Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.

Auspice

(Just leave the Hog Pit. Do it. Dooooo eeeeet.)

Seriously the worst part about being a mod, hands down, is that I have to see the Politics board now.

That is the one thing I hate most.

Like there isn't even juicy drama over there, you guys.

Haven

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

(Just leave the Hog Pit. Do it. Dooooo eeeeet.)

Seriously the worst part about being a mod, hands down, is that I have to see the Politics board now.

That is the one thing I hate most.

Like there isn't even juicy drama over there, you guys.

Did the Politics Board bang a porn star? Asking for a friend.

Auspice

@haven said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

(Just leave the Hog Pit. Do it. Dooooo eeeeet.)

Seriously the worst part about being a mod, hands down, is that I have to see the Politics board now.

That is the one thing I hate most.

Like there isn't even juicy drama over there, you guys.

Did the Politics Board bang a porn star? Asking for a friend.

My lawyer has advised me against answering this question.

surreality

@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Telling people to stay out of the Hog Pit to avoid dogpiling is akin to telling black people to obey the law when they have been killed by law enforcement time and time again for doing nothing illegal. The problem is the dogpiling, which can understandably have a chilling effect on any kind of speech here. And let's not pretend that the dogpiling occurs only within the Hog Pit; it clearly and demonstrably has happened elsewhere, which is why we have to haul threads out of other areas into the Hog Pit.

^ This. I do agree with this entirely.

That said, any maybe to surreality's consternation, but I stand by every word I said before. The number of regular, frequent posters in the Hog Pit pales to the actual number of people that read or post here.

The number of people isn't what's at issue. It may be a smaller number. It's the bleed of the behavior to everywhere else.

I'm well-aware that I have a great deal of privilege because, for whatever reason, I'm not usually a target when I make comments, no matter how wrong or controversial my opinion might be. And I'm not going to pretend that I can walk in anyone's shoes and process experiences as they might, because I think that belittles their experience.

Here's the thing with that. It belittles their experience to ignore it far more.

You're right that you can fully understand their experience no better than I as a white woman can fully understand the perspective of a black man.

That doesn't mean I shouldn't be keeping my ears open when a black man speaks about his experience and how it affects him in an environment in which I have authority to do something about it, understand that his experience is as real and valid as my own, and do something about it.

@arkandel said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

It's not the headache that I mind, it's the nitpicking. This whole thing about administrating microaggressions seems so petty that I can't get myself interested enough to even read some threads - I'm just too lazy for that (stop gasping, @Coin). If something serious like harassment happens I definitely intend to get involved, but the he-said she-said bullshit... about some random clash of personalities, not so much.

The problem is, there's nothing micro about the aggressions people are actively concerned about.

"SHE POSTED A MEAN GIF IN THE HOG PIT!" <-- microaggression.
"Yo, there's an angry screed full of completely unfounded false accusations being made here." <-- this is not a microaggression and it's not a mere difference of opinion.
"He's vaguebooking a gripe in Peeves about me!" <-- microaggression
"She's being a passive aggressive jerk!" <-- microaggression
"He's chasing me around to every thread I post in on the board and attacking everything I say on any subject!" <-- this is not a microaggression, this is harassment

Maybe the not microaggressions things are OK in the Pit, maybe they're not -- I don't personally think posting a giant pile of personal RL character assassination without some kind of foundation or evidence (unless it's a log of an actual character being assassinated!) or making real accusations about people's real lives is remotely OK no matter where the hell it's happening on the forum, and it goes on a lot. Chasing someone from thread to thread to attack them is harassment and should be regarded as such.

Carping about someone's behavior on a game is one thing. We've seen a very notable shift away from that and into trying to destroy people RL as human beings, and not in the derpy, over the top, 'we're just foolin' around and you shouldn't take it seriously' way that used to go down on WORA, but with real issues and real accusations of vileness RL.

Haven

@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Telling people to stay out of the Hog Pit to avoid dogpiling is akin to telling black people to obey the law when they have been killed by law enforcement time and time again for doing nothing illegal.

This argument will be infinitely more valid when unarmed people start getting shot in the back while in the Hog Pit.

