Why do some manga fans blatantly lie about what is in a manga?

[stray]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

In other words, if you ask fans of a work if it can accurately be given a label that some consider a sort of pejorative, you can expect pushback. So if you want a better answer, you need to ask a better question. They're the ones asking for the recommendation after all, so the onus is on them if they want to get a useful reply.

But... categorizing the recommendations they're getting is information that can and should be used to give a better recommendation; someone being a snowflake about having their favorite work mislabeled helps absolutely no one and succeeds in basically nothing but shutting down engagement in the recommendation thread. You can't have it both ways; you can't fault the person asking for recommendation for not giving enough information if you're going to get offended by the information they're willing to provide.

In my experience the biggest complaint or frustration when it comes to recommendation threads on Reddit and elsewhere is people who just don't give enough information. OP might be abrasive but at least seems willing to engage and collectively the opinion here seems to be "but not like that!" which is just kind of sad to me and reminds me of why I barely even touch recommendation threads anymore.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by stray

But... categorizing the recommendations they're getting is information that can and should be used to give a better recommendation; someone being a snowflake about having their favorite work mislabeled helps absolutely no one and succeeds in basically nothing but shutting down engagement in the recommendation thread. You can't have it both ways; you can't fault the person asking for recommendation for not giving enough information if you're going to get offended by the information they're willing to provide.

In my experience the biggest complaint or frustration when it comes to recommendation threads on Reddit and elsewhere is people who just don't give enough information. OP might be abrasive but at least seems willing to engage and collectively the opinion here seems to be "but not like that!" which is just kind of sad to me and reminds me of why I barely even touch recommendation threads anymore.

I actually agree with you that the big issue when asking for recommendations is to provide enough information. But the key point I'm saying is that the evidence provided here (which isn't all the evidence, so we can't know for sure) suggests that the OP did not, in fact, provide enough information. They're using broad terms applied liberally that have more subtle nuance to fans of the genre (not related to being "snowflakes" about anything). Learning this should be information the OP can use to request better recommendations, and that additional detail provided will help others give better recommendation in turn. Better input, better output. But none of this necessarily has anything to do with "blatantly lying" as the OP suggested.

People responding to recommendation threads don't generally have a motivation to actually lie (unless they're trolling). If someone follows a misleading recommendation they're still not going to like it anyway, and then they'll just be even more annoyed with those who misled them. A fan of a work may be blind to some of its arguable flaws, but they wouldn't typically try to mislead others about it -- they want others to genuinely like it as they do. No one's going to be "coerced" into liking it.

Maybe the other conclusion of all this is just "you're asking in the wrong place," which is certainly possible. But I'd start first with "are you asking in the right way?" and my conclusion after reading the OP's posts (abrasiveness included) is to suspect that this problem is most likely a two-way street. (Of course, this assumes the OP actually wants to solve the problem and get better recommendations in the future, and this thread isn't just about "punching down.")

[stray]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

They're using broad terms applied liberally that have more subtle nuance to fans of the genre (not related to being "snowflakes" about anything).

Your hypothetical person is flawed in the sense that they're supposedly knowledgeable enough to know better but are still giving divisive recommendations. If you know enough about genre and if you know enough about what the anime community thinks of a given work to know that there's no consensus there's really no excuse.

Anyway, more than asking the wrong way I think he's asking the wrong people. Don't limit yourself to one spot, ask in multiple places to cast the widest net. Even BW seemed to have situations where people CBF to actually read before recommending him stuff.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by stray

Your hypothetical person is flawed in the sense that they're supposedly knowledgeable enough to know better but are still giving divisive recommendations. If you know enough about genre and if you know enough about what the anime community thinks of a given work to know that there's no consensus there's really no excuse.

This is the problem with arguing a hypothetical; there's just too much we don't know and we're left to fill in the gaps without our own imagination of the rest of the context. We don't even know if this was clearly asking for a recommendation; it could have been just going into a thread discussing a work, asking a question without context, and then getting a reply from the fans, which was then taken as a recommendation. We don't know.

So anyway, I'm going to lock this thread. If this situation actually happens on our forum, then please report it and the mods will review it. As for things that happen on other forums... I think you really need concrete examples if you want concrete feedback, otherwise everyone's just filling the gap with their own assumptions and giving advice accordingly.