Erfworld Thread XI: Finally, it's HAMMER-TIME!

[Morgaln]

Rob on the reddit thing:

Spoiler

Show

Uncool times call for uncool measures. In the years of having the subreddit do its thing, it's been hard to argue that the benefits outweigh the problems.

It's not a great discovery mechanism for new readers, so there's no real growth or marketing value in it.

The post discussions there are generally kind of diluted and short, but they can be helpful. The main benefit of having the subreddit is to get a second set of update reactions from a group with less enthusiasm and mental investment in the story. If you're writing a serial and you get all your fan feedback from superfans, you can end up going down a rabbit hole and telling a more convoluted story than the average reader can follow. That subreddit is one way to check that.

The tradeoff is that Reddit's the happy home of a lot of echo chambers for throwing crap at things, like /r/****tykickstarters and /r/buttcoin. The fan subreddits for most shows, games, and things that I've followed usually get real ugly, real often. So it can be kind of a low-barrier space for Erfworld haters to post and reinforce each other's "Balder did 9/11" theories.

That alone wouldn't hurt anything. The main problem is that /r/erfworld is one of the few places those people will intermingle with people who actually do enjoy the story and support the team. And they love to lie to those people. Every time there's a meta issue with making the comic, somebody starts a fire over there with the special kind of inflammatory, made-up "I'm just asking questions" horse**** that the internet specializes in. Then that post and any reactions I might make to it will get used as a link to start fires in other channels. You'll see those kept as catalogs and get thrown back years later when something else is going wrong.

All of that is to say, the benefit/cost of the subreddit has always been a neck-and-neck race. Right now, that race is not close. Nothing good that has or will come out of /r/erfworld while we are not updating. There's only one thing we can do that will save the Erfworld community, story, and enterprise. "Get back to updating." Start Book 5 with better frequency and quality than before. Get the story moving. Make it fun to read again, and keep it coming.

That's the place we're aiming. That's what we're working on, every day and night. Anything that takes my time away from that stuff is delaying the day when that switch is thrown, and we abruptly reverse direction from decline to growth again. During this span, you can expect me (or the mods) to shut down threads and delete comments. I've already banned one user on these forums "until we begin updating again" and I expect to do that again. The cost of doing uncool **** is less than the cost of trying to make it cool.

Tl;DR I'm just going to hit things until they stop making distracting noises. It's actually kind of liberating to have other problems so big that the drama **** looks small and solvable with a hammer.

This thread is locked in a really uncool way. 8-)

Wait, what? "The main problem is that /r/erfworld is one of the few places those people will intermingle with people who actually do enjoy the story and support the team."
In other words, exposing people who enjoy the story to criticism is a bad idea? Why, because they might actually start to consider whether there's some truth behind it? Closing a forum (especially a fan forum on a third party site) is not how you do that. What you do is address the criticism itself, not try to silence those who are voicing it. But I guess he would close this thread too if he could.

[tigerusthegreat]

Heard a rumor from a friend who knows someone close to Rob. Not sure I believe it but it's interesting.

Rob was apparently smashed yesterday because "super bad thing #2" happened to be a legal battle where he was ordered to pay a previous artist money he owed them and never had paid. The ruling came down yesterday. Rob has to pay up in full or remove all of that artist's work from the site (which would be significant). Rob is stick between letting erfworld die or coming up with the money (and he's apparently broke). Not sure what artist it could be though.

He also said that Rob is doing almost all the 3d work so he can pocket as much of the kickstarter money as possible while pretending a team is working on it to increase donations.

I think my friend's source is probably full of ****, but wouldnt that be an interesting end to this story.

[Dragonus45]

Wait, what? "The main problem is that /r/erfworld is one of the few places those people will intermingle with people who actually do enjoy the story and support the team."
In other words, exposing people who enjoy the story to criticism is a bad idea? Why, because they might actually start to consider whether there's some truth behind it? Closing a forum (especially a fan forum on a third party site) is not how you do that. What you do is address the criticism itself, not try to silence those who are voicing it. But I guess he would close this thread too if he could.

Presumably a fanmade reddit that he has no say in will take its place and inevitably be super hostile now.

:EDIT: Apparently its already up lol

[The Glyphstone]

Streisand Effect - now available in Erf!

[tigerusthegreat]

Streisand Effect - now available in Erf!

Any bets on whether Rob tries to get reddit to take it down for some reason or tries to sneak in someone to be a mod for it under a fake account first?

[tomaO2]

Rob on the reddit thing:

And they love to lie to those people. Every time there's a meta issue with making the comic, somebody starts a fire over there with the special kind of inflammatory, made-up "I'm just asking questions" horse**** that the internet specializes in. Then that post and any reactions I might make to it will get used as a link to start fires in other channels. You'll see those kept as catalogs and get thrown back years later when something else is going wrong.

