Affectionately known as The Other Tropes Wiki, TV Tropes is a wiki documenting, in a fairly informal manner, the various conventions of fiction. The site was supposedly founded by three cofounders, Gus, Fast Eddie, and Janitor on April 2004[1]. The website is quite similar to Tropedia, but have a few differences.
The site when through a few crisis'. The first is known as the The Great Crash[2] with the main database and it's backups getting corrupted and made unusable. Much of the content was saved through tropers finding every bit of data through archives. Then came The Situation after much panic, the ad issues with Google seemed to be settled, for now.
Then The Second Google Incident happened. Adsense was disabled on pages contrary to Google's policy, and some alternate advertisers were found to reduce the wiki's dependency to it. This proved not to be enough when somebody complained to Google about the Naughty Tentacles page (which already had Adsense disabled), and Google pulled the plug again. This led to changes to the wiki that some seeing heavy handed and caused many tropes to get banned or leave the site for good.
Fast Eddie sold the site in 2014 to Drew Schoentrup and Chris Richmond, for an undisclosed sum. They then launched a Kickstarter to overhaul the Fast Eddie's heavily modded PMWiki codebase and design[3].
Like any sizeable work, they've collected their own fair share of Tropes.
The website has attracted plenty of criticism for the way the mods run the site as well as the general behaviour of users, particularly since the second half of the 2010s, with many past and present users reporting very poor treatment by the mods and other users. Many people have noted that the mods run TV Tropes like "dictators", and that any time someone even slightly disagrees with a mod or does something that they see is bad (accidental or not) results in them getting banned with very little to no warning.
They have been cited as "very mean", and even come off as "bigoted" [4]. Their tendency to keep a tally of transgressions regardless of severity to use should a user be suspended more than once as a means of demerit, even if said user has been keeping out of trouble for extended amount of time and abiding by their rules, is also a point of criticism.
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20230828093432/https://gizmodo.com/behind-the-wiki-meet-tv-tropes-cofounder-fast-eddie-5479423
- ↑ Legally, it isn't possible copy and paste the article because of the license that Tv Tropes has in place but link to archive.org should be able get around it.
- ↑ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tvtropes/the-tv-tropes-revitalization-project
- ↑ An experience