MSB: The meta-discussion

[surreality]

@mietze said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

I know some people that are coarse as can be here (though I wouldn't term them mean or anything, but blunt yes.), but in game they are even keeled, polite, respectful, dare I say professional in dealing with others. And there are some people here that talk up positive things that they have a history of crapping all over in game, and can be downright nasty and destructive.

Quoted for truth.

If I can't be positive, encouraging, and helpful on a game, even to the people who make me want to tear out my hair in clumps, I know it's time to step back. I have seriously valued this place as an outlet to vent the frustrations that accrue. I try to keep it anonymous and generic, and more than that, I try to wait a fair space of time before venting about <thing>, to both give myself time to chill out a little, and also to make it less likely for anyone to guess at whoever <asshole of the moment> is.

Because generally? Unless I'm naming names, which I'm not keen on unless I think it's someone people should be warned about (see the exchange with the troll on Shang from the other day for an example of the extremes I think warrant an exception -- attempts to impersonate an RL friend to attempt to traumatize someone RL? Yeah, I'mma call you out by login name and game), I really don't actually want a grand ol' mob to go torches and pitchforks on <asshole of the moment>, I just want to "OMG GUYS A THING HAPPENED AND I AM OUT OF EVENS TO CAN'T WITH!" and get it out of my system.

Maybe somebody chimes in with 'ugh, that fucking blows, I hate that, too!' and yay validation/commisseration/support network.

Maybe <asshole of that moment> sees it and even if they don't realize it's about them, that it's uncool to do <jackass thing> for <whatever reason> becomes clearer to them and they think twice about doing it again to somebody else.

Or! Maybe 'that is a fucking stupid thing to get all sandy-vag over, surr, plz go hose out your gravel and come back to us when you're not being crazy,' is the response, and I have to sit back and think, "Am I the one being the asshole here?"

I just don't see this as bad. Yeah, maybe I'm the freak in that if I'm writing something here that's 'mean', it's pretty fucking rare that the intention is to do someone harm or deliberately be a jackass to someone. I can think of one actual instance of deliberately being absolutely bitchy to someone• because I felt like being bitchy to that person for purposes of irritating them, and odds are pretty good people would never guess which post it was.

• (I'll tell ya: I @'ed someone on something specifically for purposes of them being more likely to read it, because they made a claim that 'doing X in RP means you're forcing RL THING into their face RL!' Which was total bullshit. So when recounting a story of RL THING on the forum (which is just a funny story, frankly), I @'d said person, because that, my dears, is forcibly shoving one's RL THING in somebody's face, not just posing about whatever subject in RP. Absolutely and totally deliberately bitchy. There's a reason I have a girl-boner for trickster gods, people, but to this day I'm all kinds of sad that the point was likely utterly lost on the target. Oh well!)

[WTFE]

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

I respectfully disagree. I believe that having the Hog Pit expressly encourages such behavior, and the absence of moderation tools for anything but the most egregious spambots and trolls IMHO is tacit encouragement to continue. But I understand your POV.

What is your alternative? Having a purely "make nicey-nice" board? It's been done. It died from neglect because the only people who went to use it were the people generally pointed to on … I think it was WORA III then? … for their abuses in games.

If, however, there is a huge majority of MUSHers unwilling to speak up on MSB because of the nastiness, you can tap into that huge mine of good ideas just awaiting expression by making your own MSB-like board without the 'Pit. I suspect that would be more productive than trying to change the way MSB was explicitly designed.

(I also suspect it'll go the way of the other nicey-nice board, mind…)

[surreality]

@WTFE Someone's trying one; I linked it a few pages back. Hopefully the people who don't feel comfortable posting here will be comfortable there, and ideas will cross-pollinate to whatever extent there is a crossover audience.

[WTFE]

@surreality Yeah, I saw that afterward. I took a look. It's going to go the way of the other board, I suspect. (I wish I could remember the name of it. Spin-off of OGR before it died.)

