Since this is posted by one of the staff, and reposted and highlighted by the Site Admin, I have no choice but to take this "manifesto" seriously.
ikuyo wrote:
The current framework of TASVideos is fundamentally unsustainable.
I've been on TASVideos 16 years. Things on TASVideos went mostly well over these years. Why you find it unsustainable now?
If you find it unsustainable, find solutions and improvements to make it sustainable, or make way to more talented people.
ikuyo wrote:
We cannot live like this. TASVideos will die.
... But it doesn't have to be this way. It never did.
The way the site was originally set was a response to specific cultural and technological circumstances, filtered by the creative vision of the site founders. But we don't live in those times anymore. The world of TASing does not work like it did when bisqwit stumbled upon that movie. His views, his circumstances, are not for us to follow.
It's a shame to see someone treat Bisqwit's legacy like this.
TASVideos has always been the best site for TAS, with high standards and very talented people, or at least until somewhere around 2022.
To me, anyone who says "TASVideos must die" without joking, is unfit to be the staff of this wonderful (or at least used to be wonderful) site.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
The current framework of TASVideos is fundamentally unsustainable.
I've been on TASVideos 16 years. Things on TASVideos went mostly well over these years. Why you find it unsustainable now?
The initial post, and many of the replies from other staff members explain this already. I recommend you read the thread to learn more about the topic.
HappyLee wrote:
If you find it unsustainable, find solutions and improvements to make it sustainable
That's precisely what ikuyo and others in this thread have been trying to do. Perhaps you missed this from the initial post?
ikuyo wrote:
Now, if you ask me "What should TASVideos look like if it were to abandon its submission pipeline and rules" the answer is... I don't know. I have some ideas, for sure. I think archival of movie files and knowledge bases for both the general TASing process and specific games would definitely be part of that, and these elements already exist in the currently standing TASVideos site. But I can't say for certain, and even if I did, I don't think figuring such a thing out should be my work alone. More than ever, we need people, and people are there. We ought to listen to you, to what you think the best way to achieve the site's goals is, and how we can work towards that goal.
HappyLee wrote:
or make way to more talented people
HappyLee wrote:
To me, anyone who says "TASVideos must die" without joking, is unfit to be the staff of this wonderful (or at least used to be wonderful) site.
These comments are entirely uncalled for. Ikuyo is a dedicated staff member, judge, and TASer, who contemplated and wrote a detailed and thoughtful post about how to make TASVideos better. Yet you feel she is untalented and unfit to continue solely because she used an eye-catching title for a topic entirely meant to encourage community and site growth.
Consider this a warning. Do not mistreat or disrespect people in this community, especially those who have, and actively are, contributing to its growth.
5x submission volume really mainly has it unsustainable. In the long term, the rulesets still might make various TASers not want to submit to the site (although with Alt/PG changes, it's mostly now just down to IL runs not having a definitive spot and that's arguably more technical of an issue if anything).
The submission volume increase isn't something we can magically fix, people are not signing up to be Judges and Publishers, and if anything, we've been lowering the barrier for people to help by introducing the Reviewer role (effectively a half-judge non-staff role) and having the new sync verification workflow done here. Raising the barrier for having people help us would not help.
Why submission volume is so much higher could be a variety of factors. It began with 2022's record number of submissions. As such it's likely a combination of the new site (we're now no longer on the old http only web 1.5 site), and perhaps the tier revamp and rules rewrite (although, I would argue this if anything just mostly just made people more willing to submit rather than actually allowing said submissions to be accepted otherwise: a similar effect the new site would have).
More people are comfortable signing up for TASVideos and submitting TASes, therefore more submissions have to be handled. This hasn't translated properly to staff numbers, leading to a crowded workbench we try to handle the best we can with volunteer efforts.
5x submission volume really mainly has it unsustainable. In the long term, the rulesets still might make various TASers not want to submit to the site (although with Alt/PG changes, it's mostly now just down to IL runs not having a definitive spot and that's arguably more technical of an issue if anything).
Normally more submissions is a good thing, if it means more new TASers and quality works. But a lot of the increase comes from low quality submissions / less-known/low quality games.
If the number of submissions is too much to handle, the reasonable thing to do is to set the bar for submissions and publications higher instead of lower. We don't necessarily need low quality submissions, or TASes from unofficial games that very few people cares.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
If the number of submissions is too much to handle, the reasonable thing to do is to set the bar for submissions and publications higher instead of lower. We don't necessarily need low quality submissions, or TASes from unofficial games that very few people cares.
Assuming I get the gist of the conversation, I don't think you understand what the problem is. "Raising the bar" for submissions isn't possible - you can't magically reject a submission for being low-quality before it's even submitted. The staff does reject plenty of submissions, but it takes time to do so, and that's part of the problem. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.
Vault existed back then and would accept many of these games just fine. Especially keep in mind, many of Vault's old restrictions were still kept in place in Standard all the way until mid to late 2022: the most major of them being the "triviality" clause which was not eliminated until 2022-12-31, so cannot be a factor in this rise of submissions.
