Why is this community, which is primarily aimed at children and young people, still bent on making users addicted to the platform?

I can’t stand looking at the POTM times where people often have over half of the month taken up by refreshing a forum every minute of the day that they are awake. Lets say the people competing to win the contest each month average around 13 days (which is where people are at already in December), that would equal around 150 days spent on a forum in a single year.

If you are spending this amount of time on any one thing alone then it’s clear that you have a form of addiction to whatever it is that you’re engaged with. Even if you were addicted to something productive such as work or exercise to this extent then it would likely be negative also, never mind in this case which is entirely for entertainment and is not productive in the slightest.

People at the age this community is aimed at have their whole lives ahead of them and should be using their time wisely to develop their futures. I therefore believe it is irresponsible to have this feature in a game and platform aimed at children as it creates nothing but addiction and obsession for certain users.

Even the *evil* big tech and social media companies are bringing in tools to help you monitor and cut down on excessive use as society wakes up to how damaging extreme digital addiction can be.

Instead the POTM should be picked based on different parameters based on actual contribution to the community and not just a contest for who can give up their lives the most in order to win something ultimately meaningless in comparison.

I’m mainly making this post as I know personally that, although I’m grateful for having had this community growing up and for many of the things it provided for me, the culture and rewarding of addictive behaviour did take hold of me when I was younger and I, along with others I know, we’re affected negatively by it in the long term even if we didn’t see it at the time.


If anyone has any positives of POTM the I’d love to hear them as I really can’t think of any for either the individual competing or the platform as a whole.

Im british lol

I agree that POTM should come off actual contributions to the community, which I've recommended as well many times. However, its not an 'addiction' keeping a tab open for a few hours when the majority of people here are staying indoors during the pandemic anyway.

yeah exactly like those office employee of the month awards!

Tom080 wrote on 29th December 2020, 10:26 AM:

I agree that POTM should come off actual contributions to the community, which I've recommended as well many times. However, its not an 'addiction' keeping a tab open for a few hours when the majority of people here are staying indoors during the pandemic anyway.

he has a point though, although refreshing the page in itself isn't an addiction, you probably don't even realize it, but, what is the addiction is the general feeling of when you win some sort of prize on here. with that in mind, encouraging people to spend 10+ DAYS (originally wrote hours by accident) refreshing forums for a completely useless star next to your name in order to feel that sense of victory is encouraging that addiction.

even though people are inside anyway due to the pandemic, there are a lot of other things you could do indoors than sit and refresh forums every 2 minutes to keep your time up.

What you are saying is absolutely true, but you see the problem is the best way to decide the best player of the month is by how much contribution a player does to the community as tom said.
These can be things like helping out new players but these are not quantifiable like how many hours a user has played for. Then if we give someone the position of deciding who has done the best, there can be the misuse of power and controversial opinions and arguments.

If two of the last issues I just spoke of are somehow sorted, then there is the issue of how to record what good things the player has done. What if moderators list down their good deeds? Well that can only function if there are mods online 24/7 otherwise, players can make false claims. Well this issue can be settled using cinema, but then the player has to remember the room name and someone has to check if that is true. Which is a tedious process.

Of course im not supporting the fact that POTM has to depend on a users playtime, what im saying is it's hard to adapt a new system to POTM and that if done, there can be many issues due to the fact that a quantifiable counting system like how long a player played for will reduce controversial arguments for an unquantifiable system like good deeds

I would appreciate there to be some changes made in how the POTM is decided.

honestly i just keep a tab up and refresh every few hours and check back periodically, i tend to sit at my desk and draw or talk with my friends on discord or watch youtube

but i see your point, POTM has been something i've never understood and it makes me sad to see people spend 20 days on a virtual game. because thats damaging. its damaging to the eyes, its damaging to the brain and its damaging to your health. the longest you can go without sleep is 11 days. that's nearly 2 weeks but there's nothing that tells when the side effects begin to kick in. one of the side effects are hallucinations which can be genuinely terrifying because the brain has gone into overtime and will make you envision things you're terrified of.

but anyways, yeah. really nice post. i hope people understand how dangerous POTM can be. I've never understood why POTM involves activity when it should take into account the actions of the person and their helpfulness.