Jump to content

Help vampires


jean-luc

Recommended Posts

I've been here more then three years now. Well, I signed up more than three years ago, but I haven't been active that whole time. When I first started I was very enthusiastic, writing in a Progress Report and asking a few questions here and there, even going so far as to write my own guide. But after a while it just got boring. The Q&A forum was just the same old questions over and over. But see, my tulpa never really got off the ground. Never gave her enough attention, and I still don't. And with that I felt attached to this site, because I had made a promise to never kill Snow. To never stop, to never give up. I still intend to keep that promise. And with that I felt, almost at a subconcious level, that of course I had to stay on this site, because Snow wasn't finished. And yet I was reading the same things over and over and over again, and in time the only thing that caught my fancy was the forum games. I have, as of this writing, 2,494 posts in forum games, 13 of which were posted today. That's an average of one post every 12 hours for three years. Alternatively, 2 posts a day for 3 years.

 

There are interesting, intriguing, new ideas. But they're buried under a load of horse shit.

 

I have looked again and again, hoping that something would change. Quite a lazy way of going about things, but I was hoping it was one of those things that would solve itself. It hasn't. As far as I can tell, it hasn't gotten even a smidgen better.

 

Long ago there was a thread about how tulpa.info is the worst place ever and much argument and debate around the subject. I can't recall if I made any posts in that thread, but if I did it wasn't very many because I had nothing to contribute that hadn't already been said. I eventually unsubscribed from that thread due to the same repetition problem I described before but in a localized form. But it still had an effect on me, I gave some thought into something I could actually do instead of bickering. I contacted Mistgod about recording a podcast together, and so made the first episode of Tulpaudcast. I can only hope that that podcast has helped somehow to bring some originality and new ideas. Unfortunately it takes quite a bit of time to make those podcasts, but I hope to decrease the time it takes in the future.

 

But I'd like to address something in particular: The Q&A section. It's filled to the brim with help vampires. Although that pages talks about help vampires in the context of programming questions, it's quite relevant here as well. Lets remember the key indicators of a help vampire:

 

Do they...

  • Ask the same, tired questions others ask?
  • Clearly lack the ability or inclination to ask the almighty Google?
  • Refuse to take the time to ask coherent, specific questions?
  • Think helping them must be the high point of your day?
  • Are they obviously just waiting for some poor, well-intentioned person to do all the thinking for them?

 

Now part of this may not be their own fault. If we're worried about people asking Frequently Asked Questions, then we should have an FAQ right? Well it turns out apparently we do, but I had to dig for it. It also feels somewhat like a completely different site. Don't try to put anything in the "STICKIED: READ ME FIRST OTHERWISE ALL OF HELL WILL RAIN DOWN ON YOUR HOUSE" thread, because noone ever reads that. Instead, make it easier to find the answers they want in the wiki, compared to posting a question. Instant gratification (reading a wiki) > delayed gratification (posting a question and waiting for answers). We just need to make links to the wiki much more visible IE put a link in the top in place of "Arcade".

 

Also I feel that the link to community.tulpa.info needs to be much more prominent, something like "HEY THIS IS WHERE ALL THE ACTUALLY INTERESTING SHIT GOES ON AND ACTIVE COMMUNITY AND EVERYTHING", although I have not had the perspective of a new perspective 'mancer looking at the main site (tulpa.info), perhaps it's more obvious than that to them.

 

Whenever someone slams on .info, I secretly (and now not-so-secretly) enjoy hating on something that is so easy to hate on. But I don't really hate it, just the problems with it, and hating on something is nothing but detrimental.

 

I dunno, that was a lot more rambly than I was originally intending, what do you all think?

I don't visit as often as I used to. If you want me to see something, make sure to quote a post of mine or ping me @jean-luc

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 36
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

I agree that this is a problem on these forums. How to deal with these repetitive questions, in multiple regards, is something I intended to put some effort into solving before I resigned several months ago. Now that I'm back, soon enough, I would like to renew these efforts.

It is in fact something that the staff has discussed before, but it's not always very easy to solve. You're right though, there should be a link to the Wiki in the top bar, and I would like to see that added today. I would look into doing it right this second, if I wasn't about to go to bed.

We have also discussed the prospects of a "welcome PM", in which we would do our best to cram certain information and resources down users' throats as soon as they join, in hopes that making a thread in Q&A won't be their first action, but have yet to actually get around to outlining one. Again, something we need to look into very soon. And any suggestions as to what should be included are welcome.

