First of all, yes, I enjoy highlighting the flaws in the Escapist community. Whatever your opinion on MLP or religion in general is, I don't give a shit, there's another thread in the Lounge for MLP stuff, and there's a subforum for religion. Here, I'm going to explain why I did this, and what I've found from it.
The best description of my actions can actually be found in a comment on the thread I made, which is
this one.
Now apart from calling me a genius satirist (which I indisputably am), the post explains my intent pretty much spot on.
Basically, I saw the MLP thread, asking for episode suggestions with which to help the OP "convert" his significant other to liking MLP. One thing I will make explicitly clear about MLP is that I hate the fanaticism of its fanbase, especially its attempts to make more people watch and enjoy the show.
My first thought was "imagine if 'MLP Episodes' had been 'Bible Passages'. I bet the response would be much different." Knowing that many on the Escapist are fans of MLP yet also Atheists, even militantly so, I decided to create a thread with this exact title. The responses did not disappoint.
Because I'd seen a thread beforehand that had done something similar (different subjects though) yet was difficult to understand without readers first knowing what it was parodying, I created a false "edit" before I'd even posted the thread, basically linking to the thread I was parodying and claiming it was copying me. Since the timestamps instantly show otherwise, it would be simple enough to realise I had created a big joke thread, if those entering the thread simply took the time to read the entirety of the OP.
However, the Escapist community being what it is, another of my goals was to prove once and for all whether they actually read the OP of a thread or not, or just read the title and plunged straight in with an answer. They did not disappoint me in this regard.
There was also a smaller intention compared to the big two, that being whether Escapist members pay attention to anyone except themselves. Not once have I mentioned on there that I have girlfriend, and I had even previously stated that very same day that I refused to have a public stance on religion. Of course, this is quite unfair to judge a community on, especially due to its size and sheer number of topics, which is why it's a minor intention. However, I generally like to, on interesting threads, look at the OP's details, and since the post just before was the one on the same topic, take a look for consistency's sake.
Needless to say the result was a mass of people either responding with contempt and telling me not to try and convert someone if they didn't want it, including a brony (great success on my part), who to their credit did say that they did not try to make people enjoy the show.
I also proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that most Escapists simply read the title and ignore the OP in the rush to post their own opinion, making themselves look like a fool in the process. The amount of people who actually realise that the thread is a joke is very few, and out of those some misconstrued its purpose, but I was still glad to see people got it.
One final thing I made sure not to do was post anything further after the initial OP creation. One member noted this as the work of a "master troll", and happily there are still arguments occurring even now without ever needing my assistance in prolonging the thread artificially. All in all, a very successful experiment, which has shed light on what had previously just been suspicions of mine.
