Two years ago today, DB kicked me out ~

a never-before-told story lol

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    For being too fabulous, insightful and funny?

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      I have to get my fill from your site and podcast now.

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      haha, let me see…*takes out eyeglasses* yes that’s exactly what the email said! (now go and read the Good Detective review comments with new eyes! XD)

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    Good to see you back. The podcast is great.

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      Thank you for (still!) listening!

      PS – Am I a bighead if I agree that the pod is great? (It is! I love it! I love you for listening!)

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        Not big headed at all you all put in a lot of time and effort and share your thoughts in such depth so we the listeners can tell you love doing it. Even though it’s hard work as it is a lot to do that and all the promotion social media etc. alongside watching dramas and working etc. So bask in the positive feedback and keep enjoying it so it doesn’t become a chore. Once you lose the joy it will cease to be a fun listen.

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    Did you rejoin under your same email account? I ask because I notice your fanwall has history dating back more than two years.

    I left DB myself (voluntarily) in 2018 and asked the admins to remove my account, but when I rejoined last December I used my same email account and noticed that DB seemed to recover some of my old comments from before.

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      Hello Ghost of Tim!

      I had a staff writer account alongside my ordinary user account – I was locked out of that, but I still have my normal account and all associated comments, and of course the posts I authored are still attributed to me. (I notice your first comment here was actually on one of my posts – Pretty Noona finale recap!)

      Since comments are linked to the email you use to sign up, even if you terminate your user account but then rejoin with the same email, the system is designed to link all those previous posts back to you. For a full fresh start, you’d have to use a different email address.

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    Oh no! And I always wonder why so many old recappers stopped recapping!

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      I’ll be frank, I’m one of the two (that I know of) who so offended management that they showed us the door, but most others have left for personal reasons. Many of the previous writers started while they were students, and then as they moved into FT working life, they moved on from DB and are busy in their various fields. (A lot of them are active on social media, i.e. twitter or instagram.) I, on the other hand, was a sucker for punishment and didn’t leave even when I should have, so ultimately I guess we can say they did me a favour!

      Not to mention that new DB management didn’t really value its writers as anything more than replaceable parts. They also fiercely resisted the change the site needed to remain dynamic and relevant. For example, DB has never regained its site ranking from the pre-blackout period, and there are many reasons for it, but poor management is chief among them.

      Nevertheless, timely, high quality content always wins out at the end of the day, and for actual years, they didn’t even do that – not because they couldn’t, but because they wouldn’t. 🤷‍♀️

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        You and others are sorely missed, but I’m super glad to still get your (and your cohosts, of course) insights on DOF.

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        That’s so sad to know 😩🙁

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        Thank you for telling us real reasons behind what we experience of DB lately. If not for the community here, I suppose many would have left the site a long time ago. And I so agree with you on so many points. But before I attributed the reason behind it to not having recappers with personality, so the recaps feel bland at best (with recaps that make me feel like I’m watching that episode again without being anything more than a mere recap, I don’t know why I should read it) and boring at worst.

        I don’t think there is anything we can do with the management team because this is how they chose to do it, but you are brave and I think it’s good to speak it out so that others also know about this. And I just checked your website yesterday and I loved the post about Sh**ting Stars! Completely agreed on that.

        You all are sorely missed! ♥️ ♥️ ♥️

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    Reading into why this happened has really frustrated me. You write insightful, funny, unique pieces for YEARS, and then The Good Detective comes along and you get unceremoniously axed? For the record, your review was excellent, of course. There are pieces of yours I still think about because they stand out – the Sassy Go Go recaps and the Solomon’s Perjury ones, for instance. Your voice is wonderful and the joke’s on them for not seeing it! I’m sure you’re at the point where you can laugh about this now, but I’m so sorry anyway.

    Yay to freedom of speech at Dramas Over Flowers~ 🥳

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      Thanks so much @frabbycrabsis, @egads, @mmmmm, @parkchuna, @ndlessjoie, @reply1988, @redfox and everyone else, your support and kind words mean a lot to me. I’ve said it in every year-end review I wrote for DB that it was you guys who made it worth it – I never said that lightly.

      If you ask me from my dual perspective as both a reader and a writer on the site, the drop in quality came when jb&gf took their hands off the editing. Frabby, you mention Solomon’s Perjury: that is the show I will always remember that the editor broke me and nearly destroyed my ability to write. I have never seen someone with such a frightening ability to turn good writing into bad and not know it. (I am still traumatised, lol.) During that time, every recap was stripped of personality and voice, that was their editing style. I had to second-guess nearly every word I wrote, every comma I placed, not knowing what they’d come for or why (and they’d never tell you why). Edits would change my intended meanings (or worse, even introduce errors that had not been there before), and I couldn’t question them. Or if I did, I’d be met by knife-like silence. The other writer who was also Dear John-ed? It was at this time, for this exact reason (if I haven’t misrepresented them).

