MSB: The meta-discussion

[Ghost]

@Miss-Demeanor That sounded like a very shitty day, I sympathize.

When someone wants to know the positive/negatives of a game, the source of the review is important. You don't go to Vegan websites for reviews on Omaha Steaks. People with negative outlooks and negative behaviors blow shit way out of proportion and tend to do everything in their power (on these forums) to make a place in which, by definition, they might have been inconvenienced into a place that boiled their beloved pet rabbit. Then the voyeurs and people who love to get to throw rocks, too (titillation) hop on the dogpile, and in the end, it really wasn't so much a constructive review as it was just a bunch of people taking their negative shit out on a place.

I'd put the accuracy of airing actual grievances or criticism on this forum at around 10-15%

I, personally, would rather hear the good then receive some straight, emotionless details on what the game's challenges are. Usually the amount of log activity, or logs themselves, are a good indication of some things, whereas taking a 2 week test drive of a game tends to be FAAAAAAR more accurate a review with FAR less subjective propogandist bullshit.

[lordbelh]

A while ago I played on a chat site called oasiz. It had a forum. At first it was lightly moderated and, while it had plenty of drama and petty bullshit, it was also lively. They decided to go the heavily moderated route instead, enforcing their definition of polite and orderly discourse. It died soon enough afterwards.

There's a certain personality type that loves to mother discussions to death if you give them an ounce of authority to do so.

I guess I'll take a lively discussion with the occasional nasty over an orderly forum with empowered and zealous moderators who who want to enforce the nice.

[surreality]

In all seriousness, since we are now arguing about the ways in which people choose to argue, shouldn't this be the meta-meta-discussion?

<rubs her temples and reaches for the tylenol>

[Ghost]

@surreality said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

In all seriousness, since we are now arguing about the ways in which people choose to argue, shouldn't this be the meta-meta-discussion?

<rubs her temples and reaches for the tylenol>

ANNOUNCEMENT Ever since WORA, I have been gathering research on what it would take for the MU community to be civil towards each other and survive simple discussions without arguing, being triggered, bringing up old theories about why someone is a bad person because of assumed intent (which clearly, never, comes from the self), trolling, references to Spider and how someone is like her, people showing up to tutt-tutt about how their rude comments aren't rude because they have decided they're accurate, or to argue the Oxford vs Harvard definition of the word: moist.

I believe I have the answer.

Simply travel by plane, train, or automobile to Nebraska, where a meager 7 hour journey by foot through the wilderness will bring you to my Men of Letters style bunker where I have condensed the rules, bylaws, personality profiles, extensive lists of triggers and things which shall never be mentioned, lists of words you are not allowed to use, every person's collective MU history and qualifications for what is or is not a good example, condensed lists of people who have muscled enough forum clout that they can't seem to be able to accept being disagreed with, RAPEY PLAYERS LISTS, graphical flow charts on who is cool based on who else thinks they're cool, and (my personal favorite)...a codebase repository of homegrown MU tools made by people trying to be constructive to the hobby.

For a monthly service plan of $3455.95 (awesome for me, because this will be a lifetime study), you, too, will know what it takes to navigate these troubled social waters.

...Or you can just understand that the community hasn't been any different in nearly 20 years, that you take risks in communicating with strangers online, and that while there are many mature, level-headed roleplayers out there, you will also have to share the environment with any number of people whose sole, social outlet is the internet, and in doing so, it's a roll of the dice.

Trying is important. Understanding when it fails is also important. In the end, it comes down to: is the juice worth the squeeze?

Edit: tl;dr/my point: All it takes is witnessing a positive social environment (that works hard to play well together, get along, and take care of each other) to be able to identify one that symbiotically relies upon the whole, like a bad marriage, dysfunctionally.

[Miss Demeanor]

@Ghost Yeah, that's great. Except that is not how reviews work. Seriously. Go onto Amazon. Pick a product and look at the reviews. Maybe 20% of either the good and bad reviews are about something wrong with the actual product that provides pictures, references, or some form of 'proof' or about something right with the actual product that delves any deeper than 'I like it because it works for me'. The other 80% is just people bitching/raving about the product either because something took too long, something was 'too complicated', the product didn't last for 10 years despite being made of plywood, etc. or because they joined a club that lets them get products super cheap in exchange for leaving a positive review on the site, they get a discount for writing it, there's nothing obviously wrong with it (and they got it two days ago), etc.

