Thread: Chicken Flipping: Official discussion thread

@Metous cool cool, I was wondering cause I asked about it a while back, no worries!

@asprg I mentioned it mostly cause my train of thought was that people sell on farmhouse instead of releasing because they potentially want a higher profit than releasing, or don't want to release for personal reasons. As I wrote earlier I want to encourage people who want eggs (who may want to get eggs from reselling) to consider or think about breeding chicks for release. It circumvents the whole 'flipping' issue, and if we make 'breeding your own chickens for release' more appealing, it may reduce the number of people 'reselling from farmhouse' or 'accepting gift chickens for release instead of breeding chickens to release themselves', if that makes sense?

@asprg my bad! I made the comment upon specifically seeing others use coop space as an example! But I agree!

@Metous @werfenspeer The Memorial Garden is such a cute idea and I love the concept a lot!!! but rather than doing something on site for it, I wonder if that's something that would be better as community ran/off site/maybe in the discord server in some way, so it doesn't take up server space?

edit: did not see the latest recent comments- you don't need to reply to this, to keep from prolonging this topic kdafnsfjk

I would like to mention I called them exploitable in quotation marks and I didn't mean that exact word!/lh/nm

Clarifying that because I don't word that well, I mean more so flippable. Also if that was fully directed at me, I respectfully ask you don't openly say that to/towards me(my mentality should change). I just don't word things well./gen/nm

@Katt I agree that it would be better as a community-run effort! It would also give CJ less work

@Katt ty! also dont worry i think it still fits the topic considering that i suggested it as a way to ease the pain on either side! I'm glad the idea resonates! I think the whole point of this thread to some degree was to come to some kind of community feeling/discussion so i appreciate your response!

Personally not a huge fan of flipping but in agreement with those saying that the aggressive language and feelings on both sides should stop, flipping isn't some horrible immoral thing to do (unless done with the intention of hurting someones feelings- although I haven't heard of that happening and I hope it stays that way) nor is it immoral to block users who's playstyle doesn't align with yours, if anything I'd encourage blocking (although not calling out users, nor sharing usernames around) since that would avoid more negative interactions in the long run

I wish this didn't need to be a discussion to begin with

I personally think the idea of flipping is a little mean, since buying a chicken and releasing it to get more profit feels like taking extra eggs away from someone who just wanted to make things affordable. However, it's not against site rules nor do I personally sell chickens at such low prices and therefore it would not affect me, meaning I really don't care about this topic that much.

It kind of feels like a huge non-issue that both sides of the argument are blowing out of proportion. If you don't want your chickens flipped, don't sell them lower than release price, simple as that. If you don't want to be blocked/blacklisted by someone, don't flip their chickens after they state their preferences. Easy as that, it's really not that deep.

But... (and here's where I might end up being a hypocrite)

I do REALLY find it extremely scummy to immediately release or pullet chickens that somebody gifted you for free. I don't even consider this behaviour to be flipping for profit - it just feels like a personal slight to me, especially since most instances of free chickens are given with the hopes the chicken will be loved and cherished, and there are likely other users who might have wanted them. I don't necessarily believe that an official site stance or rules would be a good idea, just including this section to clarify that when I talk about flipping, this sort of behaviour is not part of my personal definition.

@werfenspeer @Metous oh yeah no worries, just didn't want the topics to get smushed together! The farmhousing can be due to coop space reasons but that's only one "input" to flipped chickens iygwim, and I think a large part of the unhappiness came from the other "inputs" too (like the gifted chickens for example) (But also I think the overlap between "people too deeply invested in chickens to release" and "people buying/getting gifted chickens and flipping them" isn't that big, since these feel like the different playing styles mentioned.) (Maybe we can have a thread in the forum and/or discord server to memorialise chickens we've let go, but we host the images ourselves (or just uploaded on discord if in the server)? Would that circumvent the server load issue? Someone who knows more about this stuff should correct me )

