04-14-2024, 10:12 AM
I think I'd just rather do this this way than reach out to several people individually, plus I'm thinking up more things as I type. This will be a big yap deal, I'll highlight broader points. This doesn't have callouts or anything like that if that's what you're looking for, just thoughts and me being tired
I'm tired. You're all probably tired. There's probably a bit more of tiring things to come out over the next few days, then we can enjoy the next few months trepidatiously. (noun 1.a feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen.) Then more will happen. Cycles are fun.
So, a few things from my limited perspective to take from all this.
My primary one will be the one that people will say, at the very least, shouldn't be so high up in my mind, but it's what I mainly have had to deal with during this whole thing, so it's just a perspective thing. The one you want is the next one, don't worry. We really /really/ just need to stop yelling about things while they're still being dealt with. Or in general. I know, coming from me, wild, given my checkered history. It just muddies everything up, makes it hard to see what's actually going on, and makes everyone mad at each other, mostly for events that shouldn't be so dividing. I do think having a bit more open communication on big issues might help, but that's also a slippery slope. A post saying "hey, x got accused of y, we're looking into it" would make to much known and cause people to yell about things before anything is determined. Honestly, maybe an anonymous ticketing system with these types of situations would help, but that's just another system for people not being paid to do this to manage. That way when someone comes forward with evidence about big things, it'll be known what's going on with it with statuses like "ongoing" "determined to not be an issue" "punishment given" type things, but none of the names or information will be public, so at least the people that know of the situation know what's going on with it. Could be as simple as a read-only channel with threads in it in the discord, idk, things to think about with how to deal with heavy situations that are already known by some in the general playerbase. I don't have any very good answers.
The point what was supposed to be here kind of got mixed up in the one above, with just some more staff whatever blah blah blah stuff, but here's more. Given the Voss/Chief dealio, there's going to be a call for friends not dealing with their friend's issues. I think for upper upper staff, this is just a given. If a community ban is up for someone, one of their good friends probably should be able to speak on it some, but not vote. But then it gets into the mess of what dictates friendship. There's people saying Icey is in dong's group because he's in the server, but he hardly uses that server and hardly talks to us, he just has a similar perspective. I'm not sure what to do with this, if I'm being honest. For non-admins, this is kind of whatever since most things really just come down to the admin vote.
One more side-point on that. We do have to realize, no one here is equipped for some of this. Some people are expecting lawyer/judge/jury level decision-making on some sometimes heinous things from people who have, at times, been as young as 15. (yeah, if deadpool had to deal with this in his short deal with admin, that's how old he was) Most people here just aren't really equipped to be dealing with this heavy shit. Some have absolutely zero time sometimes, others aren't mentally/emotionally equipped for certain parts of it, and some people just have never had to deal with it, but they all still try. It's terrible that a mistake as big as Melodine's has happened, and I'm glad it being called out will hopefully very soon yield some positive results, but just try to understand, admins don't always deal with things in the best way due to so many variables. Consistent staffing is hard enough considering how much mood affects that
Sweeping things under the rug, taking things at face value, all that shit. I'm not quite sure what people want from things here. If staff look into something, and decide "hey, there isn't enough information here to establish a solid pattern, we're going to keep an eye out," is this consider sweeping things under the rug? I feel like that's around where most issues end up, because people are just notoriously terrible at actually saving and providing evidence. There's also the issue of people being uncomfortable with providing evidence. This is a tough issue to crack, especially since I'm just not someone who has had to deal with a lot of things so my mind just jumps to "...just do it it's better than not," which is an objectively wrong stance to have. There are fully anonymous ways to provide that sort of thing, like a simple google form with a photo upload, but again, this can easily be abused by people just sending in random things, or doctored things, and not having to provide context, which is the biggest issue with it. Not having a person to have a back-and-forth with about something to establish some context is bad. For taking things at face value, really I can just say try to think about other possibilities before reacting. We saw it with the Melodine situation, someone lied about their age to protect their identity (which is fine, entirely understandable), but just causes a separate stream of information that is available, so people have correct and incorrect facts to work with and don't know which is which. Lying is always possible, regardless of intentions. We can't make decisions without investigating validity of statements.
The last few are going to be more personal, first is the more negative parts.
