What about now?

[Flames Fuel]

I was just thinking and it made me sad....By this time a few years ago, there'd be some sort of cool event going on. And story updates would be happening....

Now there's just GC spam....Man I miss the good old days...  

[AChocolateMouse]

I, uh, have a very different take on the state of the website after the last month of observation. And I'm thinking of making it a site feedback thread.

I think Gaia needs a desperate shift in it's social culture.

Gaia is meant to be primarily a website for teenage and young adult anime fans to chat and hang out and have fun. It's meant to be a social platform. There's nowhere to be on this website right now for many teen/young adults... And here's why:

CB is filled with middle-age men trying to hit on underage girls. If you go and watch for a while you'll know that the CB has recently had:
A man who stalked a woman, tried to get a third party to stalk a woman, then paid to cover it up. This person still has an active account on Gaia.
A person who gaslit/manipulated a 15yr old into trying to send n***s. The mods wouldn't do anything about it until the police got involved.
At least three active adult users who are known for talking about how sexy underage girls are and how they'd enjoy sexually explicit acts with them.
Countless users defending these individuals from a point of extreme sincerity.
Users regularly talking s**t about women and how they're bitches, hoes etc.

GD/ED is filled with incels, alt-right, racists, anti-semitists etc. Most of the worst of it gets removed, but the culture there is still painful and obvious and overwhelmingly right wing.

Half the forums outside of these sorts of topics are dead, partially due to an ironic amount of over moderation and topic division in the light of the under-moderation on other forums. For example, a user on SF has pointed out that in the anime discussion forum, a thread such as "What is your favorite character from X anime" will get flagged and removed as spam, or sent to the CB for not being enough of a "discussion".

The art mini-shops are in a wild, flailing struggle because there's no consistent method for pricing. Artists have been badly under-paid since inflation started. There's no point in running an art shop for 100b gold when you can get a rlc for $10 and get 1TG. Additionally artists have left Gaia for more supportive cultures.

There's an extreme lack of transparency in how much money is being spent on what, where, and why even though other websites are learning to be more open and ask for what they need when.
Moderation is currently based on moderator discretion, with few actual guidelines for moderation and social culture.

So with all this in mind, it seems like the website is in a deeply unsustainable place. Because this is SUPPOSED to be a website focused on western teens and young adults who appreciate other cultures such as anime. Instead it's on the edge of being a 4-chan like disaster.
Given that the younger you are the more likely you are to lean left, openly identify as LGBT, or be a racial minority the fact that this is happening seems to be backwards. If the company were successfully attracting their target demographic, the culture on the website wouldn't be what it is right now.

So the items and economy is one problem, with overwhelming swaths of items of low quality being churned out so fast that there's no point to trying to even collect anything new any more. But also, Gaia isn't socially attractive to it's key userbase any more.

I think that to be really successful, Gaia really needs a massive re-think of it's structure and culture. It needs an updated TOS and forum rules that actually lives in 2018, that genuinely addresses serious social problems being presented today with targeting of vulnerable people. Additionally, given the reach this site originally had, the idea that if it were so popular again and wouldn't be facing facebook-level issues of hacking/political targeting/trolling would be unthinkable. But they can't even consider dealing with being popular if they're too scared to address the cultural problems they have now.

And it's not like any of this is a totally new concept. Remember that the word "Gypsy" got pulled from a large swath of the website for being a racial slur and started to be moderated out of posts, even though it's rarely used as a slur in much of their target map. They just need to bring that attitude back to the website to start fixing the culture. Reinvent the moderation team, collapse the forums into denser groups so there's more activity in each section, and start focusing on a healthy culture for the demographic you want to attract.

Conveniently this also helps with things like the lack of interesting staff/site activity. It was just national coming out day, make a simple item of a hand-held flag in a dozen recolors that are the various pride colors. Make it a small event where you quote a staff member in a thread to get the item for free or something. It's breast cancer awareness month, they could release a GC item and a free item for that in pink themes that a small percentage of the GC goes to charity. These aren't new and dramatic, they don't target removing specific people instead offering support to vulnerable groups, but they don't do them despite that and they could, both making interesting items more accessible to the general public and giving the website a subtle culture shift of support to vulnerable groups.

I think the more that decent human beings leave the website for higher ground, the more this website will sink and the less likely it is is to be able to come back. Even if you fix the items, the announcements, the GC, etc. it will only go so far.
If you join up and see posts like one I saw recently in the ED saying that a nazi getting punched is worse than rape and that circumcision only exists because of Jewish-funded doctors controlling healthcare.... And that sort of post is not only allowed, unmoderated, but similar posts around it acknowledge it as valid... How likely is it that the average teen/young adult user is going to want to stick around especially in times of deepening social tribalism? If you're a parent reading about the creepy men in the CB, how likely are you to want your 14yr old on here? It's just not functional.

The ship is sinking and needs some radical changes fast. The item quality, frequency, lack of events, the announcements, etc. are absolutely part of the problem and need fixing. But I think the fact that this website is either disturbing and potentially dangerous (CB,GD,ED,LD) or boring to be on (anywhere else that only gets 10-20 posts a day) is probably a bigger issue.

/endrant  

[Beautiful Grotesque]

*looks at her last change number*

Last Change: 256 days

I'm guessing the last time I was even logged onto gaia (aside from last night due to a friend being all excited about a new item), was around 250 days ago. Gaia is no longer one of my tabs that open up when I restore my previous session. Hell, it isn't even bookmarked.

Checked out the cash shop last night. Nothing interested me and some of the prices for the cash shop made me nope right off gaia again. No just nope, but HELL NO nope. I'm Australian, I can't justify spending $US70 on a physical product that I can use, because it came to around $AU90+ for me. So there is no way in Hades that I can justify spending $US20+ on pixel items. It's not happening.

I am no longer an active part of a community that I made some great friends over the years. Some of them I've connected with on other platforms, some have vanished from locations I still go to. As much as I loved gaia...it lost it's soul a long time ago and it will never get it back. At least, not with the same spark it once had.

You guys are still fighting the good fight, which is the reason why I am still in this guild, even though I am no longer active on this site.