Reading the SCP Leaves

SHITPOST— What does the future of SCP look like?

I get asked here and there on CuriousCat about what I think the future of SCP will look like. Obviously, any answer to this is pure fun. No one can know what the future will look like. Thus everything in this post is stupid and insane. I can hear someone asking how that is any different from any other post on this blog.

Having said that, I do like to imagine what might happen, and have found that my thoughts on what might be seen in the future of SCP well exceed the appropriateness and character limit of a CuriousCat answer (yes, I found the character limit there… add another trophy to my case).

So let’s do that here for fun. This will be the equivalent of those YouTube short movies that use floating equations written in chalk, cells dividing rapidly, a shot of a quasar or some spacey shit like that, and etcetera sciencey science things to look years into the future.

Clinical tone will be totally gone.

The site has been losing its clinical tone over time, and any idea of why it is important. The tone is in part what originally defined the genre and format, differentiating it from fanfiction or something like The Holders. As the wisdom in restricting one’s self to clinical tone is forgotten more and more, clinical tone will be seen as a nuisance and inconvenience, instead of a challenge and defining part of the process. At this point, the only difference between tales and “articles” will be the loosely-followed inclusion of the words “Special Containment Procedures” and “Description” at the start of some paragraphs.

SCP will be exclusively catered to the LGBTQ+ demographic.

Numerous schisms will happen, all of a political nature, until there is just a unidimensional brand of political and philosophical thought left. The clear and increasing aggression — the demand, actually — for social dances that signal in-group participation on SCP will dominate everything, given enough time. Why mourn the loss of anyone else outside this demographic, when they are all bigots anyway?

The militantly LGBTQ+ at SCP believe themselves to be morally superior to everyone else, oddly by virtue of their gender and sexual identity, something that they can’t help and were born with. Believing that anyone with traditional gender or sexual identities cannot possibly write something of relevance or value, SCP will make the leap and officially change the logo to the Pride version.

SCP’s drama will be defined by rampant infighting after this, and this infighting will ironically be more vehement and venomous than anything seen now. With all other boogeymen categorically banned, new forms of bigotry and racism will be invented. Bisexuals will be labeled “panphobic” and be banned on sight, their version of the SCP logo removed. “Pedophobic” will be a word you see, though it won’t be liked or endorsed by everyone. However, it will be tolerated, because by definition, everyone who remains there will want to first and foremost show others how accepting and insightfully sensitive they can be.

The downvote will be done away with.

There’s a ton to say about this one, so hunker down.

There are a very interesting set of vectors going on at SCP. The most dominant one at the moment is the need to cater to any potentially upset emotion in the participants on the site, especially around LGBTQ+ issues or individuals. It must be “safe” for users, especially these, at all costs… whatever that “safe” truly means. We have seen on numerous occasions how this excessive protection of users as vulnerable, fragile things dominates components as foundational to the site as criticism; I’m talking about valid, non-hyperbolic, writing-centric criticism. Or the freedom to downvote something as you see fit, as in the case with the Staff-discounted downvotes in the 6K contest.

We’ve also seen it dominate rational and measured judicial fairness in matters of discipline, as was the case for users who were assumed to be Nazi-sympathetic for writing about WW1. For comparison, consider that an icon of the site, Fritzwillie, was known for writing about WW1 and WW2, because the time period fascinated him, with this factoid featured explicitly in his July interview. Let it sink in that nowadays, an icon of the site would, under a different username, be questioned and pigeonholed as a Nazi for simply writing about WW2 Germany.

At some point, this apex predator of eager political sensitivity will devour any and all potential upsetting qualities of the site experience, especially for the most popular & most babied authors (these two often being the same person). This political spear is on a collision course with the long-standing justification of downvotes as something used to curate content and keep the standards of the site upheld.

This sounds absurd, but we see that YouTube has already removed the public visibility of its dislike button for this very reason, and SCP has predictably followed in military-like step with the political and social motions of all major mainstream tech platforms to date. For example, someone was banned in the IRC chat for voicing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and suggesting that it can give young people myocarditis. I work in a hospital and we see young men getting myocarditis from the COVID-19 vaccine. Even articles debunking the conspiracy claims around this topic go on to say that myocarditis is a risk and should be considered.

But an expert at SCP decided to ban someone for what Twitter and YouTube told them was COVID misinformation, without any rational or critical thinking on their part; apparently not even any looking into it on a basic level. No one else on Staff corrected this. They are lock-and-step in a mass chain-gang of ideological incapacitation and manipulation. Their mimicry of YouTube’s political philosophies is almost guaranteed.

