Posts made by simplications

@Derp said in The Pack Discussion:

@simplications

Didn’t you just disavow us with a dramatic exit not even a page ago? Is this one of those “I wish I knew how to quit you” situations? Get in or get out but don’t stand there yelling through the screen door.

Y'all should rename this thread to "a handful of exceptionally problematic people cluelessly demonstrate why they are pariahs". No one is buying the whiplash-inducing spin you're selling. Please leave this thread up forever it is a perfect demonstration of why this board is dead.

This looked like a good shoot to me. Both people being gross doesn't excuse either one. If it was just the manipulative, sexually-exploitative IC behavior to judge on it'd be easier to shrug at. But I took a look at "that other site" and there's a healthy discussion about the long problematic history of the author of this thread. Together these paint a more complete picture. If I needed more corroborating evidence, that the author chose to come here to plead their case rather than where there was already significant discussion by a much larger community is telling.

I've been following both this and the other forum for some time and the responses in this thread (from what seems to be the full complement of this site's active users) are the nail in the coffin I needed to remove this site from my MU*-related links. Y'all gross. Do better.

I'm gonna bow out of this discussion. I appreciate everyone who participated in good faith. I also regret coming in hot to a situation I had cold details on. It's easy to come out swinging when you think you're completely in the right about something but I still need to eat that crow.

I showed up wanting to address something that was, in retrospect, part of unresolved baggage I had from an era in my life where I'd fallen into Us v. Them thinking. This whole experience has given me a reason to rethink how I perceived a group that seemed nothing other than nasty people who enjoy dragging others.

I actually went and looked up in the Hog Pit archive what appear to be some of the conversations that bothered my friends who left the hobby and while the people posting there weren't, let's say, operating at their most kind and generous I recognize that sort of stuff is the product of avalanches of smaller moments of social friction. The posts were hurtful comments based on IC stuff and sort of reveling in the apparent misfortune of those they didn't like, for far lower stakes than the abusive behavior that's being discussed here. And well, that's just how the human animal sometimes operates in groups. Should those people do better? I like to imagine that they already are, or are trying to, and I don't see the value in holding further grudges.

I feel able to let go some unnecessary baggage, focus on the lessons I learned about my own conduct, and try to do better myself. Thank you for the opportunity, and mea culpa, apologies, for what of my own mess I left on the floor. I hope the best for everyone that truly wants to take steps toward improving our shared hobby's community. MU* is something special.

@GreenFlashlight said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Beginning from the assumption that a victim's story must be litigated is indistinguishable from beginning from the assumption that victims are liars until proven innocent. I acknowledge that there is no perfect solution in a situation in which it is impossible to be neutral, but that does not stop me from being deeply disappointed at the direction the advocacy in this argument is leaning toward.

When the topic is narrowly about accusations of creepy/abusive/manipulative behavior I have to agree. It's frustrating to look at this thread and my own participation in it and see what looks in retrospect like advocacy toward limiting investigation into problematic actors. I came late to an understanding that the subtext of this discussion was all about that specifically and not really at all about the other kinds of lower stakes but still harmful group dragging that I was motivated to talk about. I suppose that's a natural risk of jumping in without being fully informed and I think I regret doing so at all now. I'm barely motivated to discuss the topic I was hoping to (and thought I was) anymore either because I worry it's trampling on a discussion about how to best protect vulnerable members of the community from actual predators. Reading back through this thread now with that in mind I feel like maybe this site isn't even the right place to try to address it. The waters here are certainly murky and I can't tell who is participating in good faith, who just wants to continue fighting a tribal battle I thought I understood enough about (holy shit was I wrong), and who actually stands to benefit in some manner from a decision one way or the other.

@TNP said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@simplications said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Having not been a Hog Pit reader, my knowledge of what went on in there came from second-hand reports of people I knew or knew of getting dragged, Mean Girls style, over relatively petty shit that just always seemed like interpersonal issues, miscommunications, or whatever

So in other words, a lot of the second hand reports you heard were told to you by those being accused of something and then declaring their innocence, or that it was being taken out of context, or that it was all a misunderstanding, or 'they' were just over reacting. Totally understandable. The guilty never declare they didn't do it or are being framed and anyone you actually know and like couldn't possibly be guilty of something.

I mean, this goes both ways, right? I can be too permissive with my trust hearing the side of a story said on Discord, the people on Hog Pit or equivalent can be too permissive with their trust in the story that led to someone being dragged. That's also just looking at the case where there's a clear wrong and right. What seems to happen way more in interpersonal relationships is simply that people can hurt each other in small ways that then spirals into actions of increasingly greater magnitude until both parties are hurt enough to make a move that changes the relationship. Most of the issues I've witnessed where relationships come to a head have been like this. No sole responsibility but instead a shared mess of poorly handled failures to communicate and mutual wounding of emotions and/or ego.

