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Comment by cirgue | Hacker News Reader

If you want to destroy someone’s productivity for a day, link them to tvtropes.

I seem to be alone, but tvtropes never does this to me. I'll read something I find interesting there, but rarely do I find the links intriguing enough to continue.

Clicking the wrong Wikipedia link can cause me to lose hours of my life, but never tvtropes. I feel like I'm missing some enthralling way to use the site. Maybe that's for the best.

You're not alone.

That this comment is in every discussion of TV tropes is a weird trope in and of itself.

Do we owe this to that Minecraft welcome message? Or is fundamentally one of those self-fulfilling prophecies? .

No. This saying about TVTropes definitely exists outside of any influence that Minecraft may or may not have had.

No; it was already an established meme. Minecraft got it from the wider culture, not the other way around.

Indeed, and here's the page for it: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/TVTropesWi...

For a day? More like introduce them to TV Tropes and leave them addicted to the site for the rest of their life. If you're the kind of person who likes spotting patterns in works of fiction (like myself), you'll end up checking the site for every single of media you watch ever again, lol.

I introduced a friend to tvtropes while on IM. Later that day ...

> That's an amazing site, but I'm going to have to go to sleep now.

"Yeah it's fascinating isn't it.

> Night.

"Have you looked up 'Videodrome'?"

...

> You bastard.

Long term it saves time though. Once you start seeing how often TV/Movies lean on the cliches the site deconstructs it kind of ruins much of the mass produced low quality media these days. So you don't have to waste time watching them anymore.

This! I've noticed my watching habits have waned to almost no mass produced (visual) media. I'm no paragon of self-control, its just distasteful and not my first choice. It's all been demographically motived, paced, tested, optimized formulas that maximize ROI. For me the there is vibrance online that doesn't exist on TV. Regrettably, a lot of that is happening on TikTok right now, where authoring is so easy, all barriers removed. You don't have to show your face or use your real voice, the trends feel fresh and organic. There are lots of new voices, and the unstructured AI topic and audience clustering has helped some otherwise impossible communities to emerge. Short form video is wildly engaging, especially as a variety show. Sure tropes emerge and trends get tired, but the sheer diversity of iterations and reactions feels like some raw genesis energy.

But using tropes is not a bad thing in general, or what would you say? I think I kinda know what is low quality without looking at TV tropes beforehand.

Ofcourse not. Things become tropes for a reason.

And it is next to impossible to be original as a writer. Everything has already been done at some point in the past 5000 years of recorded history.

Lampshaded in "Bert & Ernie Go to the Movies", where Big Bird receives a link to the website.

It may take some time to explore the site, however I believe more in revealed preferences (here, the time spent) than in declared preferences ("omg my work is so important!")

My hypothesis is understanding the social fabric we live in is of the utmost importance, so maybe spending a day (or more, personally I spent weeks on tvtropes!) means that we unconsciously realize that, since it's more important than immediate productivity.

To say that differently, since we live a social life and interact with others, I think the long-term gains that come with a better understanding of the "common mental picture" allowing more fruitful interactions may be way more important than writing a few more lines of code.

In this instance, my journey ended up scrolling through all the Quora questions on the topic of Prince Valiant.

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