5x submission volume really mainly has it unsustainable. In the long term, the rulesets still might make various TASers not want to submit to the site (although with Alt/PG changes, it's mostly now just down to IL runs not having a definitive spot and that's arguably more technical of an issue if anything).
Normally more submissions is a good thing, if it means more new TASers and quality works. But a lot of the increase comes from low quality submissions / less-known/low quality games.
If the number of submissions is too much to handle, the reasonable thing to do is to set the bar for submissions and publications higher instead of lower. We don't necessarily need low quality submissions, or TASes from unofficial games that very few people cares.
My goal for tasvideos is for people to be able to find the TASes they want to find. It doesn't matter how niche the game is, I want people to be able to find it. I'd prefer to find solutions that don't take us back to when people were rightfully calling tasvideos elitist.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
My goal for tasvideos is for people to be able to find the TASes they want to find. It doesn't matter how niche the game is, I want people to be able to find it. I'd prefer to find solutions that don't take us back to when people were rightfully calling tasvideos elitist.
What's wrong being elitist or being called elitist? Since we have the publication system, it's natural to value quality over quantity.
Just setup a new section where people are free to submit anything, apart of the current publication system.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
My goal for tasvideos is for people to be able to find the TASes they want to find. It doesn't matter how niche the game is, I want people to be able to find it. I'd prefer to find solutions that don't take us back to when people were rightfully calling tasvideos elitist.
What's wrong being elitist or being called elitist? Since we have the publication system, it's natural to value quality over quantity.
Just setup a new section where people are free to submit anything, apart of the current publication system.
Elitist itself has very negative implications. In this case too, it's not so much about "quality" in so it's making arbitrary rules on what is considered "quality." Your game isn't Mario/Zelda/Pokemans? Rejected for being bad game. Your TAS isn't entertaining to whatever tiny amount of "elite" people bother to comment on submissions at all nowadays? Rejected for not entertaining. That's the general implication with "elitist" here (of course, some of this is more complicated in practice, but that matters not for being called "elitist").
We also already have a system for people are free to "submit" anything: the userfiles. And now we even have Playground. Except these are all just not publications, why bother putting things in here if it's not going to be published under the "elitist" ruleset, always put in a "lesser" place against the "elites." So many people just won't interact with the site at all.
Of course too, I would still strongly think the new site had a major role in submission volume in the first place: it made people more comfortable signing up to this site, since it wasn't some weird web 1.5 http only site. The initial tier revamp and rules rewrite did not really change the fundementals of the rules, only with time did they change, if anything it initially happening could be seen as the site becoming less elitist, thus increasing submission volume.
My goal for tasvideos is for people to be able to find the TASes they want to find. It doesn't matter how niche the game is, I want people to be able to find it. I'd prefer to find solutions that don't take us back to when people were rightfully calling tasvideos elitist.
What's wrong being elitist or being called elitist? Since we have the publication system, it's natural to value quality over quantity.
Just setup a new section where people are free to submit anything, apart of the current publication system.
Elitism is inherently unwelcoming.
Elitism also relies on subjectivity, which requires feedback, of which we’re receiving less and less on submissions as time passes.
If we went back to a system of requiring a certain level of feedback/notariety for a run to be published, then TAS authors who have interest in games out of the mainstream are starting at an inherent disadvantage to those authors who stick to TASing only popular franchises. Further, if we wanted to become elitist again, I’d argue that we’d need to remove a crap-ton of runs from the site’s publications and YouTube channel; and i can only see that driving members away, not inviting more.
Why should we prioritize the popular over the niche when both have equivalent value of accomplishment? We’re not a site based on popularity or entertainment anymore and haven’t been since the vault was introduced (which goes way back before i joined around 2015). Publishing only popular runs/franchises to the YouTube channel while accepting everything else in some unpublished area of the site, denigrates the hard work authors put into unpopular games. This is why we’ve actively tried broadening what’s acceptable; in order to invite more interest in the general hobby of TASing and to encourage engagement in the community.
EDIT:I was writing this when CPP posted his response.
Elitism also relies on subjectivity, which requires feedback, of which we’re receiving less and less on submissions as time passes.
TAS is art. Art is somewhat subjective. Our publications should have good taste and value quality, or why having publications at all?
TASVideos isn't omnipotent. It's impossible to make everyone happy. Submissions being rejected doesn't mean they have no value.
It's like if you open an art gallery, naturally you'd want arts with standards, and the best art work with limited space.
If people don't like the word elitism, so what? I'd still visit the best art gallery with the best work, instead of a random gallery that just let every trash in and lay them all on the ground.
Recent projects: SMB warpless TAS (2018), SMB warpless walkathon (2019), SMB something never done before (2019), Extra Mario Bros. (best ending) (2020).
TAS is art. Art is somewhat subjective. Our publications should have good taste and value quality, or why having publications at all?
TASVideos isn't omnipotent. It's impossible to make everyone happy. Submissions being rejected doesn't mean they have no value.
It's like if you open an art gallery, naturally you'd want arts with standards, and the best art work with limited space.
If people don't like the word elitism, so what? I'd still visit the best art gallery with the best work, instead of a random gallery that just let every trash in and lay them all on the ground.
