pouët.net

Go to bottom

Beginner demo section for pouet

category: general [glöplog]
wullon: well, there are some ppl, like cherri kandler for instance, who constantly vote down and troll around. if you don't invest time to find out he's a troll, a comment like on my first competing 4k ever ("get a life") can be pretty disappointing...
added on the 2013-07-17 15:43:31 by skomp skomp
Indeed.
I think that's the main issue, like Gargaj pointed out (and it's quite global to pouet).
added on the 2013-07-17 15:48:24 by wullon wullon
Gargaj: that is a very interesting talk indeed, but!
I am not so sure if - since the demoscene is an intersection of many very different approaches to .. let me call it "computing" in general - it is possible to adapt strategies that come from a very homogenous (i think _they_ call it) hacker (coder) community.
Therefore i am personally not sure, if giving the public (that is mostly formed by all members of the scene) tools for voting (on the products of this scene), that require a mental skillset of expertise, skill and taste. And mental stability. ;-)
Removing the downvote option would pretty much remove the dangers of (unskilled or ab-) use of that feature.

Then again, it's pouet.
added on the 2013-07-17 17:27:21 by wertstahl wertstahl
(On second read i´d like to point out that i did not mean that i think all of you are insane - i just meant certain downvoters act out of emotion.)
added on the 2013-07-17 17:29:05 by wertstahl wertstahl
Well, the same happens in real life as well. Are we going to try to screen it out there ?

Comments on prods are just that - comments. They are the opinions of the guys/girls/trolls who wrote them and that's it. Of course it is a lot of work to make a demo, and getting a harsh comment may be difficult to swallow sometimes, but, not allowing people to thumb down won't solve that. People will still have the comment text to attack you or your work.

Most of the time, when a thumb down is obvious trolling, someone else will thumb up to compensate for it (or the other way around, for selfvoting). I think that works ok enough.

Only allowing people to say your prod is great would be quite stupid, right ?

As for having a beginner section, well, that doesn't make much snese to me either. This is a database, we can lookup the group page + nfo file and get a clue it's a first prod. Some people will take this into account, and you'll get a thumb up or piggie + some tips on how to do it better next time (unless you do a 32MB TV Noise intro, in which case you may get thumbs down, and a pouet meme just for you). Some people will thumb you down anyway, wether you are beginner, 30+ years scener, and whatever your demo looks like (I'm not sure they'll even try to watch the youtube video before setting their vote, sometimes). Well, live with it, not all people on the scene are bright and smart. That's also part of the "fun".
Quote:
sdw: sorry but i believe the 2nd reason is a terrible reason for a thumb down and its something i see way too much of on pretty good demos. it's basically "i expected more" - it's about your preconceptions (from the group name, seeing the compo placement or indeed reading the pouet comments) not the demo itself.

for me a thumb down is deserved only by a demo that's objectively "bad" in the overall scheme of things. if the demo you're about to thumb down is still objectively in the top 50% of demos released this year, please think twice about pressing ok. :)


smash: No, that's not what I meant with the second reason. People who downvote the latest <insert big group name here> just because they "expected more" is annoying as well.
What I meant is that when I have watched a demo, felt like "meh, this was crap by any standard" and then come onto Pouet and see that it has 50 thumb-ups and 3 CDC, I am more likely to actually put a thumb-down, as it feels more motivated to actually show that "hey, not everyone enjoyed that".
If it is some poor newbie who has made it and it has zero comments, I don't feel that putting a thumb-down is warranted.
added on the 2013-07-17 18:09:19 by Sdw Sdw
Quote:
Some people will thumb you down anyway, wether you are beginner, 30+ years scener, and whatever your demo looks like (I'm not sure they'll even try to watch the youtube video before setting their vote, sometimes). Well, live with it, not all people on the scene are bright and smart. That's also part of the "fun".

There's dimness (which I don't think is an issue in a lot of the cases, most sceners are ready to apologize when they're wrong) and there's outright malevolence / indifference, which I'd say is considerably more prominent - and that's my issue here.
added on the 2013-07-17 18:09:58 by Gargaj Gargaj
sdw: fair enough, if its crap its crap and you arrived at that opinion before looking at pouet. :)
i think what im getting at still happens though. a rating for an individual production being set by the viewer comparing what they expected to see before watching vs what they actually saw, rather than the viewer rating a production based on whether or not they liked it in itself, or indeed how it stands in relation to a global quality level of all productions (or something like that).
added on the 2013-07-17 18:18:30 by smash smash
No, you know what? Fuck that shit. We don't need a beginner's catagory. It would only fragment shit without any need for it.

I judge demos based on wether or not I liked them, not based on how famous/oldschool/new/original/recycled/etc. something is.

I think the current situation where people get some motivational thumbs and critique is fine enough. No need to create some kind of newbie-hugbox for that.
added on the 2013-07-17 19:04:22 by ___ ___
But if we do, I'd also like to see seperate catagories for experienced groups, because obviously it's unfair if mediocre demogroups are compared to them, too.
added on the 2013-07-17 19:05:31 by ___ ___
I've been told I'm a bad person because I thumb down prods I don't like.

I've been explained it's better not to comment at all, in order not to sadden authors. Yet that wouldn't be honest.