4. Harassment and disrespectful behavior of any kind will not be tolerated on or in relation to this site. We are all adults here, and admin expect adult behavior. This means following the golden rule: If you can't say something nice, then say nothing at all.

This here is the killer, I suspect. "If you can't say something nice about Mr. Hitler then just hold your tongue, young man!"

On that site it would be considered a bad thing to expose VASpider's predation. Or Custodius'. Or the Clique That Ate MUSHes. Nicey-nice as a policy works iff all participants in the activity are nicey-nice. We know all too well that this is emphatically not the case in the real world of MU*ing.

[faraday]

@WTFE said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

I respectfully disagree. I believe that having the Hog Pit expressly encourages such behavior, and the absence of moderation tools for anything but the most egregious spambots and trolls IMHO is tacit encouragement to continue. But I understand your POV.

What is your alternative? Having a purely "make nicey-nice" board? It's been done. .... . I suspect that would be more productive than trying to change the way MSB was explicitly designed.

Actually yes, that would be the alternative. And again we seem to fall into the "it was tried once umpteen years ago and failed therefore it can never work ever..." type of mentality that people were decrying just a few pages ago.

To be clear, though, I'm not trying to change the way that MSB was designed. I don't like it, but it is the way it is, and the owners are quite clear that it's working as intended. But in a thread that asks about the effect that the forum has on the community and whether it's a net-positive, I think my comments are relevant.

[surreality]

@WTFE said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

We know all too well that this is emphatically not the case in the real world of MU*ing.

This is truth.

One of the reasons I prefer this space to others is that I know that if I'm doing something fucked up, someone here will call me out on it.

Generally, I'm not keen on doing shit I know is fucking awful, so odds are good that if I'm doing something fucking awful, I'm not aware of it.

I'd like to be aware of it so I don't, you know, continue to do something fucking awful without realizing it.

I would prefer my being awful to not continue unchecked just because somebody's too worried about hurting my feelings to say, "surr, by twiddling the widget like that, you're totally screwing over the weebles and the wobbles, only a fucking moron would twiddle the widget like that, so knock it off, you dizzy, thoughtless twat."

[WTFE]

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

What is your alternative? Having a purely "make nicey-nice" board?

Actually yes, that would be the alternative.

Then make it. SHOW US that it will work because…

…it was tried once umpteen years ago and failed…

…is the only data point we have on this and I'm not of a mind to go off and make a nicey-nice MSB alternative because I'm fine with MSB as-is. You're the one who isn't, so get out there and show us that nicey-nice is a good foundation for a community board. It's a whole lot more constructive than whining and railing at what is.

I'll be here waiting for the explosive growth in the user base putting MSB to shame. I'll be waiting for a long time if history is any judge, though.

[WTFE]

A related data point on the nicey-nice…

The Lua programming language has an IRC channel (#lua on Freenode) that's a bit of a rough-and-tumble place. It can be crass, and much of the discussion has nothing to do with Lua when nobody has questions about the language. (When people ask questions about the language they tend to get rapid, expert answers. Then conversations turn back to the rough-and-tumble off-topic norm.)

This nature of the channel offended one of the users. He tried to topic-cop for a while and got frustrated at his efforts being ignored (and, indeed, often mocked). He went off and made his own channel (#lua-support) which banned off-topic speech, mandated civil conduct, etc. The channel was elevated to a primary resource alongside #lua (and #lua-fr for French users) after a brief wiki edit war.

This was a couple of years ago. As of this writing, #lua has 266 users logged in and is hopping. I've checked its activity for the past half hour and it's hundreds of messages. At least a half-dozen newbies asking technical questions got assistance in that time, and some advanced questions have also been debated. In that same time frame #lua-support has 18 users logged in and has had ZERO activity: not even a question!

I have, in the past, kept a bit logged in for weeks. And in that time saw less purely technical activity IN TOTAL than an hour's worth on off-peak hours in #lua.