      When the administration changed, I was relieved (surely nothing could be worse than the last two years, right?), and it was better in terms of being able to write freely. But with the total departure of the OG team, so too went the vision and vivacity as the site entered a period of what seemed to me stagnation by intent. The new team clung to the wrong kind of continuity and focused on doing things as they were “always done”, and so large parts of the site continue to feel like a museum of heydays past – the static pages remain static, the drama ratings page hasn’t been updated since 2017, the header dates back to 2014 but at least it replaced that horrible 2007 one. And notice how the blurb at the top of WWW never changes? (You will now lol.)

      Old writers soon made way for new, and as time went on, I was constantly not getting anything I asked for, with shows going to new recruits instead. And ngl, that was really upsetting and frustrating. Under the previous administration, I had finally earned the seniority to ask for a show and get it (instead of being randomly assigned – which worked out dreadfully with Criminal Minds LOL but amazingly with INAR XD).

      [Sidenote: when you cover a show, you have to make sure you it fits your schedule, and my turnaround time was never more than 2 days – if an episode aired on Tuesday, for example, my recap would be in by Thursday, and under the old administration, it generally would be published immediately. Shows were assigned based on availability/schedule and seniority did rule for high demand shows – like me finally getting a Lee Jun-ki show while jb was in the house? Wouldn’t have happened if she wanted it!]

      (tbc.)

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        But longform recaps are exhausting to write (and mine always took embarrassingly long), and by then it was also clear that what readers wanted and needed was shifting – it wasn’t like the old days of waiting forever for subs. The subs were available long before the recaps were. In the time it took to produce a belaboured, boring recap, readers who just wanted to talk about the episode(s) had been forced to find other outlets. I recall a long period where recaps would appear after the next week’s episodes had already aired.

        To me, the point of a recap is to add value to the experience of having watched the show itself – I don’t need a blow-by-blow recounting. I, too, watched the episode. What I need is to know someone else is feeling what I’m feeling. I need points of confusion clarified. I need the writer to remember what I forgot. I need a thorough dissection of the hour we watched. If it came to it, I’d prefer to dispense with the recap and expand the analysis. At a point, very little of what I was reading here was giving me remotely what I came here for. It was maddening and frustrating and SO easy to fix.

        During the blackout period, I had a chance to experiment with shortform pieces (see: A Poem a Day/You Who Forgot Poetry, Mother) which I offered to do for free for my own enjoyment – I could turn these out fast when I didn’t have to mire myself in the minute-by-minute detail that full recaps require. (PS, I love fights in a recap because you can cover like 5 mins of show with a single sentence: ‘they fight’ XD)

        I also wanted us to move overall to short format recap-review hybrids (i.e. weecaps but I hate the word weecap) and longform reviews: it would solve the timeliness problem, be more interesting to read if we focused on reaction and analysis. As a bonus, we could cover more shows at the same cost (because weecaps are even more woefully underpaid than longform recaps, BUT easier to write, with a rapid turnover time).

        A note about this though: Whatever we were writing, long or short, the remuneration is not remotely proportional or anywhere near in line with industry standards. Under the new admin, there was also little acknowledgement of writers’ goodwill and hard work, and when the axe finally dropped on me, I realised that they didn’t see my work as having any intrinsic value, which was never true of the previous admin. The previous admin didn’t love me, but I always felt they valued my published work, and they understood the love I had for it – which I believe is evident in everything I wrote.

        (still tbc.)

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          This brings me to an interesting problem though: why should writers put in more effort than they’re paid for? Every time I read a blindingly terrible piece, I lose my mind for a bit (why is it so bad? WHY IS IT SO BAD?) and then remember, wait, they’re being paid so little, why should they work harder? They are, in fact, working smarter, which makes me a little rueful when I consider how much self – how much labour, how many woman-hours – I poured into my own work. I should’ve worked smarter, too. Well – I tried, but this is where it got me, lol.

          I probably would’ve carried on, disgruntled but committed, but the summer of 2020 brought us a few things: George Floyd, the unaddressed racism of Backstreet Rookie, and DB’s failure to take a clear anti-racist position despite so many of us asking for it. I offered an essay* on the topic but was turned down on the understanding that they wanted to write something themselves. They never did, and their communications with me took a decidedly cool turn.

          And so on a particularly give-no-effs morning, I wrote my “damning” comment on the GD review about DB not loving me back – which honestly was lighthearted and I didn’t think was a big deal – and boom, game over!

          And so leaving out the petty, sordid little details, that’s the story.

          –

          [*My essay can now be found on the DOF website, titled ‘Diversity in Dramaland’.]

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        I get the impression that the writing has gotten better, and more lively recently.

        Am I imagining things or has something changed? Anybody know what’s going on??

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          It has, hasn’t it? I think the biggest change is…well, deciding to change, and trying new things, and getting rid of the things that aren’t working so well anymore (like the very late longform recaps). But this question may be better addressed to present staff!

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          It’s true, at least the ones i read. I thought i just got lucky with the recapper.

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        So i went back to read the Good Detective review and now i remember, i did read your comment and wondered what happened! I hope you’re in a happier place now! Also wondering if i should watch Good Detective..