Look, I have been attacked in the Hog Pit for using the C-word. I survived. I got the t-shirt. I still C-word it up all day. Besides, who doesn't like dogs? And piles? What am I missing here?

This is a very serious post.

faraday

@surreality said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

"Yo, there's an angry screed full of completely unfounded false accusations being made here." <-- this is not a microaggression and it's not a mere difference of opinion.

Yeah, I agree. These are not microaggressions, they're full-on, "call you a stupid a-hole to your face" levels of aggression that IMHO have no place in the constructive section. But we see it all the dang time.

If it could be confined to the Hog Pit, then I wouldn't mind so much. (I'd still mind on a philosophical level, but only with as much care as I give to obnoxious Reddit forums... out of sight, out of mind.) But as things stand, it just flat-out isn't. It's in our face constantly, even in the constructive section, and it's freaking exhausting.

I can understand if the mods don't have the bandwidth or motivation to deal with it. I can understand the thinking that it's better to air the toxicity in public than private (even if I disagree with that). But let's stop pretending that this is some kind of unsolvable problem.

Set standards. Enforce them. It's not fun, but it's also not rocket science. Civilized Discourse is a thing. Moderated forums exist - heck, our games are basically this. Most of us wouldn't tolerate people talking to each other on the public channel or BBS on our games the way people talk to each other here. Accepting it is a choice, not an inevitable conclusion.

surreality

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I can understand the thinking that it's better to air the toxicity in public than private (even if I disagree with that). But let's stop pretending that this is some kind of unsolvable problem.

It isn't even just that. I'll use myself as an example here, because there's a recent one that's relevant to the point about what I consider to be an important distinction worth making.

Look at the shit Nemesis pulled the other week. He's all over the forum, in Pit and notably in various places outside the Pit calling me a liar, claiming he knows these dozens of games and forums I've been on and banned from, and so on. Not one word of this is true. I've been asked -- based on discussions here -- to not show up on two games I had no intention of ever playing on in the first place, and that's the closest I've come to getting banned from anything, anywhere, ever; I've never even had staff 'have to pull me aside' on a game I've played on about something. (I also respected that, because 1. duh; 2. wasn't planning to anyway.) While I've modded on several forums, I've neither been banned from any of forum nor banned someone from one. So this shit is just blatantly and objectively untrue.

That's not airing toxicity. That's making a bunch of shit up in an attempt at character assassination of someone who you dislike for whatever reason. And while he's gone, and he's not a credible source to the average reader, there are plenty of people around the forums who behave in the same way who are still here and aren't so obviously 'WTF'.

This is not and should never be OK.

This is different from 'this horrible thing happened on a game, can you believe this shit?' and a story is told about the event and the people involved, usually with direct examples involved. It's also different from 'this interaction I had with staff was so toxic and abusive I couldn't believe it!' -- and people with the same experience or logs or something else pops up and actual wrong-doing is exposed because of it, which can be a greater good, though it isn't flattering to the target, it's based on actual events and happened in reality and it's good that people know about it (to get better at the thing they did badly, to avoid that place, etc.).

krmbm

@surreality said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

...the derpy, over the top, 'we're just foolin' around and you shouldn't take it seriously' way that used to go down on WORA, but with real issues and real accusations of vileness RL.

What version of WORA was "just foolin' around"? My recollection of previous boards was that people were talking about someone who left his kids and dying wife for some other woman, and he might also be a bad M* admin.

Are my jade-colored glasses that thick? <.<

surreality

@krmbm That was the kind of shit that eventually went into the category of 'we should be leaving people's RL out of it unless it's directly relevant'. That was well over a decade ago, and things did change. And when relapses happened -- embarrassing pics posted, etc. -- people did rightly call that shit out as being out of bounds.

There is a real and notable difference between 'you are a sack of dead turtles trying to type the works of Shakespeare' and 'you are obviously a racist'. These claims have very different weight for a notable reason.

Auspice

Where do we stand then on pre-emptive attacks?

'I disagree with you because <largely disagreement with their stance, but could also be an attack if someone is being sensitive>, but you'll never listen to me because you always <think I'm a liar / hate me / come after me / dog pile me / other reason>.'

