TV Tropes/Trivia


 * Broken Base: The Second Google Incident was something of an event horizon for troping as a whole. Even before the advertising pull occurred, TV Tropes' userbase was the subject of intense ridicule both within and outside of it - but Google pulling its advertising, and the TV Tropes administration of the time going above and beyond the call of duty in their efforts to regain advertising-friendly status with them, was the dropped iron beam upon the camel's back. To this day, there are still people who see TV Tropes as the domain of tyrannical prudes, even as TV Tropes's reputation of being Fan Dumb personified was still widespread; efforts have also been made to try and curate cordial interaction between the TV Tropes and fork userbases.
 * Death of the Author: Strongly underlined the philosophy of troping as defined by the site around 2012.
 * Fan Myopia: While part and parcel with a site made about fandom by fandom, it hit critical mass in a frankly alarming manner and cemented the site's reputation as the domain of online pseudo-intellectualism - and that's without getting into what led to the Second Google Incident.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: The many NSFW works and Fetish Fuel tropes that were wiped in The Google Incidents - many can only be accessed through the pages' edit history or through archive sites, and some were never archived. Some of the forks emphasized that they would be much more lenient in allowing for discussion of such works in order to appeal to disaffected users on that particular side of the Broken Base, though this was to their detriment in at least one case (such as the now-deleted Fetish Fuel Wiki). This was not helped by the accusations TV Tropes administration of the time made that claimed the staff and users of those forks focused on salacious material to the exclusion of all else - while it's not hard to imagine that this segment of the userbase existed, especially considering what led to the Second Google Incident to begin with, it was more than unfair to tar every fork with that same brush.
 * Paedo Hunt: The headlong rush to embrace censorship in 2012 was framed as this trope, which both became a rallying cry and as a tool to discredit dissent and dissenters. It conveniently allowed the P5 to tar any work they disliked as "pedoshit" and anyone who disagreed with their agenda as a "pedophile". While admittedly TVT had attracted an unsavory and frankly creepy element that did need purging, the extent to which the campaign was taken -- and the targets it was pointed at -- suggested to some that it was a more cynically deliberate political tool, rather than the definite kneejerk reaction it represented in trying to solve a legitimately pressing problem.
 * "Stop Having Fun!" Guys:
 * The admins and mods were largely considered to be full of these in the initial post-Second Google Incident era. One particular admin, Fast Eddie, has an enduring reputation as such among the userbase of All The Tropes, long after his last edit to TV Tropes was made in 2016. In particular, Fast Eddie became infamous as an example of an Orwellian Editor during his tenure; forum threads that criticized him or the wiki ended up nuked, meaning that anyone who tried to access it would be redirected to a blank page. Eddie wasn't the only one with nuke powers, though - the moderators themselves had the ability to nuke threads, and took full advantage of these, also resulting in the bans of those who do the disagreeing. During Fast Eddie's final years as owner of the site post-Second Google Incident. A good case in point: when he established the P5 (widely seen as a Censorship Bureau) he expressly reserved the right to overrule them and delete something he didn't like even if they felt it was "safe" for the site, while holding up the P5 as having the "final authority" over wiki content.
 * Thankfully, this tendency has long since abated with his departure, and thee 2020s administration of TVT is much less severe in comparison, though some may still consider them this due to the strict standards they often enforce with regards to editing and example quality.
 * Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: One major reason many new guidelines were put in place during the 2010s and early 2020s, with several originating in rampant examples of Fan Myopia. A big example was the Internet Backdraft subpages, which were all wiped due to tropers consistently misusing the definition; another big and much less arguable example was the infamous Troper Tales.