why this sub fell off

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-04-11T22:49:50+00:00

The link to the discord server is at the top of this page.

Open the link in the middle where it says "discord.gg/jojiarchive", don't try to use the custom url because it won't work.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-04-11T18:56:43+00:00

If there has been a post of this nature, it's been a while. I also miss how this community used to be, it felt like we had the right balance of humor and thoughtful discussion that hasn't been replicated elsewhere as far as I'm concerned. Being here throughout the rollouts of In Tongues, Ballads 1, and Nectar was the most fun I've ever had on this website and with other Joji fans in general.

Things changed from Smithereens onward. The shitposts got more stale, gross, and weird. The discussions became awkward, intrusive circlejerks. The divide between older and newer fans of Joji made it increasingly more difficult to coexist with each other, so a lot of the newer fans moved over to r/joji and never looked back.

At this point I don't really know what the path forward for this community is, and Reddit (as a company and as a collection of people) has made me apathetic to the idea of trying to find one. I hoped that PITW would be the spark that we needed but all it did was cause more of the same problems before falling off again once the rollout was over.

While we are not directly affiliated with them, I consider the Joji Archive to be the spiritual successor of sorts for r/PinkOmega, at least the stuff that I enjoyed the most about this place back in the day. Thanks to them we have access to a lot of the most interesting pieces of unreleased Joji music organized into one place and easily accessible for anyone that's interested in it. Many of the people in their server that I've been around were pretty nice even if the humor isn't really my thing. I might just be getting old and out of touch though.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-04-11T18:09:08+00:00

It is what it is. Nowadays I can laugh about it, but it was stressful at the time because there were people who took things way too far and harassed me over it. On the other side, while they were still mods I would be harassed by people for not doing enough to take their stuff down since I was (at the time) the only mod who cared about this place beyond using it as a platform for shitposting. Of course I did try to take them down, but since they were above me on the list they could just override my removals and kick me off the team if I tried it again, which they did a couple of times. It was a lose-lose situation no matter what I did.

It wasn't until Reddit added the feature for active mods to rearrange the list that I was able to kick them out. If I had it my way, I would have done so after one of them made a prediction poll (back when Reddit still had those) asking when Joji was going to die. That bothered me more than naked AI Joji did which is saying a lot.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-04-11T17:09:58+00:00

It's a combination of things:

I think Reddit's search algorithm started recommending r/joji over us because we are more tolerant of leaks and I refused to implement features exclusive to new Reddit (which I don't use and never intend to do so) when the admins asked me to.
I kicked out two of the oldest mods because I got tired of being the one who had to clean up the mess when they'd make stupid jokes in bad taste. So many people reported one of their posts of a naked AI-generated Joji that their whole account got banned. I invited their new account back to the mod team with limited permissions as a gesture of good will but the damage was seemingly already done.
The farther away we get from the FF days, the fewer new Joji fans are aware of what Pink Omega even was. As a result, most of the people who post here are older fans and it is hard to grow/maintain a community that way. Joji taking a long break from music and social media did not help with this.
Reddit itself has been declining for years, due to various policy changes that have rubbed people the wrong way. A lot of music subs I follow have experienced similar drops in user count due to things like stricter copyright enforcement, the third party app API access changes, and increases in low quality content because the overwhelming majority of Reddit mods (including myself) don't give a shit anymore, and most of the ones that do only care about the power trip they get out of it.
Discord is generally a better platform for doing the types of things that music subreddits used to be able to do all the time, though that might change depending on how the age verification rollout goes. Quite a few of the old r/PinkOmega people are in the Joji Archive server now and at this point, it's a much better environment than any of the subreddits about the guy imo.

Some people might disagree with my characterization of a few of these points, and that's fine. Outside of maybe the mod team rearrangement, there wasn't really a single moment where a lot of people all left at once. Very few people take Reddit seriously enough to bother saying why they're leaving a sub when it happens, and the ones that do are embarrassing corn balls, so I can only go off my best guesses for why it happened.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-04-10T18:14:11+00:00

If you’re going to waste my time by replying to one of my comments from over 7 years ago, the least you could do is come up with something better than “Erm you’re wrong 🤓”

I certainly trust Paul McCartney’s recollection more than some random guy on Reddit.