This is a pattern I see over and over again.

Now, I have seen the other direction work as well. #haskell vs. … I think it was #haskell-newbies or something? The main #haskell channel was not only off-topic and a bit rough-and-tumble (albeit not as R&T as #lua), it was also a place where Asperger's-afflicted geeks showed off how obscurely they could do anything. So someone new to Haskell would join the place, ask an innocent technical question, and get increasingly bizarre and inappropriate solutions. The new channel had a bit of a nicey-nice policy (albeit without the ban on off-topic), but it also had a major value-add: it banned the "fuck with the newbie" behaviour. Which meant newbs could ask questions and get serious, useful answers instead of the ever-expanding mindfucks of Asperger's at play.

That channel is thriving. Indeed it occasionally eclipses the original in activity and it almost always eclipses it in terms of useful content.

There's a lesson in here for anybody who wants to make an MSB-alike that's nicey-nice: if your sole selling feature is "it's like MSB but we ban negativity" you will almost certainly fail. If, however, you find some value to add (a game database/wiki, say) and aren't as harsh in the nicey-nice as most such sites tend to be you may actually grow and eclipse MSB.

But I'm still not holding my breath.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@WTFE said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@surreality Yeah, I saw that afterward. I took a look. It's going to go the way of the other board, I suspect. (I wish I could remember the name of it. Spin-off of OGR before it died.)

Electric Soup? It's the main one I remember. What it suffered from is what I'm afraid MSB would suffer from with stricter moderation on...how mean people can be, I guess. The gloves were on all the time, and so some VERY bad ideas and dumb statements (women sometimes play male PCs? MY WORD HOW STRANGE AND SHOCKING) got by with basically no critique whatsoever. Some people will interpret any criticism, no matter how constructive, as an evil, and then discussion just dies. Also, yeah, the people flagged on WORA as abusive staffers posted a lot, which was a bit lulz.

[Ghost]

To be honest, I think @faraday has the right idea. Without an open attempt to bring people together, the sense of "I love this hobby but everyone I rely on to provide me with it can go fuck themselves" with simply remain. It's too easy to break people down using this medium. The Hog Pit alone seems to generate negative behavior in some people on a Pavlovian level.

I, 100%, support the creation of an anti-Hog Pit board. A White Lantern to the Black Lantern board. A negative, alternate universe-turned positive environment where the posts are intended to be truly constructive, positive, helping each other out, and not in that "Jamie, I love you, but constructively you'd be less of a cunt if you'd stop..." way.

About 4 months ago I had the bright idea of opening a grieving/apology/disclosure thread where I thought it might be healthy for people to use it as a means to get some weight off of their shoulders or apologize to people for any of the 750,000 ways communication gets cross-wired in this hobby.

It took about all of 10 minutes, if that, before it turned into a grudge fest of bitter, unethical people I used to RP with trying to use the thread as a means to attack me, an argument as to what constitutes as an actual apology, and a bunch of negative dogpiling.

Maybe if some of y'all motherfuckers held your social gathering in an environment lined with pictures of cute kittens and free hugs, some of you would be less prone to spend so much time correcting each other and trying to find common ground?

I say, fuck it, it's worth a shot.

(Disclaimer: And no, I'm not going to discuss that apology thread or partake in the topic being derailed into the Ps and Qs of what happened there. I chose to not defend myself on that thread because doing so would have taken away from the point I started that thread. The Ps and Qs aren't important, though had I chose to defend myself it would have been ugly and stupid, so I chose against. Please stay on topic. The apology thread, in itself, is an example as of the latent negativity and culture of dissent.)

[WTFE]

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@WTFE said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@surreality Yeah, I saw that afterward. I took a look. It's going to go the way of the other board, I suspect. (I wish I could remember the name of it. Spin-off of OGR before it died.)