Mark my words: this political catering and its prioritization will in time begin to come into conflict with the existence of the downvote. It might not win, but the confrontation will happen. Because no rational resistance has survived against this purely selfish and political impetus so far, it is likely to lose, or it at least will take great amount of debate to suppress it.

At that time, the site will have been utterly destroyed, in more ways than it matters to count. The loss of downvotes as curation will not make SCP any more dead than it already would be by that time, and it should truly not come as a shock to anyone who has been paying any sort of attention. Because there will not be a democratic curation method, the site’s contents will be determined by nothing other than this exact political imperative in the guise of literature, and by the tastemakers in the culture. Anyone will have the ability to sink an article if a perceived slight or offense can be mined from it (no matter how outlandish), as was the case with SCP-DISC-J. These articles simply won’t be greenlit, and those that do will just receive varying degrees of upvotes, or be deleted summarily by Staff with “witnesses” authorizing it. The deletion of the downvote solves the problem of upset user feelings and yet also retains the capacity for gloating that relative upvote counts afford SCP authors.

Again, this might sound obtuse and very far-fetched, but we already see it in practice. There is already a community in confic whose selectivity for its users is unapologetically and religiously tied to political affiliation; SCPCommune does not have downvotes, and some at SCP are eyeing that. It removed downvotes and anonymized voting, not as a way to adopt alternate curation methods, but as a way to minimize or avoid potential trauma in the act of the creation process; to pander to and cuddle the in-group there to a maximum.

The bigger, more sure point is that there are two strong currents of culture at SCP that are on a collision course; (1) the need by Staff to pander more and more to authors’ sensitivities, no matter how irrational, and (2) the obsession with upvote metrics. Authors only need to interpret a downvote or criticism as “toxic” to begin a dialogue about it that Staff and others take seriously. The “malicious downvote” claim is already a blank check for Staff and for weak authors to cash at will, and this will be taken to the bank until an equals sign is placed between the two words in the phrase.

The concern that SCP will be flooded with content — way more than anyone can keep up with — is already the case in the present day, and will be defeated using the argument that there truly isn’t a cap or limit to the number of SCP slots that can be created. A new set of 1,000 article slots is cheap, and text files are small things of data after all.

Curation will still exist, but it will simply be a result of hyper-concentrated and up-front group-think. If this sounds odd to you, just think of the greenlight process; that’s all it will be. If it passes the greenlight phase, it will simply exist, and be in a rat-race for only upvotes. Speaking of which…

You will be able to pay for upvotes.

This will be a result of Project Foundation, assuming it takes off. Because the code will be homegrown, and certainly if it is Open Source, someone will easily be able to script an army of bot upvotes specific to something as narrow as a page, or something as wide as an author’s entire output. They will monetize this. After all, the authors at SCP are willing to pay money for upvotes, and it is only a matter of time before we see that actualized.

It has already existed in some ways; people will pay for custom CSS themes on SCP, and previously they payed for crit… both of these equate to upvotes, and certainly in the hopes and intentions of the author.

The introduction of payment channels within the SCP on its new and glorious platform will create a black market of cheating, cultural impovershment, and untold levels of corruption in Staff, particularly the Tech team (see “SCP Staff will be paid”, below.)

Single articles will feature numerous different CSS variants, eventually including as much as possible

Speaking of paying for CSS themes, authors will at some point turn their greedy attention to the fact that you can stuff multiple custom CSS themes into a single article. If the authors provide a slate of options, as with SCP-6747, they will get a double-dip of upvote benefit: people who would not like the article due to the CSS can just click on the less obnoxious one, and people who think CSS makes an article good will be more likely to upvote.

We have seen this across entries throughout SCP, with a more humble and effective uses, such as SCP-6000, which in a miraculous move of elegance, changes the CSS into the Wander’s Library one at the climax. We see a similar use and justification in SCP-6140. We see no such in-universe attempt at justification in SCP-6747, indicating that… as always… that concern will be lazily dropped like an edged syllable in slang to just streamline the process of getting to the good stuff; upvotes. Likewise, we see no such justification for CSS theme switching in a recent (horrendous) rewrite of Keter Duty.

You can read a more thorough analysis of CSS’s increasingly central role in the community-perceived quality of literature on SCP, here. Be on the lookout for numerous CSS themes per article as a way to mine for more upvotes. This, of course, will become absurd, as the initial vision of a bureaucratically-believable document is trampled to death.

Quality control will be mocked.