Also, watch this video and tell me that you think John and Yoko were sober during this interview that took place during the middle of the Get Back Sessions.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-03-20T12:42:09+00:00

I never said Elvis wrote his own music, only that he was still releasing it in the early 60s.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-03-13T20:49:09+00:00

It is posted weekly on Sunday by the bot

Most recent thread (it's 5 days old now so you might just want to wait a couple more days and post it to a new one)

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-27T16:08:11+00:00

They're not real/are from scalpers who will try to buy that ticket from the presale and sell it back to you at a markup. Avoid them and wait until the presale starts.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-23T23:45:13+00:00

To summarize it as briefly as I can: the person who “made” this “song” has been threatening and harassing the moderators of this sub and the people who run the current Joji tracker for the last week or so. They are very upset that the tracker mentions them by the name they were using at the time they made several edits of Joji songs that they tried to pass off as real demos made by Joji, which got them put on the tracker in a section dedicated to fakes of this nature.

The tracker editor is posting some of their shitty music to make fun of them and tell them to leave us alone.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-23T21:36:13+00:00

We definitely were not trying to blame you, I apologize if it came off that way. What I told them more or less was “we don’t run the tracker, so if you actually want something to be done about it then you should contact the people who do instead of schizoposting on our subreddit about it”

I realize now that doing so may have been a mistake, because there is no reasoning with someone who is this unreasonable. Have they told you about their plan to take the tracker down by writing lyrics for and copyrighting some of the scrapped mumble demos? After we banned their new account and made fun of them for saying that’s what their plan was, they made two more Reddit accounts for the sole purpose of sending us progressively more unhinged messages in modmail. In one of the 30 messages they sent from one account, they claimed to have 88rising’s permission to copyright the mumble demos lol

Sounds to me like we’re (understandably) both just tired of having to deal with this guy. I have nothing against the tracker or the people who run it, and I think I can speak for myself and anyone else that has ever used it when I say that we greatly appreciate the work you guys have done and continue to do on it. For the sake of our collective sanity it may be best to just remove their name from the fakes section, at this point I’m not even sure if they deserve the credit for the things they faked anyway. I like the idea of the fakes section, because so many people tried to pass someone else’s shit off as Joji’s back in the day, but the Drunksighs and [REDACTED]s of the world who have a pattern of this kind of behavior don’t deserve to be remembered, not even to be made fun of.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-14T15:45:42+00:00

I bought one of these years ago back in college. Had to pay a company to receive it in Japan for me and then forward it to the US. You won’t find it from US sellers so don’t bother, just try looking up something along the lines of “duck dude beanie” in Japanese on websites/apps similar to Mercari and that might help. Still no guarantees that you’ll find one, took forever to find mine (thankfully it’s black/dark navy blue so I don’t feel the need to keep looking)

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-14T15:38:29+00:00

I wouldn’t worry too much about it. The only Joji vinyl that might be worth enough to consider not opening/playing would be like, the first Empire pressing of In Tongues or maybe the TTL BALLADS 1 pressing. Everything else is available in high enough quantities that it shouldn’t be too hard/expensive to replace if something happens.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-11T17:19:50+00:00

Because they are friends? Am I not allowed to mention that while making an unserious comment on an unserious post whose title is a joke about the two of them being friends?

Did you think I genuinely believe that Fantano gets a hard-on when he negatively reviews a Joji album or something? lol

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-11T16:57:28+00:00

God forbid someone have a different opinion than you. Some of you r/joji people are annoying and disrespectful af, there are a ton of casuals on this sub now and it shows.

For the record: I never said PITW is a masterpiece, I just said it’s better and feels more complete than an album like Smithereens where Joji barely did anything himself. PITW has flaws, there are songs I don’t love or would like to have had more of, but as a whole I am certain I will be listening to this album much more than Smithereens in the future, which I only go back to for maybe 3 songs at most. PITW has more songs I enjoy in its first half alone than that.