To use a parallel, I feel that releasing a chicken that was gifted for free is a lot like selling a birthday gift the day after you got it - the person who put thought into picking it out, buying it, and prepping it for you finds out you traded it in for profit. This isn't illegal by the law, of course. But I can see how much that would hurt and feel rude, and how one would never want to gift anything to them again. So it is probably similar with gifts, hatcheries and the like, where thought actually went into the project. (And also not under site admin jurisdiction - I trust everyone to figure out how to deal with it on their own)

When I designed the farmhouse, it was was intended to be an impersonal space - a marketplace where you sell something you don't want to keep anymore and can get back the resources you invested in it. Once something enters someone else's ownership, it belongs to them, and they decide what to do with it. If the idea of that happening is unpleasant, I feel there's tools to help people avoid it (e.g. setting custom prices). I can see people don't only use it that way, but I guess in my mind, I always felt like there's so many channels (particularly trade) to get things to people whom you trust to use in the way you prefer, that I haven't yet fully wrapped my mind around the fact that people see the farmhouse this way...

That said, I am considering that idea of a 3 day cooldown after purchase for release? I think it may help with the situation where someone just doesn't know about opinions about flipping, because they have time to get to know the site before release. It also feels neutral since it doesn't effectively prevent people from flipping at all, it just alters the time scale if that person really intends to do it?

That said...I would also prefer people not to post messages that develop the feeling of distrust and pathologise flipping as intentionally not caring / cruel / other morally charged terms I've seen used for it. I'm saying this because it arguably seems hurtful. It's a huge grey area, I admit, and even I don't know the best way to admin this. But please just keep in mind how someone might feel if they see a message that plausibly deniably could be about them, which calls them cruel (when demonstrably from this thread, it seems to happen mostly just from people not understanding that others have an issue with it.) - I do need specific examples here because I do need to illustrate a specific set of actions, I don't remember who has said these things, this is not intended to target anyone and I want this to be taken generally.

I also want to note to the people who don't understand why people are upset by flipping: even without considering emotional aspects, it is still resources and time that have been spent on a chick (3 days incubating an egg, which takes up your nest space), and then put it out as an accessible (cheap) gift, which gets turned into profit and also makes the chick not exist anymore. It's not that the people who do it do it with the intention of hurt, but it is very understandable why it feels like a waste.

I think that's all I will say about how I view these things, as I am the site's creator, and I can't really speak my mind without it also potentially being taken as the site's official stance. These are all just my own opinions. I'm committed to not implementing anything unless people are generally not opposed to it + actually want it, or there's a way for people who don't want it to opt out of it. And I sincerely apologise if that personal opinion made itself felt in the official announcement, I am willing to continue revising it if people have more concerns.

@circlejourney I think the 3 days cooldown for releasing when a chicken is bought on farmhouse is a good idea because it is the same amount of time that is taken for an egg to hatch.

As someone who breeds for release fodder, I would prefer to be able to release my own hatched chicks immediately, i.e. not restricted by the 3 days limit since they did not pass through farmhouse

If someone accidentally buys a chicken they don't need, they should also be able to trade it away immediately to someone else who might need it more (instead of releasing). So I think there's no need for a trade lock (if you were thinking about it, if not it's cool) just trying to cover all bases

@werfenspeer Yeah, the scenario where I picture this coming into effect is a chicken being bought off the farmhouse, and the only function it affects is release (idk about pullet pool - that still allows 30 days of leeway). any other scenario of acquiring a chicken would not be affected. though I do want to hear if anyone disagrees with the concept - because it's possible I haven't thought of a different usage scenario that this would impact?

@circlejourney I just thought of a scenario where a person buys a chicken for low price, trades it to a friend (no trade lock) and then the friend releases it immediately. It would be good for the release lock to persist even through trading to a different owner

@werfenspeer hm yeah, the way I picture it is that it's like a status effect that's applied to the chicken, and it will have an icon in the same places where you see the egg cooldown/hunger icons.