Posts made by faraday

@surreality said in Regarding administration on MSB:

does real harm in a way the absurd version simply can't.

Both do real harm. Absurd or not, hurtful words hurt.

@surreality said in Regarding administration on MSB:

This is because while it's not fun to hear, "you're a shit-flinging howler monkey who should die in a fire after being hit by a train and reassembled in a secret government lab full of ex-Nazi sadists!" it's also... ridiculous. It is very hard to take that seriously. It's a lot easier to take something like, "I think your attitude is toxic and you should not be welcome in this community because of it," or "I think you are mentally unstable*," to heart, and be hurt by it, even if the claim is equally absurd in truth.

If someone called me a "shit-flinging howler monkey who should die in a fire" I would be just as hurt by it as someone saying "you are mentally unstable". Both are hurtful, cruel things to say. I frankly don't want to be a part of a community that welcomes either one.

@surreality said in Regarding administration on MSB:

There are peeves -- things that aren't wrong but still drive people bonkers -- that I would prefer people have an off-game safety valve for.

This is an honest question: Why do those peeve vents need to be in the Hog Pit? Can't you vent about, like, "Man I really hate it when people metapose passive-aggressively" instead of making it a personal attack like, "Man, faraday is the worst with her metaposes" ? RL Anger is venting and it's not in the hog pit.

To clarify a few things in response to @ixokai @surreality and @bored

No, I am not saying that people being rude on a forum causes people being rude on games. That's absurd. What I am saying is that a culture of negativity can bring out the worst in people instead of the best, and that attitude can spill over into games as well. Especially when it devolves into personal grudges.

I'm not saying MSB or even WORA is all bad. Both have done good for the community in terms of "outing" bad behavior. I'm just arguing that this good could be done without the mud and hostility.

• Good: A whole bunch of independent 1-star reviews of a game complete with logs and/or specific anecdotes of bad behavior. That's a public service.

• Bad (IMHO): Somebody posting a comment about bad behavior, and twenty people who don't even play there jumping in with torches and pitchforks, arguing back and forth, and the thread ultimately devolving into f-you GIFs. Then the bad staff on the bad game goes back to their players all "Yeah whatever, those MSB guys are just a rabid mob, ignore them and trust me."

For every person from MUSHland I know who posts or lurks here, there are ten more who are all: "Oh hell no" because of the negativity - either witnessed first-hand or by reputation. I think that does, ultimately, undermine the credibility and the good the site can do.

I was never a member of WORA. I created an account, logged on once or twice, was horrified, and left. MSB is better than that, but it's still very negative. Frankly a lot of the people I know who are members here - myself included - are too afraid to post new discussion threads because so many of the threads turn hostile.

Literally nobody is saying "no bad game reviews" and literally nobody is saying "only kumbaya, rainbows and sunshine are welcome, if you have anything negative to say - zip it".

All some of us are asking for is a forum with civilized discourse, where acting like decent human beings toward each other in a vanishingly small hobby is required and not laughed at as some quaint little idealistic naivete. This is the same sort of behavior we say we want on our games, why not extend it to the centralized out-of-game community as well?

But whatever. I'm done tilting at windmills for awhile.

@prototart said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Like, I don't invite people I know RL to do stuff cus MU*s have a huge problem with abusers and corruption and shit like that, not because somebody's rude here or whatever

I'm saying it's related and pervasive. You're free to disagree.

@wizz said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I don't find the toxicity WORA was known for "entertaining" and I have a pretty low opinion of people who do, and it frustrates and discourages me that big meltdowns like the UH X-Men drama tend to draw new faces who want to see more of the same.

Yeah. I get that @Arkandel has no intention of doing away with the hog pit. That's the mods' right and it is not my intention to beat a dead horse.

But I will say this: We talk sometimes about the future of MUSHing, about how hard it is to draw in new players, etc. As someone who knows writers who might be interested, who has a daughter who some day might be interested... I can't in good conscience invite them into a gaming community that is so darn toxic. And I'm not just talking about MSB here, because the same attitude that feeds the Hog Pit pervades the games too.