Electric Soup? It's the main one I remember. What it suffered from is what I'm afraid MSB would suffer from with stricter moderation on...how mean people can be, I guess. The gloves were on all the time, and so some VERY bad ideas and dumb statements (women sometimes play male PCs? MY WORD HOW STRANGE AND SHOCKING) got by with basically no critique whatsoever. Some people will interpret any criticism, no matter how constructive, as an evil, and then discussion just dies. Also, yeah, the people flagged on WORA as abusive staffers posted a lot, which was a bit lulz.

That was it. Electric Soup. Anybody who wants to make a nicey-nice MUSH-oriented forum had better pay close attention to Electric Soup and see why it failed so spectacularly.

[faraday]

@Three-Eyed-Crow and @WTFE In yet another example of why I often feel like a visiting alien among these boards, I actually have extremely fond memories of Electric Soup. It was started by a very good friend of mine from B5MU days and I regarded it as a success while it lasted. And frankly, if a forum is going to die because people can't discuss things constructively without being jerks and belittling each other, I can live with that.

So yeah maybe some day I will do that experiment. But right now I have better things to do with my time than play forum cop.

Incidentally, I find it ironic to hear 'if you don't like it, quit whining about it and go make your own' on a forum where every other advertisement thread is filled with pages upon pages of unfettered whining about how people don't like some particular thing on a game and how that's not how they'd have done it. Heaven forbid someone suggest something as horrifying and revolutionary as to just be nice.

[WTFE]

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

…I regarded [Electric Soup] as a success while it lasted.

Literally everything is a success while it lasts. Even if it lasts a few microseconds. What you said up there is basically the equivalent of "the operation was a success until the patient died on the table".

[Clarity]

@surreality said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Gingerlily said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Maybe someday there will be a Mu* gaming and design discussion forum that has no place for or interest in bashing other people (whether they feel like that bashing is totally legit or not, that is not what I am focusing on here)

Apparently there is one. Someone passed along the advertisement for it the other day. It's new, so I didn't see any posts there when I signed up.

http://www.mushology.com is it.

There is also Optional Realities, where game devs, designers and players discuss different approaches:- http://optionalrealities.com/forums

[surreality]

@faraday I don't think be nice is an inherently bad goal.

I think it's a goal with some potential pitfalls, but I think the same thing about this place, and thought the same of WORA.

Be nice would be an easier goal if, as @WTFE mentions, nothing ever went wrong that needed to be mentioned -- but plenty goes wrong, and plenty of people screw up, intentionally or otherwise.

I think the thing many are wary of on the 'nice' front is that being nice and doing the right thing aren't, actually, always the same thing.

'Use tact and do not be deliberately hurtful' is, I think, a more realistic goal or guideline than 'be nice' when it comes to potential positive outcomes.

[faraday]

@WTFE Electric Soup lasted for 5+ years. If you consider that to be "died on the table" that's your prerogative I guess.

@surreality Yes, you're quite right. I like your wording better: 'Use tact and do not be deliberately hurtful'. You can write a movie review that says a movie is horrible in a tactful way.

[surreality]

@faraday Pretty much that. You need to be able to point out flaws, or a place will turn into a mutual flattery and butt-kissing society, eventually, and that's not terribly useful. If you (or anybody else) actually aims to do this, I would suggest putting up some examples of tactfully phrased constructive criticism/etc., since that will help set the standard by example.

(We've seen how some of the 4chan trolls are considered too inappropriate for this place, but their behavior is standard fare there, etc., so examples are important.)

[WTFE]

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@WTFE Electric Soup lasted for 5+ years. If you consider that to be "died on the table" that's your prerogative I guess.

"Lasted" if you view "perhaps the 10 worst individuals in MUSHdom dominating all conversation playing procedural judo to remove any hint of criticism or accountability" as "lasting".

[Ghost]

@WTFE said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

…I regarded [Electric Soup] as a success while it lasted.

Literally everything is a success while it lasts. Even if it lasts a few microseconds. What you said up there is basically the equivalent of "the operation was a success until the patient died on the table".

