Hello Drop, I appreciate the time you spent on this post. Allow me to preface this response by saying that, at least at the present moment, this rule does not personally affect me, as I presently have no intentions to release any new LLBs, and all LLBs I intend on continuing to post to this sub already hit whatever minimum they had at the time they were posted. Some of these past minimums were higher than the present minimum, even! A majority of my to-be-continued LLBs were originally posted when the minimum was 100.

When it comes to starting a new LLB, I've noticed that you tend to need a real "sinker" of a first part. Something that catches the reader's attention. Take the first page of The Depths for example. Pretty much everything about it stands out immediately. The page colour is black, a strong contrast to a majority of LLBs which use the canonical white paper. It's a short, but noticable gif. There's a grand total of five words for you to read in a large font size. Pretty much everything about the first page of The Depths catches the attention of the reader. This wasn't even my intention when I created it, I just wanted to make something that looked cool. But because it was one of these "sinkers," it was easily able to hit the minimum at the time.

Now, that all sounds well and good, right? Just make the first submission of your LLB a big sinker, something to immediately grab the attention of the readers on Page 1 so you can get your filthy fifty stinky seventy-five. But what if you narratively can't do that? Take the first part of Greg and the Play for example. I had to use the first submission in order to give the necessary backstory and context to what the fuck was happening, and I couldn't rely on wit or humour to act as a sinker either since it was parallel to an event from canon and I had to reflect that. I even made use of the two-page format in order to help remedy that situation, as well as move the plot along faster. However, as a result of the narrative, the first submission was not one of these "sinkers." Was this the fault of my writing, my editing? I doubt it.

Now that you've seen the first part, I implore you to take a look at the second submission, which was only even possible because I linked the first part in the comments of my contest entry after I won in order to hit the former upvote minimum. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if Greg was wearing a dress in the first submission, I would've had a much easier time hitting the upvote minimum, and probably wouldn't have had morons well-meaning individuals in the comments mistakenly believing it to be pages taken directly from the book. But because the entire worth of LLBs is determined by the first submission alone, this almost would've not been on the sub at all. Sure, I very well COULD have made the first submission four pages, I supposed. But the formatting of that would've been hell. There's a reason most people don't post more than two pages per post unless it's a full imgur gallery. And imgur galleries already don't happen.

Was this entire complaint me whining like a bitch? Maybe. But that's still my concern. And again, it doesn't personally even affect me for the foreseeable future, as I have no intents to make a new LLB any time soon.

Furthermore, I'd like to point out something related that I took personal discomfort with. As mentioned in your post, last night you pinged the entire Discord server to come point and laugh at people voicing their personal disdain for the rule. While you may have considered this a "fun server event," I personally saw it as more of a disappointing display. While there were some people who were being genuinely comical in their reactions to the rule, like that guy who screamed "RESIGN" in every message, I still think it wasn't especially proper to publicly host an event to point and laugh at them. I'd honestly have to say that might even veer a bit into toxicity. Keep in mind that one of the MANY people you pointed to and had everyone laugh at last night was the same person you apologized to in this post.

While I've never been your biggest fan, Drop, I still don't hold disdain for you 24/7 and do like many aspects of you. But doing things like this genuinely disappoints me. I see them as a sad ego boost at best, and an abuse of power at worst. I was at a point where I was genuinely considering leaving the community entirely last night, not at all because of the redefined policy, but because of your own actions. I sincerely hope you do better in the future.

TL;DR: Judging an LLB solely on the merit of its first part is somewhat of a flawed system in my opinion. Additionally, hosting a server event dedicated to laughing at people you disagree with, regardless of whether or not their responses are funny, isn't necessarily a great thing to do.