The Shame Game

Hella

@surreality Good lord. That needed a TL;DR that wasn't a lame meme. Trying too hard.

Ghost

@VulgarKitten said in The Shame Game:

@surreality Good lord. That needed a TL;DR that wasn't a lame meme. Trying too hard.

GOD DAMNIT STOP SHAMING HER!

"Shaming is lethal." - Brene Brown.

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past thirteen years studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame.

Brené is the author of three #1 New York Times Bestsellers: Rising Strong, Daring Greatly and The Gifts of Imperfection.

She is also the Founder and CEO of The Daring Way and COURAGEworks – an online learning community that offers eCourses, workshops, and interviews for individuals and organizations ready for braver living, loving, and leading.

Brené’s 2010 TEDx Houston talk, The Power of Vulnerability, is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world, with over 25 million viewers.

Brené lives in Houston with her husband, Steve, and their two children, Ellen and Charlie.

Hella

@Ghost Here, let me help!

TL;DR I'm mocking these people and it's hilarious.

Ghost

@VulgarKitten UrrrDerrrDurrrrDuhDerrrrdurrrDeeerp

That's what you're doing. You totally wanna get jabs in at @surreality. WE GET IT ALREADY. STAHP. Shut your lying, heartless, venomous SCORPION WOMAN mouth and go back to reading and not commenting. I want this thread to be 'DURRRdeDurpBurpBlehBalawwwwwBlurtDerrr free.

We should fight We should fight and have fun

surreality

@VulgarKitten said in The Shame Game:

@surreality Good lord. That needed a TL;DR that ~~wasn't a lame meme~~ didn't hit a little too close to home. Trying too hard.

FTFY. (I do recall when the downvotes were visible, after all... )

Kanye Qwest

What is up with that? I want to know who downvotes me! I want to know so I can drink deep of their delicious hatred, or mild disagreement with whatever I've said. Mmm, delicious mild disagreement.

saosmash

@Kanye-Qwest Perhaps with just a soupcon of passive aggressiveness?

surreality

@Kanye-Qwest said in The Shame Game:

What is up with that? I want to know who downvotes me! I want to know so I can drink deep of their delicious hatred, or mild disagreement with whatever I've said. Mmm, delicious mild disagreement.

I know, right? It's pretty dumb.

There are basically three kinds of downvotes.

"I disagree with this but don't actually care enough to articulate the reasons why."
"OMG MY FRIENDS ARE BEING DISAGREED WITH AND THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED."
"I hate your face and everything you say turns me an increasingly vivid shade of puce."

None of which are worth getting worked up over, none of which could be considered 'shaming'. The first is mild but generally useless feedback as it contains no real counterpoint, and the latter two are pretty expository of who still thinks this is high school.

TiredEwok

Shaming is a dual-edged sword. In most cases it is a horrible thing - like shaming a woman who happens to enjoy having sex and is happy with having more than one partner - but, on the flip side of the coin, it can also be a very powerful tool. While it might fall upon deaf ears (or blind eyes, if it's done on a forum such as this) it just might get someone's attention and make them realize their behavior is unacceptable and help them to decide to try and change it. I don't condone using it except in the most extreme of cases and only if you're sure that the shaming won't cause more harm than it might cause possible good.

Kanye Qwest

In reality, shaming is very effective at what it CAN accomplish - which is setting the standards by which communities ostracize people. Shaming a girl who likes dick probably won't make her stop liking dick, but it will encourage everyone around her to join in on the shaming and exclude her from reindeer games, job promotions, and not being burned at the stake.

Kestrel

@Apu said in The Shame Game:

Shaming is a dual-edged sword. In most cases it is a horrible thing - like shaming a woman who happens to enjoy having sex and is happy with having more than one partner - but, on the flip side of the coin, it can also be a very powerful tool. While it might fall upon deaf ears (or blind eyes, if it's done on a forum such as this) it just might get someone's attention and make them realize their behavior is unacceptable and help them to decide to try and change it. I don't condone using it except in the most extreme of cases and only if you're sure that the shaming won't cause more harm than it might cause possible good.

Shaming can be said to be a powerful tool in that it helps enforce social norms, some of which are pretty useful to have around — like don't molest children and don't talk at the theatre.

The problem is, who decides social norms? In some (too many) settings for example, sexual purity as a desirable feminine trait is a social norm. People can be shamed for deviating from the norm in anything from skin colour to their eating preferences.

In essence, shaming is the worst sum result of mob mentality, and even where the mob's anger is justified, it's a poor tool for the job.

If there's one thing everyone should know it's that sometimes they're wrong and make bad judgement calls — individually, let alone as part of a mob or adherence to social norms.