 

There are at least a few ways that helpful resources could and should be more obviously presented to new users, but I don't expect the problem to ever really go away, entirely. Some people won't read FAQs and guides and previous threads no matter how easy you make it to do so. Some people either think that their question or situation is in some way special, or they're just too lazy.

 

I think it's interesting that you suggest that the link to community.tulpa.info be more prominent on the home page, because when the home page redesign was being done, the idea was to not make it too obvious, intentionally, so that users would actually spend some time on the topsite, reading the FAQ, Wiki, and Guides, before coming to the forum to ask questions.

 

I'm still taking things a bit slow, personally, after the bit of burn out I suffered from exhausting so much energy in this place, but I have every intention to discuss things with the staff and implement changes around here, and this concern is certainly one of mine, as well.

 

I would be happy to hear any suggestions from users as to how this problem can be helped, as evidently even something as obvious as having a link to the Wiki/FAQ in the bar at the top can be overlooked by us.

"If this can be avoided, it should. If it can't, then it would be better if it could be. If it happened and you're thinking back to it, try and think back further. Try not to avoid it with your mind. If any of this is possible, it may be helpful. If not, it won't be."

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And yet I was reading the same things over and over and over again, and in time the only thing that caught my fancy was the forum games. I have, as of this writing, 2,494 posts in forum games

 

I find that funny. Across all our accounts, we have roughly 1650 non-forum game posts, and probably not too many in forum games. They're even less stimulating than "Is my tulpa a tulpa" threads, in my opinion. But hey, maybe it's just because they're on Tulpa.info. On forumgames.com I might enjoy them. But as of now, it doesn't seem like the place.

 

 

The rest is all accurate though. "We have attempted to deal with this problem before", or something like that. What it basically comes down to is "Somebody needs to make a huge, fluid and comprehensive FAQ thread/section". You can tell how that's gone. And none of our different ways of trying to make it work have done so.

 

I personally don't think one large FAQ is the answer, though one main hub/thread for it could be. Admittedly, although many questions are not too difficult to search for here, many are. In fact it can take quite a bit of effort to find exactly what you're looking for as discussion tends to branch away from what the exact title of the thread implies, not to mention all the textwalls many contain. So people make a new thread.

 

To some extent, this is the life of any forum. Old questions and discussions come up again and again and are discussed and questioned again and again. Exclusively making and replying to threads on previously covered subjects will kill the forum, but so will a universal fear of asking/discussing something that has been before.

 

It's a forum, not a Q&A directory or a dictionary. It simply won't be that efficient, no matter how you try to make it so. But, ours could certainly use some organization. The primary problem in collecting the many past threads on many past topics is that we as a community never endorse specific answers. Everyone contributes their own, but we never say "This thread on tulpa sentience is basically all correct, learn from here. Then go follow this guide on creation." And that is unfortunately the feeling you get when trying to pick and choose threads to cover specific questions.

 

Not to mention just how many there are. Sure, we can list a few threads discussing sentience, doubt, vocality, sex, and so on. But will there be a point in your list of threads covering having relationships with both tulpas and humans at the same time? Well, add that one in. How about having trouble stabilizing your perspective while visualizing your wonderland when it tends to spin out of your control? What about discussion of having tulpas long-term, tulpas dealing with their hosts' emotional issues, tulpas' thoughts on the real world, and so on? Obviously, we will never be able to account for all of the different, legitimate questions people will ask. Even with a theoretically perfect FAQ thread, there will still be lots of unique questions that are worth discussion.. But how will anyone know if it's already been discussed?

 

That's why the recycling of old discussion material, as it occurs naturally, isn't a problem. It's really necessary. The optimal thing to do here is to compile a list of the most common and important questions. I think this is where most of the community's discussions on this topic have failed. People get too caught up in encompassing every possible discussion that they lose focus of the biggest offenders, of which there are surprisingly few. The threads that make you go "Ughhh.." the hardest are the ones we need to make readily accessible answers to. And, obviously, they need to be a little too readily accessible.. because some peoples' first instinct is to ask first, read later. An idea for that was automatically sending members a message when they register introducing them to the forum and linking to the FAQ(s), making sure they at least glance at it before becoming a vampire.

 

 

Someone's got to actually do it, though. As some of the most active members that have no real complaints about the forum, we've been working on our own personal solution. We can't account for every single good, educational post on the forum, but we can account for ours. We keep our own mini "FAQ" list where most quality and informative posts we write are kept, with brief descriptions.

