ChocolatePi wrote:

braxbroscratcher wrote:

adasba wrote:

They can also be bad. Followers are ALMOST like drugs.

Okay. First. They are only bad if you let them control you and how you behave. As my dad always says, its all about discipline. If you let reading possess your life, then BOOKS are bad. If you let computer games (I'm eyeing you, Minecraft…) control you, then PC's are bad. Get the idea?

Same way with drugs. Drugs are only bad if you abuse them or illegally use them. Ever take a decongestant or antibiotic? Those are drugs. And yet, they aren't bad, are they?

Drug, in this context, means an addictive substance like alcohol or cigarettes (I could name much worse though :p)

I don't agree with adasba that followers = drugs, but he doesn't mean antibiotics here.

adasba wrote:

Followers are ALMOST like drugs.

The_Kitty_Eevee wrote:

adasba wrote:

Followers are ALMOST like drugs.

braxbroscratcher wrote:
Yes and no. You can have IRL friends follow you (Me and Scottjon002) and you can have people you DON'T know IRL follow you. The latter, while you can call them friends, are not really friends. Step back, and think. On the other side of this website outside of a computer screen, someone with a name like FriendliestLoverFollowGuy could really be a thug waiting for you to slip up and hand over information that could be used for bad. Like, say you give someone your phone number by accident. (next to impossible here, but plausible) Now they know where you live, and can easily find out WHO YOU ARE. This means he could hunt you down, kill you, take your stuff, ruin your life, break your stuff, or even could steal your identity. Online, you MUST NOT make a mistake. What you put here is here forever. ST could scrub their servers, and there would be NO GUARANTEE that that info went away along with the old data.

Prinseskat wrote:

This is ridiculous. Might as well remove following completely - then instead of follow for follow, you can love for love!
But because people with few loves will think that their projects are worse than others and people with top-loved stuff will start boasting about their projects, you could remove loving projects! Doesn't sound too far off from hiding views. According to you, I'm not even allowed to see how many people have taken a look at my project. As for subtracting them… that's just plain lying.
The remixing idea doesn't sound too bad.
Advertising can already be solved by reporting them. It's spam. Or do you want to remove commenting to prevent it in the first place?
Basically, most of this I don't support.

sidartha wrote:

braxbroscratcher wrote:
Yes and no. You can have IRL friends follow you (Me and Scottjon002) and you can have people you DON'T know IRL follow you. The latter, while you can call them friends, are not really friends. Step back, and think. On the other side of this website outside of a computer screen, someone with a name like FriendliestLoverFollowGuy could really be a thug waiting for you to slip up and hand over information that could be used for bad. Like, say you give someone your phone number by accident. (next to impossible here, but plausible) Now they know where you live, and can easily find out WHO YOU ARE. This means he could hunt you down, kill you, take your stuff, ruin your life, break your stuff, or even could steal your identity. Online, you MUST NOT make a mistake. What you put here is here forever. ST could scrub their servers, and there would be NO GUARANTEE that that info went away along with the old data.

They would not kill you.Most people are kids on scratch.

adasba wrote:

Zro716 wrote:

adasba wrote:

Everyone knows about followers. They are people who appreciate your work. They can also be your friends. They can also be bad. Followers are almost like drugs. You get followers, and you are addicted.

whoa whoa whoa hang on, you're comparing followers to drugs? I think you mean narcotics, but still, that's politically incorrect to compare to because it is not common for everyone. yeah I can agree people find it a little to “addictive” in a sense that they depend on it to stay on Scratch.

Before, when they were called friends, people thought of them as their online friends. Now that they are followers, lots of scratchers think they mean fame. It has caused lots of problems, such as spam and advertising, copying projects with no credit, and supporting what seems to be “good”, such as stopping the AE war and F4F for followers. Many otherwise innocent scratchers have been banned or left due to their follower hunger.

I don't think changing “friends” to “followers” has caused those issues - they have been happening since the dawn of Scratch. I get what you mean that the specific kind of spam and advertising (“follow me!!!!11!”) has risen but project copying and resistance to trends have always happened.

but I don't think you can assume “innocent” Scratchers were banned; they had to be guilty of something. however, what you said about people leaving because they aren't getting enough followers is true, and equally sad. sad because they prioritize their popularity before the learning experience.

I have a simple solution to this. Remove the “followers” tab completely. Still include the tab showing who you are following, so you can check the people who you are fans of, but remove the follower tab completely, and make it invisible to the F12 mode by not even having it in the code. If people use an external program to scan the entire scratch webpage to find people that have them in the “following” tab, and they start talking about how many followers they have, then they should get an alert.

actually I can see the benefits of this idea: less things to get per page means faster servers. however, intuition tells me once the followers row is gone, people are gonna shift focus to the following row and intensify “follow everyone” games, and some people will still find out by going to http://scratch.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/users/username/followers/ . but I believe the pros outweigh the cons for now.

secondly, I don't think it should go to the extreme of sending alerts to users discussing about their followers.

There are lots of fame-related problems that will stay even if followers don't exist. There is copying, view hunger, and advertising. To stop copying, tags inside the .sb2 file will show a remix link. If the tags are removed using a program or by hand, the offline editor will not open the project and if uploaded, the user will be given an alert and the project will be removed. Sprites from the backpack will also have these tags, and they will turn into multiple links in the “Notes and Credits” section. Hand-assembling a copied project will also add a remix from a similarity checker, which won't care about extra scripts.

I believe there are project copy checkers in the works already, but they can't be perfect because there are so many ways to dissect a project and reassemble it elsewhere.

View hunger can be solved by deleting the view count, or muting people who do it. Another solution might be subtracting views if people complain.

views aren't all that important to the servers, so I don't see what problems will be solved by getting rid of them. there are so few people who actually care about views nowadays.

Advertising can be solved by deleting comments, or on other peoples profiles a “remove for advertising” button where ST members and moderators quickly remove them.

there is a big difference between advertising and spam

These are good ideas. I think the scratchers who did something bad from followers never would of done the bad things if there were no followers. Also, my idea of removing the followers bar was not to speed up the server (I just realized it did) but it was to stop people from going crazy about fame. Also, I think I should say that the followers page should be deleted as well. I think the alerts are a bit extreme but maybe it just tells them that scratch is not about fame but doesn't count towards a ban. I think most people won't go through a ton of trouble to program a tag remover or something, but the few people who do it will probably get banned if their projects get popular. I think the view thing is correct. I didn't think this through completely. I made a studio on this if you look at my profile. @Paddle2see commented there.

cookieclickerer33 wrote:

Is this a necropost?

I can’t tell if you quoted someone or not

xz-Blaze wrote:

cookieclickerer33 wrote:

Is this a necropost?

I can’t tell if you quoted someone or not

in suggestions, necroposts doesn't really exist.

arnavacc wrote:

I lost TNTMAN2022 completely Please come back friend.