I'd say a good half of the major blow-ups I witness come out of the above.

It's not the statements of 'I disagree.' It's the ones of 'I disagree, but you won't listen because you already hate me!' and that last part almost always puts people on the defensive because most people think of themselves as a good person and they get whiplash when they're having discussion A and someone comes after them about issue B (or dredges up Past Discussion 16 from three weeks ago).

And if your disagreement about the topic puts them on edge while you also made them defensive about their Inner Good Person, chances are they're going to come back not just defensive, but a little on the offensive as well.

Which is where I come back to my earlier point: we need to all learn to take the advice we regularly try to issue forth to game admin... sometimes it's best to just walk away. Even if you only walk away for twenty minutes to take a breather and clear your head. Whenever I find myself getting upset (I get angry more than anything else, personally), this is what I do. I get up, I walk off, and I go clean or cook or pick up a book. I just get tf away from the keyboard until the pressure in my head ebbs off. I don't always make it away from the keyboard in time, but damn if I don't try.

bored

@arkandel Finally having gotten around to vote, I gave a neutral.The flavor text to that one isn't actually correct for my choice, but numerically I think it's right (ie, I do 'care' but I'd give you a 3/5).

I still haven't seen many instances of positive moderation, but then again it also kind of seems like you've reigned back actively moderating after the first few attempts (mostly, but not exclusively, by @auspice) went so poorly.

You've been responsive to banning the 4channers and Cirno, which is good.

I'm still not sure about the board subdivisions and rules, we discussed a lot about restructuring those but instead we've basically just slowly floated back toward same-old (where we can fight in ad threads a little bit until it gets too mean and then, to the Pit!).

So, meh? I don't have any problems with things now, but its mostly because it seems like you stopped doing much. I'm 100% happy with that, but its also hard to rate that as 'you guys are doing great.'

Kanye Qwest

If this place got rid of the hog pit and didn't allow the drama and slapfighting that goes on there, this place's traffic would slow down a lot, and it would eventually be mostly the same half dozen people posting gifs and RL gripes and occasionally an ad thread would blow through, like a tumbleweed.

It's not the worst thing in the world. But it seems like it would be a lot of work to maintain a board that could easily be a discord chat.

Derp

@kanye-qwest said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

If this place got rid of the hog pit and didn't allow the drama and slapfighting that goes on there, this place's traffic would slow down a lot, and it would eventually be mostly the same half dozen people posting gifs and RL gripes and occasionally an ad thread would blow through, like a tumbleweed.

It's not the worst thing in the world. But it seems like it would be a lot of work to maintain a board that could easily be a discord chat.

I don't think it would slow down at much as some people think. I think that more people would post more frequently when some of the louder, more grating voices are gone. Some might leave, sure, but plenty would stay. And the people who want to have their slapfight can have it elsewhere, since they can never seem to keep it contained to the proper areas.

And by the way, that's one of the other issues I think needs to be addressed: There needs to be consequences for violating the 'posting pit material outside of the pit' beyond 'I guess we have to move the thread now'. Because certain people do that A LOT. And just moving the thread does nothing but let them know that it's okay because someone is willing to follow them and try and clean up their mess.

The admins might not think that we should need an adult in the room. That's fair. We probably shouldn't. But should and do are different animals. We shouldn't need one, but we clearly do, and that is the job of the admins.

If they have neither the inclination nor the time to do so, the solution there is also pretty straightforward: give the job to someone who does. If you don't want to do the stuff that is clearly in the job title, then don't take the job. I and respect all three of you, but damn, the 'but we do not want to do the things that we are here to do' arguments make my eye twitch.

Thenomain

@kanye-qwest said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

If this place got rid of the hog pit and didn't allow the drama and slapfighting that goes on there, this place's traffic would slow down a lot

[citation needed]

Before Soapbox got Wora-y again, it was very active with positivity. I believe that a Soapbox For Happy People would be quite active, albeit the last time someone tried to enforce this (on an anti-Wora) the board was just as much about blind back-patting as Soapbox is about snarking.

