Hi there. I'm posting here to directly respond to posts and because I received a PM from someone in this thread who I respect very fully and whose counsel I value. I'm not here to make you guys feel uncomfortable or like you're being punished. If you feel like you want to reply to this in here, feel free to do so--normally we ask that replies on mod stuff go in PM to avoid derailing but I'm saying this just so it's really clear I don't have anything to hide here. If you feel like replies in here will derail the thread, reply to me in PM if you have any input. If you think I'm an idiot, go ahead and tell me--I'm not here to punish anyone.
RE: Tamerlane; it wasn't my ban, but it's in keeping with how we moderate. He was rude, hostile, and openly insulting to other users. That's grounds for a ban. That's something we ban for. Sometimes it sucks when someone is a bright and positive contributor (someone here linked a post that seemed to me to be pretty thoughtful) who also comes with some baggage; the hardest bans to do are bans against users that you like, if only they'd avoid doing that thing that gets them banned. I'm sure Hito can vouch that there have been a lot of users over the years that carry with them positive contributions, but also rule-breaking baggage.
If other users were also insulting to him on the same level, we would go through the thread and deal with that. The "you have an anime avatar, your opinions are invalid" poster was banned, so I'm not sure where the double standard is at this point. Sometimes one user gets picked up before another. Sometimes when we moderate a thread we take action on a few users individually and then wait until a moderate has time to sweep the whole thread. Not asking you to give us the benefit of the doubt, just to say that sometimes it's worth waiting a little while before forming a conclusion about the conversation going on behind the scenes.
I am sorry that you feel you don't have a safe space there. Some of what you're assessing is correct and a function of the way the site has grown. We've talked a lot about it in private, about trying to make people feel more welcome. We have a pretty good handle on open insults, but maybe not casual disrespect. We have more work to do. I do think that you are right to note that, to some extent, the culture of the forum has shifted in a way that the majority opinion is sort of socially outgoing, "well-adjusted", and behaviours associated with "nerdiness" can get frowned upon or get a bad reaction. I don't know that it's easy to police for that or easy to solve beyond encouraging people to be nicer to each other as a matter of basic decency.
Personal advice threads are particularly bad for it, because the formula is generally: Someone who is lacking a basic life skill makes a thread asking for help, they get mocked for lacking a basic life skill making it harder for them to learn it. I think a long time ago on GAF someone would be more likely to get a little bit of good natured ribbing, but now it's probably at the point where the tone of the thread is mostly negative. Sometimes the person making the thread contributes to it by being pre-emptively cocky or defensive (or really not even making a minimum amount of effort to think through the situation themselves) but that's not an excuse.
I do not agree that it's constructed among explicitly heteronormative lines because I think both in terms of our rules and in terms of our forum culture, we have a generally safe and welcome space for users regardless of sexual orientation. It's not perfect, of course, and I think everyone on staff takes improving it seriously. We're not paid for this, we do this because we want to make a positive difference on the forum and help out.
If you ever see an indication that you're not welcome anywhere on GAF, please tell me and I'll step in to make sure you are.
I know Kabouter very well. He is not a party bro. He is not an alpha male. He is not an aggressive guy. I have never seen him get angry, I have never seen him be rude to someone. He is an extremely tolerant guy and I have never seen him hold it against someone that they are weird or different. And he'll be the first to admit that he's a weird guy too. He's Dutch, he likes bad european electronic music, he's quiet, he likes history and tax law, he likes bad made-for-TV movies like Mega Crocosaurus vs Mecha Sharktopus, and he's really hard on himself. I don't say this to set you up on a date, but to make it clear that whatever he said, I hope you know that he's a good guy and I think he'd be a good friend to anyone in this community if they needed help, including in dealing with the poster who was rude to Tamerlane.
