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North Carolina
1 review
9 helpful votes
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100 FOLLOWER ACCOUNT BANNED WTF?

Ok, I have a bit of a long story so buckle in.

I really like the way the coding works. Coming from the point of view of someone who has basically no experience with code, it works pretty well. The tools are easy to learn and I'm a bit better at coding now.

The scratch moderator team sucks. Let me tell you my story on this website.

I started a religion as a joke. It was called "Clickstianity" and it was really funny. I was very clear that I was not discriminating against other religions, I was very nice to literally everyone, and I got permanently banned.

First, my original animation about the religion was taken down automatically because people mass-reported it. They said they would put it under review and that it should be back up soon. It never came back up. I made a new animation, same thing happened. The newest one I made did not actually taken down, which was good because I spent a lot of time on it. One user, was overly christian and was harassing me about my religion calling it "fake" and a "cult". I told someone else about this through scratch and was banned for a week for "spreading rumors". I waited out my week ban and got back. I made some more projects and eventually got 100 followers. There were always people who would be toxic and hate on me, but I dealt with it. A few days later I was banned AGAIN for "spreading rumors". Whenever you get banned, it shows an example of the message that got you banned. I got banned for the same message that I already got banned for! I wrote an appeal, it only took them a few days to respond. Their response:
Hi there,

The Scratch website is a website that serves as an educational resource for children and their parents, teachers and their students, and people new to programming to learn about programming skills. But when we see users who have been blocked and notified so many times, we start thinking that they're not really interested in Scratch anymore, and we can no longer trust them.

Based on your past history on the Scratch website, we don't think you'll be able to follow our Community Guidelines. Your account(s) will not be unblocked. Please do not use or make any Scratch accounts.

Why? They then proceeded to IP ban me, and any of my fans who were associated with the religion. Someone was literally accusing me of being a p*dophile, I reported him, and do you know how long he got banned? FOUR HOURS!

Date of experience: January 27, 2021
Texas
1 review
7 helpful votes
Follow Robert S.
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Most reviews about the Scratch website make the mistake of reviewing Scratch as both a programming language and a website. These two things should be kept separate. Parents need to decide whether to let their child create a Scratch userid and participate on the website.

Scratch is a social media website where children role play and chat about topics that include puberty and sexual orientation. They sometimes use the embedded software to make presentations about their lives and interests. This software has some minimal programming features and therefore also allows children to reproduce games by copying the instructions from books or videos.

Some members will figure out that getting front-page recognition is reserved mostly for people who learn to merchandise themselves and their projects. They have to work the community. They learn that they have to beg or trick others into liking their projects, constantly ask people to recommend their projects for front page slots, and find ways of tricking the algorithm to allow their projects to be displayed on the first page of trending projects. It might be true that learning to merchandise their work is a useful skill but is that what you expected when you let them use the Scratch website.

Parents should also be concerned with how easy it is for children to pirate copyrighted music. The Scratch team assumes that there exists a fair use defense for any project that includes copyrighted music. However, the Scratch website makes it very easy for your child to extract just the music into music format files on your home computers. This is piracy and the Scratch teams' reply to this is that every child needs to know the copyright laws in their local area. Parents and school administrators should be concerned about how easy it is for Scratch to allow illegal music in common music formatted files to be stored on their home or school computers.

If Scratch, the language, is used in school then it seems a bit of a waste. Scratch is free but school time is not. It would be better if school districts used a language that didn't run out of concepts to teach. The Scratch team does not want students to know about data structure so nothing about tables can be taught. They don't want students to know that procedures can be made once and used anywhere in a program. They don't want students to know about functions. They don't want students to know that arrays can be passed as arguments to a subroutine.

The Scratch team says that the language is specifically designed for the age range from 8 to 16 but every suggestion that would allow the language to have more educational value to the upper age range is countered with "but that would confuse our 8 year old users". That means that Scratch as an educational product is designed for 8 year olds. Parents and school administrators should keep that in mind before selecting Scratch as a tool for learning programming.

Date of experience: January 20, 2023
Pennsylvania
1 review
0 helpful votes
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It is gud
March 22, 2022

It is gud because it is gud. Scratch is gud. Also be a gud hooman and usee Scratch. I got femes. It fuun.

Date of experience: March 21, 2022

Overview

Scratch has a rating of 1.8 stars from 93 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers dissatisfied with Scratch most frequently mention new account, year olds and ban people. Scratch ranks 153rd among Kids Educational Resources sites.

service
49
value
42
shipping
19
returns
21
quality
46
+70