Listen here, i'm trying not to go on a rant why viral is bad, because i already got (perma)banned for that, but this is a serious matter. I do get that Hugelol wants to attract more people to the site, and i'm completely fine with that, but the way they're doing it is completely wrong.
First of all, and most important, viral is not funny. Usually funny is subjective, but that's absolutely not what viral is. If viral actually had some good content we (the community) wouldn't be bothered by it nearly as much as it does now.
Second, viral may cause an increase in visitors for now, but that's just only short-term. To explain: there are "two" kinds of people: Hugelollers, the suicidal edgy oldfags, and everyone else on the internet. by adding viral Hugelol will attract some 'normies' to the site, but at the cost of the 'true hugelollers', some will leave the site, and some will turn off viral, as hugelol very much keeps reminding everyone. Thing is, once all the hugelollers turn off viral, we'll stop complaining (i'll come back to this later) about viral, and the newer users who come from places like 9thatwhatshallnotbenamed, think it's totaly fine to post viral-like posts, which are not blockable since they're posts and not viral anymore. Once that happens, we'll get what happened with when bots where a huge thing: many Hugelollers leave, resulting in less quality posts, resulting in more viral-like posts, resulting in more hugelollers leaving, eventually changing the site to what it hated. Worse is: when the good posters leave, all that remains is just viral-like posts for the normies, who eventually will leave the site too, because there are way more, and way better 9-youknowwhat-like sites.Thus resulting in a dead site.
But the thing that bothers me most is the admins way of dealing with this (guess it'll be a little bit of a rant), I'll make this clear first: we, the community, the Hugelollers, we DO care about this site. We all know Hugelol needs money to keep the site going, but whenever we try to fix it, or even just shine some light on the problems, Hugelol just shuts it down, slams down the banhammer and continues on. Of course, a lot of the time it's complaining and making 'edgy posts' about it, I did it too and that's why (I think) I got banned (communication isn't Hugelols strongest part) but that's simply how the community, how we do things around here. We all care about the site and when we see a problem, we just make a post out of it because that's the most effective way of showing these problems to everyone. I completely agree with "Complaining about HUGELOL (its policies, moderation, etc) may result in post deletion and a ban.", but please, accept critism, admit the mistakes you made and just try to listen to what the community has to say, because we all are trying to help solve the problems if you are willing to let us.

to strengthen my point of us do wanting to help the site: I suggest making viral like mature: you actually have to turn it ON to see it. Heck, slap that button on the frontpage if you want, but do make it that the newest of new users won't think it's the norm to post those kind of things.
maybe like this: http://puu.sh/ugweq/47a56543bb.jpg

Hugelol, please listen, we do care

Hi,

My name is Soraia, I'm the team leader of H2opop, a group from "Clever Advertising Lda", one of the best advertising companies in Europe.

You're getting this e-mail because I'm interested in advertise on your website and I believe we can make a great deal.

I always pay upfront and I can buy all your traffic every month! Also, we're not asking for exclusivity and we look for longtime cooperations.

For further information just send me an e-mail or give me a call, I'll be at your disposal any time.

Best regards,
Soraia Santos.

International Sales Team Leader
Skype: ads.nowads
Phone: +351915501060
Website: www.h2opop.com E-mail: soraia@h2opop.com

The introduction of the Viral and Mature tags seems to have done nothing but worsen the problem that it was meant to fix. The default setting now hides displays Viral posts, bringing additional content to the site, but blocks Mature posts, meaning that many (most?) of the content created by users is blocked for people first viewing the site. The sites biggest draw is its own brand of memes and its requirement that posted content is funny, but most of this is put behind a Mature wall, while the Viral posts -- which have almost entirely taken over Front for anybody not signed in -- are all posts that are taken from elsewhere on the internet, and are posts that new visitors have likely already seen.

As far as a solution, I'm sure most regular users would prefer dropping both Viral and the Mature block, but other than that I don't really have any ideas.

The new feature that hides votes for the first hour or so doesn't really compliment viral posts. The spine of this site is it's community. If, by introducing viral content, admins seek to attract new people in here, they might start posting bad content aswel. So, for them, we should include vote-visibility, so that they would more easily see what type of content is acceptable, and what isn't.

Either that, or make new-users unable to post until their account reached 5-10 day mark, so that they'd be lurking for a while before becoming a part of the community.

Having more users isn't bad, if they post quality content.