The featured page is the first thing most scratchers see when they enter scratch. You would expect there to be a showcase of all the different things you can make, right?

No.

There are 2 types of projects that often get featured:

1. Animations

I'm fine with animations and they don't really crowd it up but it gets boring after a while,

and

2. Platformers

Again, a very broad topic. You have 3d platformers, 1s1s platformers, pen platformers, scrolling platformers, platformers with bosses, etc.

You would expect all of these, right?

No.

EVERY platformer on featured is of the same structure. Not mentioning names, but here's what normally happens-

green art - grass
text on the screen
no scroll
2d
no boss
level by level

1st level no obstacles
2nd level first lava encounter
3rd level first spikes
4th level first bounce

some platformers just keep going with lava and spikes for tens of levels…. even water is rare. Uncolored was an exception, combining dynamics of something to lose and a plot twist at the end, but in general the structure is the same. The player's color is even the same.

And because they're featured, they get thousands of loves, favorites and comments. The creator also gets tons of followers from that single project.

So right now it seems that if you can make a generic platformer, you can get front-paged and famous.

Exceptions are rare so we get the same platformer on the front page for a month.

Are there not board game simulators, action games, boss fights, etc.? No. The Scratch Team's rules on featured projects essentially rule out everything but animations and platformers, severely limiting featured.

Suggestion: Let users tag their projects with tags like “platformer, boss, action, board game”, etc. then feature one of each tag.


Not only that:

What is the community remixing? Is it a platformer this time?

No.

It's now the art projects. Wasn't Scratch meant to program? Well, coloring contests nevertheless fill the front page, and that's going to repel users from the website.

Suggestion: Tags.

TLDR: The front page is boring.

The featured project list isn't an algorithm, or so I beleive. The featured projects are chosen by a human.

I agree with your idea with Games, but I find all your comments on Art very offensive. Even though I am not an Artist myself those people work hard on there drawings and have just as much as a place as everything else on the Explore Page.

scratch978654 wrote:

Wasn't Scratch meant to program?

you could apply this question to platformers too, considering most people who make them just take the scripts from a project and don't do any coding

edit: actually, most platformers are more like art projects considering the people don't do any coding

1. If you look at the front page today, you'll see that there are not any platformers, or animations. It's not always just these two types of projects.
2. It is not an algorithm; the ST manually chooses the projects from what Scratcher's suggest.

Something I'm kind of upset about is that they got rid of tags in projects… It would be nice if you could like follow a tag and see projects which use that tag (still with a max of 3 tags on a project)

Wyan100 wrote:

I agree with your idea with Games, but I find all your comments on Art very offensive. Even though I am not an Artist myself those people work hard on there drawings and have just as much as a place as everything else on the Explore Page.

I'm sure they do. However, there should also be a variety. Keep featuring them, but not in as much of an abundance as before.

yeah! i made a project called Patformers…
to combat the huge amount of Platformers.
here is the link: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/395294700
i have to say, it dident get seen as much as i would like it to so i am
trying to raise awareness about this issue.