al. "Undergraduates’ Text Messaging Language and Literacy Skills." Reading and Writing 27.5 (2014): 855-73. Web.
Varnhagen, Connie K., et al. "lol: New Language and Spelling in Instant Messaging." Reading and Writing 23.6 (2010): 719-33. Web.
So, when you refer to me, and every one of the other six and a half million users of fanfiction.net as people who "write like some grotesque reject from the dark depths of modern teenage text-code communication", you're not only very clearly trying to insult people - not, I think we can agree, a very kind thing to do - you're also doing a bad job of it.
Oh, yeah. I should have mentioned that before. I, as someone who uses fanfiction.net almost exclusively at this point, found this to be incredibly insulting. Why do I use fanfiction almost exclusively? In part because of things like this. The FIM community has gotten increasingly elitist over the course of the time I've been involved with it. I really hope you don't fall into that trap. I like you and I like your stories, and I'd hate to see you go down that path. This isn't the first time I've felt uneasy reading one of your journals, but I've never spoken up because they never targeted a demographic I was part of. Now that they have, I, as the flawed human I am, finally have decided to speak up. Please, consider what you're saying. This wasn't in the spirit of kindness, compassion, and welcoming that this fandom is supposed to be about.
I have a feeling I won't win any friends for this, seeing as people who read your journal are most likely inclined to defend you, but I had to say my piece. If you feel I've been unfair in my critique, I'd like you to point out why. I'd really like to be wrong. Again, I like you, and I'd be ecstatic to see that this feeling was just the result of a bad day on my part, and had nothing to do with this.
TL:DR; don't be a dick to people, even if you think their stuff isn't great.
Man I remember Sailor Moon fanfic sites back in the day where you'd download a zip file with that week's chapter updates in individual text files and you'd have to weed out the stories you weren't following and decide whether to read the new stories. It was brutal.
I dunno man. Fimfiction is a much better designed site but searching for content can be a less pleasant experience. There's a lot more murky waters to wade through on Fanfic but Fimfic has a much higher population of Candiru. Being so internetz has attracted a lot more troll, gore, and sex for it's own sake.
On Fanfic if you turn mature on you can expect a bunch of stories of varying quality which have some sex or gore or mature themes but are otherwise actual stories of length and not completely focused on the mature content.
There are so many stories on Fimfic where it's "characters tortured to death" or "characters have the shecks" and there is nothing else at all that the story os even about... Shipping and slash are about even though.
Lots of people complain about downvotes but this site benefits from them greatly.
Could have been worse, it could have been the other way around.
I still go to fanfiction.net. i've got real-life friends who write there, and i write non-pony stuff, too. I can't publish that here. ;) but yeah, the publishing of fics there and how to edit really does suck. It's a friggin' ton easier on this site.
Also, thanks for the stroll down fanfic-memory lane. :D Man, I remember webrings and the Anime Web turnpike.
3526073 I don't think you read my post that carefully. To begin with, I never correlated writing textese with writing ability. I said that some people there write stories that read like textese which is, quite honestly, not how you should write a story, regardless of whatever benefits they might or not get out of it.
Also, like I clarified in the post, sure ff.net has more stories and users, but when you break it down by sections and say, go to anime, then slayers, you have about 5k stories. Not a million. In my experience, when looking at those 5k you'll find a lot more crap in comparison to 5k stories here.
Your experience in ff.net might be nice, and I'm sorry no one here has talked to you to the extent there, but have you asked for feedback? I mean, until now you hadn't commented on other blogs, and that's cool, but interacting in comments, going to groups and posting stories all work together to engage other users. Personally, if you PM me I will respond.
Additionally, I've been in ff.net since it pretty much started. At least within the first year of it, and while I have met a lot of nice people there, my point in the blog is that there's a lot less interaction with all your readers. The only way you can communicate with them is pming, which is a clumsy system or in the forums which is... well... not very inviting imo.
And as I have acknowledged in other comments, I never said stuff here was perfect, but it is a fact that the quality of writers I find here far exceeds the vast majority of who I've found in ff.net. That doesn't mean they're not there. But they are drowned in far more crap than the good authors here, and that is in part because this site really allows people to promote other's work, something that basically falls down in ff.net to posting tremendously long things in the bio there.
My main thing is here you have active engagement with others, which is what makes this place honestly better. To address your concerns, and clarify, I never said everyone in ff.net writes horribly or that everyone there is a douchebag that has no clue how to improve.
But again, my experience in 17 years of ff.net has been to see a lot less improvement and community efforts to promote it than here. That is what I am basing my observations and rant on. But as with just about anything, your mileage might vary.
