Speaking from direct personal experience has always helped me improve things, and I happen to have a lot of personal experience with matters described in this thread...
The first TASes I saw in my life, of the games I played myself, I didn't realize they were done with tools, so you can imagine my absolute insane fascination with what those gods could pull off in real time! It was one of the strongest positive emotions in my life.
Fortunately it didn't really fade out after I've learned that TASing is not a real-time thing at all. Instead while discovering every aspect of this hobby in 2010, I got fascinated over and over: by the expertise and creativity needed to design those movies, by HD encodes, by judges and their high-level work, by emulator coders and all the unique tools, and to top it off, by the warm and kind overall mood of the forum (especially after the places I've been before TASVideos).
Fascination with judges persisted for years, and I was dreaming of becoming one, which happened in 2013. The first few months were very interesting, but eventually it became boring and there were a lot of submissions to judge, so I cut a whole bunch of corners to speed myself up. Which led to my demotion in 2015, and in 2016 I developed a new approach to judging (maximal thoroughness) which made it interesting for me again... for a few more years.
Then in 2018 I became a senior judge and got to organize people as well as the rules. It was hard but rewarding. But I slowly started feeling
a certain problem: I stopped having any time on TASing. The only submissions with my name after 2016 were things others did on top of my old work, or my trivial tweaks to movies I judged.
#8889: feos's Flash Samorost in 04:21.24 was the only bright exception where I had a chance to be creative again.
I was unable to finish the MAME core for bizhawk because I had to look after the submission queue. I stopped publishing because I stopped having any spare energy on that extra job. I don't have time to finish my current emucoding project - Amiga in bizhawk. Heck, I was only able to have this insane
Wiki: Activity rate because I kept switching from job to job the second I got tired of doing the same thing. Combined with constantly working with people on people problems, this made it not unbearably boring.
But even though I don't have a real life besides my RL work, I still don't have enough energy to process the submission queue even if it's the only thing I do for like half a year (like it was in 2023).
We never reliably have enough active judges for enough time to let them work in a relaxed way while still not drowning in submissions they have to process.
Due to insane amount of judgments I have to do, I stopped enjoying it many many years ago. The only bright side is when there's some movie that requires thinking out of the box or some research, and I accomplish it after fearing it for a bunch of weeks. That feels awesome. All the rest is empty duty, and the more new submissions I see these days, the more it kills me that I have to work more and more and more just so the queue is not 500 in size. I have to sacrifice everything I ever wanted to be doing, to this. And even then no matter how hard I crunch, the best thing we get is the queue not increasing for a while. Right now it's 83. In 2018 when I first started caring about it, it consistently stayed at 30 no matter how we crunched.
This summer I realized I do not want to overwork anymore, and I can't. I spent a few weeks working on AmigaHawk instead of judging, felt refreshed, claimed like 10 submissions to handle them quickly, and halfway though got overwhelmed again by a certain issue: no matter how much we overwork, there's no goal to possibly accomplish with judging. No matter how much you've overworked before, there will be infinity of new submissions to work on like nothing happened. It doesn't get easier, it doesn't get more efficient. Every edge case is like building everything from scratch, because
reality forgot to give a fuck about our policies, so all we do is constantly hacking our policies to be less optimistic and more realistic.
That's right, we've been working on policy improvements for years like crazy, and they are not going to ever match
what this hobby needs. It's always
what we need from the hobby. But as it was rightfully noted in this thread, our rules limit creativity more than they help it.
Now I can't say I have a clear vision of what exactly needs to be fixed in our policies and how, to make everyone happy. And interestingly, I can't even come up with a way to
improve TASVideos to be more sustainable. The staff team that we've had for the last few years is so awesome that after all the reforms, the overall current system does feel ideal in terms of achievements and rewards. The only fundamental problem truly is we don't have enough people to do this at the required volume.
Maybe we just need to be more demanding for new judges and publishers. Because
really the site will die if everyone burns out, which will happen with the current ratio between queue size and the amount of people who manage it.
And either we manage to attract more staff members, or we'll have to reduce the work they do. There's no easy and enjoyable solution here. And the community has to understand it too.
I do feel that the current situation is deeply rooted in our site culture: admins and staff were so dictatorial that only minimal amount of things were outsourced to the community. Staff would manage everything according to whatever vision was prevalent at the time, and the feedback would be parsed only within that vision, not as a way to constantly improve that vision. The community got so used to it that now people don't seem to even think that judging and publishing are important and interesting jobs to do - they know staff magically does everything for them. So now if we try to outsource some things, barely anyone would volunteer. Or maybe it depends on how eagerly we ask? I'm not sure.
There's a high level-matter to all this as well.
I spent the last couple decades of my life pondering leadership and proper ways to inspire people, while also ensuring the job is being done. And on one hand I had real-life dictators that cling to their unlimited power like it's the only good thing in their life, and on the other hand I had my own first-hand experience in keeping things alive and well.
The more power a dictator collects, the more catastrophic the crisis will be, because complex systems can't function with only one point of failure: work needs to be distributed, or it won't be done. And since they never distribute the work, it's not being done. They just monopolize the spheres they don't understand, and then they ignore what needs to be done in them, because they're incompetent and dumb. So everything gradually degrades.
A true leader is not just one that gets things done, but also one who's built a system that works on its own without them. A true leader does not want unlimited power! Because they know how hard it is to successfully control things and ensure they work well! So they try to distribute the workload while also dreaming about not having to continue the manual routine.
Which has been my dream for a lot of years. I kept dreaming about having a team that would be able to do the grind without my direct involvement, so I could do things I like while only overlooking and resolving their questions.
And I can't even say there's no such staff team... they just have such an insane amount of work to do that I can't afford enjoying life while they're grinding. I'm dreaming about not having to judge anymore, but ever-increasing queue has been one of my nightmares for many many years. I don't know how to solve this, but this summer I decided to stop worrying about the queue size, while still doing whatever I can. The hard part is that I seem to have reached my
internal judging limit. I may still do precedents or technical things, or maybe trivial things, but I really want to start judging less. I really want to do other things without failing to sleep at night over giant queue.
So once again I have no idea how to solve this in a neat way that everyone would love. We either need to magically get 2-3 times more people on staff, or we need to do 2-3 times less work.
