Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[Boredfrom]

Most political cartoonist are stupid scum. Even the ones that are funny (unironically or ironically).

I imagine that’s why some of them escape to TV.

[benji]

While I have no love for the FBI or any other branch of policing, I do feel that considering we are 10 years out from gamergate and seem to be on the verge of a gamergate 2, there is needed accountability for more extrimist gamers so we don't get into bombthreat territory again.
The image of "GamerCops" however is moderately amusing to me

https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-feds-are-coming-for-“extremist”-gamers.826941/?post=120441612#post-120441612

Second ongoing thread where ResetERA.com members are advocating for the federal government to prosecute people for non-crimes. #ACAB

[benji]

Kelly is the only valid political cartoonist.

Ben Garrison isn't a mere political cartoonist, but an artist.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

Resetera brigading in offsite drama to report Sweet Baby Inc Detected. No wonder PoliEra thought reporting to the FBI was perfectly fine.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

 I saw it.. but I cannot say what it said..!

[benji]

Oh, Cauliflower trying to pretend he's not Poodlestrike, must be a day ending in y. Pound sand.

[Taco Bell Tower]

Those Hecht posts   He is getting the boot for being associated with far right sites like KF, right?  Having a account in KF means you are KF, no ifs ands or buts about it.

[BIONIC]

I'll start off by saying that Finale's post was fantastic...basically a much more polite version of one that I've been holding in my pocket in case I needed to deploy it.



Brady hasn't even, himself, appealed the ban. I ain't gonna give a lot of credence to an appeal when it's just a bunch of online friends trying to tell us what they think he was thinking/may have meant. I don't see any reason to dig deeper into it if he himself can't even come up wih a response to us himself.


I'm gonna copy/paste this part from the post I had prepped:




lol we don't have enemies. Sure, we are aware of repeat offenders and essentially wait for them to do something stupid so they can be shuffled off the site, but that's about it. We're primarily concerned with people who are not capable of having a conversation, and are more looking to score internet points (which, btw, have never ever mattered, anywhere). If you can't articulate your point without being a bigot or trying to dig up personal information on your opponent, we're happy to move you along to your next forum.

Given what I've personally seen of Bdub's all-but-admitting he wanted Brady gone in a previous CC discussion (and how that sentiment implied that PoliEra as a whole was being 'on thin ice' for not reporting Brady's post, implying we were ALL guilty by association), I'm not sure I'd see the point either.

tbh, I wasn't there for the Brady ban, so I don't know all of the circumstances that surrounded it. But I do trust the other members of staff to carry out their duties in a way that makes sense (btw I understand it was reduced at least). But I do stand by the fact that having people brigade tickets/reports/etc. with requests to unban someone or with comments like "wtf was this ban"...they really don't help. I would trust that the person who was banned would be capable enough to submit a ticket and explain themselves.



We've had plenty of bans where people in a community ask for information, or request a rescinding of the ban, just to brigade us with shit in order for us to buckle. It doesn't work, it will never work. The best way to convince us that the ban was wrong was for the person who was banned to reach out and explain why it was wrong. Trust me, it works more often than you'd think.

[USER=3524]Addie[/USER] I was an Airman. Yes I was an officer and everyone hates me for it. I'll take it, because the enlisted were the best part of the job.

This isn't a good statement on this. In this case, you're saying the "correct" way to handle this would be for the poster alone to file an appeal, instead of listening to people rightfully offended by the horrific semantic debate that was impossible to ignore (as you cannot ignore a mod). A survivor of sexual assault opted to have their account deleted. On a practical level, the original person might not care to appeal it.

At no point did another mod or admin jump in to push back, so it's not surprising that people would take Plagiarize's words as the position of the mods overall. And that's why I mentioned (and candidly have to disagree with Finale Fireworker's original post on this) the accountability structure. Maybe mods really do hold each other accountable but it happens secretly if it does (ironically in a Discord, I assume). It's unreasonable to suggest users report a mod's post because 1) that mod could then see the report on their own post and who made it and 2) there's no way to know that more mods/admins won't back the offending post.

The two issues here that users had were from a mod and an admin respectively posting things that, from any other user, should/would get reported and then probably actioned to whatever degree. What's the protocol when this happens and how do users know that it's being followed?

Yeah, and I stand by it. The person who made the post is the best person to explain their reasoning. Maybe it was sarcastic, maybe it was satire - sometimes we miss that because it's not obvious. Especially if said user is a member of a community here, I don't care what their "friends" or what-have-you say, because, most times it's just slurs thrown at us, and the rest of the time it's just assuming what the user meant. So yeah, having the banned user explain themselves makes the most sense, because they can best explain what the hell they were saying, or meant to say.