Lets not even get into the lowest-bidder nightmare that is the fanfiction.net interface. I know they added a night-reading mode sometime recently, but that merely takes it from eye-bleeding to eye-straining.
3526101 Granted on the mature stuff, but I think that's a downside of not having a "clop" tag. There are plenty of mature stories that are actual stories around. It gets bogged down, but hopefully that will be fixed.
You mad fool you.
MLP is the first and only fandom that I've ever really participated in; "Spiderses" was the first fanfic I read in my life. A few months ago, I grew kind of curious about other fandoms and decided to look into one of my childhood favorites, the first series that really stoked my imagination and got me thinking up story ideas on my own, Redwall.
I did investigation across a number of sites, trying to hunt down what people considered to be the best Redwall fanfics out there, and found most of them located on fanfiction.net.
I don't know what frightened me more: the quality of Redwall fanfiction in general, or the quality of fanfiction.net in particular. I think I found one fanfic that would have counted as "serviceable" by fimfiction standards, if extremely slow-paced, and the site itself was baffling in its crusty simplicity. It was like someone had crafted the site a decade ago and then just forgotten about it. Being used to a site that grants me far more options than I could ever use, an overabundance of ways to sort and filter the information on the site, and a variety of ways to interact with other authors, readers, and fans, using fanfiction.net for a few days made me feel crippled, blind, and dumb.
I'm fully in support of Knighty's plan to use the fimfiction backend to host other fandoms. If fanfiction.net is the best competition out there, then it's not really going to be a competition. I'm excited to see if other fandoms and fanfiction writers are invigorated by being given the excellent tools that we have. ~ Sable
Man...I remember visiting that place in the days of yore. I had just stumbled upon it somehow. SSBM had just come out and I was looking for fanfiction for that, and Pokemon, and various favorite video games or anime. Good times...
Now it just makes my eyes bleed.
Heeeeeeeeyyyyyy look at that! One of the MANY reasons it's a horrible horrible idea to open this website up and make it into a general fanfiction website like High Emperor Knighty intends
Wow, damn, I'd forgotten about Webrings. :O
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The lack of fucks the site admin give over distinguishing actual stories from pornography is astonishing and one of the main things they need to change if they want to attract writers from other communities.
Also, Fanfiction Reviews are far better for stories than Fimfiction comments. Comments are great for blogs, forums, groups, etc. But story comment sections are unproductive due to all the bulshit. If people want to discuss the story the author should make a group for it for that purpose.
And to think my spanish uncomplet fics are there.
I do think FF.net's worst aspect is its web design. I have a lot of Fallout fanfiction that I host over there, and after getting used to how simple and easy it is to use FimFiction, their system for publishing and editing was murder. Say what you will about the guy, but Knighty is a web design god compared to whoever made FF.net what it is.
3525995 No doubt. Things just tend to derail a times when I rant. And holy hell those Rings were pretty much how I found a lot of really cool stuff, especially web comics. I wonder whatever happened to that comic artist for Coyoteville? xD
But yeah, Fim has done wonders for keeping people connected with the authors and their stories in ways fanfiction clearly hasn't. Not like I'm discounting the good this site's done. One of its most key features I feel is how it keeps that thread of community linked between readers and writers. A bonus sort of bloggers sphere added to the mix beyond just "I updated this" feature.
Still, any system that can improve on helping me find more stories that suit my interests or encourage me to want to write something that won't be lost in a sea of "other" fics, then yeah can't help but vent a bit on that when stuff about Fimfic come up, it's something I've been talking about even before you became a mod so it's not like I'm trying to force it on anyone, just a small part that came up in my ramblings that went on a bit too. I care about the site but I'm not gonna turn a blind eye to its faults as there are things that need improving before it can really become a successful ALL FICTION website.
There really has to be a way to give people more freedom to tag their own stuff, ala Derpibooru to some degree. I know pictures work and look nicer and fit better on the cards, so aesthetics aside, I can't see why we don't adopt such a system. But yeah, just an old fic fan who reads too many stories, bitching about not enough stories to read that try to do more than ride on the coattails of an episode or other already established popular stories.
Didn't mean to derail the blog.
I didn't want to suggest anything, but I remember when I was in my early 20's going there and just deleting stories en masse using cut and paste because of how ridiculous the security hole was... I suppose I could have used their zero day exploits to just mix the stories all around, but I was lazy. And, it's not like anyone lost their work... in theory. Then again, I grew up where the lightning was plentiful and knew to keep frequent back ups of my work or loose it.
