Board Thread:Off-Topic Discussion/@comment-6433273-20171231161124/@comment-53539-20180122150013

Dizzyzebra wrote: CCyclone wrote: Dizzyzebra wrote: Can you guys link to the original sources/screenshots for the bullying? I'd appreciate it, things do get buried fast. *edit* Nevermind, found it. :'D

I remember, we've had even bigger bullying scandals than this. And few years later, those involved have only grown in popularity. Most didn't apologise, we just forget. Wait, seriously? What on earth could've been worse than that? Doing the sorts of things Akuo did is just awful; I sincerely hope the fandom didn't just forget about it.

The only ones I can really think of is when Sangnoksu was bullied by racists when he first released the 1000 Year Tale (which has almost hit 1M), and the covers of Scissorhands and Freely Tomorrow for SeeU being taken down for the exact same reasons. Well, I think Freely managed to stay on for a while but the comments/like bar was disabled.

What other serious issues like that have there been? Alrighty, prepare for a Vocaloid Community Drama History Lesson! This happened a few years ago, so I won't bother naming names.

The Set-Up:

The year is 2014. The Western UTAU fandom contains a popular clique consisting of about 3 people, let's call them the Cool Kids. The Cool Kids are very well-known and have a big influence over English UTAU. In our little corner of the internet, they are the in-crowd. The members could be a bit sassy, and would occasionally call out other users for copying USTs, etc. However, for the most part they are appeared to be nice, normal people.

The Drama:

Then one day, all hell breaks loose. An unknown user has set up a Tumblr blog and leaked a magna carta's worth of screenshots from the Cool Kids' private Twitters. The blog has since been deleted; however, let me give you an idea of what sort of things these users were saying behind the rest of the fandom's backs. I've seen a lot of people talk rudely about each other in private, but the Cool Kid's cruelty was on another level. I've never seen anyone that embittered over UTAU before. Their private Twitters contained some of the most disturbing, narcissistic things I've read from this community. To this day I have never seen private vents as vicious as theirs. The Cool Kids were insulting users with disabilities, laughing at other people's art, how bad other people's UTAUs were, how little they'd improved and wishing violence on the people that had annoyed them. I recall 'I hope we made that bitch cry' as a quote.

An amusing aside: At the same time, another group of salty users had set up a forum, also intended to talk smack about other Vocaloid fans behind their backs. Or 'vent', shall we say. Even these users were shocked by what the Cool Kids were saying. I remember reading 'Not even we said anything that bad!'. You know your private Twitter is messed up when even forum members are shocked.

Anyway, that Tumblr post gained thousands of notes. Famous Western producers called them 'animals', I remember CircusP expressing his shock at their behaviour, amongst others.

The Aftermath:

1 member of the Cool Kids apologised, and promised to be more mature in future.

1 member claimed that the people they were talking about deserved it, said that this was a scheme to make the Cool Kids look bad.

And 1 member said 'Congratulations, now you know how I really feel'.

No one quit, and everyone involved is still doing well.

-

I remember it well, because it was disturbing to see how people can be nice in public, yet twisted behind closed doors. It's been a while, so I hope everyone involved has become a better person since.

So remember kids, if synths are making you so angry that you need a private space to tear people apart, it's time to take break from the community. No fandom should be that stressful. I remember something similar at Dragoncave, someone broke into the forum wherein they found upcoming projects and insults towards people they didn't like. I left dragoncave after the Frilled dragons showed up the true nature of one of the artists... Plis behind the admins back a few of us saw he pics that someone shared of things. Seeing the upcoming dragons was nice, but it became clear that general artists making dragons in the creation section were biasly being not chosen most of the time.

In the beyblade fandom, there was a similar section on one forum I was on... All we did was share torrents of episodes of season1 though. So not everything behind closed doors is all that bad... But often it provokes problems having it. I understand the need to have it though at times. But it can be abused. In our case, it was so the owner could help reward trust fans who during a bought of drama with the Beyblade Japanese fans proved they understood the nature of the drama going on. Like I swear 90% of the fans didn't give a dam the top doujin artist had one of their comics uploaded for free to be downloaded on the old Microsoft Websites or wherever it had been. It didn't concern me, as I'd never stolen any art at all from the Beyblade fans of Japan and to this day try to be careful. :-?

@Ihavenoideawhatsoever, In V3, the last year of an engine is spent releasing late projects, particularly if other projects delayed things. If the project is not far gone and the next engine is handed out to the companies, they will abandon the project to restart it in the next engine version.

There wasn't a great difference between V3 and V4 except XSY and GWL and the guy behind Project Vocaloid was retiring so... There was no explosions and lights like the V2 to V3 era. No time I suppose. The launch of V3 was actually delayed because they were giving for studios to get ready and V2 had been so good it was something they saw investing into things to look spectacular I suppose.

V3 however, overall... I don't think it saw things as much as V2 had, a lot of things went right but also wrong in V3. Too many vocals, for example, meant they caught into each other's sales and there were clear winners and losers. There was issues with recording methods resulting in many same-y sounding voicebanks. And just generally... No reason for fan to buy every vocaloid. Fans instead picked their vocals and went with them.

The only one who was an oddity for an update was Tone Rion, as she seemed to plod along. But I guess in her case... Since V4 was all about Nemu and Rion was just *updated* and therefore she was just *there*, they wanted to improve things and release a vocal that producers would be more on board with. Nemu generally does everything Rion did, but better then her. Bit "Touch luck" to Rion fans I suppose when you think about it. Normally we say updates are a signal of overall successful vocaloids, but Rion really was an exception.