BackSet

BackSet

The Great Thief Yatagarasu! From Camp Half-Blood, Half-Blood Hill, Farm Road 3.141
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  • BackSet
    The Law of Inevitable Statistic Abuse:
    • Any kind of numerical statistic displayed for users and/or submissions (such as post/edit count, average score vote, or "karma" points/"tokens" for users who contribute and/or are active), will inevitably cause some people to go to insane lengths to try and drive up their statistic(s) and/or lower those of others they dislike, usually through attempts to cheat the system, even if the stat is never taken the least bit seriously by the community. This represents a classic example of Goodhart's Law.
    • First Corollary: Any kind of numerical statistic based on users' votes will inevitably cause some people to create ludicrous numbers of sockpuppet accounts for the sole purpose of such abuse on that statistic.
    BackSet
    BackSet
    • Second Corollary: Nobody will care about any numerical statistic. Despite this, people may end up citing such statistics during a protracted flamewar, especially in the absence of another argument or when it has been reduced to arguing semantics.
    • Third Corollary: Any system which rewards members for any such statistic will inevitably prove counterproductive as the people who actually get rewarded the most are those gaming the system, which will irritate those who actually contribute honestly.
    BackSet
    • Rule of Ratings:
      • Any time score voting is presented on a site, most voters will only give out the maximum or minimum possible scores, depending on whether they liked or hated whatever is being voted on. Any scores between the two might as well not exist.
      • Corollary: If a poster cites a composite rating from a site such as MetaCritic or Rotten Tomatoes in support of his/her position, the poster in opposition will call into question the methods used by such sites.
      • Corollary 2: Anyone who does give an intermediate rating may draw hostility from both sides for 'not being able to form an opinion', particularly if they give a rating exactly in the middle of the scale.
      • Corollary 3 (The Front Page Corollary): Anything that gets featured on the front page will immediately get a ratings boost regardless of its actual quality, due to a flood of people who give the maximum rating to anything that doesn't suck out loud (and some things that do).
    BackSet
    The Average Rating Sine-Curve:
    • On a site with score voting, a user or work of high caliber will gradually rise in its average rating score until it rises high enough on the charts to draw attention to itself, at which point fans of other works or friends of other users will vote it back down so their preferred entity has the better score. Once it gets knocked back down, said fans will forget about it, allowing its rating to gradually climb back up until the cycle repeats.
    • Corollary: Due to this effect, nothing can stay on an all-time top-rated chart permanently, as being on the chart will attract people who will vote it down to make room for their own preferred entities.
    BackSet
    BackSet
    • The Up And Away Corollary: If there is only an upvote button and not a downvote button, works will attract more upvotes by simply being on the top-rated chart until they gain an unsurmountable lead, even when it is blatantly obvious to an unbiased observer that the work is outdated.
    • The DeviantArt Corollary: When a work is promoted to a spotlight position, the comments section will fill up with complaints about why this work was chosen instead of a certain other work of higher quality. If there is even a grain of truth in this statement, the conversation is likely to degrade into vicious attacks on the work until the creator deletes it or quits the site.
    BackSet
    • The Law Of Cosmic Balance: On a forum or website with favoritism voting, if someone or something has a skyrocketing perfect record, they will eventually receive the lowest possible vote by one or more members.
    BackSet
    Wimp Syndrome:
    • On a board which advocates a specific series of games with multiple difficulty levels, the board's users will not take you seriously if you do not play on the hardest difficulty level.
    • However, if you claim to beat the game among the harder levels if not the hardest level of them all, you better be armed with screencaps.
    • Corollary: DMD Syndrome: Only the highest difficulty level will warrant any respect from the community. The name is taken from the highest difficulty level of Devil May Cry, which is called Dante Must Die.
    BackSet
    BackSet
    • Corollary 2: This applies to games with ranking and reward levels such as Halo 3. The average member will be at the highest possible rank or close to it and often this will be to the point that to the average player, they are speaking a completely different language.
    • Corollary 3: Players will eventually resort to lying about their achievements in order to fit in with the crowd.
    • Corollary 4: If a board doesn't do this, a newcomer will immediately assume it does as soon as they are asked "what difficulty are you playing on?", even if it was being asked to help give advice based on that information.
    LegoLad659
    LegoLad659
    I really hate when people do this. Let me play at whatever level I flipping please, don't patronize me for not being a 'hArDcOrE gAmErZ!!!!11!"
    Saccharine Cyanide
    Saccharine Cyanide
    Pff, easy setting? I exclusively play Barbie: Horse Adventure on the highest difficulty setting because I'm a real gamer™
    BackSet
    • Law Of Old'd: No matter how "new" news is, at least one person already knows it, probably from a different forum or corresponding chatroom. Even though a user will get flamed for posting "old news", there will always be several users who didn't know it before.
    BackSet
    • Illinia's Paradox (The Me Time Rule): If you are having a one-on-one conversation with an angsty user and trying to console them, it may seem as though the best way to help would be to sympathize and relate to them by telling about your own experiences with the subject. This will actually not cheer them up at all, because you are robbing them of attention.
      Person 1: I'm depressed.
      Person 2: I remember when I used to have problems with depression...
      Person 1: Shut up, we're talking about my problems, not yours.
    BackSet
    • Noob Effusion Axiom: If you make a habit of parodying annoying users, you will become just as annoying as they are.
    BackSet
    • Law of Reverse Irony Perception: When posting a Sacrastic or Ironic post the amount of people who recognise the Sarcasm is inverselly proportional to the amount of Emoticons used.
    BackSet
    • Law of Sarcasm Infallibility: "Sarcasm always makes sense, even when it doesn't."
      • On every forum, there will be at least one member (usually a veteran) who will task themselves with speaking only in sarcastic, witty one-liners. Said one-liners will be assumed by everybody to be meaningful, even if they actually don't make any sense.
      • If the one-liner is clearly meaningless, its meaninglessness is assumed to be the meaning.
      • "Pwned" Clause: If said one-liner has a spelling error, that error will be assumed to be part of the meaning too (and will be replicated by other users).
    Kaerri
    Kaerri
    I remember when we had a typo in a site announcement and everyone jumped on it. In a friendly, teasing way. ^;3^
    Daisie
    Daisie
    Ah yes, the pwoer of threadmarks. Legendary!
    BackSet
    • The Law of Misplaced Nationalism Embarrassment: Seeing someone from your own home country make an idiot of themselves with Misplaced Nationalism is embarrassing, but seeing someone from another country do it is more mortifying because it makes you realize just how much the idiot from your home country is embarrassing the country as a whole.
    BackSet
    Just gonna skip over the Diversity Obliviousness Phenomenon since I posted that one a long while back.

