THe Mentality of Circlejerk

What is circlejerk? (Or, what the hell even is this?)

    Circle Jerk has been around for a while. For as long as lol has been around, circle jerk has existed. Maybe. I wasn’t around that far back, and wouldn’t know shit. But it would very well make sense for circle jerk on the boards to exist as far back as Beta and Alpha, when everything was overpowered.     Circle Jerk is a trend. More or less, when something is commonly seen as overpowered, people are going to be unhappy about it, and are going to make angry posts about it. When Circle Jerk really takes off is when it inspires another person that it really is overpowered. (More on that later.     Circle Jerk has existed for a long time and will continue to. It is a natural part of any game where everything is not 100% balanced.

Circlejerk and self propagation. (Or, why there is so damn much of it.)

    Circlejerk is a movement. It starts with a number of people being genuinely unhappy about how something works. They then make an angry post. That angry post gets read by someone else, who gets riled up, and convinced that something is grievously wrong. Let’s say that person isn’t quite mad enough to make their own post about it. After all, they haven’t had to deal with it. But then they do. And during a game, they get destroyed by someone using whatever is the “problem” at the moment. Then they are mad, and will make their own post, starting the cycle anew.

    This cycle lends itself to be upvoted by people who are likeminded, and generally ignored by people who don’t give a fuck one way or another. People who disagree may or may not downvote, but if they comment, and voice their disapproval, they will be the ones getting downvoted to hell.

Circlejerk and nice posts. (Or, where are all the happy gameplay posts?)     There are way more let’s nerf than let’s buff posts. Why? Shouldn’t there be just as many? No. The reason for that lies in player base. Only a select few people play fiddlesticks and can ask for buffs, while everyone and their grandmother can complain about lethality, or Lee Sin, or Yasuo. This means that in the end, there are those posts, but they are nowhere near as popular.

Is Circlejerk a symptom of something worse? (Or, should I be worried that an angry circlejerk will show up at my door with a gun because I argued against Lee Sin getting nerfs?)

    Circlejerk is nothing to worry about, remember, many of these people aren’t actually mad about lethality, or whatever happens to be “OP” at the time, but rather, they saw something that convinced them, and then encountered a game that served their confirmation bias. Any given circlejerk will die off given a month or two, with or without nerfs.     But is it a symptom of cancer in the Lol boards?     Fuck yes.     The simple fact that we can be convinced that something is OP by a stranger that may be hundreds of miles away is unnerving. If I was being completely honest I would say that I was writing this under the covers, hiding from the people who didn’t like my Yasuo post.     But really, don’t worry. While there is a symptom of cancer among the Boards, it isn’t fatal. We just have to work harder to stop such posts from getting off the ground. Because it is cancer and will kill the system given time to develop.     You think you're tired of seeing half the front page posts being circlejerk? Wait until you see nearly all of it complaining about how Op Yorick adc is and how we should revert the rework.

One last note. (Please don’t run away yet)

    Circlejerk is entirely curable, we just have to bother using that downvote button, as sad as it may seem.

Is it in the right place now Riot?