I never did manage to figure out how to pull up files from the shadows of a forced shutdown or freeze (or whatever) so if it wasn't saved it before what amounts to a blue screen of death it was lost. It wasn't like I did it on purpose, I only had a dial up connection and I couldn't justify the telephone line being busy while I read 20 something chapters in one sitting... or over the course of a few days. I mean, once I realized I was removing peoples work from the site on a semi-permanent basis I stopped. And, I probably wasn't the only one purposely taking advantage of cut and paste feature with the fics.
Yeah, I'm pretty new to the fanfiction world, and have tried reading fics for other shows I like, but couldn't. Fanfiction.net is just so bad, I can't find anything at all that looks remotely appealing.
Okay, so the design of this site is way better than that of fanfiction.net, no argument there. And it is also true that the vast majority of stories there are horrible. However, there are a number of gems there, it just takes a lot of patience and searching to find them.
Also, while ff.net's lax standards might be bad for readers, it's good for inexperienced writers who just want to get their story out where others can see it.
So while I agree with the spirit of your argument, I disagree with the implied blanket statement that ff.net is entirely without redeeming value.
3526309 Actually, FF.net already has competition from an all-fandoms fanfiction site which is much better designed than ff.net (and has a higher general quality level to the works on it): Archive of Our Own (aka AO3). In my opinion it's not quite as good as FiMfiction, but it could still be a much more worthy competitor than FF.net would be.
This was all about my childhood, D. I grew up with the 'net, and I saw all those things form as the web grew... I was even in some of those webrings back when.
That said, I've never cared for ff.net. Some of it was that I didn't really "get" fanfiction for a while (weirdly) and part of it was that, in a world of bad designs, FF'net's design always set my teeth on edge. Even today, it does so - stark, utilitarian, confusion, sometimes just bass-ackwards... It practically defines "bad interface". I've read a few stories there, some good, some bad.
My hope is that there's eventually a version of FiMFic.net for everyone. This site has levels of awesome I don't think most people ever actually realize...
There's a lot of good stuff on Fanfiction.net, but by the hoary horrors of horse Hells, it's buried beneath Himalayas of bad writing, bad characterization, bad grammar and just plain bad ideas. Fimfiction is far from perfect, and obviously a rather focused site, but as you say, this place is not as bad. Thank Celestia!
I understand that ff.net is not perfect in any way and I know that some people hate it, but I personally don't hate it and can't really comprehend why people hate it so much. For me, I've read some stories on there that are, in my opinion, better than some of the published books a lot of people seem to worship. Same for here. Honestly, I read great stories and enjoy reading them very much. However, I read stories on ff.net and, even though they aren't the best stories I've read, I still enjoy them just as much because the authors put their time and energy into actually attempting to write something and I appreciate that they are willing to share their stories with us. I don't think I'll ever fully understand the dislike so many people have for ff.net, but that's just how I am. I'll acknowledge that fact that people don't like it, but because I do like it, I'll just never be able to fully comprehend their feelings towards it.
ooooh are we allowed to site bash now? i have a whole list of things to say about EQD
3527119 Here's the stick, there's the horse: https://www.fimfiction.net/group/450/i-hate-equestria-daily/threads
Have at it!
Site bashing groups have always been legal. Just not persons. Unless that's changed, in which case continue to site bash anyways.
Ah, I remember the old Fanfiction Mailing List. The joys of having fanfics just drop into your inbox (a chapter at a time). Of course, you also had the Titanic pile of terrible stories delivered to you as well, on top of having to sort through the endless chain of flames to see if it was the next chapter, or just a edited version. I think the only fic I ever tried to write was posted there...
I find the best way to deal with Fanfiction.net is to stick to a couple of communities and writers; I may miss out on a few new ones that are decent, but I find that decent writers stick together, so perusing their faves will do the job.
My personal experience with fanfiction.net consists of about 30 minutes, 10 of which was me trying to make sense of their system and the other 20 was me trying to figure out why everyone wrote at a 3rd grade level.
We really do have it good, here.
3526288 Okay, I have to say, your response to me was a lot less heated and much more reasonable and well reasoned than I expected. Which is good, and also seems to suggest that your insults were errors, not intentional. I still think that all of your complaints can be chalked up to the cite being worse, which I agree with, and not the people themselves being worse. And I still think that calling anyone 'some grotesque reject from the dark depths' is not a very nice thing to do. But I concede that I, having been angered by the aforementioned generalization and negative comment, perhaps responded quicker and less open minded then I should have.
Also, side note, how do you know I've never commented on other blogs before? Did you mean just yours? Is there a way to track that about users? I'm not sure I'm okay with this.