So employing the worst sum result with the conviction that you may be right isn't the best idea. It leads to bad things.

I think shame is only worth using (and risking) when applied independently and internally, not commanded externally.

Hella

@Ghost said in The Shame Game:

@VulgarKitten UrrrDerrrDurrrrDuhDerrrrdurrrDeeerp

That's what you're doing. You totally wanna get jabs in at @surreality. WE GET IT ALREADY. STAHP. Shut your lying, heartless, venomous SCORPION WOMAN mouth and go back to reading and not commenting. I want this thread to be 'DURRRdeDurpBurpBlehBalawwwwwBlurtDerrr free.

We should fight We should fight and have fun

Hah. Somebody downvoted you and it wasn't me. Dude. So over it. It really was too long and pointless to read past the first couple of excerpts. The last one was mocking you, though! Do you even lift bro???

Hella

@surreality I didn't read the whole thing because it was too long! SRY!

surreality

@Kanye-Qwest Agreed that what the community standards are is key.

"Liking sex" is, in fact, something that got a whole lot of shaming in the early days of previous forum incarnations, so it's actually a pretty good example to go with.

More specifically, admitting in public that you TS'ed? Doom, doom, doom in the early days of the forums -- we're going back to the late 90s and early 00s here.

This was silly in many respects because more people did it than didn't. It was treated like a 'dirty little secret', however, which meant a whole lot of people would decry it while typing one-handed in the next window over.

A handful of people admitted it. Me, @Ninjakitten, Peverel, @HelloRaptor, and a handful of others, but there really were only a handful of us. And the reputations we had at the time revolved heavily around that -- no matter what any of us were saying.

"Who should listen to you? You're just a stupid perv." <-- that kind of thing was incredibly common.

It was also stupid.

None of those people ever backed down, though. Nobody stopped admitting it. Nobody crawled off to die in a hole. None ever talked about it any differently then than is done now. People stood their ground because they were found nothing wrong with standing there, even when it wasn't comfortable.

Time passed. Shit changed. People grew up. (OK, most people grew up; there are still some folks stuck in the 90s on this one, but they're now as rare as the handful were back then.) You don't really see the hatefest toward anyone who considers TS as potentially a part of RP for whatever reason in the same way.

Sometimes the behavior being shamed is stupid. Sometimes it's the shaming itself that is the behavior that is actually stupid.

Recently, the major public outcry around here has been "don't use slur language and pretend it's cute or OK, it makes you an asshole".

I think the community is pretty much on the right course, frankly.

Pandora

@surreality said in The Shame Game:

There are basically three kinds of downvotes.

"I disagree with this but don't actually care enough to articulate the reasons why."

"OMG MY FRIENDS ARE BEING DISAGREED WITH AND THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED."

"I hate your face and everything you say turns me an increasingly vivid shade of puce."

I disagree with something in your post, and I'll articulate why as soon as I finish this sandwich and type up my response - I just didn't want you to have to wait in suspense to see that I think you're an idiot. But it's coming, bb. Have a downvote while you wait.

surreality

@Pandora That, too, definitely. I was mostly thinking about the ones where there's just the downvote and no actual reply -- but you're right, there are a lot of those that are more 'this is the warning shot to inform you that a counter-argument is coming! Take cover!'

Arkandel

I don't have a lot to add to this thread except this: Ganging up on people gets a big sigh from me.

There are posts whose contents can be summarised (and not by much) down to people giving a +1 to their friends - and I don't mean in lol-karma but just showing up pretty much only to show support. This bothers me because it cheapens dialogue - arguments stand or fall on their own merits and who has them should be irrelevant. There really isn't such a thing as 'losing the argument' either since that implies several things that invalidate debate itself, but the "hah, we sure showed him/her" mentality completely rubs me the wrong way.

mietze

@surreality

I believe TS shaming to be just as prevalent as it was in the 90s. Perhaps even more so, because instead of "oh they write smut" at all, now it has morphed into "don't trust that player with that plot/bother to RP with them, they only care about TSing" and it makes access to plot and activity even more curtailed (since now there's mostly other-player STs rather than staff run things).

The OOC defamation stuff is just really toxic on games, always has been, but now that there's been a change to a need to rely on the goodwill of other players for any kind of non-social play. So reputation and goodwill is arguably even more important than it ever has been.

Arkandel

@mietze This is also our version of popular media culture. Sure, posing torture, decapitation, spilling intestines and smashing brains is fiiine but did we just describe a penis entering a vagina? SHAME!

Hella

@Arkandel And the opposite of that 'hey do you mind if we FTB on this sexy times stuff?' SHAME that chick is such a prude. It's just a game. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't, depending on the person.