I'll take your word that he said what you said, but just to provide some context I will expect that he meant it in an extremely light-hearted and joking manner. I can personally tell you that I've never seen him moderate against people on any kind of basis like that. He is one of the most progressive people on the team, and he is one of the most active in moderating against hostile, racist, or hateful viewpoints. And yeah, he makes fun of me for my weird eccentricities too, and my weird tastes. And I make fun of duckroll. And duckroll makes fun of EatChildren. And EatChildren makes fun of Kabouter. We have a very jovial atmosphere. Maybe sometimes when we post stuff that we think comes off as light-hearted or joking, other people read it as insulting or personal. I understand if you don't take my word for it.
When we make suggestions to EviLore for new moderation candidates, we look at all communities. I know Dresden posts here. Other people whose names we kicked around on a sort of long-list and then short-list were involved here too. As a staff, I promise, we're not hostile to the contributors here.
As a general point to the thread, I understand if you feel like it's hard to participate on GAF outside this thread. I'm sorry if people make you feel that way. I'm especially sorry if anyone involved in moderation does. I understand the temptation to stay in here where you feel safe and comfortable, and I wouldn't stop anyone from doing that. But besides some of the jerk users, there are also a lot of great users outside the thread. I hope you do manage to participate elsewhere here and think of yourself as part of a bigger community. We're going to try to do a better job at dealing with threads where no one is doing anything bannable, but a lot of users are just being low-level not very nice to others. I'm not sure it's even possible to curb that behaviour at a place this size but hopefully we can make an impact. We're still going to ban people for being openly rude and hurtful, but we're trying to do better to stop situations where 10 people gang up on one, the one becomes defensive, and then crosses the line--if we don't stop that, then we encourage a situation where everyone is just nice enough to avoid being banned, but no nicer, and that sucks.
Sorry for taking up space in here. Have a nice day.
Okay, I think that I can address the things that I intended to address now. I'd first like to thank you again for being willing to do this--I know that it would be easy to write us off as a bunch of malcontents, and giving some legitimacy to our concerns is something that I appreciate. Even if you're a representative of the site I hope you don't feel like I or anyone else here blame you or any other staff for the behavior of some members; you've always been nothing but upstanding in your personal conduct and moderation style.
I'll only touch on Tamerlane briefly as I trust your judgment on the acceptability of his behavior. I suppose that this is normal, but because I liked him I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt after looking through his post history in the thread and only wanted to be sure that he hadn't simply become more aggressive in response to getting dogpiled for controversial statements. If this was not the case, then there's no question that he stepped over the line in how he couched some of his statements. It's unfortunate. I think that most of us were bothered more by the then-inconsistency of what
hadn't incurred a ban alongside him; all people are more sensitive to injustice when it's a kind that's personally familiar to them, hence, I think, the outrage over that poster not having received a ban when the recipient of his insult was. This has all since been rectified, of course, and whether or not it was a result of the discussion that it sparked here, I'm glad that the staff doesn't tolerate ad hominem insults. I appreciate the insight into moderation habits and will definitely be mindful of the fact that simply because bans have been handed out in a thread, it doesn't indicate that all other posts have already been vetted for acceptability.
About the shift in GAF culture, I understand that many aspects of this are beyond the scope of the staff's ability to control; there's no way to preempt the types of condescension and bullying that come with a prevalent alpha male forum culture, and I suppose that it's not the staff's place to try to intervene in the natural evolution of a forum's culture so long as it's not evolving in a way that is becoming blatantly exclusionary. I am not bothered in the slightest by the fact that OT is now more about lifestyle topics and less about specific interests; it's simply the institution of an accompanying "nerd hierarchy" dictating the inherent value of another poster's opinion based on something as arbitrary as which hobby they choose to express out of the constellation of
all of their hobbies that has become stifling and supremely discouraging to my participation outside of this thread.
