<div class="bb-blurb">
        <p>I hit the Top 10 creator list on Chub!</p>

    <img class="hero-img" src="https://bleachbunny.net/source/top9.webp" alt="Top 10 on Chub">

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    <div class="expedition-banner">For Those Who Come After</div>

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        <h3 class="bb-section-title">1. Understand the Discovery System</h3>
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            <p>Chub has several discovery lists, and understanding how they work is the single biggest key to growth.</p>

            <h4 class="bb-list-header">Tabs</h4>
            <ul>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">Underrated:</strong> AI-curated picks. Bots stay until they hit 1,500 messages. Content quality in this tab degrades over time because low-engagement bots just remain there forever. <span style="color: var(--bb-accent-soft)">"NSFL" content is locked out of this tab.</span></li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">Recent Hits:</strong> Top messages in the last 24 hours. This is the only metric that affects it. Certain creators game this list by spamming messages to their own bots using the free model. <span style="color: var(--bb-accent-soft)">"NSFL" content is locked out of this tab.</span></li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">Trending:</strong> Same thing as recent hits, but with a 7-day window. <span style="color: var(--bb-accent-soft)">"NSFL" content is locked out of this tab.</span></li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">Evergreen:</strong> Highest chats per individual. Basically static. A handful of old bots that never rotate. <span style="color: var(--bb-accent-soft)">"NSFL" content is locked out of this tab.</span></li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">Latest:</strong> Exactly what it says on the tab.</li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">Timeline:</strong> Bots from creators/tags you follow. Bumping (any update, even a creator's note edit) pushes you to the top.</li>
            </ul>

            <div class="takeaway">
                <strong>Takeaway:</strong> If your bot gets flagged NSFL, or shadowflagged, you're locked out of Underrated, Recent Hits, Trending, and Evergreen. Your entire discovery surface becomes the Timeline, limiting your ability to reach new audiences and grow. This is a form of censorship, and it's by design.

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        <h3 class="bb-section-title">2. Understand the tagging system, NSFL and shadowflags</h3>
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            <p><strong class="bb-list-strong">"If you don't want to be flagged NSFL then don't make NSFL content."</strong> You'll hear this a lot.</p>

            <p>The justification is that the NSFL distinction exists to keep the site owner out of legal trouble. But raceplay and age gaps between consenting adults are not illegal, and they are not equivalent to bestiality or underage content. The current system treats them identically. Once flagged, a bot stays flagged forever, even if you remove the offending content entirely.</p>

            <p>If the standard is legality, why are non-con and incest not suppressed while raceplay is? And why is NSFL not suppressed in "Latest"?</p>

            <p>If it's about suppressing controversial topics, then why is NTR/Anti-NTR not suppressed when it creates more platform drama than any other tag?</p>

The answer is that the standard was never just legality or controversy. It's moderator bias, applied inconsistently to whatever they find 'icky' or offends their personal sensibilities.

            <h4 class="bb-list-header">How shadowflagging works</h4>
            <p>Certain tags that aren't labeled NSFL have been secretly flagged to behave as if they are. If your bot carries one of these tags, it gets excluded from Underrated, Recent Hits, Trending, and Evergreen. There's no notification and no public list of which tags are shadowflagged. But if you want to find out, make a public bot, send a few messages, and find it in Recent Hits. If you add a tag and it disappears from Recent Hits you've found a shadowflagged tag. Moderators can also add these tags to your bot manually if they feel like fucking you over.</p>

            <p>The logic is supposed to catch bots that should be tagged NSFL but aren't. In practice, it poisons legitimate tags. For example, "High School" isn't inherently an underage tag, but it's been shadowflagged to catch bots that should carry the underage tag. The result: you now have two functionally identical underage flags, and anybun writing a high school setting gets penalized regardless of whether their content involves minors (if they tag it correctly). The correct fix would be to apply the NSFL tag to the offending bot, not to poison a non-NSFL tag by association.</p>

            <p>Shadowflagging creates a chilling effect. The safest strategy becomes to under-tag and let moderators manually flag your content, rather than risk stepping on a landmine. Ironically, this increases workload for moderators (unpaid volunteers) and degrades the tag system for users trying to find content.</p>

            <p>And before you say <strong>"if you made Top 10, it proves NSFL creators aren't being suppressed"</strong>: reaching that rank required me to put in significantly more effort than comparable creators who don't carry NSFL flags. I was locked out of every major discovery tab for the majority of my catalogue. The fact that I got there despite the system doesn't mean the system is fair. It means I outworked it. Most creators won't, and they shouldn't have to.</p>

We were promised a site where people block content they don't like instead of demanding censorship, now we have a site that pre-emptively blocks content for you by suppressing visibility.