That is just how humanity works. Get over it. You aren't going to get your perfect world, and haranguing people to 'be better' is both futile and frankly, self-righteous. You have no pedestal to stand on, your house is just as glassy and fragile as ours. So either do the work and sift through all the bullshit like any good consumer would to find out what is really going on... or go find somewhere that will cater to your need to hear only the good and happy things in some mythical perfect world where nothing ever goes wrong and nobody is ever an asshole. This is not it. It will never be it. And you really just sound like an ass trying to make people behave how you want them to.

[Ghost]

The defense rests, Your Honor.

[Miss Demeanor]

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

The defense rests, your honor.

Please do. Haven't you ever wondered why shows and movies with supposedly utopian settings always end with 'and then someone was corrupt and someone else blew it apart and then things got back to being normal'. Utopic societies do not exist. At best you get a dystopia like Star Trek or Firefly or Waterworld or Judge Dredd or Blade Runner or, or, or... I could go on for days with references to this. We as human beings are incapable of being 100% nice all the time. We are not wired for it. And frankly, I would rather see shit getting spewed out here than keeping it bottled up to where it gets spewed out onto someone's rl.

Vitriol on, MSB. Get it out in the format specifically set up to be that pressure release valve.

[Ghost]

@Miss-Demeanor said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Vitriol on, MSB. Get it out in the format specifically set up to be that pressure release valve.

People love being negative as a pressure release, but they typically hate being responsible for the collateral damage in the wake of their negativity.

MSB is upstream from almost every current MU playspace, and pissing into it, pressure release valve or not, runs a high risk of polluting everyone's drinking water, all across the hobby.

[surreality]

@Miss-Demeanor said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

I would rather see shit getting spewed out here than keeping it bottled up to where it gets spewed out onto someone's rl.

...or on the actual games.

Venting is necessary, sometimes.

I would rather see someone explode here in a froth of senseless bile and profanity than see them treat somebody like crap on the game because they're fed up with a peeve.

Negative feels are real and are as valid as positive feels are.

People are not negative, not-nice, or bad people for having negative feelings about a negative experience.

Negative experiences are common things everyone encounters sooner or later in life.

Repressing shit is not, actually, super great for someone if they do it for too long. I would rather see someone post, "Dammit, it always drives me crazy when people hog a scene. Attention whores are annoying." in the Hog Pit than suppress that feeling the dozen or so times it takes for them to explode with the force of twelve times the vitriol the unlucky thirteenth person they perceive to be behaving this way could ever possibly deserve even if the problem behavior really was genuinely and objectively problematic behavior.

[Ghost]

@surreality Agreed. Non-personal griping can really open a good discussion on conduct, how to write policies, etc. God knows you and I have talked at length about all of your awesome policy write-up ideas. I love the way you focus on the bigger picture when thinking about these things, and the ability to bring up behaviors and other issues, without personal attacks, is really just problem identification and a solid part of the improvements process.

Having said that, I think a lot of people on the boards are always on the lookout for being someone's vague-post topic. The assumption is, if it's being made vague on MSB, it's being far less vague via pages, and people want to know if they're being complained/shit talked in a way where they can neither address the problem, nor defend their actions, purposeful or not.

So I think with many of these vague posts about behaviors there's always a quick round of OMG ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT ME? that happens, which determines whether or not it needs to be a fight, ugly, etc.

LOL I think we've messaged each other a few times with: "heyyyyy that wasn't about me was it? Are we okay?"

Yeah, because shit goes from okay to NOT OKAY in the blink of an eye around here sometimes.

Who the fuck can relax, rp, and have fun while having to watch out for that shit?

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@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.

Part of the problem, as noted, was what was considered "not constructive" was handled with a bit of a steel fist and/or sledgehammer, making the place ironically less open than it wanted to be, than it should have been. Sure, this means that the ideology wasn't abused by creative trolls, but I felt that it was abused by the people who were there to uphold it.

I'm not saying that it was a bad place, or that your time there wasn't genuine, but I don't think it was the place that people have been saying that Soapbox should be, and I don't think Electric Soup was the place it should have been.

