Something Completely Different
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if a bunch of different women who have no connection to one another say someone is a misogynist with such conviction they’re willing to abandon a community they’ve been part of for years it usually means it’s not a baseless attack
you sound like every game owner who’s ever showed up here to defend some creep they were enabling on a game
it’s gross and it’s why this place is going to end up you, him, and the three people who upvote your posts
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@prototart said in Something Completely Different:
it’s gross and it’s why this place is going to end up you, him, and the three people who upvote your posts
Okay.
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@ganymede said in Something Completely Different:
@prototart said in Something Completely Different:
it’s gross and it’s why this place is going to end up you, him, and the three people who upvote your posts
Okay.
Legit question, who is this for now? You made a rape apologist an admin and then banned everyone who had a problem with it, almost all of them women, and then blamed everything else on a third party who, alongside everyone else on staff, has since quit.
What do you think is going to happen here? Do you think anyone is coming back? Do you think anyone who’s been victimized somewhere is going to trust you enough to ever actually bring anything here, knowing you ruined 20 years worth of reputation rather than admit you made a mistake by elevating your misogynist friend?
You’ve been around long enough that you should realize what happens every time a sequence like that plays out.
And it’s never, not even once, been, “everything gets better because everyone calmed down, quit being such uppity bitches, and understood what they THOUGHT was reality was actually just their feminine delusions.”
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Let me make this clear: none of this was ever mietze's fault. I have taken and will take full responsibility for the choices I made and the actions I took. Don't put words in my mouth.
As for the rest of what you wrote, I'm not sure what will happen. We will see. Who is this place for? Whoever remains, I suppose. The people who've in the past come to me with complaints about stalkers or abusers visiting this site know my position on people who do that and how I deal with them.
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@ganymede said in Something Completely Different:
Let me make this clear: none of this was ever mietze's fault. I have taken and will take full responsibility for the choices I made and the actions I took. Don't put words in my mouth.
As for the rest of what you wrote, I'm not sure what will happen. We will see.
You have, time and time and again, said outright that some things were decided on by all three of you and very knowingly implied that everything else was decided on in the same manner, except for the paroxysm of bans you issued to essentially every active female poster for justly criticized you over giving power to a rape apologist, and then insisted that nothing could be done about any of it until she was back. The only person who thinks any of this is Mietze’s fault is Mietze, and that’s because of you. Because you put all of this on her.
No one is putting words in your mouth. You are not dumb. You knew what you were doing.
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@ganymede said in Something Completely Different:
As for the rest of what you wrote, I'm not sure what will happen. We will see. Who is this place for? Whoever remains, I suppose. The people who've in the past come to me with complaints about stalkers or abusers visiting this site know my position on people who do that and how I deal with them.
You make them admins.
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You are continuing to personally attack Derp, which is against the code of conduct; please cease doing so.
I have explained why I made the decision not to remove Derp, and will accept the consequences of doing so.
If you think I am responsible for putting the entire situation on her, that's fine; that's your opinion.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@ganymede You banned @Kanye-Qwest for calling you a thumb, though I do believe she said "fucking thumb" and then you give warnings here about "continuing to personally attack". Your application of your own rules are so uneven that is it even any wonder that people like @RightMeow, who doesn't seemed involved in any way, is still TIPTOEING around in their responses for fear of a ban?
I didn't really want to respond because I didn't want to provide any more oxygen to this last gasp as I was, at one point, an admin too. However, I well and truly feel like you are going to walk off into the sunset, head held high, thinking that you were right the whole time even as you lost a community. I am not as attached to the name or place as some people, and it is fitting that yet another iteration of these boards goes out in a bang, but it's still a bit sad to see.
@reimesu You pinky. Gany's reputation. Despite your histrionics about what WORA is and what MSB is, it is still a community. And reputation matters. To what extent depends, of course, and with whom, but it's not nothing.
I won't dramatically peace out or anything, but @Ganymede I feel like you did a disservice to this community and @Derp, if you had been any sort of thoughtful, you'd have stepped down for the sake of the other mods, if nothing else.
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@glitch I'm pretty sure KQ did more than just call Gany a fucking thumb. Pretty sure there was a (at least one) 'fuck you' at some point, and that seems like a pretty personal attack.
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Whether I did the community a disservice will be seen in what it becomes. There is more to the community than the people that I banned or who walked off to start something new. This is something mietze believed in, and she made me believe in the same.
You see the results of my actions and judge me for it. That's fine. But I think we saw and see the community differently. And I am not so vain to think that my departure, whether in shame or hubris, will do anything to fix what I saw as broken.