Thanks to the loss of the downvote and the ability to purchase upvotes, all metrics of quality will be thoroughly decomposed. You might think that comments would still help define what is good and bad, but you would be wrong (see the section on that later). An upvote will continue along the asymptotic line it has been on for the past years, and finally mean absolutely nothing (as opposed to barely anything, as is the case now). Authors who love the new paradigm will happily disregard any argument in favor of reinstating downvotes as a method of quality control. The abstract nature of “quality” will put it in the same holding cell that “immersion” is currently in, and mocked for being the concern of stupid people. Quality will be inherently assumed in the author name of those remaining, because and only because they are writing for SCP.

K-Contests will be won by supercell conglomerates of authors.

Given that marketing will increasingly determine what is considered “quality” on SCP, as is already the case now, lone authors competing in K-contests will have a harder and harder time winning them. The role of good writing should be obvious in this scenario; completely inconsequential. Especially when combined with the eradication of the downvote, though I can see SCP reviving downvotes for special occasions, such as these.

K-Contests twice to three times per year.

Lone authors who foolishly attempt to win a K-contest will at least have the opportunity to try again very soon, this time in the company of a proper upvote orgy. The ever-inflating number of incoming SCPs will grow more and more, as has been the case for the past years. With more and more mediocre quality articles being posted, the quickening will be accelerated further because of the lack of time and energy it takes to get these stinkers pushed through to the MainList. No downvotes means more slots occupied more decisively. Series will fill up with blinding speed. K-contests will be just as common as the garden variety of contest, and the winners will have less and less reason to feel good about winning one (but don’t try to tell them that).

Over 100 SCP-001 proposals

There were four SCP-001 proposals in the months of October and November 2021. This is getting old and real quick, with authors having less and less time between joining the site and posting a 001. We also have numerous other authors who have unfortunately followed in the footsteps of djkaktus and believe that writing multiple 001s is an accomplishment... like a badge a video game gives you to dupe you into playing it more. With the randomization of the proposal list (done around this time), and the spotlight featuring new ones, authors eager to see their name as a proposal as a sad and misguided confirmation that they are talented will pour in.

Article features (including SCP-001s) will be based on equity, not quality.

This sounds real bad, but it actually isn’t a problem once quality has been uprooted and criminalized for being unfair and making sensitive authors feel traumatized. Lower-rated articles will not be stood for, as they will be interpreted as oppressive. Staff will step in so that authors feel included and “safe” from the toxic feelings of relative inadequacy. Staff will “progressive stack” lower-rated SCP-001s, for example, to promote upvote equity. Upvotes will be rewarded to authors by the same methods that they are sold, as prizes for competitions. Upvote drives for particular authors, especially those considered marginalized, will also be a thing.

Roleplaying will become normalized.

With quality and any semblance of restraint in the writing and culture for the boundaries and aspects that made confic confic, users will increasingly gravitate towards the false bravado and clout of their fictional (universally more attractively-drawn) counterparts. A time will come when someone can, in a simplified interpretation, write themselves in-universe into a Staff position out-of-universe. Everyone will tolerate this due to the implications such a move could have for their own insecurities and delusions of grandeur.

A splinter of SCP authors will eventually pine for a return to fundamentals and the initial vision of the site and genre.

In the midst of SCP going absolutely off the deep end, led by the mistaken belief that participating in SCP is worth it, a talented and reasonable group of authors — some very talented — will give up hope and abandon ship. They’ll split off and form their own project. They will not join RPC or SCP Commune. Their revolt will include the total rejection of the ACS.

“Minor attracted persons” will have a SCP logo variant.

Why does the history of SCP as we know it not inspire confidence that a strong stance will be taken against this? A known sex pest who propositioned and sexually manipulated minors went without punishment on the site for it; all because he was a high-up name. Nothing we’ve seen from SCP can really argue against the eventual tolerance and inclusion of MAPs openly; highly liberal circles of politics (which again, SCP does its best to mimic) already defend them as a marginalized group of people in need of de-stigmatization. Look for the argument “love is love”, and/or “y’all means all”. Some will leave because the association with a pro-MAP place will be too much; and the skeletons in the closet of SCP will be quickly forgotten, thanks in part by information censorship and misinformation campaigns perpetuated by SCP Staff, as they do in the current day.

AdminBright will return but be shooed away again.

AdminBright was given a six month ban and forever removed from the Staff after it was finally conceded that he is an abusive person. Like the censure for Dexanote and Mann, the needed discipline for Bright’s obvious actions took more than a year to enact, in an attempt to downplay the drama and dissipate the heat.

This ban will expire in February 2021. A browse of Bright’s Tik-Tok (yes, a 40-something year old has a Tik-Tok… I do not advise you to go find this) confirms that he is still obsessed with role-playing as Dr. Bright for his oblivious and adolescent audience. It’s not so much that he loves SCP as a writing project as much as he loves it as a host community.