I am so, so tired of people bringing up Laced with "you should have known" or "you're just friends with all the shitty people" or "you're two for two" comments. I was friends with him for years. He was a piece of shit during that, but he was the main person in that entire friend group. I had some rose-tinted goggles for those red flags, that's something I have had to come to terms to heavily. He treated me pretty shittily at times, but I just let it be because friends whatever. I basically wasn't allowed to be friends with some other groups of people without just getting kicked from his whole server, and never wanted to open that can of worms. But I never /ever/ saw his whole treatment of women thing, except in regards to Reina. Which at the time, it was almost impossible to formulate a solid opinion. Trying to bring him up as a gotcha, when LOOOADS of people were friends with him as well during this is just flat disrespectful. I'm not perfect, and I'm bad at confrontation with anyone I know personally. And with the Jack deal (sorry in advance for the namedrop) since I probably have to bring this up. I'm not going to stop talking to someone entirely if they're doing something that I think is salvageable. I don't believe in just giving up on people like that. From information I currently have, most of the Jack stuff has to do with a small number of people, and I /still/ have him on extremely thin ice and am trying to help him better that behavior. The thin ice is thinner than you're probably thinking.. To say I'm just letting it happens, or sweeping my friends shit under the rug or whatever is just not true. I've spent my entire history here trying to fix my friends. A lot of them slurred like sailors and were shitty to people because it was funny at times, and guess what? It's gotten leaps and bounds better, even recently. I'm not just going to sit here and let people pretend I'm a shitty person for association when have of this server has had a history of blatant sexism, racism, whatever. Some of it very recent. Some people let their friends treat the people they're closest to like absolute garbage to the point of tears, but because the people involved think they can do better (which from my understanding is a similar case with Jack), it's fine. This is how things should be. I'm not even sure what people want from that whole deal. Do we want him ousted from the community for it? I'm just confused.
Aaaaand the last part. More of this. I'm just so tired. I've spent the last few months trying to fix burnt bridges, trying to be friendly/civil to as many people as possible even if we had a bad past, I thought I was on my way to making the server formerly owned by Laced (then deadpool, now me) somewhere different groups would come hang out, and thought it was doing okay before all this. But now I've lost friends, had people leave all the spaces I'm apart of, everything over things out of my control, that I frankly had nothing to do with and have tried to stay completely out of (and failed miserably), and now I have people looking to me as either a voice of reason or a part of the problem. When I just want to hang out with some people after work to preserve my sanity of being overworked. I'm selfish, but this was just the worst time for all this, and to be being brought into it repeatedly by outside parties is just rough, but it has me to the point where I just want to bury the hatchet with anyone, even the people that hate me (yes, you, person reading this), because I'm just tired. I want to just hang out with anyone and everyone again, this whole being divided over everyone collectively deciding to handle things in the worst way is just so tiring.
Yeah. Idk. Just had to get brain on paper. As an aside, I am sorry to anyone I've snapped at recently. Inexcusable, but just a product of lots of stress, I do hope some people out there would let me talk to them about some things that we aren't seeing eye-to-eye on because...nothing is too deep for me to just not want to be around people. Blah
tldr
communicate more, communicate effectively
I'm tired. You're all probably tired. There's probably a bit more of tiring things to come out over the next few days, then we can enjoy the next few months trepidatiously. (noun 1.a feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen.) Then more will happen. Cycles are fun.
So, a few things from my limited perspective to take from all this.
My primary one will be the one that people will say, at the very least, shouldn't be so high up in my mind, but it's what I mainly have had to deal with during this whole thing, so it's just a perspective thing. The one you want is the next one, don't worry. We really /really/ just need to stop yelling about things while they're still being dealt with. Or in general. I know, coming from me, wild, given my checkered history. It just muddies everything up, makes it hard to see what's actually going on, and makes everyone mad at each other, mostly for events that shouldn't be so dividing. I do think having a bit more open communication on big issues might help, but that's also a slippery slope. A post saying "hey, x got accused of y, we're looking into it" would make to much known and cause people to yell about things before anything is determined. Honestly, maybe an anonymous ticketing system with these types of situations would help, but that's just another system for people not being paid to do this to manage. That way when someone comes forward with evidence about big things, it'll be known what's going on with it with statuses like "ongoing" "determined to not be an issue" "punishment given" type things, but none of the names or information will be public, so at least the people that know of the situation know what's going on with it. Could be as simple as a read-only channel with threads in it in the discord, idk, things to think about with how to deal with heavy situations that are already known by some in the general playerbase. I don't have any very good answers.
The point what was supposed to be here kind of got mixed up in the one above, with just some more staff whatever blah blah blah stuff, but here's more. Given the Voss/Chief dealio, there's going to be a call for friends not dealing with their friend's issues. I think for upper upper staff, this is just a given. If a community ban is up for someone, one of their good friends probably should be able to speak on it some, but not vote. But then it gets into the mess of what dictates friendship. There's people saying Icey is in dong's group because he's in the server, but he hardly uses that server and hardly talks to us, he just has a similar perspective. I'm not sure what to do with this, if I'm being honest. For non-admins, this is kind of whatever since most things really just come down to the admin vote.