Now it's not all bad. But it is pretty disheartening.

@tnp said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Some of you will be thinking 'Huh?' which is exactly my point. There's a reason why WORA has lasted so long in whatever form and Idealistic Gamers Unite went the way of the dodo a long time ago despite being contemporaries of each other.

There are numerous reasons some forums succeed and others fail. IGU wasn't a great forum for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with its posting policy. And "this failed once back in 2002 so it will always fail" is pretty thin logic.

@sparks I like your example much better. Churros for everyone!

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

No one says we can't be in the Constructive section and give a completely horrible review for a game or even a staff member. Do we also need to call them a fuckhead?

The problem isn't necessarily the "bad review", it's the snowball effect that one creates on a discussion forum.

Reviewer: "This game sucks"
Game admin: "No it doesn't"
Reviewer: "It totally does. Here's a log."
Game supporter: "Lies! Cruel lies!"
Bystander: throws fuel on fire
Other Bystander: jokes about getting popcorn

And pretty soon we're devolved into hog pit territory and it's hard to pinpoint exactly where along the way things went off the rails.

This is why review sites don't allow discussions about the reviews. They just don't end well. Ever.

And yeah, I get @Thenomain's nudge nudge about discussing something that comes out of a review. I just think that sort of thing works better when discussed in the abstract with cooler heads, like I mentioned to @Three-Eyed-Crow a couple posts back. "When is it okay to spy on players, if ever" can be constructive. "OMG UH Staff is spying on everybody" is a fine 1-star review, but unlikely to end in anything other than a dogpiling dumpster fire when turned into a discussion.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Or put it simply: it is currently against the rules to post 1-star yelp reviews where the public will see them.

I'm actually with you there. I just don't think that forum software like this is a great vehicle for reviews. Would yelp or amazon tolerate one of the review areas devolving into a "You!" "No you!" type flame fest, complete with "F You" meme GIFs? I seriously think not.

Good review sites let you give a star rating and your opinion, perhaps with a chance for a rebuttal from the owner. It varies of course, but a review is very different from an ad is very different from a discussion. What we have here is discussion software trying to serve many masters.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

No one sane thinks that, and it's most often a straw man trotted out by game admins trying to shut up discussion here. Please don't replicate their behavior.

Feel free to consider me insane if you like, but for me it's a very simple matter of cause and effect.

Why do you warn people about a terrible restaurant? Because you don't want people to eat there. What is the natural consequence if you achieve enough momentum to succeed? Nobody eats there and the restaurant is forced to close.

Will the recent kerfluffle bring down UH? Probably not. MUSHers are notorious for tolerating crappy staff behavior in the interests of their own fun.

But you're not going to convince me that the majority of MSB-ers grabbing the torches and pitchforks don't wish for that to happen.

ETA: I'm not suggesting that we should curtail negative reviews. There should be a way to warn people about crappy games. But there's a difference between someone posting a 1-star review on Amazon with their opinion, and a bunch of people getting into a pages-long flame war of insults and defenses.

@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I really wish people would stop waving this "bring down games" thing around.
It's wrong.
It's a lie.
It's being blatantly disingenuous and looking to be dramatic.

It's not being disingenuous when it's quoting what other people have repeatedly touted as a reason for MSB's existence. Now whether or not MSB or WORA ever actually had that power is open for debate.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

how about the fact that the current moderation regime/system/rules/whatever you want to call it seems to be incapable of supporting a thread that exemplifies MSB's purpose. At no point should we feel like our rules exist to protect the dishonest and abusive garbage-people that comprise UH's staff, and yet it seems like the rules have largely served their interests over ours, with a thread about legitimately terrible people being over-moderated, chopped up, etc.

And that comes down to the basic question @Arkandel et. al. need to answer about what is MSB's purpose.

If the purpose is to support civil discourse about MU-related topics, then no - the UH thread did not exemplify that purpose.

If the purpose is to support no-holds-barred discussions to hold people accountable and wield the power of public opinion to bring down games, as the old WORA did... then you're right.