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@glitch My point is that this place doesn't exactly have a good reputation. Gany's trying to make it better but people walking because they're upset that they can't make personal attacks doesn't exactly make people look good, either. Also, I am not a pinky, right now, I am giant upraised middle finger.
I deleted my comment, btw, (to everyone, not just at glitch) because I am having a hell of a rough time IRL and decided I might have been overdoing it. I'm not exactly even-minded just now. My original comment is going to remain deleted.
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A lot is going on IRL for people. Just take care of yourself. Remember there isn't a comment that can't wait 24 hours to be posted.
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I'm not replying to that directly because I don't want to give the impression that it's aimed at reimesu, but I'm going to use it as a springboard:
People are not walking because they can't make personal attacks. It's the internet. The internet runs on personal attacks (and memes, and memes that are personal attacks). We can make personal attacks anywhere, MSB did not provide some rare fix that is no longer available.
People are walking because community trust was broken. It was broken in the way that snapping a twig five times and then feeding it into a woodchipper counts as 'broken'. An action was taken, there was backlash, the original actor doubled down, there was louder backlash, an ultimatum was given, a ban came down that a huge portion of the board not only thought was unfair, but wildly inappropriate, things blew up, and it came down to 'shut up or else' in somewhat more politely worded terms, to which a massive chunk of posters took the 'or else' option, either via further bans or simply leaving.
Derp was not the cause of most of this (though folks were already going to walk away over the appointment), he was the spark. Gany, you keep writing about how this is all your responsibility, and you're entirely, 100%, beyond belief correct, which is basically the only point at which you've been correct in any of this. But I'm not sure you quite understand what exactly that responsibility was. I lay it out again:
You broke the community trust. There's an unspoken understanding in any community of people, anywhere, in any medium, but particularly online, that those who hold the authority will use their authority fairly, that they will listen to complaints and concerns, and that they will take appropriate action. This does not mean bowing to every whim or allowing every fire to burn uncontrolled - and you are well aware of that - but it does mean that when a bunch of people have a problem with something you've done or not done, your response needs to measured, your response needs to come from a certain understanding of why the problem has sprung up, and it needs to adequately address the issue.
Cold rules-pounding does none of this. I think you fell back on it because you were unprepared for protest, you did not know how to respond to the size of said protest, the vehemence of it, the direct attacks and the anger, because iron-clad rules are comfortable for you, because you feel you can draw a line in the sand and everyone worthy will find where you draw the line to be acceptable, or at least satisfactory in the moment, and everyone unworthy can be kicked out without guilt, because breaking rules and crossing lines are in and of themselves proof that someone who receives a ban deserves the ban.
A lot of people disagree.
The reason why this kicked off is frankly unimportant at this point. You've made your decisions. You're now trying to patch up all the holes by trying to address every angle, cover every possibility, because the solution is, clearly, that there just weren't enough rules, that the reason people got upset at how you handled things is because you hadn't set enough boundaries. Look at this:
This is silly. This is proof of the problem. If you've got to put that many conditions on what is, for every other part of the forum, a simple one sentence description, rather than simply relying on the stickied conduct post, then you need to ask yourself why. Frankly, if you don't want a version of the Hog Pit, then I recommend locking it down for good, and leaving it visible for the sake of preservation. If you want a debates forum, then open a debates forum, but, again frankly, I'm not sure it matters at this point. It doesn't to me.
You broke the community trust, and community trust is a fragile, fraught thing not easily mended, if ever. People in this thread are afraid of the hammer coming down if they don't tiptoe enough. No amount of reassurance will fix it. No number of apologies will fix it. Nothing is going to fix it, because the people who have left, willing or otherwise, are by and large not coming back. You don't fix community trust once it's broken, you rebuild it, from the bottom up, and in this case I'm afraid that is also going to require rebuilding the community itself.
But before you can rebuild anything, you need to understand why it fell apart in the first place. I'm not convinced that's going to happen, but you don't need to convince someone also walking out the door. You just need to set the metaphorical pen down for a moment, set aside the self flagellation (real or performative), and take a good long honest look, not at the 'what', but the 'why'.
And I will tell you right now, the 'why' isn't that you didn't have enough conditions set in place to mire any attempts at protest.
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@kalakh said in Something Completely Different:
This is silly. This is proof of the problem.
This wasn't Ganymede. This was me. The decision was made to change the name. The old blurb was not in line with the new Code of Conduct. So I redid the blurb.
Could probably be less verbose, but frankly, I wanted to get it up and opened again more than I cared about whether it took up any extra space or whatever, and having it there is a good reminder that the rules changed.
If someone can figure out a shorter way to say that, I'm all ears. I'm not married to that blurb. It just does what it needed to do.