I could simply take the route of greatest utility and simply
not use an anime avatar on GAF (and quite often I actually do disable my avatar when posting in OT to maximize the odds of receiving a response when I pose a question), but I can only wear one hat at a time and this thread is where I spend the majority of my time on GAF (this one thread has higher-quality discussion on the medium than
every full-fledged anime forum on the internet) and, moreover, I'm violating my principles if I conform due to external social pressure. I'd be delusional to feel entitled to
anything I like being above criticism on GAF, but the sense that a significant percentage of posters happily accept stereotypes that suit their worldview and
revile me as a human being over nothing of consequence whatsoever is, well, it's just sad.
I know that "heteronormative" was an iffy word to use to describe the nature of AlphaGAF's attitude toward AnimeGAF because GAF has a track record of punishing intolerance for the LGBT community. I would never, ever, ever, ever try to equate liking Japanese cartoons with the infinitely more profound effect that sexual orientation has on shaping one's identity, and only bring up the issue of heteronormativity because the first recourse of many posters with a violent dislike for anime is to accuse those who like it of being pedophiles; implying that someone is heinously sexually deviant because they engage in a hobby that defies traditional gender roles. Now, I know that part of this is due to the very real issue of lolicon that unfortunately exists in some quarters of the medium, but without even going into the obvious issue of stereotyping and the dumb fallacy of thinking that two things are equivalent because they share an art style, I also think that it makes it much easier for other people to make such an accusation without ever stepping back and considering just how truly abhorrent the accusation is that the people they're accusing are somehow weird, emasculate, or childlike themselves. (Of course, it also doesn't help that there are usually a few people in "anime iz 4 pedos" threads that double down on the stereotyping to spite their opponents, which just creates confirmation bias.)
Just look at the way that Bronies are regularly pilloried on GAF, regardless of whether or not one thinks it's healthy to so closely identify with a single franchise. People openly despise them for liking something "for children" or "for girls", individual examples of genuinely strange or deviant people in the fandom are dredged up to smear everyone by proxy, and every possible insult imaginable is rained down upon them, but most usually in the form of insinuations about social prowess or sexuality in keeping with AlphaGAF's values. There's definitely an in-between space where people reject some gender roles but still accept others where it's still perfectly acceptable on GAF to treat these people poorly for not being "real men" or whatnot.
About Kabouter, the context for his statement was a post in a thread titled to something to the effect of "are you biased against posters with certain types of avatars?". Someone here compiled a list of dozens of posters who responded with "anime avatars", and among them were both Kabouter and EatChildren. Given your description of who he is as a person, I can accept the possibility that he was being facetious. Keep in mind, though, that other people here can attest to the fact that I'm particularly frightened of inconsistent moderation given the fact that I never quite got over being banned as a junior on uncorroborated suspicion of being an alt and so others here are likely not so concerned that a mod's personal tastes may affect who they give and do not give the benefit of the doubt. What I think is most useful in your detailed description of Kabouter is the important reminder that it's impossible to make a judgment of someone's character based on a single thing that they like. Most of us here, not just in this thread but on this forum, are well-rounded people with a diverse set of interests and, most importantly, aren't
defined by their interests.
Japanese animation is just something that I like, no more and no less than anything else that I like. I'm an aspiring history professor, I enjoy traveling, cooking, and photography, I adore most premium cable dramas and comedies, I stay informed on politics and current events, I take care of several animals, I game, I'm learning woodcrafting, and I even have several "boring old man" hobbies that I'd probably also be mocked by GAF for like model railroading and antique collecting. Any one of us here has a list this long and longer of things that we enjoy that have
nothing to do with a 100x120 image, which is why my skin crawls when it's used to dismiss anyone wholesale for
any reason--I'm sure you're more than aware of what happens if you voice a controversial opinion in a Nintendo thread with a Microsoft avatar, for instance. GAF has wonderful ideals and I'd love to see more people actually living up to them.
I've taken everything that you've said to heart and I'll see if I can't get myself to dip a toe into the OT waters if the opportunity arises. You're a massive asset to this place, Stump, and I hope you'll keep dropping in here from time to time, even if what you see might be bewildering!
