Well, if everybody's weighing in on
Reactions from Clampe's students, I might as well.
So I've been lurking around e2 on and off since high school. I haven't posted too many nodes. I remember around the time
Wikipedia was just starting to make itself seen, and I always thought to myself, "Well, that's nice and all, but the writing there has no soul,
and e2 is bigger anyway." And the softlinks! Softlinks let me get lost here for hours and hours.
Now, of course, Wikipedia is a
rampaging juggernaut and e2 is about as big as it was back then. Maybe even smaller, if
passport is to be believed. I'm not going to compare content between the two, because that would be stupid: Wikipedia
likes to be soulless, that's the whole point, and e2 isn't just about facts. I'm just talking about growth.
Growth is what makes a site like this live. Indeed, growth and changing content is what makes any site based on user-submitted material flourish. And e2 has been stagnating while other sites are flourishing. Why is that?
Well, I don't know if e2 is truly unfriendly to new noders or what. I do know that when I tried to put a writeup in a node to keep it up to date, my writeup was promptly deleted and I was given a message to send a message to the person with the outdated writeup, instead, despite the fact that that user hadn't produced anything in months. Then, when I bothered to check the node again another user had posted a writeup with essentially the same information as mine, a writeup which exists to this day. But wait, he was a new user too! Maybe it isn't that established users get away with shit, maybe it's just that justice here is completely random, or something.
In any case, it's damn hard to keep any factual node up-to-date, just from the layout of the site, if the system is slanted such that new writeups of any kind are discouraged. The policy of
E2 isn't unfriendly to new noders, it's just that you, personally, are a shitty writer is probably not particularly helpful in that regard. When your first writeup is nuked for a specific reason, it's understandable. When your first dozen writeups are not nuked, but downvoted and given snarky anonymous softlink comments, it's just
the established group telling you to fuck off.
But hey, it's your site, not mine. Nowadays I just look up the occasional recipe. If you want this site to stay the same size it was six years ago, hey,
more power to ya.