Getting on the "ban fake news" bandwagon, huh? So what sort of lies we talking about? Some guy speculating that that big thing two is a disgruntled former artist? Man, that's just a theory, not fake news, people tend to speculate when not being explicitly told the answers, hell, we tend to do it when we ARE told the answers.

I've never been on the erf subreddit, but I have been checking out the freefolk subreddit, and that is a fantastic place. Is it anti-GoT? Well, I'd say it's anti-**** writing, but you could certainly say that the majority of the posts are anti-GoT. Certainly it's the place for people that get kicked out of the official GoT subreddit. It was NOT easy getting people there either. I read a page that talked about how the official GoT tried to shut them out, but they overcame all the challenge, and now Freefolk is more popular than the official subreddit. I also respect that they have little to no mod oversight, and the memes on that page are GOOD.

The real danger is that subreddits fill in the vacuum left by this shut down and do a freefolk. Not sure Erfworld has enough people interested enough to get much traction though. I'll just continue to vent here until Rob realizes that he can just ask Rich to shut down this thread too. Honestly, the original book is still hosted here. You'd think there'd be a bigger place for discussion, or that there would be more of it. Like, what about all the new people that read book 1 for the first time here? When is the last time a new reader actually made a post here?

Anyway, here's the thing, you can ban the stuff you don't like, but, in the US at least (unlike China and, increasingly, Europe) free speechers gotta free speech. Hopefully the day is coming soon where we can have more viable online platforms than freaking twitter and youtube. The consequences of silencing after your detractors is worse than leaving them alone. Even if the detractors are saying stuff that is hilariously wrong, like the earth is flat, which is a belief that gets WAY more adherents than you might think.

[cervidal]

Anyway, here's the thing, you can ban the stuff you don't like, but, in the US at least (unlike China and, increasingly, Europe) free speechers gotta free speech.
[/FONT]

I think everything Erfworld going on right now is a dumpster fire and that Rob is little better than the monorail guy from the Simpsons. But please, please, please don't go parading around everyone having a right to say whatever they want on any given forum or other media platform. They don't.

Your right to free speech begins and ends with not being persecuted by the government for what you say. No business is required to give you a platform to say anything, true or not.

[tigerusthegreat]

I think everything Erfworld going on right now is a dumpster fire and that Rob is little better than the monorail guy from the Simpsons. But please, please, please don't go parading around everyone having a right to say whatever they want on any given forum or other media platform. They don't.

Your right to free speech begins and ends with not being persecuted by the government for what you say. No business is required to give you a platform to say anything, true or not.

[MReav]

Streisand Effect - now available in Erf!

Streisand Erfect?

[tigerusthegreat]

Streisand Erfect?

The effect of trying to censor something ending up making it more public/popular. it comes from the fact that Barbara Streisand wanted an aerial picture of her house removed from a website. Before her lawsuit it was downloaded 6 times (2 of which were by her lawyers). After he lawsuit but before it was removed, it was downloaded 420k times.

Fun thing about the outstanding kickstarters. The Print Book 2 & Draw Book 3 kickstarter, a stretch goal was "an extra full-color, art-intensive page. [Rob] will try to keep my grubby words off of these, and let you enjoy the view. " for every $1k over $105k that was raised. $146k was raised (41 updates). The chart on the page lists 31 full art pages, so I'm not sure if that was a limit imposed or just wasn't updated for the final total.

Looking at Book 3, and counting pages that have at least half the page covered by one panel or have minimal text, there are 10 of them for book 3 (Page 3, Page 11 [Questionable], Page 23 [Questionable], Page 34 [Questionable], page 44 [Questionable], Page 53, Page 86, Page 97 [Questionable], Page 128, Page 135). There are 20 in book 4 (Page 10, Page 12 [Questionable], Page 13 [Questionable], Page 16, Page 24, Page 36, Page 48, Page 52, Page 61, Page 69, Page 73, Page 89, Page 98, Page 119. Page 144, page 153, page 175, page 178, page 182, page 187).

Oddly enough, between the two we hit the lower 31 number. However, I don't know what criteria Rob would be using for this, if he even gave a crap about it (guessing not).

[tomaO2]

I think everything Erfworld going on right now is a dumpster fire and that Rob is little better than the monorail guy from the Simpsons. But please, please, please don't go parading around everyone having a right to say whatever they want on any given forum or other media platform. They don't.

Your right to free speech begins and ends with not being persecuted by the government for what you say. No business is required to give you a platform to say anything, true or not.