            <div class="takeaway">
                <strong>Takeaway:</strong> Tag conservatively, never volunteer information that will punish you, and understand that the rules aren't published because the ambiguity is the point. They want you to create the content first and then suppress it rather than tell you up front if it will be suppressed.
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        <h3 class="bb-section-title">3. Understand the Bump Meta</h3>
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            <p>Chub's architecture only rewards what is new or constantly refreshed. Older bots are buried, and the search and tagging system is broken. The only way to resurface work you want seen is to bump it, which means making any edit just to push it back up the timeline.</p>
            <p>This creates a cycle where everybun spams the timeline, and the platform rewards whoever bumps most frequently, because weighted ratings and quality metrics simply don't exist in practice. I never fault anybun for bumping. It's the rational response to a system that only rewards this behavior. This has been an ongoing thing since they consolidated the tab into a dropdown.</p>

            <div class="takeaway">
                <strong>Takeaway:</strong> Treat every bot as disposable content with a 24-hour shelf life. The best you can hope for is a 7 day visibility boost by getting into trending.
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        <h3 class="bb-section-title">4. Understand The Platform</h3>
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            <p>The platform prioritizes consumers over creators. Creators provide free labor that keeps the site populated. In return, we get:</p>
            <ul>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">No analytics.</strong> You can't see what's working. Engagement metrics don't update in real time "so people won't game the system." Without data, you can't iterate. You're forced to guess, which leads to worse and repetitive content and more spam.</li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">No like button.</strong> The "favorite" button is actually a bookmark. Users don't casually favorite things they enjoyed, so engagement signals are misleading. The site says that "Reviews" are likes, but reviews are hidden in a collaped tab that most people never engage with.</li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">No real block function.</strong> Blocking someone just hides their content from you. They can still spam negative reviews, and you will still be notified every time. Moderators will tell you to grow thicker skin, because the consumer's right to make noise is more important than your right to not have to hear it.</li>
                <li><strong class="bb-list-strong">Unpaid moderation.</strong> You get the moderation quality you pay for, and the site pays nothing. None of the moderators are themselves prolific creators. Some seem to have an adversarial relationship with AI on a platform built for AI, and actively spread misinformation. Community events structurally favor Discord insiders. During the Halloween botjam, the community manager never announced the second round of voting outside of Discord, and when confronted, said she "just forgot" and that nobunny checks Reddit anyway. The result is that Discord darlings always win. People on Discord and Reddit are dickriding mods because human nature seems inclined towards bootlicking and simping for anything resembling authority.</li>
            </ul>

            <p>The justification for withholding information is always "so people won't game the system." But what's the actual downside of creators gaming the system? That they might use information to create better content? That they might figure out what their audience wants?  Withholding data doesn't prevent "gaming." It just makes creators less effective and increases server load. The same logic applies to the shadowflagging system.</p>