 

But that's just our small part. You're not the first or the tenth or the last to bring up this problem, so take what I just said and try to do what they've failed to: anything.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's pretty tiring to reread the same threads and churn out the same answers in a mechanical fashion, and this is something that I've been doing for almost four years now. We could set up meetings and threads so that some of the members here could come together to make a welcome message, but we're still going to have people ignoring those just they would the stickied threads in the boards and the topics in the IRC channels.

 

The search function is pretty shitty (especially when a lot of people make threads with non-descriptive titles, and it's hard to find anything if you're using more than one term or if you don't know who made the thread), but I still think it's better for newbies to try that before they ask anything. Personally, I think linking preexisting threads and locking the new ones, leaving them to get drowned out as newer threads are created, works the best.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

People are self-entitled on the internet, and you cannot do anything about that. There is no solution, for the problem lies within not only the 'help vampires', but within ourselves.

See, there is nothing to actually discuss of tulpamancy in a realistic domain. You cannot post what you do with your tulpa in the PR section without fearing it may be regarded as blogging and posting about non-technical development. You cannot ignore the forum games because that's why a lot of people are continuously active. You can't express opinions your tulpa shared in the hopes that people will care (because honestly, nobody will.). And then people turn to you and ask you 'why is fun disallowed on this place?'.

 

 

This is a research facility. The workerbase of this facility is trying to change it from being a facility to a community, but there is a code of work. You can't just express things like 'omg my tulpa talked to me', because to many people, it's something they do effortlessly and hold no interest in you as a person. And you know what? It is wrong to consider people are actually more than posters on this place. And here is why; this is a subjective practice, right? if you start sympathizing with someone overboard, you're gonna start being in their favor for no reason. Like israelis are in favor of JPost who post horrendously misleading info because 'it's the hometown paper!', or stupid terrorists who follow ISIS because it's all about religion. And you may think 'Oh Judas this never happened, people never conformed to one's beliefs or became total sheeps!'. Wrong. They did. Look at Melian who had a plethora of people behind her and David who tried to change the 'acceptance' rate so hard. Even though nobody realistically cared, she still tried and used the sympathy factor and sugarcoating her responses to make it so that people develop a certain bias against her opposition and puts her in favor. (refer to: Jake vs Mistgod.)

 

The fault is that people seek two things;

 

*They want to express what their tulpa is doing, they want to show the world what their tulpa can do because idontknow.

*They want to help because they have absolutely nothing else to do, or, they have the will to 'help' and are nice guys.

 

If this place is bothering you then by all means take a break. If an online forum is getting at you, if simple pixels and people are bothering you on the internet, you need to take a break. Because yes, yes, yes, tulpa.info as a forum and as a community are detrimental to having a tulpa live in intimacy for any beginner. I had a huge fuckin' crisis in my mind in which friend became foe and I couldn't do anything about it, I was told to leave the community for a while and that was a great choice, I regret none of it and feel much better.

 

You want not to kill Snow? Make a thread about your situation. Go ahead and contribute to the plethora of threads people made because they had no signs, or felt desperate, or had no other hope other than 'I shall not give up'. Is there anything wrong with it? No. But what 'is' wrong is this place at its core. You can't change it for the best with how apathetic people can be to improvement. Because some people want this, some people want that, and some people want nothing at all. This is hopeless.

A wise man once said: 'Before judging a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that, who cares? He's a mile away, and you've got new shoes.'

 

Graced are those who could avoid this phenomenon. This is perhaps the worst expression of evil in humanity's history, but who am I to judge?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I do think that an extended FAQ would be good. Those people who have been answering Q&A a lot, you're the best placed to say which questions are the most common and aren't on the current FAQ. If it were made like that, it could be stuck more prominently at the top of Q&A or something. Right now it's in the "Please read before posting" message.

 

With a more comprehensive FAQ like that it might be feasible to start moderating Q&A a bit more, removing questions that get asked a lot. But I'm hesitant, because for all that that sounds terrible, people still seem to want to do it. Vos, if it's so tiring, how have you spent 4 years doing it? I got sick of it after less than 1, if that. And other people who do actually answer Q&A, do you see this as a problem?

 

About the search, I think the built-in search is useful for some things, but finding threads isn't one of those. Better to use Google with site:tulpa.info.

 

 

Also just to reply to some other things

If this place is bothering you then by all means take a break. If an online forum is getting at you, if simple pixels and people are bothering you on the internet, you need to take a break.

No, I mean, some of us might want to help it rather than leave but,

Because yes, yes, yes, tulpa.info as a forum and as a community are detrimental to having a tulpa live in intimacy for any beginner.

Yeah, I think this is true, possibly. Not the place at all, obviously I hope we do help people. But being here constantly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Iscariot Well then, not the most optimistic views as usual, huh? But I want to fix an external problem, not an internal one. People are only complaining because they want to see change.