The prevailing vibe I've gotten from the responses in this thread has felt like "Protecting the community from known bad actors is so important that we must maintain a stance that accepts public judgment of individuals, and any collateral damage done to actual innocents is acceptable." That's a tough pill to swallow, and yet I don't even know that I can disagree with the conclusion. Maybe, given the complication of anonymity and the vulnerability exposed in a hobby where people regularly establish such intimate interaction, that really is the cost of vigilance.

So, is astute moderation the only mitigation we have available? Not to groove on fresh wounds, but that's cold comfort.

I gotta thank @Kestrel again for their post, it's made something click that I just didn't get the whole time I've been participating in discussing this topic. I bet that sounds like I'm trying to cheekily throw shade given the language they used to address my posts but people get heated when things are personal and I can tell this is personal to them. No hard feelings.

Having not been a Hog Pit reader, my knowledge of what went on in there came from second-hand reports of people I knew or knew of getting dragged, Mean Girls style, over relatively petty shit that just always seemed like interpersonal issues, miscommunications, or whatever. My perspective, and "agenda" if you want to put it hyperbolically, was to address that behavior. I saw it decrease enjoyment in the hobby for a lot of people I met while playing. I saw it drive away people whose sides of the stories I heard. I saw the obvious cases where the reason someone was getting dragged was because they didn't fit the cultural norms established by the privileged group. I'm not the kind of person to engage much in the OOC community, surely due to unresolved pain from the time I was taken advantage of, which happened very early in my MU* career. I took those events personally because I kept my sphere real small and it hurt to see people go.

I'm not interested in silencing voices that are raised to legitimately try to protect potential future victims of awful people. For a bunch of reasons that could fill a whole other thousand-post thread, there seem to be a lot of bad actors in the MU community. I don't think that preventing people from raising awareness about actual bad actors will "repair the community". That would, quite obviously in my opinion, be a step backward.

The behavior I'm concerned with limiting is that that appears much more low-stakes. The jabs at people who just don't fit the prevailing cultural trend. A genuine miscommunication or hurt feeling between two people that occurs without intent of abuse or malice, resulting in someone being frozen out of a game. We often deal with intense subject matter and get into intensely intimate relationships in this hobby. Just like in real life, it's easy for wrong turns in those relationships to spiral out into negative energy that poisons the behavior of even well-meaning actors. The whisper campaigns, public dragging, or character assassination that can come as a result of legitimate miscommunications or interpersonal issues that wound pride or deal emotional damage is the entirety of what I'm interested in addressing. That stuff, though lower stakes than actual predators, hurts the community too.

(edit: a few words in the opening sentence to better express myself)

@Kestrel

Cullen sounds awful. I have empathy for the victims. The personal kind of empathy that comes from a shared experience. I don't feel like sharing much of my own story save the detail that the person who took advantage of me was a prominent member of a MU in-group. Telling my story would have got me nowhere but publicly blackballed. Instead I just cut ties with that person's character. That only got me privately blackballed through a whisper campaign by my abuser's in-group. Didn't spend too much time on the game, or the hobby, thereafter.

I appreciate that you've provided an example of how all of this focus on keeping the stories of certain bad actors alive can, sometimes and through significant effort and luck, result in action being taken against a serial abuser whose individual actions look less problematic until they are considered in the sum. Your post here was infinitely more compelling than anything else I've read so far on this site, so thank you for going through the trouble.

My concern isn't in protecting the super bad actors like Cullen. Honestly, I have to give my position a bit of a think now that I've read about him. Here's what I'm struggling to reconcile, and maybe you have an opinion. How do we allow a way for people like Cullen to be identified, without creating a forum that allows privileged groups to victimize basically anyone they want through character assassination? The stuff that isn't reports of actual criminals but instead the "I think this person sucks" over what are actually very minor personality conflicts, that then result in pages of someone getting dragged by the friends of the poster.

@Misadventure said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@simplications so avoid discussions critical of players and staffers at games? Or just of attaching any sort of suggestion as to motivation or psychology?
...
How would you like to see someone make a post where they want to say X player on Y game created multiple characters in an attempt to secure RP with them after I told them I wasn't interested? Is suggesting a Queen Bee mentality too far? Is mentioning unwanted contact is for the purposes of sexual RP suspect?

I wouldn't want to see any of these as posts. If someone is acting in a problematic way on a game you're on, you should take it to the game runners. They have the opportunity to hear what you have to say, possibly compare it to other reports they may have heard, and get the other side of the story from the accused. This protects all parties.

The person reporting the issue is protected from having what may have been a distressing situation made public. They may also be accusing someone who is popular or a member of a privileged group, and might face retaliation if they were exposed publicly.