If a business bills itself as a public platform, then, ipso facto, it becomes one. This was the sort of argument that made is possible for people to gather in what is technically a privately owned public space (not a public park) during Occupy Wall Street, and it should also apply to other online forums that bill themselves as public spaces (reddit and Erfworld forums would not count as such, just to be clear, but I'd have an issue if reddit took a side and said, for example, you could not make a reddit for GoT criticism).

Twitter is trying to be both a publisher and a public platform at the same time, and the rules it enforces is done in a very poor manner with little oversight or accountability. It's a mess, but they can get away with a lot of this kind of stuff for now due to there being a massive monopoly being grown off the efforts of the days when it was MUCH more free speech friendly.

Also, what you are talking about is the first amendment, not free speech. Those are two different things, but related because the first amendment is the primary way the US protects free speech. Unfortunately, there are no government public areas online. EVERYTHING is owned by some business or another, so the laws will have to adapt.

[Welf]

Did Musk inherit that much?

No, but if you look at his career his key to success was being good at marketing and convincing investors.

The tradeoff is that Reddit's the happy home of a lot of echo chambers for throwing crap at things, like /r/****tykickstarters and /r/buttcoin. The fan subreddits for most shows, games, and things that I've followed usually get real ugly, real often. So it can be kind of a low-barrier space for Erfworld haters to post and reinforce each other's "Balder did 9/11" theories.

Those are interesting examples he choose for bad subreddits. Both expose scams. And buttcoin in particular is even frequented by Bitcoin investors because it offers a point of view outside the echo chambers. And that is bad?

If a business bills itself as a public platform, then, ipso facto, it becomes one. This was the sort of argument that made is possible for people to gather in what is technically a privately owned public space (not a public park) during Occupy Wall Street, and it should also apply to other online forums that bill themselves as public spaces (reddit and Erfworld forums would not count as such, just to be clear, but I'd have an issue if reddit took a side and said, for example, you could not make a reddit for GoT criticism).

Well said. I dislike the tendency of banning free speech by privatizing more and more public spaces.

[cervidal]

If a business bills itself as a public platform, then, ipso facto, it becomes one. This was the sort of argument that made is possible for people to gather in what is technically a privately owned public space (not a public park) during Occupy Wall Street, and it should also apply to other online forums that bill themselves as public spaces (reddit and Erfworld forums would not count as such, just to be clear, but I'd have an issue if reddit took a side and said, for example, you could not make a reddit for GoT criticism).

Your business as a public platform doesn't hold water even with your initial argument. If you'll recall, when the park owner decided he had enough with the protesters, he got to give them the boot. Only public pressure kept him from pulling that trigger sooner.

Twitter is a business first and foremost. Facebook is a business first and foremost. Any censoring or lack of censoring is done purely on financial motivation, even if its simply avoiding the cost of government intervention.

[-D-]

Guys, I don't see how this has anything to do with Erfworld. But I get you. Erfworld doesn't move, so talking about anything is better than taking about nothing.

[tigerusthegreat]

Guys, I don't see how this has anything to do with Erfworld. But I get you. Erfworld doesn't move, so talking about anything is better than taking about nothing.

It is tangentially related, as Rob is trying to control the narrative of Erfpocalypse 2019 by banning people from the forums, deleting and locking posts, and shutting down the subreddit.

[Welf]

Guys, I don't see how this has anything to do with Erfworld. But I get you. Erfworld doesn't move, so talking about anything is better than taking about nothing.

It's the requiem of Erfworld the comic. Artistically the project is degrading since book 3. It's obvious Rob is burned out as writer and needs to move on. He just can't because he's financially dependent on it. But the hiatus ahead will likely finish this.
Which is sad I loved Erfworld.

[MReav]

The effect of trying to censor something ending up making it more public/popular. it comes from the fact that Barbara Streisand wanted an aerial picture of her house removed from a website. Before her lawsuit it was downloaded 6 times (2 of which were by her lawyers). After he lawsuit but before it was removed, it was downloaded 420k times.

Fun thing about the outstanding kickstarters. The Print Book 2 & Draw Book 3 kickstarter, a stretch goal was "an extra full-color, art-intensive page. [Rob] will try to keep my grubby words off of these, and let you enjoy the view. " for every $1k over $105k that was raised. $146k was raised (41 updates). The chart on the page lists 31 full art pages, so I'm not sure if that was a limit imposed or just wasn't updated for the final total.

Looking at Book 3, and counting pages that have at least half the page covered by one panel or have minimal text, there are 10 of them for book 3 (Page 3, Page 11 [Questionable], Page 23 [Questionable], Page 34 [Questionable], page 44 [Questionable], Page 53, Page 86, Page 97 [Questionable], Page 128, Page 135). There are 20 in book 4 (Page 10, Page 12 [Questionable], Page 13 [Questionable], Page 16, Page 24, Page 36, Page 48, Page 52, Page 61, Page 69, Page 73, Page 89, Page 98, Page 119. Page 144, page 153, page 175, page 178, page 182, page 187).

