The Likeable Nickname: Yang Jia (1)
Hope everyone finds this useful!!~~
Likeable Nick.
Most of the time, it's a term dripping with disdain, but not in my case.
Of course, in your average spots like LawGal or HunterGal—or anywhere that's turned into a total Time America hellhole—I'd fall right into the usual "likeable nick" category that normal users gripe about.
But here? In the Ancient Tomes Gallery—OldGal for short—my posts pack a serious punch.
"Another day, another flood of recs..."
OldGal lived up to its name: a place to share ancient texts with fellow community users.
Back when it first popped up, it was all about swapping historic manuscripts or archaeology papers that had etched themselves into human history. But things had changed.
Now, in this post-Gate era of magic, OldGal was all about divvying up the ancient magitech tomes that elves had hauled over from Yggdrasil.
Elves, with their ridiculously long lifespans, had left behind mountains of records. But they weren't the type to kindly translate those ancient elven scripts into the world's languages.
Plus, among the surviving elves, not many could even handle ancient elven anymore. That made elven translation a high-value industry raking in top dollar.
And I? I did it for free on OldGal.
Well, not entirely free. I took recs and views as payment instead of cash. Every time I dropped a translation, the likes and comments poured in.
Obviously, I wasn't shelling out my own cash to buy magitech tomes and translate them. Sure, I'm a rec-starved, view-hungry, comment-craving gal-crazy lunatic, but not that insane.
The stuff I translated and posted on OldGal was mostly already analyzed to death or floating around publicly if you knew where to look—common as dirt.
But even those "common" materials had readability wrecked by different translators per paragraph. Total garbage. I'd just tweak them based on the originals, fixing the crap readability and polishing them up.
That's why even in mage-central LawGal, my OldGal posts were the top rec for magic newbies.
They were free, common knowledge, and I'd rewritten the sections so even total normies with zero background could follow.
But aside from my stellar contributions, OldGal's vibe was stagnant as hell.
I believe internet communities thrive on endless influxes—battling trolls, assholes, and shitposters, layer upon layer of that grind building character.
Not that I like trolls or shitposters, but they're an inevitable side effect of traffic. Like drowsiness from cold meds.
No traffic? The place rots. OldGal was the poster child for a community festering in its own stagnation.
Refresh every five minutes? Barely a new post.
Not even dumb memes or diary dumps to pad the activity.
Hell, at night, without the regulars holding the fort, even the occasional boomer raids slipped through.
Not that many boomers showed up anyway.
This was a serious crisis. No influx meant death. Lurkers dried up invisibly.
Humans are suckers for numbers—if views and recs look low, no one posts.
Even I was feeling the drop in recs and views on my recent posts.
The mods floated lowering the rec cutoff for featured posts as a fix, but that's just a band-aid. Eventually, you'd drop it to one rec? Then any throwaway sock could spam featured shitposts.
Click.
I refreshed OldGal again. Nothing new. Posters were mostly fixed nicks anyway.
The usual crowd I saw daily. Community rules banned cliques, so I never said it out loud, but humans gonna human—familiar nicks build familiarity through comments, posts, and recs.
Lately, a few users were name-dropping my handle directly in comments on my posts.
Users who'd normally get their throats slit by OldGal's iron-fisted mods under their hardcore isolationism. Ironically, the mod was letting it slide.
Made me wonder for a sec what the anonymous mod was really thinking, but I shrugged it off.
I skimmed some comments on my post and felt an emotion you shouldn't get from an internet community.
What to call it?
Sense of belonging? Or more elegantly, solidarity?
Here, you could kinda glimpse the mod's intent too.
He loved his community. That passion must've rubbed off on users like me who cared.
Building that belonging among likeable nicks like us.
He wanted his OldGal— the one he built and ran— to stand apart from the sewer-pit galleries, so he went nuclear with the floater ban.
And it worked. OldGal carved out a unique, differentiated vibe from the rest.
But if that's the goal, why not just make a cafe or blog? Why stake your turf here?
No clue. I'm not the mod.
But there's one thing I wanna try.
I might not show it, but in OldGal right now, I was on a level even the mod couldn't touch.
30% of shared materials were my posts. The other 70%? Subjective crap or twisted interpretations— unusable as resources. They barely got recs and buried.
What if I suddenly went apeshit? Could the mod butcher me as emotionlessly as he danced through anon trolls?
Things could stay peaceful forever.
But endless peace just piles on useless fat, which turns into chronic disease and dooms the community eventually.
I couldn't just watch that happen.
Not when I actually cared about OldGal a bit too.
Someone might call me crazy. But communities need crazies like me.
"Alright then..."
Of course, I wouldn't troll hard enough to wreck the place.
My goal was just to wake up the mod and users with some alarm, while drawing in fresh blood.
Ahh, felt like a martyr braving the ban hammer for the community's sake.
Anyway, I started prepping to shake things up.
Couldn't just dive in and trash it— prep had to be careful, meticulous.
Especially since I'd do it on my main, He123. Botch the intensity, and it could taint my rep across other gals.
Not a huge deal since I wore masks on He123 too, but still.
"Whew."
I sighed, leaning back from the monitor. I got the intent, but attacking a community I loved with my own hands? Couldn't hide the nerves.
"Guess I'll eat first."
As the saying goes, even Geumgang Mountain is best after a meal. Gotta fuel up before the big deed.
"Mmm~"
Humming happily, I pictured my plan while ordering grub.
Today's pick: mild black bean noodles. Heard somewhere you eat Chinese before big events as tradition.
They recommended spicy jjambbong, but I suck at spice. Ramen prefs tell the tale.
Bzzz—
These days, no doorbells even. Delivery guy snaps a pic, app pings my phone.
Creeeak—
I yanked the door open, scarfed the steaming mild black bean noodles while checking galleries. Most hummed along fine.
But OldGal? From order to delivery to unpacking: just two new posts.
Not even peak dead-of-night— around 11 PM, prime activity hours.
Slurp—
I observed OldGal's pathetic state with detached disappointment, finished my tasty meal, brewed coffee, and plopped back at the desk.
"Ugh... time to kick this off?"
Hands on keyboard and mouse, about to launch the sabotage—
Click.
Refresh, and bam— top post caught my eye.
Some anon had dropped fresh intel. Via overseas proxy IP, no less.