One more side-point on that. We do have to realize, no one here is equipped for some of this. Some people are expecting lawyer/judge/jury level decision-making on some sometimes heinous things from people who have, at times, been as young as 15. (yeah, if deadpool had to deal with this in his short deal with admin, that's how old he was) Most people here just aren't really equipped to be dealing with this heavy shit. Some have absolutely zero time sometimes, others aren't mentally/emotionally equipped for certain parts of it, and some people just have never had to deal with it, but they all still try. It's terrible that a mistake as big as Melodine's has happened, and I'm glad it being called out will hopefully very soon yield some positive results, but just try to understand, admins don't always deal with things in the best way due to so many variables. Consistent staffing is hard enough considering how much mood affects that
Sweeping things under the rug, taking things at face value, all that shit. I'm not quite sure what people want from things here. If staff look into something, and decide "hey, there isn't enough information here to establish a solid pattern, we're going to keep an eye out," is this consider sweeping things under the rug? I feel like that's around where most issues end up, because people are just notoriously terrible at actually saving and providing evidence. There's also the issue of people being uncomfortable with providing evidence. This is a tough issue to crack, especially since I'm just not someone who has had to deal with a lot of things so my mind just jumps to "...just do it it's better than not," which is an objectively wrong stance to have. There are fully anonymous ways to provide that sort of thing, like a simple google form with a photo upload, but again, this can easily be abused by people just sending in random things, or doctored things, and not having to provide context, which is the biggest issue with it. Not having a person to have a back-and-forth with about something to establish some context is bad. For taking things at face value, really I can just say try to think about other possibilities before reacting. We saw it with the Melodine situation, someone lied about their age to protect their identity (which is fine, entirely understandable), but just causes a separate stream of information that is available, so people have correct and incorrect facts to work with and don't know which is which. Lying is always possible, regardless of intentions. We can't make decisions without investigating validity of statements.
The last few are going to be more personal, first is the more negative parts.
I am so, so tired of people bringing up Laced with "you should have known" or "you're just friends with all the shitty people" or "you're two for two" comments. I was friends with him for years. He was a piece of shit during that, but he was the main person in that entire friend group. I had some rose-tinted goggles for those red flags, that's something I have had to come to terms to heavily. He treated me pretty shittily at times, but I just let it be because friends whatever. I basically wasn't allowed to be friends with some other groups of people without just getting kicked from his whole server, and never wanted to open that can of worms. But I never /ever/ saw his whole treatment of women thing, except in regards to Reina. Which at the time, it was almost impossible to formulate a solid opinion. Trying to bring him up as a gotcha, when LOOOADS of people were friends with him as well during this is just flat disrespectful. I'm not perfect, and I'm bad at confrontation with anyone I know personally. And with the Jack deal (sorry in advance for the namedrop) since I probably have to bring this up. I'm not going to stop talking to someone entirely if they're doing something that I think is salvageable. I don't believe in just giving up on people like that. From information I currently have, most of the Jack stuff has to do with a small number of people, and I /still/ have him on extremely thin ice and am trying to help him better that behavior. The thin ice is thinner than you're probably thinking.. To say I'm just letting it happens, or sweeping my friends shit under the rug or whatever is just not true. I've spent my entire history here trying to fix my friends. A lot of them slurred like sailors and were shitty to people because it was funny at times, and guess what? It's gotten leaps and bounds better, even recently. I'm not just going to sit here and let people pretend I'm a shitty person for association when have of this server has had a history of blatant sexism, racism, whatever. Some of it very recent. Some people let their friends treat the people they're closest to like absolute garbage to the point of tears, but because the people involved think they can do better (which from my understanding is a similar case with Jack), it's fine. This is how things should be. I'm not even sure what people want from that whole deal. Do we want him ousted from the community for it? I'm just confused.
Aaaaand the last part. More of this. I'm just so tired. I've spent the last few months trying to fix burnt bridges, trying to be friendly/civil to as many people as possible even if we had a bad past, I thought I was on my way to making the server formerly owned by Laced (then deadpool, now me) somewhere different groups would come hang out, and thought it was doing okay before all this. But now I've lost friends, had people leave all the spaces I'm apart of, everything over things out of my control, that I frankly had nothing to do with and have tried to stay completely out of (and failed miserably), and now I have people looking to me as either a voice of reason or a part of the problem. When I just want to hang out with some people after work to preserve my sanity of being overworked. I'm selfish, but this was just the worst time for all this, and to be being brought into it repeatedly by outside parties is just rough, but it has me to the point where I just want to bury the hatchet with anyone, even the people that hate me (yes, you, person reading this), because I'm just tired. I want to just hang out with anyone and everyone again, this whole being divided over everyone collectively deciding to handle things in the worst way is just so tiring.
Yeah. Idk. Just had to get brain on paper. As an aside, I am sorry to anyone I've snapped at recently. Inexcusable, but just a product of lots of stress, I do hope some people out there would let me talk to them about some things that we aren't seeing eye-to-eye on because...nothing is too deep for me to just not want to be around people. Blah
tldr
communicate more, communicate effectively
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