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          Thank you! Yes, I am definitely happier ❤️

          I really loved S1 of GD and highly recommend if you like a bit of midnight bromance with your ambiguous morality and general murder mystery! Bear in mind the first two eps are so-so – following that, the show consistently got better by the episode! (I gave it a garbled review as my top drama of 2020 in our Year End Yak podcast of that year if you want to listen to me lose my words lol)

          I haven’t started S2 yet, but I hope it’s as good and I look forward to it! I’m actually a bit scared of watching it because a) if I watch it, it’ll get finished, and b) I’m afraid I won’t love it, which would be really sad because I love S1 so much. 😅

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      ALSO FRABBY

      I particularly fondly remember the Sassy Go Go recaps because at a point, I was like, damn restraint, I am COMING IN – and then proceeded to comment to my heart’s content under my chosen alias for that year – I can now tell you fishfingers_fb was MOI. (Hope I didn’t say anything embarrassing or shameful under that alias LOL)

      God I laughed to myself so much. I commented so much, I laughed so much, and I had fun being a ‘regular beanie’ again, without the weight of the staff ID. (Also were those the yellow box days? Somebody asked in the AMA about why staff don’t comment on their own recaps – I think these days they probably should with the engagement so low. In those days we were advised by the boss beans to hold our peace (unless for corrections or clarifications) – we had our 4K words to say what we wanted, the comment space belongs to the readers. And of course, in the old site, the author’s comment always had the yellow box – great if you were going in to do some official business like break up fan-wars, but dreadful if you wanted to make a quiet little comment. The yellow box was kind of like the equivalent of the teacher being in the room at lunchtime, and it gave us undue weight in the conversation. So it wasn’t a hard and fast proscription, but it was sensible advice for most situations.)

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        Those kinds of restrictions are nuts to me – this is a blog, and obviously we want to interact with the authors! If they put all their points on the table and go silent, even after we pour out heart into engaging with them, then that’s not much fun.

        I’ll tell you what, I don’t remember fishfingers_fb 😂
        But I CAN tell you that Sassy Go Go was the first thing I commented on here, and I have you to thank ❤️
        I love that you’ve now got Dramas Over Flowers to add as much flair and personality into a piece as you want. I actually recommended your Diversity in Dramaland post to a friend the other day, because it’s brilliant and it comes back to me every now and then!

        Everything you’ve summed up here about Dramabeans since, like, 2017, is particularly frustrating because we were all saying exactly the same things. We were screaming in empty comment sections that change needed to happen, that the posts were long and boring, that the site was a ghost of what it had been. Loads to us fled to Rabbit, and then Discord, because the show stifled the conversations we wanted to be having. Frankly, it’s baffling that it took so long for those criticisms to stick, and for a lot of us that long overdue change came too late.

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          You know what, staff doing minimal commenting was a pretty sensible policy for its time. Remember site engagement was really high then – a popular show was getting hundreds of comments on average, and honestly, by the time you’ve pounded out your 4K, haven’t slept for days, and your wrists are hurting like hell, you’re frankly quite relieved your job is done 😅 (also I am the worst worst worst for replying to comments so anything to get me off the hook is taken with a smile and a thank you). And the yellow-box power can’t be understated: on the old site, when the author of a post commented, their comment came up highlighted in a yellow box! It made us feel awkward an conspicuous, like we were shouting when everyone else was talking. But it was a guideline not a rule – if anyone asked us something directly, or if we really had something to say, we could. And there are certainly times when it’s helped me to have that policy to fall back on, particularly when I got hostile, fighting comments (which we all did from time to time). It stifled the temptation to go out and unnecessarily defend your opinions, and it allowed readers the freedom to say what they wanted to say.

          But yes, things are definitely different now but it’s not my problem anymore!

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            I think the podcast came from a place of hunger and discontent as well: what we were producing was what we wanted to consume, and what we wanted to consume was something we couldn’t find anywhere. I had no idea how satisfying and enriching to my life it would become, but yes, yes, and yes: it is marvellous to be able to flex your own ideas, to be experimental, to not answer to editors who don’t like you. I think my writing is less “perfect” now, and certainly less voluminous, but I’m working with people who love me, and whom I love, who respect me and whom I respect. And we’re able to build each other up, and do our best to live up to what we believe in. And at the end of it all, that matters more and most.

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            I genuinely forget how many comments the site used to get (and the little highlighted comment thing), and now I understand 😂

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          Comment was deleted

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          also how dare u not remember the magnificent fishfingers_fb (the fb stood for ‘for breakfast’ – because what is better than fishfingers for breakfast? NOTHING.)

          I believe she also commented A TON on Signal recaps. Wait, unless that was a different alias. I don’t remember now, I laundered my aliases every year or two 😂😂😂

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          WAIT Sassy was your first comment?? Haven’t you been here for forever though? 😆

          oh wait 2015 was forever ago

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    wait. They kicked you out when I am the more infamous troublemaker a rude bitch????
    I am a failure and a disgrace

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