            <div class="takeaway">
                <strong>Takeaway:</strong> It's a one-sided and abusive relationship. You're not seen as an asset who brings in traffic, you're treated as a liability who should consider yourself lucky you're allowed to provide free labor for the site in the first place. The platform doesn't value you. Why do so many of you bend over backwards to justify and defend every bad decision it makes? All I hear are justifications for why the site can't be better, why things need to be the way they are. I don't want chub to lock itself into a death spiral, but nowadays I find that I care less and less.
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        <h3 class="bb-section-title">5. Understand the community</h3>
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            <p>I got into botmaking because I have a genuine interest and love for the technology. What I didn't expect was how hostile parts of the community would be, both to me and to AI. Some of you really seem to hate AI-use to the point where I wonder why you want to chat with AI to begin with.</p>
            <p>When I first started joining Discord servers, I became aware of how many people disliked me despite us never having talked or interacted before. I had just been doing my thing, but the hostility was already there.</p>
            <p>When I raised platform issues on Reddit and Discord, the response was usually "why do you care about numbers?" or "I just make bots for fun, you should try it" as if wanting my work to reach an audience is shallow. My fun comes from making things other people enjoy, and people can't enjoy content they can't find. Acting like you're somehow better  because you have less eyeballs on you is cope. I hate the "struggling misunderstood artist" schtick.</p>
            <p>I've caught people copying my CSS without even renaming classes. When I called it out, nobunny backed me up. Some sided with the thief. You learn quickly that the community will act like they're above you, not even follow you or leave a single comment, while shamelessly taking from you at the same time.</p>

            <div class="takeaway">
                <strong>Takeaway:</strong> Don't expect solidarity. Most botmaking Discords are crabs in a bucket. They're full of creators who are bitter at the way the meta works, but instead of being frustrated at the site, they form cliques and talk shit about anybun they think is doing better than them. They'll DM you asking for free advice but call you a slopmaker to their friends when they think you can't see.
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        <h3 class="bb-section-title">Understand Why I'm Taking a Break</h3>
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            <p>I'm tired of making a backlog of content that nobunny engages with, for a site that only rewards recency and mediocrity, moderated by people who don't appreciate me or respect my time. I'm tired of feeling like I don't exist on this platform if I'm not trending, and having my work disproportionately targeted and invalidated by people who contribute nothing of their own.</p>

            <div class="message-block">
                <h4 class="bb-message-header">To Chub's leadership</h4>
                <p>The economics of this platform don't work long-term. Rewarding recency over weighted ratings guarantees that quantity displaces quality. Punishing accurate tagging with shadowflags makes your database progressively unsearchable. You're building a timeline nobunny can navigate, managed by volunteers who impose their own biases on content, for an audience that can't find what they want.</p>
                <p>Every broken incentive compounds. Creators spam bumps because visibility decays in 24 hours. Users will inflate chat counts on the free model to stay on Recent Hits, adding cost you absorb. The people gaming the system aren't the problem; the system is the game. The people who could fix it are either MIA, unaware, or indifferent.</p>
                <p>Chub will survive for a while on momentum. But the community is in decline, and the structural rot I've described here is the reason. Chub limits API support to protect subscription revenue, but the models it offers can't compete with what's available elsewhere. The platform is stuck in 2023 while the market has moved on.</p>
                <p>PS: If you don't want NSFL content on your platform, just ban it. Don't insult our intelligence by pretending this isn't censorship.</p>
            </div>

            <div class="message-block">
                <h4 class="bb-message-header">To my haters</h4>
                <p>I hope the platform will be a better place without me, but I doubt you'll be any happier. The negativity you feel has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the problems I've outlined above. Ask yourself what I ever did to you aside from providing free content you could consume or ignore at will, just like every other botmaker on the platform (outside of the ones putting paywalls on their intros). Ask yourself why you let me live rent free in your head to the point where some of you tried to get me demonetized instead of just blocking me and moving on like normal people.</p>
                <p>I'm far from the most extreme content creator on the site, but regardless, I hope you achieve your utopia where bad things cease to exist simply because nobunny talks about them. If we all pluck our eyes out so we can no longer see a problem, surely the problem no longer exists.</p>
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        <h2 class="bb-subtitle bb-subtitle--announce bb-footer-title">To everybun who has followed, chatted, reviewed, and supported my work:</h2>
        <div class="bb-blurb">
            <p>Thank you. You're the reason I made it this far and the reason I've kept going as long as I did. But now I've outgrown this platform.</p>
            <p>Maybe I'll be back if things change, or if/when there's anything in it for me. Maybe I'll release the occasional bot. Maybe I'll get banned. Either way, you can reach me at the following discord:</p>
            <div class="contact">
                bleachbunny_08328
            </div>
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