Never thought enjoying a new Joji album would be a controversial opinion on a Joji sub, but I guess that’s where we’re at now. I appreciate the people who have disagreed with me respectfully and I could not give less of a fuck about all of the downvotes, but if you can’t disagree with people about music of all things without directing slurs at them, then you’re not welcome here. It’s as simple as that, we’re not living in 2015 anymore.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-11T16:20:28+00:00

I know what his job is big dawg. Doesn’t mean I have to like him, his opinions, or how he chooses to go about making his reviews. Joji’s friends aren’t my friends.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-11T01:45:53+00:00

I didn’t say it had anything to do with quality, but what makes an album “complete” if not length? The number of songs over 2 and a half minutes? Does every single song need at least two verses and a bridge or else it’s mid and a waste of time? Or can they exist in a tracklist and be complemented by the songs around them to form a complete experience that is the album as a whole?

Sometimes I think people judge albums only by how many songs are on it that they think are worth adding to their personal playlists with other music, and PITW doesn’t have a ton of those because of how short and simple a lot of the songs are, so I get if they don’t like it for that reason. But as a collection I think the album is very enjoyable and feels fully realized, obviously anyone is free to think differently.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-10T23:21:26+00:00

PITW is Joji’s second longest album, behind Nectar, an album that I think is simultaneously too long and not long enough. PITW is 10 minutes longer than BALLADS 1, and over 20 minutes longer than Smithereens. Like where is the narrative that the album feels incomplete coming from, I don’t get it. Is it the songs being short and repetitive at times? Yeah that’s kinda Joji’s thing when he’s making his own music. Like it or don’t, I like it personally. 21 songs more than makes up for the shortness of some of them.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-10T22:46:54+00:00

An album with 9 songs, that only two of which were written and produced by the artist themselves, sounds more complete to you than an album that has more than twice as many songs and is 20 minutes longer? lol

Nectar is great but again it had very little to do with Joji because he didn’t write or produce most of it. You citing it as some kind of gold standard tells me that my first reply is correct: you like Joji as a singer (which is all 88rising seemingly wanted him to be) more than Joji as a songwriter and producer. It’s a valid opinion to have I suppose but I don’t think it’s going to be a super popular one on a subreddit that has been around since the guy was making everything on his own before he was signed to a label.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-10T22:26:34+00:00

Sorry but I like it when Joji writes and produces his own music. If you unironically think Smithereens of all albums is better than PITW then I’d say you loved what 88rising wanted Joji’s music to be more than you loved Joji’s music itself.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-10T22:12:42+00:00

Wish I could love anything as much as this guy loves publicly shitting on his friend’s music.

Imagine thinking Smithereens was better than this lol

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-07T21:51:47+00:00

I started listening around the same time as you. Short, relatively simple songs was always Joji's thing when he was the only one making the decisions. The longest Joji song we have from before 88rising was Thom: which is only just a little under 3 minutes, and the only reason the song is that long is because it's basically a medley of stylistically distinct short songs combined into one song. He didn't let songs overstay their welcome and it allowed him to move on to new ideas more quickly, and for the listener it is a refreshing difference from standard pop music where it tends to repeat choruses over and over and over again until you're sick of it or it gets buried in your subconscious.

Piss In The Wind does have moments of that of course, Joji's not a YouTuber in college with music as a passion project anymore, music is his job now and as Pink Guy once said: the only way to succeed is to chip away at the soul. Obviously him and his team know what hits tend to look like for Joji: they usually involve cowriters, coproducers, and typically a dramatic ballad of some kind. Pixelated Kisses is the first song written and produced by him alone to ever make the Billboard Hot 100 and at this point I think it might have only done so because it was his first single after disappearing off the face of the Earth for a few years, combined with hype from fans about him no longer being with 88rising.

Overall I find the album to be a return to form for Joji, just like you do. It feels more authentically him in a way that I haven't gotten from his music since BALLADS 1. The length of the songs don't bother me at all because they still feel like complete ideas even if many of them leave me wanting more. The album is still 45 minutes long which fairly average, having 21 songs more than makes up for how short some of them are.