--

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Yeah, because shit goes from okay to NOT OKAY in the blink of an eye around here sometimes.

"Around here"? I've asked that question far more on games than on here, so I'm going to call Confirmation Bias -- yes, on both of us. Kudos to @Miss-Demeanor for pointing out how specifically your complaints are not hobby-specific.

In catching up from a day and a half on this thread, I'm going to guess that your complaints can be boiled down to The Apology Thread in particular, and specifically one person in it.

I understand being bitter that a thread has gotten out of your control and wanting to regain understanding, wanting to get everyone on the same page, but when you put yourself out in public and on, I dunno, let's call it some kind of Soapbox, you open yourself to commentary from those passing by.

Looking at the +1s (I believe this thread is before the -1s were removed), people agreed with you and @Miss-Demeanor about equally. Remember, I believe in "the silent majority", I figure that most people who want to comment here don't want to open themselves to criticism and will use that +1 as meaning "I agree" and nothing more. I use it as a metric to mean how much I should pay attention to the post, to actually read it.

In the Apology Thread, these posts were most upvoted:

• The original post
• Miss Demeanor's counter-point
• @mietze's advice trying to be honestly helpful
• Cobalt's winning one-liner: "MUSoapbox; Where we argue over apologies."
• WTFE's reiteration of it
• @VulgarKitten being funny, because I like it when she's funny; she should be funny more
• @GangOfDolls' counter to Cobalt/WTFE in defense of the original post
• @surreality explaining "consideration of others" to Miss Demeanor
• @gasket saying how one post makes Soapbox as bad as WORA
• @Tinuviel actually using the apology thread to apologize
• @Coin getting involved to say that apologies have more meaning face-to-face
• mietze reiterating how public apologies are dangerous for inviting commentary
• gasket saying how one person's actions represents the entire board

I'm stopping here. I thought I'd get about 5 posts out of this, but this thread has really split opinions in Soapbox, but I would like to note, in the way usually used for yelling: The opinions were very passionately split.

Looking at this thread, I cannot believe that Soapbox is any one thing but passionate. I see humor, understanding, frustration, caring, and the odd insult all being +1'd, being thanked, someone saying "yes, this represents how I'm feeling right now".

--

Final note: If you want to now remove the +1 you gave me before I finished this unexpectedly long edit, Ghost, I don't blame you. No hard feelings.

[Miss Demeanor]

@Ghost Actually, I would say you have that reversed. The games tend to be upstream of MSB and what is happening in them is what is trickling down into MSB. You see the behavior that is already occurring on the games being brought to MSB, not vice-versa.

[ThatGuyThere]

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.

Had not checked out the other place but that is a serious discussion killer right there. It does not even have to be about a person. Technically the post where I mentioned what i didn't like about the Savage Worlds system which mentioned no actual person would have violated that rule because I definitely did not say nice things.
Enforcing politeness i would find annoying and likely be enough to cause me not to bother but eliminating any sort of criticism , which the rule of if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all does, is beyond stupid to me because it eliminate what to be the very purpose of discussion boards would be.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

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?

As far as I know it is dead, it was around in the late 90s, not sure on exact year it started or stopped.
I remember checking it out before discovering Wora and found it ... well we are in not in the hog pit so lets say I found it to be the internet version of a church social all smiles and positivity yet I had the distinct feeling at least fifty percent of it was faked.

[Ghost]

@Thenomain NO, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR +1.

As far as that other thread goes, I don't have an actual complaint per se, but was more tying in that experience into the greater topic at hand. I read back through it a few days ago because someone +1'd a post of mine after 5+ months, and at some point every now and then someone posts something like: Well, I'm not going to post an apology for something NOW, seeing how people are dogpiling on people trying to follow the spirit of the thread"

I think some of the more constructive threads follow this format:

• Constructive topic! Let's be constructive.
• Someone posts in spirit of topic
• Someone corrects poster
• Poster retorts
• Dogpile begins
• Ten posts arguing semantics
• People shy away from posting about constructive topic
• Personal attacks
• What were we talking about again?
• Attempt to re-rail topic happens
• Someone corrects poster
• Poster retorts
• Dogpile begins
• Ten posts arguing semantics
• People shy away from posting about constructive topic
• Personal attacks
• What were we talking about again?
• Attempt to re-rail topic happens
• Repeat...