TASing can be art, but it is not limited to that. There is a valuable aspect of technical achievement also.
There is value in recognizing the best that can be done in a game using TAS tools even if no one particularly likes that game. There is value in record archival for history’s sake. A lack of artistic value does not negate all value of a TAS.
There is plenty of art that i would appreciate that would never be considered “good enough” for an art gallery; similarly, a lot of stuff that does end up in art galleries, I would consider absolute rubbish. Just because something is in an art gallery doesn’t mean it’s actually good to the majority of viewers. Frankly, the majority of highly valued art has its value more tied to the artist than the art itself. So why should we just cater to a particular “elite” group and effectively say “screw you” to everyone else?
The main issue is that we’re NOT trying to be solely an art gallery anymore. As i already mentioned, that hasn’t been the goal of the site since vault was added years ago.
If you don’t like the stuff you’d consider as trash here, then just ignore it. It being here doesn’t lessen the inherent value of your own accomplishments, nor should it lessen the perceived value of your work by viewers.
It’s not the word “elitism” that people don’t like, it’s the attitude of elitism. And the problem with it, again as I’ve already mentioned, is that it’s more likely to turn people away than it is to be welcoming to them. So for the majority of us who want the site and hobby to grow, taking an elitist approach is counterproductive.
Speaking for myself (not as staff), I’d much rather lose the few “elites” who think they and their work are better than others, than potentially lose a majority of members because we stupidly chose to return to our former elitist ways.
But a lot of the increase comes from low quality submissions / less-known/low quality games.
[...] We don't necessarily need low quality submissions, or TASes from unofficial games that very few people cares.
I've been a member of TASVideos for a good few years now. I haven't made many submissions, but I've always been working on TASes, many of which I've hoped to submit to the site one day.
The old rules of TASVideos, the ones that more strictly dictated game choice and goal choice, were a major point of stress for me. I didn't just need to worry about making my work optimal, I had to have this big cloud hanging over me that all my work might just get thrown out immediately if it didn't meet a requirement for being interesting or popular enough.
Changing this ruleset has made my life far more relaxing. I don't work less hard on optimisation because I'm a perfectionist who cares about the quality of my work, but I don't have to stress about whether Phonics Racing Adventure will be entertaining enough to whichever random group of people on the forum happen to watch it. I can decide which projects I work on purely based on what I want to make, and not what TASVideos rules coerce me to make.
I want to point out that many of the rule changes that have taken place over the last few years have been workshopped with the community, such as the recent decision to remove entertainment requirements from Alternative branches. These decisions have been made because the community at large has agreed with them, and you have chosen not to participate in their discussion before now. I don't think there's anything wrong with (respectfully) voicing your disapproval, but I think it would've been better to do it at those moments instead of turning up now and demanding the past 2 years of changes be reverted.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11479
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HappyLee wrote:
Normally more submissions is a good thing, if it means more new TASers and quality works. But a lot of the increase comes from low quality submissions / less-known/low quality games.
If the number of submissions is too much to handle, the reasonable thing to do is to set the bar for submissions and publications higher instead of lower. We don't necessarily need low quality submissions, or TASes from unofficial games that very few people cares.
As someone who has judged more than a thousand movies over 10 years, and as someone who has been in charge of movie rules for half of that decade, I can provably say that the problem with any kind of official borderline is that it's arbitrary in nature. People who happen to be around when a new borderline is being discussed may have some good points of where it should be. But first, quality of such a policy would depend of how many factors this team/community would be willing to account for. Second, nobody is infinitely smart, people have limits that are very hard to overcome (and if the decing team is too progressive, community may not understand/like the proposed change). Third, reality does not give a damn about our borderlines, and is never limited by them.
As a result, no matter how hard we try to design sensible policies, there will always be a huge percentage of really good movies that don't nicely fall on either side of our borderline. We'd like that movie, and it'd be high quality... but you guessed it, TAS is art, and art is not limited by policies! Artists creare what they want!
So, if we try to follow our policy to the letter, we'd have to reject something for being "too creative". And that resilts in TAS artists not wanting to bother submitting. So the overall quality of the works featured in the "gallery" gets lower.
Raising the bar is not a solution, because first, indeed it would not change the amount of submisions (at least until people get demotivated enough from submitting at all, which would take a few years), and second, it would mean we start rejecting perfectly good movies that we accepted before just because they got unlucky to fall on the wrong side of our new borderline. So again, we'd be losing high quality works and people who can make them, because our rule happened to not align with their talents. Not a great path all in all.
So we instead solve it by getting rid of limitations, gradually, to make it easier to judge movies, because now judges don't have to put a square peg into a round hole every time anymore (authors too) - the policies become less arbitrary, and less strict, so we just judge on technical quality alone, which is much less subjective. It also makes it easier for regular users to help judges by reviewing movies when the policies are more straightforward. And yes that makes us an archive rather than an art gallery. But that doesn't mean we can't have a gallery inside of it. People just objectively create much more straight speedruns than playarounds, so an archive is what they need.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