The assumption here is that we don't have members of staff who aren't also victims of sexual assault, or whatever variety of affliction might be applicable to the post at hand. We do. We are not oblivious, and we are very cognizant of any experiences that may be relevant. We're not gonna get it right all of the time, but we do have people that can relate to the issue at hand.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

Sure, we are aware of repeat offenders and essentially wait for them to do something stupid so they can be shuffled off the site, but that's about it.

Ok so Brady's ban was targeted. Thank you for admitting it to us!

[remy]

lol we don't have enemies. Sure, we are aware of repeat offenders and essentially wait for them to do something stupid so they can be shuffled off the site, but that's about it.

We don't have enemies, just a list of people we keep tabs on to eliminate at the first sign of weakness

[remy]

Big "alcoholic uncle walking in after a bad family argument has finally settled down and rekindling it to make it 5 times worse" energy from hecht.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

I am completely unconcerned about anybody calling "the feds" or the ADL over anything I've ever posted online. B-Dubs and Nepenthe, on the other hand?

[Taco Bell Tower]

We're primarily concerned with people who are not capable of having a conversation

Ban anyone who doesn't agree like GAF which B-Dumbs told people to STFU about GAF

[KillRideMedley]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/march-11-2024-aftermath-saudi-arabia%E2%80%99s-state-sponsored-gaming-booth-is-upsetting-queer-pax-east-attendees.827028/


I bet if there was a Hamas/Palestine Booth 

[Potato]

He does realize that “hate speech” and “antisemitism” aren’t things the FBI could take a site/company down for right? I know Hecht is a drunk which explains his retarded posts, and Slayven is a formerly homeless mental patient so that explains his retarded posts, but you were seemingly the normal one b dumbs. What happened

He seems to think the FBI operates like a TV show where something is reported and a crack team infiltrates to shoot first and ask questions later. Should have secret government agent Hecht inform him how bureaucracy actually works

Hecht is the only confirmed Muslim killer on thebore or Resetera.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

Just accept that Muslims culturally do not want to be associated with the LGBTQIA+ and there's nothing wrong with it! Wait, are you Islamophobic? If Anti-LGBTQIA activities doesn't stop you from supporting Palestine then you should be fine with Saudi Arabia in gaming.

[benji]

lol we don't have enemies.

You don't?

After all the insane shit I've been through, after all I've sacrificed--my mental health, my physical health, what is probably the future I should have had--nothing has offended me more than this. Nothing has made me angrier. Every time I've tried to write up a post about all this it just turns to furious anger, threatening fire and brimstone to those pushing this nonsense.

You know better than most some of the insanity I'm forced to carry around, some of the dark things and choices I'm forced to relive in the quiet moments of the night when there's nothing but me and the night sky.
...
I've given up a lot in doing this job. I no longer have a place in the communities I call home. I have friends that won't talk to me because I had to keep the peace and give people space to speak their individual truths instead of siding with them and my own beliefs. I can't make a blatantly obvious post that's literally just a point made by others without being completely misinterpreted, on purpose, and made to sound like I'm saying something I'm not. My mental health is shit and there's days my physical health isn't too far behind.

Basically, what I'm saying is the people pushing this whole "dubs is a millionaire bought out by M$" piss me off to a degree I've never dealt with before. I've been accused of 200 different kinds of bigotry and xenophobia over the years because we wouldn't let people go off on each other and break the rules without consequences. But this? I've never been as angry or offended in my life and I've been driven to suicidal ideation a few times.

Keep in mind this is all me on a personal level. If anything official gets said it won't be coming from me. I'm so angry I don't trust myself to do it and so it'll come from another admin. I just had to say something, to push back on the nonsense, or go insane.

Anyway, I'm taking some time away. Sorry to everyone on staff if I made your jobs harder, I just couldn't keep quiet anymore.

We warn or ban the wrong person on the wrong day in the wrong topic using the same process we did for the thousands of reports we've done for the past several months where no one complained, and all of a sudden we're here in this situation, where Discord brigades are happening, forum brigades are happening, Twitter is blowing up, I and other staffers are getting Discord pings demanding explanations when we're off trying to live our lives, we're seeing reactionary conspiracy theories form in real time on the forum completely unchecked, members who see what's going on and try to push back get dogpiled, all of this is happening while we're being called out as not having "learned a lesson," when this isn't even the first time we've been here and subsequently not the first time we've actually moved in response to member demand.
...
I've been apologizing about accidentally setting people off since I was an Ace Moderator, sometimes over decisions I hadn't even been involved in. I've had hours long meetings with my team over the course of these years trying to find a way where we can just get to a fucking place, as adults, where something like this doesn't turn into an embarrassing online revolt against people who you can easily target versus the real folks out there actually doing damage in this godforsaken world. Like goddamn, you would've thought that we fired 1900 people.