Maybe my idea of meaningful conversation is different than yours, but I've found life outside the Hog Pit to increase my activity on the rest of the boards and my desire to have more meaningful conversation because of it; my pessimism wanes and I don't feel that speaking up would make me someone's punching bag.

I'm not wholly on board with @Ganymede's summary of needing to be on it if it's there, but I also no longer think that the shit-talking about a game matters for the health of that game. I'm not afraid of not having complete control, because people will judge the heart of a game by playing there, not by what spazzes think, or at least if they do then either they have a strong sense of self where they can see what the spazz is really saying, or they themselves are a spazz.

Mind you, Gany and I have gone back and forth on foundational Mu* game design for close to a decade now, and I respect the hell out of her approach, and really anyone who has tried and failed and taken that in stride.

No GIFs.

Sorry.

krmbm

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

[citation needed]

http://www.oocities.org/idealisticgamersunite/

Thenomain

@krmbm said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

[citation needed]

http://www.oocities.org/idealisticgamersunite/

(edit to address the actual quote)

I don't think that IGU and Wora were all that different. It had a ton of administration problems, and their uneven application of their own rules caused a chilling-effect which is I think the Number One reason people stopped going there, not including the WORAites who went there to troll. The whole board was half a troll of WORA, or was at the very least an ANTI-WORA which is, IMO, the entirely wrong reason to go about making something. Some people loved the idea and they would've been enough to carry it on, but the admin didn't follow through, or they were disingenuous in doing so.

tl;dr: If you think IGU wasn't full of drama and its share of vitriol, then you and I were on different IGUs.

faraday

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@krmbm said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

[citation needed]

http://www.oocities.org/idealisticgamersunite/

The "OMG somebody tried this once 15 years ago and it didn't work therefore nobody should try this again ever" argument is getting tiresome. Games and forums fail for all kinds of reasons.

And frankly, if the community can't manage to have a forum without being awful to each other all the time? Then that says something about the community.

Thenomain

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

And frankly, if the community can't manage to have a forum without being awful to each other all the time? Then that says something about the community.

Which is why I wanted to pipe up with, you know, a rare note of positivism: I think we're fine with it. When Soapbox popped back up, people were so glad they could be in a place that wasn't Wora that the energy was very high. I think we're perfectly capable.

What I think happens is what I think happens to all games: The Downward Mediocrity Spiral.

The people you want around are the people who are well-balanced and thoughtful, and they probably have lives. These people have limited time in their day and when things start going south, they can see the direction the wind is blowing or just duck out because they could get a better return of their time somewhere else.

This leaves you with the next layer of helpful and well-balanced positive people. And the next. Eventually the game will balance out at the lowest level they're allowed to get away with by staff, either staff's own morality or staff's level of activity. (The nice thing about a larger game is that you can avoid the staff or the lower-quality players far more easily. This is why games with horribly corrupt staff can be insanely popular.)

So very quickly, a game's player quality and energy spirals down to the people who instead of playing to add to it, play because they can put up with it. Mediocrity reigns.

I say this out of love for the hobby, because I believe that it's true, because if we talk about things we can understand better and maybe, just maybe, we can get along better and have more fun without needing someone to "manage" us. We can absolutely manage ourselves.

Derp

@thenomain

That's such a disturbingly accurate version of the Peter Principle.

krmbm

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

The "OMG somebody tried this once 15 years ago and it didn't work therefore nobody should try this again ever" argument is getting tiresome. Games and forums fail for all kinds of reasons.

So is the "[citation needed] but all proof/examples from the past are invalid 'cause they're old" argument.

I don't read most of what's posted here, so I honestly don't see the things that apparently happened recently that made people upset about shit spilling out of the Pit. If that's happening, then it sucks, and there should be more enforcement of moving threads into the Pit when that's where they belong.

I wouldn't want a bunch of fluffy bunnies running into the Pit and declaring it their safe space where there should be no name-calling, so I can understand why you wouldn't want all the immature monkeys getting loose on the rest of the forum.

But I do disagree with the notion that we don't need/want/have room for a place where the gloves can come off.

If you don't like that place, don't read it. But don't try to decide for the rest of us that it has no value, and we'd all be better off without it.