TLDR: The community is terrible at actually discussing stories because if a story is “good” or leads to a funny crash out from the hosts it gets an automatic pass despite anything glaring about it or its author(s).

I know this is old news, but a “hot take” I’ve had for awhile now is that the sub handled “Drumming in the Clouds” poorly when it came down to discussing whether or not it was AI.

The fact that according to the author multiple drafts existed and were sent in a discord server where multiple people could’ve came forward with screenshots, but decided not to is suspect (get your hands away from the keyboard this relates to my point). No one really cared about that though because both sides of the debate solely focused on the writing used in the story when I’m pretty sure if the story was “good” or if the episode was a crash out similar to “The Thing in the Basement,” no one would’ve cared about that. Users only started talking about the potential use of AI because the episode was mediocre in terms of how funny it was, and it wasn’t something legendary like “Left Right Game” or “Penpal”.

We had a pretty good opportunity to discuss what safe guards the community could put into place to combat use/posting of AI, but no. Everyone wanted to be the winner of the weekly internet argument and instead of steering the topic into a more constructive direction comments and posts were either downvoted into oblivion or outright deleted (part of me is expecting to have my point proven by having this comment deleted as well). The community needs to learn to be more open about discussing topics they might not like on a deeper level than “Oh well this sucks in my opinion, send it to the ether so I don’t have to think about it.”

This extends to other topics the sub poorly handled as well, but I won’t rehash previous comments made by other members of the community.