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@derp said in Something Completely Different:
@kalakh said in Something Completely Different:
This is silly. This is proof of the problem.
This wasn't Ganymede. This was me. The decision was made to change the name. The old blurb was not in line with the new Code of Conduct. So I redid the blurb.
Could probably be less verbose, but frankly, I wanted to get it up and opened again more than I cared about whether it took up any extra space or whatever, and having it there is a good reminder that the rules changed.
If someone can figure out a shorter way to say that, I'm all ears. I'm not married to that blurb. It just does what it needed to do.
The problem isn't the name, or necessarily even the length (though the length is indeed silly), it's the content and reason for it existing. That's a whole lot of waffle to say 'we're really nervous about this forum', but more importantly, whether the Hog Pit was or was not a problem, it was not the problem. And if the most noticeable response (aside from a bunch of bans) to what went down is "people were too mean", then it's pretty clear the situation was misdiagnosed and will continue to receive the wrong treatment.
Or, shorter: it doesn't really matter how good the patch is if you're patching the wrong roof.
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The reason for the change wasn't that people were too mean. The reason for the change was that it usually devolved into just browbeating and name calling and shouting people down via sheer pressure of numbers.
Your standard dogpiling, bullying scenario.
To steal a quote from someone else: "MSB follows WORA's spirit still. It is a safe place where MUSHers can post criticism of games without fear of reprisal from the game owners. It was a place to call out the bullshit of games and players under the anonymity of another identity."
But the hands-off approach to moderation eventually just turned into a few very vocal minorities shouting down every user that disagreed with them in some pretty dramatically shitty ways.
And that's what the new Code is meant to curtail. You can argue. You can disagree. It can get heated. But it's not going to just devolve into a series of dogpiling personal attacks anymore because people think it's a no-holds-barred section where anything goes.
In short: we don't expect everyone to get along all the time. But we're enforcing a bare minimum of civility and boundaries for those kinds of debates.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@kalakh said in Something Completely Different:
Or, shorter: it doesn't really matter how good the patch is if you're patching the wrong roof.
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@kalakh said in Something Completely Different:
You broke the community trust. There's an unspoken understanding in any community of people, anywhere, in any medium, but particularly online, that those who hold the authority will use their authority fairly, that they will listen to complaints and concerns, and that they will take appropriate action. This does not mean bowing to every whim or allowing every fire to burn uncontrolled - and you are well aware of that - but it does mean that when a bunch of people have a problem with something you've done or not done, your response needs to measured, your response needs to come from a certain understanding of why the problem has sprung up, and it needs to adequately address the issue.
The trust was broken in a seeming majority of the vocal, not the majority at large. The bowing to every whim is the most accurate thing in here and frankly a lot of that bowing has gone to the vocal majority in the past 3-4 years, including allowance of skirting the letter of the ‘law’. Again, call me ignorant, but this continued pressure by a select group that has been a vocal majority has the perception of bullying; and I understand they don't want to hear that term when its applied to them as they like to believe they have the moral high ground. It reads as if, we got some changes here to make MSB better, we should have some control over what's allowed/disallowed from our viewpoint. From outside that viewpoint it looks a lot different. I'm not friends with Mods here, but I can see that being the perception while trying to point out this as a third party. I can be a scape goat/flying monkey/sympathizer if that makes folks feel better in some need to polarize sides here.
Cold rules-pounding does none of this. I think you fell back on it because you were unprepared for protest, you did not know how to respond to the size of said protest, the vehemence of it, the direct attacks and the anger, because iron-clad rules are comfortable for you, because you feel you can draw a line in the sand and everyone worthy will find where you draw the line to be acceptable, or at least satisfactory in the moment, and everyone unworthy can be kicked out without guilt, because breaking rules and crossing lines are in and of themselves proof that someone who receives a ban deserves the ban.
The having rules and sticking by it, including what to do about direct attacks and anger, was ironically advocated by the a large portion of the folks recently banned or having just walked. The irony is there. When this change came into being, a few years after the switch to this incarnation of MSB/WORA/Predecessors (or the one that wasn't hosted on digital ocean I suppose), some folks spoke up in anger, many older folks walked then not liking the change. A whole host of old faces walked then. They said MSB was dead as they walked out the door disgruntled. but it survived.. Then, which lead them to walk, there as a big advocacy for less silent observation by mods to more hands on administration. Just when it didn’t work, more recently, for the advocacy group, its now a bad thing - having some rules were good until it was applied to them. Again, I know I’m viewed as a flying monkey for admin, when I have zero contact with any of them.
A lot of people disagree.
A lot of people do not (I am not saying they agree either, but they are not upset over recent Mod activity) - they're just not largely vocal as the current posters have been in the last few years.