I don't think we can have both, and this thread is illustrating that rather emphatically. Feel free to prove me wrong.

@tnp Haven't we seen how well (not) that works with staff alts?

I don't see how this is any different from being a game admin. I don't expect to have to use "Staff Voice" "Not Staff Voice" on my game's channels. When I correct somebody, they know it's The One Me correcting them because they stepped out of line. It's not like I'm gonna fool anybody if I say "Hey knock it off" from my PC. (Oh, that was Fara talking with her not-staff voice, she didn't really mean it. No, that's just not how people read it.) And yeah, there's a burden that comes with that, because it can easily make people uncomfortable like @Tat said about their bosses. It just comes with the territory.

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I honestly don't agree with that. I've seen it in the past way before I ever was an admin here, when I'd call someone on stuff they said even in the Hog Pit just because it seemed... well, out of line. And folks might have argued back a couple of times but they stopped. They cut it out.

I'm not saying it never happened, but it was the exception rather than the rule in the threads I saw. Perhaps you personally just had better luck calling people on things because folks respected you. But we can agree to disagree on whether it's pointless.

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

This is your forum too, so if speak up if a thread is going the wrong way; please and by all means don't just wait until one of the three of us is around to wag a finger when people are shitting all over a non-Hog Pit thread. Don't hesitate to call someone on it if they are unnecessarily vicious even in the Hog Pit - it's not some magical no-man's land, we are still all people behind the computers. We shouldn't be just ripping into each other just because 'the rules' allow it.

I appreciate what you and @Ganymede and @Auspice are trying to do here because I want a forum where people can civilly discuss MU* stuff.

But here's the thing... us individually calling people out is pointless. We saw that for ages before you took over. There's a large number - possibly even a majority - of posters who think that the entire site should be a hog pit. Even just calling for moderation invites people to pounce on you.

You can try to shove that stuff down below a wall, but it'll always be there - simmering beneath the surface and spilling over into the rest of the site.

Imagine a workplace where employees could be as horrible as they wanted to each other (barring outright threats or racial slurs), but only in the break room. Seriously, what are the odds that the negativity would stay only in the break room? Zero. You've created a mindset that negativity is welcomed in that workplace. You've got habits being formed... Joe and Mary become so used to trading barbs with each other that they forget it's only allowed in the break room. You've got negative impressions being formed ... Joe said something horrible about Harvey in the break room so even when they're working they're constantly sniping/snarking at each other. And you're going to have a not-insignificant number of people who go: "We're already all flaming each other - why does it matter if we keep it just in the break room? This is dumb."

Trying to contain it is fighting an uphill battle - possibly even a losing battle. And it will require a degree of moderation that I don't think either the mods or most of the posters here are comfortable with.

@three-eyed-crow said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I DO think you need to be able to talk about actual THINGS that are not good (spying on players, how sexual harassers are dealt with, and even questionable policies like the No Sex RP thing those Star Trek admins eventually decided to overturn) outside the Hog Pit, because those are important topics.

Constructive topics unlikely to devolve into a hog pit dumpster fire:

• How to deal with harassing players
• When is it OK to spy on players
• All about TS Policies

"Why this game is the worst ever" is unlikely to ever lead anywhere good. It just isn't. I think everyone knew that thread was heading towards the hog pit the instant it was posted.

@sunny Yeah I was trying to agree with you. UH-dude crossed the line when h/she started calling everyone idiots, and selectively enforcing moderating personal attacks based on whether the victim replies is kind of silly. And I wasn't meaning to imply you didn't know the difference between unconstructive/constructive, I was just outlining my personal line in the sand. It wasn't directed at you.

@sunny said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Like, it was OK for dude to lie and call us all pathetic, it was the 'hey this was literally in the log we can all see you are lying' is the over the line into the personal? What?

Obviously the mods will make their own decision about where the line is between constructive and hog pit lies.

FWIW, for me it lies with personal attacks. It doesn't matter if the other person responds. Constructive is: "I disagree with you because <reasons>." Unconstructive is: "I disagree with you and you're an idiot if you can't see why your idea is dumb".