I noticed this very late—there are only about five hours remaining on the Kickstarter—but I’ve learned that TVTropes is running a modest Kickstarter to get funding to revamp its site and become even better. The Kickstarter has surpassed its $50,000 goal, and is just a few hundred dollars away from making its $100,000 stretch goal as I write this.
A lot of pixels have been spilled about how Wikipedia exemplifies the impact of the digital revolution upon old media, being a form of encyclopedia that could never have been made without computers and networking. But so, too, is TVTropes. What Wikipedia does for information, TVTropes does for media criticism, by breaking down each literary work into its component elements and then making it possible to cross-reference by those elements to find other works that use the same ones. By some happy accident, this appeals precisely to the human instinct for novelty-seeking, making it a great way to while away untold hours when you should probably be doing something else.
Because TVTropes wasn’t designed to be the huge behemoth it has since become, its structure is starting to show its age. Every TVTropes entry is effectively one long text document, using non-WYSIWYG editing. There’s no easy way to create “wicks” from one document to another apart from editing both documents to put the same text in. And the site doesn’t have a good mobile version.
The funding from the Kickstarter aims to fix all that. The site operators will be switching TVTropes from a text parser-based system to a relational database, which will make crosswicking easier, as well as changing the sorting of tropes. They will hire a full-time programmer and a part-time programmer to focus entirely on the revamp, as well as add additional servers and create an API. And assuming that it reaches the $100,000 stretch goal (which seems probable), they will sponsor season 3 of a Tropes-related vlog series, and produce a new vlog series of their own just for tropers.
I think this sounds like a great idea. The Kickstarter is clearly no pie-in-the-sky pipe dream; it’s well-written, and seeks a reasonable amount of money for its goals. I’ve gotten enough good out of TVTropes over the years that I’m practically salivating at the idea of it becoming even better. They have some decent Kickstarter rewards, too; I kicked in at the $55 level which will provide a nice designer T-shirt with the TVTropes logo. If you see this post in time, you might consider doing the same.