 

@Waffles, removing threads due to repetition is never the answer. Replying with a redirect to a thread it's a repetition of and locking it is perfectly fine however. But answers like "use Google with site:tulpa.info before your search" are why nothing gets done. We aren't dealing with (no offense,) internet-savvy, high-attention-span people with this problem. We have plenty of members who use the forum just fine, new and old alike. The problem of repetitive thread subjects is most common with people who simply won't do much real research before asking questions.

 

Which again, as I said, isn't entirely their fault. I believe most such members skim several pages of the Q&A section and if they don't find what they're looking for they make a thread. Honestly that seems kind of reasonable, though I myself would probably do closer to 20 pages that can't be expected of everyone. Yet we also are not dealing with completely clueless people who probably don't even know the name of the site to get back to the thread they posted in the wrong section. The majority we're trying to focus on here are those who do some modest research (in their eyes) in a limited range of areas. When I talk about a FAQ, I'm not talking about a thread with answers to questions, I'm talking about a thread with threads as the answers to questions. We aren't walking away from these constant discussions with clearly defined answers we can put in a Q&A thread, it's a much broader experience than that. The trouble is finding what's worth reading for that experience and what's not.

 

The logical answer to people recreating old threads unnecessarily is to help them find those old threads before they do so. The best way I can think to do that is to collect old, qualitative threads dealing with the most commonly "Ugh"'d questions/topics and organizing them in a thread made readily apparent through whatever means (again, an automated private message would work perfectly.. That notification is impossible to ignore). Threads, not answers. People don't (usually) want a single answer from a single person, they want to see lots of different views and arguments to find which works best for them, or to create their own. At least, that's what the act of creating a thread would imply.

 

As for the current FAQ, it's as extensive as it should probably be. Not readily available to those who don't look for it, though. It's inside the unappealing "New Members" section in one of the four similar looking threads and is the second visible link that.. Well, I understand that it says "frequently asked questions", but it just doesn't pop out as "THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY ESSENTIAL" as it probably should. For those that actually get that far, they were likely going to do some research anyways.

 

 

Work from their perspective. You're assuming they're going to look in places that they really probably aren't. FAQ needs to be emphasized up-front in some welcome-screen that people will actually read. That honestly even makes PMs iffy. It would have to be titled something like "Some information to get you started", not "Welcome to Tulpa.info!" or such. And even then it would have to be concise and show the links (as few as possible, glossary and FAQ seem good) as prominently as possible. Perhaps even as the first thing in the message, standalone without accompanying text.

 

Here is a list of terminology you will encounter on Tulpa.info

Here is an extensive list of answers to common questions you may have

 

Hello and welcome to the rest of the message you aren't going to read etc.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

Link to comment
Share on other sites

With a more comprehensive FAQ like that it might be feasible to start moderating Q&A a bit more, removing questions that get asked a lot. But I'm hesitant, because for all that that sounds terrible, people still seem to want to do it. Vos, if it's so tiring, how have you spent 4 years doing it? I got sick of it after less than 1, if that. And other people who do actually answer Q&A, do you see this as a problem?

 

There's sometimes useful advice that isn't mentioned in other threads, so I'd be hesitant on deleting some of those threads. We'd be able to keep that if we just linked and locked; it'd clutter up the board's history, but I don't think that it this matters too much, really.

 

Yeah, I thought it was a shame when you stopped answering in those threads. You were generally better at knocking sense into the people who couldn't think for themselves, but I understand that it's all redundant and it'll be taken care of by one of the other usual suspects. I'm only doing it to make it easier on people, even if I think they're idiots for not looking anything up.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tewi, yeah, the exact format of the FAQ could be a list of threads, the point is just to collect them. Well, whether people really do want lots of answers or just an answer I don't really know, but either way that might not be a bad idea as such. Yeah, presenting it better might help. Right now it is in plenty of visible places. On the topsite, in the "Please read before posting" sticky, and so on. Besides, I'd kind of expect people to look for an FAQ before posting anyway, but maybe that's the internet-savvy thing. On that note, I don't necessarily expect everyone to have that Google idea, it's just a recommendation for something that can be publicised.

 

As for way the Q&A section is moderated, I guess it does depend on what you want to achieve. If you want to reduce clutter then I guess removing those threads is a good idea. If you want to discourage people from doing it, maybe just locking them would be OK. But if useful advice does get posted in those threads, like Vos says, then are they even a bad thing? Likewise if answering them makes people's lives easier then it doesn't seem to be a problem. This is what I'm not really sure about here, and why I'm kinda hesitant to do anything at all.

