Mr.Guy

Mr.Guy is an OWOT user and administrator with the ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) tag.

As an Admin

Mr.Guy was among the many users who were given admin roles purely on basis of being in FP's YWOT friend group while OWOT was being developed.

He used to be one of the more active admins. But in the modern day he is only active in the Discord server.

Mr.Guy is generally a very chill figure within the OWOT Discord and will join in on conversations every once in a while, often to propose ideas for the community.

Proposals for Improving OWOT

1. Remove chat: The chat, being one of only two immediately interactable UI objects on the page, sets the tone for the site. The content of the chat inevitably seems to become an expression of the current state of owot, an observation that can have a profound effect on the enthusiasm a person develops early on. Text on the canvas could be from any time in the past, put there by anyone for any reason. This directly opposes the effects of staring at the chat; in that it forces you to reckon the type of users and ideas you can expect yourself to be immediately surrounded by when you're on the site. You can't simply scroll those users or their messages away: the chat is a constant, consistent with the people that inhabit it. Where the canvas is a symbol of creativity not limited by boundaries, so to does the chat oppose this in interactive functionality and social design. As it stands now, the front page's chat has evolved from the intended "pin board" usage where users discuss a world, into a whole platform for real time communication. I believe this is where the abuse is stemming from, and I propose that removing the chat would be a good first step to dismantle the toxic attitudes that attract troll behavior to the front page. It would be wise to test it first; there could be other ways to integrate the chat (only visible/usable by registered users, whitelist, slowmode, etc) that might have more positive effects.
2. Redesign the SOP: This is the first monument seen by any new user who joins the front page for the first time. Very much about this experience is left vague, and almost no direction is given besides the ratings and teleportation station. Thus one ends up requiring much stronger curiosity and attention span than the average person generally exercises in order to discover the purpose of anything beyond the unprotected areas around spawn. I think that the SOP should be bigger with a few short tips so that users can glean fundamental concepts that embody the adventure of discovering the front page and expressing oneself on it, and there should most likely be a graphic content warning. Links to coordinates 50 out in any direction on the top and bottom and both sides of the SOP would give users immediate incentive to branch out.
3. Encourage registration: Discouraging use of the site without an account will foster more users who feel like coming back and end up turning away low-effort attention seekers. This could be done by limiting features more harshly for unregistered users, including rate-limit, cell color, and ability to place links, while granting these features to any registered user. This would incentivize a more coherent community to form, and would aid in designing a more effective moderation system.

I'll continue this essay soon, I gotta go to work lmao

As documented in OWOT Today.

On YWOT

"Then I did a couple jobs for Andrew Badr. He paid me in Bitcoin, the sum of which now has me tossing and turning at night."

On the YWOT canvas, Mr.Guy started off as a spammer but eventually turned his focus towards more helpful endeavors like road maintenance. He was most famous for building the North Road ladder, one of the first major Northern trails from after the 2015 Wipe.

Mr. Guy was briefly hired by Andrew Badr, the lead developer of YWOT, in 2015. He was tasked with removing emojis from YWOT, since they had a habit of messing with the formatting. Mr.Guy's employment by the YWOT creator ended on a sour note when Andrew fixed emojis himself, thus nullifying everything Guy worked to accomplish.

To add insult to injury, Andrew paid him in a sum of Bitcoin that now has him "tossing and turning at night."

Mr. Guy left YWOT for OWOT due to the former site's negative sentiment against scripting.

Trivia

• As an experiment, Mr.Guy once placed chalkboards in public spaces to see what people would write on them. This was partially inspired by the chaos of the OWOT canvas.