    • English Law: If a user expresses annoyance or puzzlement that Americans don't spell words the same way as everybody else, the first response will be that English didn't have standard spellings until the 19th century, after the first dictionaries were published in America.
    BackSet
    • Dutch Multilingual Constant:
      • Most multilingual forum-users that are able to speak three or more languages comfortably, if not fluently, will tend to be from a relatively small number of areas; Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, etc. It is also common that on any particular forum, the multilingual users [or at least half of them] will from the same area.
    BackSet
    • Official Secondary Language Principle:
      • If a forum is based around a particular work or series which includes one or more usable constructed languages, words or short expressions from those languages will tend to be found in posts otherwise in English (or the native language of the forum) and tend to be widely understood even among those who do not speak the language to any greater degree.
    BackSet
    • Wannabe Polyglot Syndrome: If a community has a considerable number of people who speak a common second language but still mainly stick to using the community's primary language with each other, then there will also be at least one other person who claims to speak that second language despite having no qualifications beyond "I took a year of <language> in college", if even that.
      • Corollary: If the second language is Japanese, said user's vocabulary will most likely consist of "kawaii", "neko", "baka", and "desu". There is also a 50% chance this user mispronounces "neko" as "nickel".
    Come, flock to me anti-weeb jokes!
    BackSet
    "It's not that I don't have enough motivation. The problem is that I don't have any at all. Not for useless things."
    -Linhardt, Fire Emblen: Three Houses
    BackSet
    • Polyglot Syndrome:
      • As a 100% English site grows bigger, the probability of finding a post written entirely in another language approaches 1. Said post rarely has a reason for being written in a different language, since obviously the user can navigate an English website.
      • Corollary: There is a 90% chance said post will be written in Spanish.
      • Addendum: If is an Anime or Manga site, than there is a 90% chance the post will be in Japanese.
      • Corollary: If the forum has a primarily European audience and lacks an enforced 'English-only' rule, 1 in 10 threads will be in French, German or Russian.
    BackSet
    • Lock Picking Theorem:
      • When a new user creates a thread which is quickly locked, there is a 50% chance that they will make a thread asking why the thread was locked, demanding the thread to be unlocked, continuing the locked topic, or apologizing for being stupid enough to create the thread in the first place.
      • The longer the new thread goes without being locked, the more closely it will come to resemble the original thread, including the exact same arguments and posters.
    BackSet
    BackSet
    • The more the topic starter asks to restart the thread without starting whatever debates, flame wars and criticisms that locked the previous thread, the more likely:
    1. the same points, debates, flame wars and criticism will start up, making this new thread likely to be locked like the old one
    2. Will cause even more points, debates, flame wars and criticisms to start up in addition to the old points, usually calling out the user as being a hypocrite and/or the one to start the conflicts that locked the previous thread whether or not they really did so
    3. they more than likely will be the one to start it all over again and cause 1 and 2 to happen.
    BackSet
    • Poster Ghost Rule: Every forum will have at least one member who hasn't been active for a long period of time, but everyone else remembers them and reminisces about their antics. You will be expected to know about them even if you only signed up a week ago.
    BackSet
    • Technology Nooblet Phenomenon:
      • In a popular forum, there will always be at least one new user who will start out thinking that the forum administrators designed the forum software it uses and will request bug fixes and offer suggestions. They may also confuse anyone with moderator or comparable status with an admin.
      • The Fix It Corollary: If the forum is about software or consumer electronics, there will always be at least one new user who thinks the forum administrators designed the software or device and should therefore be contacted in case of bugs or feature requests. This applies whether or not there is a forum section dedicated to such, an official bug report form and whether or not the forum is in any way associated with the company involved.
    BackSet
    I just read some quotes from My Immortal and my brain hurts. If even quotes from that story can cause pain then I can't imagine what reading the full thing must be like.
    BackSet
    • The Me Too Guy: On every forum, there is at least one user who feels they don't fit in with the community, and will constantly refer to this fact by referring to themselves in most of their posts, qualifying every post as an opinion, apologizing profusely for other posts or actions, and eventually attempting to start a "Why does everyone hate me" thread. It is usually the case that this person would fit in just fine if it weren't for all of their desperate attempts to fit in. This user is especially prone to other laws such as the Boomerang Law, the Name Change Cascade, the Lock Picking Theorem, and the Illusions of Grandeur Principle.
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