[Derp]

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Thenomain NO, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR +1.

As far as that other thread goes, I don't have an actual complaint per se, but was more tying in that experience into the greater topic at hand. I read back through it a few days ago because someone +1'd a post of mine after 5+ months, and at some point every now and then someone posts something like: Well, I'm not going to post an apology for something NOW, seeing how people are dogpiling on people trying to follow the spirit of the thread"

I think some of the more constructive threads follow this format:

• Constructive topic! Let's be constructive.
• Someone posts in spirit of topic
• Someone corrects poster
• Poster retorts
• Dogpile begins
• Ten posts arguing semantics
• People shy away from posting about constructive topic
• Personal attacks
• What were we talking about again?
• Attempt to re-rail topic happens
• Someone corrects poster
• Poster retorts
• Dogpile begins
• Ten posts arguing semantics
• People shy away from posting about constructive topic
• Personal attacks
• What were we talking about again?
• Attempt to re-rail topic happens
• Repeat...

Weird. It's almost as if a group of humans with differing opinions are trying to find a happy median on a topic they are passionate about.

No, really. This is pretty much any sort of basic group behavior when there are ideological factions in competition. Some pretty good chunks of psychology, sociology, and political science are devoted to studying this.

This is not an error; this is how our neurological coding works. You see it in literally every heterogenous group.

[mietze]

Having read electric soup at its most active, more or less the same pattern took place there without the distraction of poop throwing.

And as we have also seen time and again, there are definitely people who are bound and determined to show you how much of an ass they are even if they never break a rule. Including anti-profanity and anti-attack.

I think having "no negativity" can be a problematic descriptor because that's definitely in the eye of the beholder. Waxing poetic about how superior one's play style/conduct is has no negatively per se, but it's certainly been used here and elsewhere to beat people with or attempt to intimidate them. Fortunately those folks tend to be just as easily spotted.

I think once you've played on 3+ games, it's pretty intuitive to take ANY review or issue, positive or negative, with a grain of salt. It's why I think very little harm is done to games by "negative" reviews. I do think damage can be unwittingly done by a stampede/rush/extremely high expectations based on a positive review though.

So it would just plainly be better if people just read things as opinions. I'd say leave the princessing or the eeyoring out of it all, but that's just a personality thing that you'll never be rid of. It's not super hard to just read and get a feel for folks.

[Paris]

@Ghost Re: the thread in question: there will always be people (here included) who will be happy to make things look worse than they really are; who will turn a minor situation into proof that you are the worst person ever, or hijack things to grind their axe.

Never give them fodder. Good intentions will still be twisted around.

In your case, it's tough, because just messaging someone once ('Hey, I'm sorry, etc,') will bring on accusations of harassment and doom and woe; or going back to a game to say anything will net you the same, so you think, 'hey, we're all on soapbox...' But, no.

It's why, after I got ghosted by folks I thought were decent friends, I didn't follow to find out why (I saw what happened to others), or ask here; I just accept that sometimes, there is no closure or explanation on anyone's parts, and trying to re-open a closed door anywhere only results in unpleasantness.

People know who and where you are, they'll find you if they want you. That's what I tell myself, and devote my energy to people who want it. If you worry about your own past behavior, just be a better person now and acknowledge things if brought up to you.

[Salty Secrets]

Enforced positivity has to be one of the worst concepts I've ever run across, both in mushing and in real life, to address and comment on something said a few posts back.

No good can come from making people store their real feelings away. You either end up with an oppressive atmosphere where everyone is smiling and it just feels wrong, as was described, or you end up with people frequently bursting open when their emotional containers are full. Since everyone has a different-sized bottle, the larger the user-base the more likely you are to see one of those explosions daily and chain-reactions can be devastating.

... but that's not to say that everyone always saying exactly what they think is good, either. Many read the authorization to be honest as the authorization to be an asshole.

[Ganymede]

@WTFE said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

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.

IGU (Idealistic Gamers Unite) worked just fine. I recall having many civil sparring sessions with ICE and Peverel there.