There was very little constructive point to this reply, and I think this is a prime example of the kind of attitude people are talking about on MSB.

• Technically it's not a failure if you dont try?
• We're all dying because our cells are degrading?
• "TECHNICALLY, you're stupid if you think something on the internet is successful because by 2245 we're gonna have the psi-net and all internet usage is gonna be laughed at like Geocities webpages and go away so HAH! FAILURE!"

You had an opportunity to keep the topic about Electric Soup and instead chose to wax negative on the definition of success.

So, seriously, there's no need for responses like this.
--On Point

Is there anything left of Electric Soup? I must have missed this entirely or it was before my time. Anything about it I can read up on?

[Miss Demeanor]

@Ghost Have you considered that some of the negative responses offered are because some people simply did not have anything good to say about it? I'm not trying to imply that this is the case here, I know nothing about Electric Soup. But trying to force positive response into a negative experience often just comes off as the person sounding like a self-righteous tool. I had this happen recently, actually, irl.

I was driving to work in the car I had just gotten earlier that week. Roads are clear, its early, there's almost NO traffic because its 7:30am on Good Friday. Suddenly there's a car that comes screaming down the road, in the left lane, that cuts across right in front of me to make a turn down a side street. Being a sensible person that does not want to be in a horrific accident, I hit my brakes and turn the wheel sharply to avoid T-boning this asshole. The result is the sidewall of my rear passenger tire blows out completely. Not just a pop, not a puncture. It BLOWS OUT. So I pull into the nearest lot I can find, call a tow truck, call work, call the auto shop, and call my mother to see if she can give me a ride to work because hey! that car she JUST GAVE ME is going to be in the shop today! I wait for the tow truck, when it shows, this guy has a dog in the cab of his truck that apparently HATES PEOPLE. It is snarling and snapping at me the entire ride to the auto shop. The driver just keeps pulling the dog closer to him and telling me to 'not worry about it'. We get to the shop, my car is unloaded, my mom meets me there. I speak with the mechanic, let him know what needs to be done. Mind, this guy already knows I'm coming, told me he could get me RIGHT IN. The owner of the shop appears while the mechanic is dealing with my car. And HE starts going on about how LUCKY I am and how I should be looking on the 'bright side' because it could have been 'much worse'. I'm about to fork over $600 to get three tires (because hey, apparently two of them were at the end of their lifespan anyways), I am late to a job that is SUPER ANAL about people being on time to work, and the bulk of my savings has just flown out the window. But yeah, sure guy who doesn't know me, tell me all about how LUCKY I am that it isn't worse. How GRATEFUL I should be right now and how I should look on the 'bright side'. Fuck that guy. That savings was supposed to help me get into an apartment this summer so I could finally be independent again, five years after a nasty divorce. That car was my first real sign of independence and that I was getting somewhere. That was NOT a positive experience, and the fact that I SURVIVED it does not make me 'feel better' about its occurring. That's like saying 'Congratulations, you have managed to not die today despite being a healthy adult human! You shouldn't let this terrible experience that has set you back by months interfere with the fact that you can do something 8 billion other people can do, too!' Yeah, sure.. I can say I survived a terrible game. But if that's the best thing I can say about it? Then yes, my opinion of that game is going to be 'it sucked, it was horrible, x, y, and z are why it was a horrible place of suck'. Sometimes there isn't a nice thing TO say about something, and frankly, I want to know about the bad experiences and shitstorms that have occurred on a game. I wouldn't discount bad reviews of an item I'm looking at investing my time, money, and energy into just because 'its negative and unhelpful'... why would I do so with a game that I'm looking at investing my time and energy into?

tldr; Sometimes you need to see the bad along with the good so you can make the most informed decision of what you will choose to do with your time and energy. Hearing nothing but the good will never help anyone anymore than hearing nothing but the bad will. I want something like the Hog Pit so I can see both sides of the game, and use those 'reviews' to decide if that's somewhere that I want to be.