I'm personally over it. The brigading, the Discord drama. I'm fucking done with it. Members here either want to act like adults, or they don't.

we get a decent amount of weird brigaders and legit stalkers in there who do not need the extra attention.

But really, my bigger question is, if we're serious about trying to temper emotions, is really like...why do a lot of y'all just assume the absolute worst of us? Why do you need to fill in the gaps of knowledge with animosity in the first place?

Sure, I will admit that there's an "us vs. them" mentality when it comes to staff and users, but I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I, personally, don't think the majority of users are really a problem. 
...
But I will also admit that after years of being deliberately taken in bad faith by both consistent sects of users, and understanding that a lot of animosity is fomented on Discords where I have no control before being brought here on the forum and resulting in brigades, that I am, as a person, under no obligation to constantly assume good faith on everyone. I have a right to be suspicious that any given member I'm talking to on matters of policy might be taking my posts off forum to shit on me and twist my words (hell, I know for a fact they're taking my normal participation posts off to places like KF and the Bore to shit on me lol). I have a right to be suspicious that any questions I'm being prodded with are being asked with an ulterior motive, and that they're trying to get answers out of me. I have a right to notice when certain folks who show up time and time again in drama spells suddenly come at me in a topic wherein I've literally never had any actual direct contact with them, but they seem to have a whole lot of deep-seated resentment for me.

Trust is broken. But that goes both ways. You can't have your staff constantly harassed, mocked, and attacked on and off the forums by large swathes of members for extended periods of time, and then go "Gee, I don't know why you think we're a potential outburst waiting to happen; we're not gonna bite." The harsh truth is that y'all are, because outbursts happen without any real foresight on our end, we get shit on as being entirely the problem, and nothing is learned. Respect is further eroded. So you, individually, might be fine, and again we've not had any beef with each other. But at the same time I don't know you as a person and we certainly don't interact enough to be what I would consider a true online friends. Why should I trust you, or any other specific member who I've not had extended offline interaction with, as if you are a close friend?
...
Acting like we've done nothing is part of the frustration I and other staffers have. Again, I've been in the trenches since like 2018 or so constantly apologizing to people, regardless of whether or not I was the one who pulled the trigger on a decision, constantly ensuring people that we aren't bigots, constantly having discussions and roundtables with people, and constantly working with staff in the wee hours of the morning or actually on the clock at my real job(s) to get these agenda items off the ground. Seems like no one cares when we're right here again because we banned a popular-enough member, because people seem to act as if we've done nothing and we've not "learned a lesson." Again, at this point, what lesson is there to learn except "don't ban the people I like?" Because that's not going to happen if the people you like break the rules.

Uh-oh. Now Hecht is throwing his hat in the ring:

But because of the nature of a lot of the Discord communities, they tend to become very insular - you aren't gonna find many Xbox fanboys in the Sony Discord, and vice-versa. They are communities focused on a specific topic/platform - and that's fine. The problem is that they become very, very protective of their own. A "prominent" member in those Discords could suddenly be banned on ResetEra, for a very legitimate reason, and then the rest of the Discord server becomes incensed because "hey, we love that guy, why did they get banned? I DEMAND ANSWERS AND RECOMPENSE!"

To put it bluntly, we do not give a shit, nor two shits, about who your favorite users are. If someone crosses a line, they will receive the same punishment as any other user. If you feel like your buddy is inching close to that line, it's on you to tell them "hey, dude, maybe tone it down a bit," if they aren't learning from their previous infractions on the site. We do not care if they are the person in your Discord that leaks the most information, provides the most insight, or helps the most people out - if they cannot control their behavior on ResetEra, then they will receive the same punishments as the users before them. If they cannot stop their disruptive behavior, then they won't be part of the site much longer. We. Do. Not. Care. Act like fucking adults.

We also are not oblivious to brigading. When a user from a Discord gets banned, we definitely see an influx of users that we know are a part of that Discord suddenly flood reports and tickets with appeals or not-subtle messages on what we can do with our mothers. For those of you submitting those, you certainly aren't helping your/their case. It just shows us that you're stuck in some sort of cult of personality and, let's be frank, we don't care about your cult.
...
Lastly, again. We have no fucking reason to lie to you all. Sure, we're gonna make mistakes. And yeah, you're gonna have to make the enormous leap in trusting us when it comes to ban escalation (speaking of which, where's Twitter's ban history? Facebook's? etc.). We aren't "against you." Sure, there is a sense of "us v them" because we're management and we're the closest form of "authority" on this site.