 

Still though, Tewi, I basically agree with what you think should be done. Definitely, a list of the most common questions that aren't on the FAQ, and their answers. Moreover the wiki hypothetically makes doing these things, adding new questions to an expanded FAQ, easy, but I don't know if that thing actually works. Far as I know it hasn't been touched since 2013, and the registration may or may not work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Most often, I assume people are alright with single satisfactory answers. But we're discussing people who make threads to ask questions, and I have to assume such people are looking for multiple responses from different people. At the very least, they are open to a single answer from any of many people.

 

I don't really know what to say about where the FAQ is linked. I don't exactly browse the //tulpa.info/ part of the site as much as //community.tulpa.info/. "Read this before posting" threads are fine and necessary, but anyone who's used a forum for more than a couple years knows that problem users.. don't. But they also click on and off of automated introductory PMs pretty quick too unless they seem important. That's why I said to present them with something they need up front - show them there's terms they need to know and a list of answers to questions they may have, then the other stuff. More on that in a second. All I meant with the Google idea is that it does not much affect the core problem here, it's just a useful thing on its own. Maybe, maybe a less complicated and bad search system could help people find threads they wouldn't have otherwise. I'm not sure how often people actually attempt to use the search feature rather than skimming topic titles. Speaking of, even then it's hard to gauge what exactly is in any thread you may find. But the site: google trick may be an interesting thing to put in the automated PM or New Users area (it's less urgent, but don't let it be buried).

 

Anyways, I did my best to emulate what somebody with a small amount of forum experience and alright level of attention/motivation to find information would've done once on community.tulpa.info. First, I clicked the Help button, which was utterly useless. It's bad that I actually clicked a Help button for once and did not even get help. Second, I looked over the different boards and saw New Users, having faith there would be relevant information and not just "Introduce yourself" and "Here's the rules" threads. I ignored the "Welcome!" and "General Advice" threads in favor of the other two, although "Beginner Questions General" was less of a FAQ and more of a catch-all thread for specific questions I may have. The spacing in the first three lines of Guide for New Members was weird, but the two links were actually helpful and noted. The rest was kind of instruction-manual-y and I skimmed it to see if anything caught my eye, which was GAT and everything following Questions & Answers. By the way, the "Staff and People to Note" section requires quite some updating.

 

After that, I guess I'd go start skimming over topics in the Q&A sections and clicking ones that interested me. (Perhaps that's a jaded view though, I'd likely find nearly all of them interesting were I actually new here)

 

As I said in my initial post, nobody in our system has any problems with how the site is. Lucilyn is occasionally disappointed at the lack of discussions to participate in. So I wouldn't say there were any real problems with the Q&A section thread-wise. I personally advocate for the influx of new questions that may have been discussed before, though I really wish there were the aforementioned theoretical "Thread of threads" thread I could direct people toward for the most mundane ones. I don't personally think deleting or locking any threads is necessary unless they're breaking a rule, or perhaps if they're a combination of an overused question and effortless OP. You could delete that and send a PM redirect to a relevant thread(s).

 

Contrary to Iscariot's apparent view, I do believe this is a community and not an information research and dispensing facility. The participation of somewhat-newer members in discussion of old, recycled topics is beneficial both to them, new-new members, and the life of the forum overall. The main problem is that people like Amber take it upon themselves to answer every thread as if it's absolutely urgent, and completely burn themselves out on the forum entirely. I also advocate for taking a step back and only participating in what looks interesting to you once you've reached a point where things seem monotonous. As long as the forum is still not dead, there will be new members learning from old ones, becoming normal members who continue answering in these threads. I remember when Nonefromhell (rather quickly) went from newbie to using what he'd learned to help others. Of course, veteran members like us are also necessary in some amount, just to keep the newer ones in check and all that, you know. Not too many. If people would stop burning themselves out and just participate when they felt like it on occasion, we'd have way more than enough senior members filling that role.

 

Unfortunately they seem to almost always overexert themselves and then leave. There honestly aren't that many members like us that have consistently been ~around and posting periodically. Of the three more popular recent Q&A section threads I just checked, based on registration date and post count (2014 with 5 posts does not count) there are almost none at all. If you don't count staff, it's just us, and Fall barely made it in. They are however a perfect example of not burning yourself out and contributing when you've got the time and patience.

 

Maybe we need an automated yearly message reminding established users to take it easy so they don't ruin tulpa.info for themselves. That's practically more important than the current topic, here.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...