Ignore the bad thumbnail- anyways, Scratch has been an AMAZING site and creative outlet for me the 4 years I have had it. I got to improve my art, logical thinking, people skills, and my animation. The platform is amazing, but there are just a fewwww little tweaks that could be made, plus a couple huge issue regarding platform safety that I encountered a few months ago. Let's start off light, with feature suggestions. Display names - I think this would be a super cool feature to add so I could call myself Rain instead of people calling me Mandaring all the time. Plus, I like to change it up :D Spot to add you pronouns and lgbtq (if you are lgbtq) - this would be cool to not take up space in your bio, plus if you could add people's set pronouns to their comment, people could immediately know what pronouns to use for them. Built in animated thumbnails - I have tried doing it before, but I have never had luck. I want to do this since I got multiple TNEs for my MAP and I wanted to display them all on the cover of my project to show appreciation for all the people who took time to do them :). AI moderation - (NOT AN AI SUPPORTER BUT HEAR ME OUT) not sure if it's already used the moderate, but ai actually understands slang, kids on the site being harmless, exc. It wouldn't be generative ai (WHICH I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT SUPPORT) but an ai to help scratch team moderate since it's clearly a huge job. More music and sounds - maybe like harmless meme sounds like vine booms :) Mods in studios - basically roles in studios so mods can also change the description of a studio :) NOW ON TO THE BAD STUFF :( TW: MENTIONS OF SELF OOFING, BULLYING, HEAVY TOPICS EXC Section 1 - bullying and harassment This has been a pretty bad problem on the platform, since hateful comments were not stopped by the filter, and resulted in the ban of one of my fellow scratchers, Emilly. I feel like the site could try and make their moderation better, and maybe ask some 13+ scratchers to work with scratch to improve how the site moderation works, from a kid's pov. Section 2 - Personal Info Sharing (BIG DEAL) A while back (4 months ago) I was looking at the comment section of a scratch who had talked to me before. I noticed that scratch allowed THIS comment to go through. "I have a question what school do you go to And what state do you live in" When seeing that, I was in absolute SHOCK. Scratch, what do you mean you block people for doing pings for their comics, and NOT for asking for such sensitive information? BOTH SCRATCHERS LATER GAVE BOTH THEIR SCHOOLS AND THEIR STATES. What if they weren't both kids? What if the person asking for that info was planning to hurt them? What if, what if, what if... I reported the situation to Scratch Team twice. I never got a reply. I am extremely disappointed in scratch for this. While I understand that this is a huge platform managed by a small team of people, how come simple things are blocked instead of these? Section 3 - the hack We all know the scratch hack a couple months ago. Huge deal. BIG DEAL. Thousands probably got their passwords stolen. Projects were infected to spread the hack. However... When I got infected with the hack, I was redirected to a DC (bad robot chat site) link. While I wasn't able to access it since it is blocked on my home wifi and school device, a person who could actually told me abt what was going on in the server. There was illegal stuff going on. Hate crimes. Trying to get ppl to k!ll themselves. Scratch Team, what the heck? I understand no one saw this coming, but... Really? Hopefully under the new ceo you guys can fix this all. Thanks for reading, Rain out.
Writing by me