So I don't know what to do know. I don't want to hurt anybody. Yet I don't want to lie.
USE THE PIGGY
added on the 2013-07-17 20:44:37 by wullon wullon
Quote:
by g.:
I've been told I'm a bad person because I thumb down prods I don't like.

I've been explained it's better not to comment at all, in order not to sadden authors. Yet that wouldn't be honest.

So I don't know what to do know. I don't want to hurt anybody. Yet I don't want to lie.

Well, everyone is different and I think some are more hardened to criticism. I think though if you're not willing to take any, how can you expect to learn and get better?

Quote:
by skomp:
wullon: well, there are some ppl, like cherri kandler for instance, who constantly vote down and troll around. if you don't invest time to find out he's a troll, a comment like on my first competing 4k ever ("get a life") can be pretty disappointing...

Yeah, but that's just going to happen. Just learn selective reading :) To honest, someone decided for some thread/post I made for something I was doing that I was wasting my time (instead of making demos, of course) and followed my profile to my only prod to just to give it a useless comment and a piggie, but it doesn't matter any more to me than if he'd actually thumbed it down.

At the OP, I think separating people out could end up a bit odd because how do you know when you've graduated the "beginner" section, and if you make it to the top of that, there might be a bit of "well, great! you're best of the second class."

Other than the "best of all time" box on the home page, the prods in which definitely deserve to be there, I don't think Pouet is explicitly organized to marginalize any sort of production. Some might see it as a competition beyond the party (if any) it was released in, but by and large I always figured this was a place to show off the scene stuff you've done, good or bad.

My first prod sucks :) It's here anyway. I'll get better perhaps, but I certainly won't ever write a Frameranger, and I think that's just fine.

(makes me think of "I'm bad and that's good. I will never be good and that's not bad, because there's no one I'd rather be than me." from Wreck-It Ralph.)
BB Image

"But what if someone thumbs down my prod?"

BB Image

(source)
If I understood this thread correctly, the thumb up/down system is the problem, so just hide the whole thing by default, except if explicitly enabled in one's personal preferences.
added on the 2013-07-17 22:13:43 by yzi yzi
Quote:
If I understood this thread correctly, the thumb up/down system is the problem

No, some people abusing it are the problem.
added on the 2013-07-17 22:39:43 by Gargaj Gargaj
The opening post says something about avoiding thumb-downs. Just hide the whole thing. Who needs it anyway.
added on the 2013-07-17 22:46:52 by yzi yzi
Quote:
I've been told I'm a bad person because I thumb down prods I don't like.

I've been explained it's better not to comment at all, in order not to sadden authors. Yet that wouldn't be honest.

So I don't know what to do know. I don't want to hurt anybody. Yet I don't want to lie.

You thumb down stuff you don't like, and state why in a polite manner. Opinions are subjective, and there's nothing wrong about saying you didn't like something. Just remember to be a human being talking to other human beings, and you'll be fine.
added on the 2013-07-17 22:47:07 by lug00ber lug00ber
But noone agrees with the opening post.
added on the 2013-07-17 22:47:21 by Gargaj Gargaj
i dunno. i get the topic.

this is tricky tho. beginners do "underdeveloped" graphics for these days and voted down. you could sort that in as "oldschool" graphics. but the real oldschool ran on machines as old as the demos themselves and are fully optimized on that platform.

so asking for something inbetween? really hard to make work. *shrugs*
added on the 2013-07-17 23:00:39 by yumeji yumeji
What is the purpose of the thumbing down. What good has it ever done? (aside from Variform 2) At least for my own prods, I don't think I would have done anything differently, even if I had known all the thumbs beforehand. Come to think of it, the whole thumb up/down decision is dumbing down the whole culture in a way. If you come to Pouet while logged on, you're presented with a silly question: thumb up, thumb down, or piggy. Why am I asked such a dumb thing. If I go to a museum to look at so-called pieces of art, or if I go look at the pictures that the kids have done in school, is there a questionnaire accompanying each and every doodling: thumb up, thumb down or piggy? Even if we could add such a feature to any physical object or place with "augmented reality", wouldn't it just make us dumber, first of all quantify everything in terms of up/down/piggy, but also, caring to see the results of other peoples dumbifyings? What purpose would such a system serve.
added on the 2013-07-17 23:50:45 by yzi yzi
I mean, there are leagues in sports. Local, regional, global etc. It's ok I think - it's often most fun to compare against roughly similar competitors.

Although the open demo compos - everybody in one compo - are nice too.

Why not have both? Have one demo compete in different arenas?

Just a thought.
added on the 2013-07-18 00:01:53 by vibrator vibrator
how about a more sophisticated voting system? different people, different opinions, everybody focuses on something else, and it comes down to one thumb. what about demos with kickass soundtracks and boring visuals? or the other way round? an oldskool demo showing awesome technical skill but failing designwise? and so on... so how about thumbing categories? like design, audio, visual, tech, narrative, whatever comes to mind.
i like comments that point out how the thumb was derived ("effects a little repetitive but the soundtrack makes up for it, so piggie"), but many of the comments i read here go down to "rocks" or "sucks" without explaining why. thumbing within categories could solve that.
added on the 2013-07-18 00:04:34 by jco jco
3. Mostly.
added on the 2013-07-18 00:10:27 by numtek numtek

login

Go to top