The person accused is protected from premature judgment. For bad actors, especially privileged groups punching down at someone they don't like, merely putting doubt into the minds of the wider community about someone does damage to their reputation that will last even if the accused is exonerated.

Your game community (and the hobby community at large) is protected from the chilling effects of a normalized culture of character assassination. If you let this type of behavior go on long enough you're going to find that the people who thrive on drama are the most active and the people who don't have gone on to pastures that are safer, quieter, and more collaborative.

People who thrive on drama find it useful to characterize their behavior as justice-seeking, and then insist that it's the duty of everyone else to enthusiastically participate lest they be lumped in with the problematic. This is nonsense, but insidiously powerful nonsense nonetheless. If, driven by a privileged group, it is allowed to become the normalized mode in a community, it has the effect of driving away everyone who doesn't share the perspective and enthusiasm of the privileged group. You'll end up with a community that is comprised of the privileged group lording over a transient population of newcomers and some other portion who are oblivious to or uninterested in the OOC goings-on. People in the latter groups can at any point find themselves in the crosshairs of the privileged group. Those who thrive on drama and passing judgment, eventually lacking further obvious and acute bad actors, will not cease in this behavior but instead lower the bar for what passes as undesirable activity so that it includes new targets.

This is the mechanics of curating in and out groups. There's nothing revolutionary or equitable or just in doing this. People who are advocating for it have not discovered this one trick that community managers don't want you to know. It is just and only the most basic, tribalistic behavior humanity is capable of.

(edit: Changed an instance of "Players" to "People")

@Misadventure

I was speaking in specifics to begin with (stats about Hog Pit), and then generalities thereafter.

I agree that Hog Pit was not "designed" for the purpose of outing bad actors, but the current of conversation in this thread had turned to the topic of and justification for public discussion of the character of individuals, which was something that went on an awful lot in Hog Pit, so it seems germane to me. I was not a reader of Hog Pit, and my only context for it has been the periodic mentions (on chats/other forums/discords I was part of) of who was getting dragged over there. So from my perspective, and I feel pretty confident speaking for many others who like me didn't participate in but were aware of the Hog Pit, its primary function was to engage in unmoderated character assassination.

As to why I specifically think this is an important topic to discuss in a thread about repairing the community? I think allowing public character assassination empowers privileged groups to run roughshod over the rest of the community. Arx for instance lost a lot of really good roleplayers who ran afoul of the privileged group there, and that group had strong representation in the Hog Pit. The whole reason I'm even here on this site typing this was because someone said "You'll never guess which crew got banned from MSB" and I decided to come have a look.

It's one thing for a social circle to have their own discussions about people they do and don't like. That's normal and cool. The problem is when this occurs in a wider group that has the complexities of larger social hierarchies. That's where you end up with privileged groups punching down at the vulnerable.

What would I do with a forum I had a say in the running of? I'd want to make sure that the forum kept things equitable. Most relevantly for this discussion, that means preventing the discussion of individuals by the group.

The Hog Pit had about 150,000 posts. Even at the liberal figure of 15 bad actors to be tracked for the public good, how's that signal/noise ratio look at 10,000 posts to 1 jerk?

Obviously many of those 150,000 posts weren't about those 15 jerks. How many others were just targets of opportunity getting dragged by people who enjoy being nasty?

There's a reason that avenues of public discussion enforce rules about personal attacks. Unmoderated discussion always creates a scenario where a privileged group are able to punch down at those who aren't. The idea that this punching down occasionally hits someone that actually deserves it is a flimsy justification for making the wider community vulnerable to predation. If you're not part of the privileged group you now need to be careful not to cross the ones who are.

If you think that "this isn't a danger to anyone who hasn't done anything wrong" then you are arguing that this privileged group's moral authority is an essential trait conferred by their membership to the privileged group. And if you're arguing that and part of this group? Check your privilege.

(edit: rephrased the first sentence of the last paragraph to be (somewhat) more clear)

The premise of a forum warning people about bad actors seems thin. These are text games that provide anonymity. Any one of the bad actors can join and make a new character. What outs their identity to the forum is the actions that they take from that point on. They do some fucked up stuff and people who hear about it go "Oh hey, that's fucked up in a way very similar to Well Known Jerkface. it must be them." People on the forum all agree. Got'em.

At what point did the forum protect someone? If Jerkface gets banned from the game he's on, it's not because he's somehow been identified as Jerkface without having engaged in bad behavior. The identification requires the bad behavior to occur. The behavior, and the toll it takes on the victimized, has not been prevented.

In order for that behavior to be reported, it has to have been done to or in the presence of someone that is reporting it. Did they skip reporting it to the game runners and instead came to the forum instead? This doesn't make any sense.