It's fine. I get it. But we are not going to be able to solve your problems. And we certainly aren't going to be able to suddenly fix people's behavior. A user above (sorry, can't be arsed to scroll up) asked why we don't just perm everyone - it's because if it's something not completely horrible - e.g., hostility - maybe that person is just having a bad day and they just need a break. It is our honest hope that people learn from their mistakes. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. We all benefit when we can just have an actual conversation rather than shouting at each other into the void.

You guys need to understand, there are people who's entire personality is literally hating on specific mods and finding any reason to shit on all of us collectively. Like, I already got a guy following me around and sniping whenever he gets a chance. Nep has a few of them and so do other mods. There's users who will sit in their discords and literally make crap up about us based on nothing but their own head cannon and random delusions until they spill over onto the main forum.

[Boredfrom]

Sure, we are aware of repeat offenders and essentially wait for them to do something stupid so they can be shuffled off the site, but that's about it.

Why people like Messy get so many second chances? 

Feels there is people in the mod team that hate his guts but would prefer that he gets the hint rather than outright ban him.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

[Potato]

Sure, we are aware of repeat offenders and essentially wait for them to do something stupid so they can be shuffled off the site, but that's about it.

Ok so Brady's ban was targeted. Thank you for admitting it to us!

History of histories right there

[benji]

It's great how a month ago they were all "just talk to us like adults instead of screaming at us."

Then B-Chuds screamed at a Discord while plagiarize and Nepenthe stayed silent and the whole staff gaslighted everybody before coming out from behind their hidden blinds in the wake of mass bans to blame everybody else more. While B-Chuds keeps yelling about Kiwi Farms and the FBI murdering staff members. (And two threads cheer for the feds to start arresting people for non-crimes and one of those threads involves the formation of an insane conspiracy theory against which the staff would likely endorse through bans.)

[benji]

This is why the FBI taking down Gamergate 2 and Joanne is more important that ever.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/march-11-2024-aftermath-saudi-arabia%E2%80%99s-state-sponsored-gaming-booth-is-upsetting-queer-pax-east-attendees.827028/


I bet if there was a Hamas/Palestine Booth 

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

This is why the FBI taking down Gamergate 2 and Joanne is more important that ever.

Can't wait for ZeoVGM's take.

[Boredfrom]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/march-11-2024-aftermath-saudi-arabia%E2%80%99s-state-sponsored-gaming-booth-is-upsetting-queer-pax-east-attendees.827028/


I bet if there was a Hamas/Palestine Booth 

The comments from that video are legit kind of creepy... not mention double faced when intersectionality is involved in the conversation.

Then again, I dont go to religious channels so dunno how creepy they get in general regardless of religion.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

She reverted and all past sins are forgiven. YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY FOR HER! 

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

I agree some of the comments do come across as creepy.

[Boredfrom]

Wait, Shaun king converted to Islam? 

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/march-11-2024-aftermath-saudi-arabia%E2%80%99s-state-sponsored-gaming-booth-is-upsetting-queer-pax-east-attendees.827028/?post=120446766#post-120446766

User banned (5 days): thread derail

Saudi government's security relies almost solely on American weapons, which are sold by American congress and government officials, who are voted in by American people. I seem to recall Biden signed a massive arm deal with Saudi in 2022. I wonder how many American people hold it against him in the upcoming election.

Biden's felating of Israel has pretty much sucked all the air out of the room for a lot of his past bullshit, but it goes without saying the man should be in prison for multiple reasons (including what you just cited).

Anyway, this is enormously disappointing to see from PAX. I bet they had a response pre-cooked for this.

Hey, how about we NOT derail the thread from the major issue presented in the OP?

[Boredfrom]

Biden's felating of Israel has pretty much sucked all the air out of the room for a lot of his past bullshit, but it goes without saying the man should be in prison for multiple reasons (including what you just cited).

Anyway, this is enormously disappointing to see from PAX. I bet they had a response pre-cooked for this.

 

But I suppose is kind of touchy to talk about Saudi Arabia and LGBTQ rights without mentioning the religious and social realities of the region… so GENOCIDE JOE!

Edit: BTW, BOYS CLUB AND HOMOPHOBIC RHETORIC! (felating Israel)

[Boredfrom]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/‘reject-aipac’-us-progressives-join-forces-against-pro-israel-lobby-group.827052/

Good, I hope this grows and grows.

It should be political suicide to support genocide, both politically and financially and especially with arms.

But in our fucked up reality, it is the opposite, the safe option is to support it in all its forms, the hard option is any form of resistance to it.

A political system does not have to sacrifice an entire population for prosperity.