So, he will appeal his ban and ask to be returned to casual activity on the site… something he was doing after his “retirement” but before the ban. He will be let back in, because Staff haven’t admitted the true threat and terror that he is to the community, in no small part due to the bad PR and optics it would mean for them (great prioritizing, our protective leaders). Thus they won’t have any explicit reason to say “no”, and their hands will be tied.

Bright will then frolic around the community and site, seeing what questionable behavior he can get away with, as always. At some point, the optics of having someone that radioactive will catch up with the Staff, and they’ll either reach an agreement with him behind closed doors to leave “willingly” (like they did at the height of his scandal), or they’ll publicly admit meager reasons to again ban him, to keep him far away from their spotless image.

His true horrors and evils will never be admitted to by SCP Staff.

The age-old rule of no straight popular culture SCP items will be done away with.

The writing culture at SCP is slowly being replaced by a memetic one. That is to say, it is becoming more and more of a social media platform, and acting like it more and more. We all know that the final form of degeneracy for a social media platform is just memes. Endless posts of memes. Most bad. Now look at SCP. Among Us SCP, MemeCon, SCP-6000-J… we’re basically already there. That means this isn’t much of a prediction, but I’ll take my easy shots where I can get them.

Article criticism will be a bannable offense.

Only positive comments will be allowed. The basis of this will be the delusion that anything that has the potential to make people feel bad, no matter the reason, is toxic and unhelpful. More authors will at some time start point out the obvious; that you can’t separate a work from an author. When that card is played, any insult or critique of the article will be taken in a 1:1 correlation with a violation of Rule Zero.

This will first be the case with authors featuring any variant of the LBGTQ+ flag, and spread from there.

To demonstrate the probability of this, and to show just how proximal it is to the current paradigm, see how the SkipIRC has enacted a rule that would discipline by ban anyone who “[attempts] to cause physical/mental harm to another user”.

Staff will have teams dedicated to surveilling and digitally stalking users.

Probably given some incredibly twisted title, like “Protection & Safety Team”. Different from the on-site efforts against critical comments, this will represent the SCP’s manifest destiny when it comes to moderation and control, and will extend silently into all available internet spaces. This will be fueled by paranoia. If anyone is seen saying anything questionable, or going to a site deemed questionable, they will be brought before a digital tribunal and virtually executed on the spot, the chance to explain themselves a hilarious and snapped olive branch. The sheer audacity and unethical behavior will be justified in the name of tolerance & love.

SCP will only officially exist in English.

The insanity of -EN’s overly confrontational stances regarding their politics will ultimately isolate them from other branches. The culmination will be SCP’s refusal to accommodate any international branch (“spin-off”) onto their proprietary Project Foundation code, happily pretending like the logistical problem is why the -INT branches didn’t follow them. By that time, the -INT branches really won’t want to.

Black Highlighter will become the default CSS theme for the Wiki.

For a site increasingly concerned with catchy looks, it is inevitable. I don’t actually think this is terrible, as the theme does look good, and there’s something to be said for updating with the times. The Sigma-9 theme will be available to authors to use on an as-desired basis.

Authors will mint and sell their articles as NFTs.

In order to guarantee a steady revenue stream into SCP, Project Foundation will offer authors henceforth the option to publish under licenses and statements other than the traditional CC BY-SA 3.0 one. This sounds impossible, given that all SCP material is derivative of SCP-173 and therefore must share-alike.

But the truth is that nothing in the SCP universe or format is such that a new and alternate format can’t be created while retaining the name SCP, and most of its features in a poor man’s rendition of the current ingredients… thereby avoiding that share-alike requirement. Additionally, no one would be interested in or capable of suing SCP over a breach of their own, by-then sacrificed CC license, because all who go along with it will be able to benefit monetarily from it, and exclusively so. Disgruntled authors will move on and not have the energy or time to hold SCP accountable to its own past, content to leave it to the fate of its own destructive devices; same as it ever was with people who have walked away.

Staff will charge a fee to publish with copyright and rights reserved on their platform, thereby funding the ongoing costs of Project Foundation (this of course being less and less the funds true use). They will also take a cut for any donations given to authors through the website for this reason. There will be zero transparency regarding the movement and eventual utilization of these fees from SCP Staff, who will swear they won’t get paid, until…

SCP Staff will be paid.

