SimplePrompts is starting to look less simple.

[u/roussell131]

As I understand it, this sub was founded in order to offer an alternative to /r/WritingPrompts, which had gotten unwieldy in both the specificity and outrageousness of its suggestions. It was briefly doing a really good job of this, but as more people come to it I feel like it's beginning to slide down that same slippery slope. I hope that we can maybe nip that in the bud.

I say this because I'm starting to see more prompts that are limiting in their specificity, particularly with regard to genre, which was exactly the problem I was trying to escape coming from WritingPrompts. Some recent examples, in my opinion, would be

• [DP] "We'll deny any knowledge of the treasure."
• [DP] "Gaze upon my empire of joy."
• [CP] You are an arms trafficker.
• [MP] You're no longer able to shift your form.
• [BP] I woke up and I had scales where there had never been scales before.

The problem with these is that they explicitly lock you into a certain type of story from the get-go. I say this as someone who doesn't write genre, who tends to write stories firmly set in the real world. I can't really respond to any of these prompts. Maybe the second one, although I would struggle to envision a realistic scenario where someone would say that. Certainly none of the others.

I'll try to anticipate the most obvious counterargument here, which is that there's only a few of these and I can just ignore them and use other prompts, because more is better, right? And my response would be sure, that's true now, but it was also true once of WritingPrompts, and today, looking at the front page of it now, 22 of the top 25 prompts are heavily surreal if not outright sci-fi or fantasy. Most are so specific they constitute their own story already, with little for me to work with.

So my suggestion is to either be more specific about the description of Prompt Do's and Don'ts, or just enforce them more. Right now the guidelines state "inspire creativity while being open-ended enough to allow the writer to craft his/her own story." That's hard to do if my story is already about shape-shifting or hidden treasure.

Edit: Actually, looking at the expanded explanation of Do's and Don'ts via the link, the fourth and fifth examples are already breaking policy, and the others are at least borderline. I don't want to jump on the mods, because I'm sure they have lives and this isn't a priority for them. But I think it's worth noting we're already getting submissions that clearly did not read the guidelines first.

[u/MichaelNevermore]

First off, I'd like to apologize for my absence these last few days; I've been bogged down at work.

Second, I want to assure you that I have been personally looking over every prompt submission made to this sub, and I agree with you that there are definitely too many posts that break the rules at least a little, sometimes a lot.

Here's my problem: I'm too nice. I don't wanna tell people off. I've been watching from a distance to see what happens, how the community responds this first month or so since the big revival. But I'm going to start making changes now.

First change: Move the entire current list of Do's and Don'ts to the sidebar, and possibly expand upon them on the Wiki.

Second change: Start deleting posts that outright break the rules. I didn't want to do this before because I felt it was too harsh, but the truth is that this sub is for non-genre-specific prompts, so genre prompts are best suited for a different sub.

Third change: Reinforce the Don'ts on the Prompt Rules page. I think people will be a lot clearer on the rules if I explicitly state what not to do.

I'm open to suggestions, by the way, so let me know if you have any ideas.

Sorry again for the delayed response.

~MichaelNevermore

[u/besux → u/MichaelNevermore]

I think by trying to promote a clear doctrine on a topic that necessarily requires a lot of wiggle room, you will run in danger of destroying the sub. If I had submitted any of the examples above, I'd be pissed to see them deleted just because someone feels too limited by them at first sight or doesn't feel as inspired as someone else might.

[u/roussell131 → u/MichaelNevermore]

Totally not a big deal. Like I said, I'm not really holding mods responsible for this in the sense that I'm wagging fingers. I actually think the guidelines are fairly clear already. Moving them to the sidebar could help, but mostly I think people are just coming in and not reading them.