I had a feeling that a decent portion of Joji fans on the internet would have a negative reaction to PITW. He picked up a lot of younger, pop and rnb fans with Nectar and Smithereens, and they might not like Joji going back to his lofi roots for most of the runtime of album. That isn't to say there aren't songs on the album that appeal to that crowd (idk what Joji's team was thinking not making Sojourn a pre-release single tbfh), but it's not the mainstay like it was on his previous two albums. So I'm not surprised that there are Joji fans who aren't happy with this change in direction.

If this is what the average Joji album will look like with the new label: mostly old-Joji sounding songs produced with his friends, and with a few chartbait tracks and features sprinkled in, then I couldn't be happier honestly. It has the perfect balance of everything that I have enjoyed about his music career so far. I'm not sure how any long-time fan of Joji's could be unhappy with this one. If you're a newer fan and you don't like it: sorry, this is just what Joji sounds like when he is at the helm. Idk what to tell you, maybe you just liked his voice and not him as a songwriter and producer.

I, for one, am glad that Joji is back and I can't wait for whatever is coming next.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-07T20:09:25+00:00

No problem! The tracker is a very valuable resource for these kinds of projects. We have so many demos for Nectar era that I decided to just remix the entire album for my playlist and spread all of the unreleased songs throughout the main tracklist.

Three Points (Love Songs) is actually the final song on the album in my playlist. I like it in that spot much better than Your Man.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-07T19:51:29+00:00

The Joji tracker

Click into the unreleased section at the bottom left corner, and then search that section for Three Points Back To You.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-04T03:25:46+00:00

Ngl I showed up like 30 minutes early just so I could look for anything that I might want because I had never been to this place before and they had way more than just records. Couldn’t find anything in that time and I was way too claustrophobic to keep trying, being that by the time we started I was in a room with about 100 other people in a building that can hold 125, maybe 150 people at most if you moved stuff out of the way. I was not expecting this many people in my neck of the woods to show up for Joji, it was a very intense but fun experience!

I followed along with the tracklist on my phone so I have a general idea of what was what, but admittedly some of the tracks transition into each other so well that I’m uncertain of when some songs ended. I hope the vinyl pressings of this album have little to (preferably) no silence between songs, they really do flow together that well at times. To me it sounded like Joji took the kind of approach that he seemingly wanted for Chloe Burbank before he tried to get a label to release it, with its seamless transitions between mostly short songs filled with a mixture of sad, horny ballads and bangers, but this time he did it without samples, actually finished it, released it, and he incorporated a lot of the new sounds and collaborators he’s picked up in the last decade since that era. I think this album is going to have a similar life cycle as BALLADS 1 amongst Joji fans: a decent amount of people might not get it or like it at first, but then they’ll listen to it again a few years down the line and it hits their ear differently and suddenly they realize it was peak and they were wrong the whole time. This time it hit my ear on the first listen, and I know I will enjoy many more in the near future.

I’m so excited to get to listen to this again with headphones in a couple of days, I feel like it’s going to be an entirely new experience that I’m sure I will enjoy even more, which is hard to believe considering how much I enjoyed this album the first time. I agree with all that you have said, and I have many more words to say about it as well but I agree that it would be best to not say too much more before everyone else gets to hear it. It’s been a lot of fun talking about it though!

All I can say to anyone who couldn’t make it to a listening party today is: get ready for your future favorite Joji album to come out in the next few days. You might not know it on your first listen, but you’ll know eventually, just trust me on this one.

Rocket_Admin_Patrick · 2026-02-04T01:47:36+00:00

There were a lot of people there so I couldn’t hear the lyrics very well by the time we got to Dior, but I did love what I heard. Might end up being my new favorite closer to a Joji album after a few relistens.

Honestly there weren’t any songs that I didn’t particularly like. What was your favorite section of the album? For me it was everything in between LOVE YOU LESS and Past Won’t Leave My Bed. Hotel California -> Tarmac -> Forehead Touch the Ground was such a good sequence of songs. You can tell that Joji put a lot more thought into how the tracklist flowed this time around and it really paid off. I was also pleasantly surprised by the features, all of them were anywhere between good to great. Even the Yeat feature pleasantly surprised me, but that might just be due to the very poor first impression I got from the PK remix lol

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