To be fair, they work hard enough to be already, and have for a long time. This will be championed as a justice by most of the site, while a small and dissenting minority (later ridiculed and chased-off) will find how far SCP is getting from its roots increasingly discomforting. Nay-saying these individuals will be easy enough for the on-board community; they are jealous that they aren’t earning any money. Staff will become an absolute cesspool of corruption. The faintly-beating heart of writing on what will still, even then nominally be called a writing site will suffer despicable and shameful insult after insult until what is left of its unrecognizable form is ran so far into the ground, it will be dead & buried without any more effort, ceremony, or mourning.

SCP Staff will act like Andrei Duksin.

After some SCP material is published under licenses other than the CC BY-SA 3.0, intellectually protected material will be brutally enforced across the internet by threat of lawsuit (and probably illegally if you want to get down to the dirty details of it). Again, no one will have the resources to challenge SCP, who already have a legal war chest of funds, and can truly raise just as much if not more again very easily, even if it means enacting the relatively simple operation of false-flagging an antagonist, e.g. a Duksin 2.0 except fake this time, to a gullible and tithing public.

All downvotes will be deleted by Staff unless they are justified in a comment.

This one is a slightly easier-to-swallow alternative to the eradication of the downvote entirely. But it will be one of the two; mark my words. We’ve already seen this take effect in select places, such as the 6K contest article entries, where downvotes were discounted by Staff because they didn’t think they were justified well enough. (The irony here being that the only way to determine as much was because people justified their downvotes in the comments. But this will see a head-spinning inversion, like so many other things at SCP over the years.) The ability to remove downvotes entirely will be something the Tech Admins will be able to do after Project Foundation, just as it can currently be done with Wikidot’s Admins.

djkaktus will be reinstated to Staff.

After the total pandering to LGBTQ+ individuals is in-play at SCP, kaktus — not of the preferred camp of gender and sexuality, but uniquely tolerated due to his actions in the June 2018 Logo Fiasco — will be re-evaluated and re-interpreted as heroic, perpetually. He will no longer have to pretend to care about things like accountability and transparency, or Eric Cartman his way into seeming concerned for the direction of the SCP community and its Staff. He will be allowed to rejoin Staff, and will. He’ll eventually make his way — quicker rather than slower for sure — to Admin. After, he will install a cronie-style system of Staff selection and promotion that will further act to centralize power into his and their hands, becoming Grand Admin. His reign will make Scar’s Pride Lands look lush.

Articles will explicitly feature Patreon links.

See above. Probably in numerous spots. Certainly at the beginning of the article, as the first thing you read.

Articles will increasingly be the product of Patreon requests.

See above. Not just the names of personnel, but entire articles specified by patronage. The eradication of the downvote will make this easy, as will passing through the greenlights thanks to Staff’s new vulnerability to bribes.

Advertisements will interrupt articles.

See above. Over time, they will be strategically placed at cliffhangers in the article. No one will remember SCP-4998 as a cautionary tale. This will take the form of social media advertisement campaigns, with paid-for shills in popular YouTube content creators, even e-thot promotions, meant to appeal to increasingly basal and animalistic weaknesses.

… and finally, most-obviously…

SCP as we know it will be completely dead.

This is really not a different prediction at all; it’s basically all of the above wrapped up in a SCP-001: Atonement singularity of garbage. We’ve seen numerous authors wage an ideological war against immersion, simply because it is a valid argument against the imperialistic march of militant LGBTQ+ism into every crevasse of the site, and the woefully hopeless idea of quality will be next (although its visage will be retained and insisted for braggadocio). Writing at SCP will be crippled by a pre-emptive concern and fear for potentially upsetting someone. Horror will continue to be replaced by what will be celebrated as an LGBTQ+ product, the authors believing that SCP should be a cultural export that represents this artificial group. The triumph of emotional catering above quality concerns will mark the terminus of SCP as both a writing and confic site, a historic snatching of failure from the jaws of victory, and herald it squarely as a collection of fanfiction… full-circle & completely defeating the point of starting it.

In the words of DrGears:

“The best decision we came up with was that… we were going to be brutally honest and make sure things were still going while still letting folks in… at a certain point we had to make a decision how stuff was going to go and how it was going to stay, and we kind of had to choose to be mean… We looked at other forums and other writing projects that were very open and non-judgmental and touchy-feely, and those didn’t go very well. So we decided “OK we’ll be jerks” and it’s worked out so far pretty well.”

Anyway, these are just some ideas that I’ve barfed out for you shotgun style. Now I can just link this to people who ask about it. Some of these will surely miss, but then again, some will hit and closer to the bullseye than your naive, norm-loving mind can currently admit.

Check back to this article from time to time; I will update it with more predictions as I have them.

© Lack of Lepers