News & Opinion
by Furret/WarOnSound
Sep 2 2021 · 5 min read
Critics of the wiki and its users have, for some time now, been saying that many writers on the wiki treat it less like a place to write for fun or improvement and more like a social media platform. Writing itself has taken a backseat to shilling articles for upvotes and building brands. Many incidents come to mind when one thinks of specific examples of this, like that time when Rounderhouse and djkaktus manufactured an obviously fake rivalry to draw extra attention to their SCP-6000 contest entries (they got first and second place respectively, so I imagine we’ll be seeing more of that in the future), and another one was added to that list recently. In fact, this particular incident may be the most clear example of the wiki’s cultural downward spiral yet.
The Yurtkast is a podcast hosted by Rounderhouse and some of his friends from the r/SCPDeclassified Discord server, including PlaguePJP and J Dune. Recently, they recorded an episode where a new author, DarnellJermaine, was challenged to write an article in under two hours with the prompt “bathing”. He was given help and critique from the other people on the podcast, including SCP-5000 contest winner Tanhony, and the article was posted to the website as SCP-6542. It’s an okay article, in my opinion. I respect its brevity and its willingness to leave out certain details and let the reader infer things, but it’s nothing special. Unfortunately, the quality of the article is barely relevant to what came next.
The Yurtkast is recorded live, and people in SCPD were watching Darnell write the article. As a result, several people immediately flocked to the article when it was posted, upvoted it, and left shitposts on the discussion page.
All initial shitposts within 4 minutes of one another, where confused reactions come in minutes later.
Darnell didn’t make an author post, and none of the people who helped him with the article disclosed their involvement, so the people reading the article who didn’t know about the Yurtkast were understandably confused and wondering what was happening. One person made a comment accusing those involved of foul play and was promptly dogpiled by five people before the comment chain was shut down by staff; this user was also given an official disciplinary citation for suggesting so. Another person left some critique that, to be fair, was far too aggressive, and they were also dogpiled before staff stepped in. The people involved with the article’s creation and the people who liked the article were also passive-aggressive towards people who didn’t like it at points. Someone said that the article only got attention because of the podcast it was tied to, and PlaguePJP responded by saying that the article got attention because of the podcast it was tied to.
As of the time of writing, the article sits at +13 with 157 comments, and seven people have been written up for how they behaved in the article’s discussion thread (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Reviews are mixed, but the article looks to be safe from deletion at this point.
The problems with this article’s creation and the resulting discussion are so numerous that I’m struggling to even organize my thoughts. I guess I’ll start at the beginning. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with writing an article as part of a podcast, but filming said podcast live in front of a bunch of people and not saying that you did that is pretty shitty. There’s no way that the people running the Yurtkast didn’t see the flood of people upvoting and shitposting coming, it was an extremely predictable outcome, so I’m forced to assume that they knew it would happen and didn’t care about the article getting attention for reasons completely unrelated to its content with nobody outside of their clique knowing why. Wouldn’t surprise me. I probably don’t need to say why dogpiling people and being passive-aggressive is shitty, especially since they’re doubling down on an incredibly dumb decision when they do it. I’m particularly amused by the mental gymnastics PlaguePJP does to try to refute the accusation that the article only got attention because of the Yurtkast. Your argument isn’t as good as you think it is, Plague.
What we’re seeing here is SCP brainworms at their least covert. From conceptualization to posting, this article was never about writing in any capacity. It was about arbitrary definitions of success (can we get this guy his first article on the site in 2 hours?), marketing, and brands.
Nobody cared about this article except in the context of everything that isn’t writing, and that’s depressing. I hope the negative reception is enough to deter anyone from trying this again.
It’s not all bad, though. Darnell has been handling this entire situation very well, much better than the people who made it happen. I hope his time writing for the wiki gets a lot better from here, though with how much the wiki’s culture has degraded in just the last couple years I doubt it will.
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