Oddly enough, between the two we hit the lower 31 number. However, I don't know what criteria Rob would be using for this, if he even gave a crap about it (guessing not).

Psst: Check the spelling ;)

[tigerusthegreat]

Could be because its 1230 in the morning but what did i spell wrong?

[tigerusthegreat]

I feel like Rob is trying to alienate all the "freeloaders" who are not tools with these update/news posts that are behind the paywall.

Also, someone shot me this link which is a lot harsher than I would have gone. I wonder if henry backed one if the other projects and didn't get his rewards.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

It is tangentially related, as Rob is trying to control the narrative of Erfpocalypse 2019 by banning people from the forums, deleting and locking posts, and shutting down the subreddit.

He's even tried to come into earlier incarnations of this thread to staunch criticisms in the past. I got a little nervous about that one, personally.

[tigerusthegreat]

He's even tried to come into earlier incarnations of this thread to staunch criticisms in the past. I got a little nervous about that one, personally.

The harder he tries to tamp down on it, the more he brings attention to it. He could have avoided the whole problem by not reacting to it or replying with what their plan is regarding the old kickstarter rewards.

Using kickstarter as a long term way of keeping the lights on is stupid, especially if he could get the same amount of money posting two text updates a week (not to mention the good will earned). They dont even have to be story updates as a lot of the fanbase would be happy with explanations if how things work (e.g. the klogs from book 1) or tangential storylines (omg look another uber tower/temple with cool signamancy). Rob is a great writer (from a technical standpoint) and an in depth storyteller (even if he loses the plot sometimes) and he is using neither of those to his advantage right now.

He needs a manager/ babysitter to keep him on track and writing and not distracted.

[MReav]

Could be because its 1230 in the morning but what did i spell wrong?

Spoiler: explaining the joke

Show

I already knew what The Streisand Effect was. 'The Streisand Erfect' was a suggested name for the term as applied to Erfworld.

[tigerusthegreat]

Spoiler: explaining the joke

Show

I already knew what The Streisand Effect was. 'The Streisand Erfect' was a suggested name for the term as applied to Erfworld.

*facepalm* that's some good wordplay that sailed right over my head.

[MReav]

*facepalm* that's some good wordplay that sailed right over my head.

Probably would have made it easier if I said "Should we call it The Streisand Erfect"

[tigerusthegreat]

Any tools care to share the toolbox only update that got posted last night? Looks like someone sent /u/greatomniscientdev/ a copy or summary but he didn't post the details (shame, he had no issues with the "long version" update. Wonder if there's discussion about big bad thing #2 that should be 'kept private')

[halfeye]

Probably would have made it easier if I said "Should we call it The Streisand Erfect"

Maybe, but it wouldn't have been as funny.

[Ornithologist]

No change on thing #2 also no new info on it. mostly a technical post on what they need to do to restart updates, and what they want to do on top of that before they restart updates (but won't delay restarting comics to work on).

I can see if he completes this setup as he believes it to be, it will greatly help him in particular push comics out very regularly, and even help get to some of those chronic kickstarter backlogs.

However, Some of his list items are non-trivial problems. I don't know if its something he and his team can solve. Think Procedurally generated crowd/army shots that don't have many or preferably any duplicate characters, flock of unique Orylies etc.

A road map is good, but I don't know that the route will go where it needs to go.

[tigerusthegreat]

Thanks for the overview

However, Some of his list items are non-trivial problems. I don't know if its something he and his team can solve. Think Procedurally generated crowd/army shots that don't have many or preferably any duplicate characters, flock of unique Orylies etc.

Yeah....good procedural generation is hard to do. Sounds like another Rob stretch that wont happen.

He needs to focus on a Minimum Viable Product, not a tool that will solve every issue ever.

[-D-]

Erfworld is the only comic I ever heard that decided to go 3D. Like, 3D Max and ****. On the bright side

We'll have a lot of BAD CG to complain about

[tigerusthegreat]

Erfworld is the only comic I ever heard that decided to go 3D. Like, 3D Max and ****. On the bright side

We'll have a lot of BAD CG to complain about

My personal guess is that Rob wants to get to a point where he doesn't "need" an artist as he has had a lot of artists quit on him.

I don't think he realizes that operating a web COMIC without an artist is not going to be easy even if he gets thousands of models created. He'll be stuck with a very static feeling world, building everything out of the lego pieces he had constructed. If you've ever tried to make a game with something like RPG Maker, without importing any new art assets, you'll realize the futility of it.