An Open Letter To Communication And Community Betterment · 9:18pm Jul 6th, 2021
It is with a heavy heart I write this blog. For a little over a year now I have seen this site slowly grow a bit more hostile and divided from what it was prior. It pains me, it pains my body, heart, and soul. And I'm sorry to say I've had a hand in it myself for causing perhaps some unneeded hate and vitriol. I'm truly sorry for that.
I believe the catalyst for this all started with Marenheit 451 and Aryanne. Something I participated in, but have many harsh criticisms for. People were correct in that there was some natsocs involved in it. They were cowards hiding in the Aryanne server and 4chan. And while they deserve criticism for their toxic beliefs, that does not extend to the majority who simply fought for artistic freedom. I joined in, before knowing everyone involved, because I didn't like Derpibooru's response to the drama. Same with my good friend Tiddy. Whom, I might add, also puts down the natsocs and the horrible people that hid behind the good part of the cause to cause unnecessary hate.
So, I see where both sides of that were coming from. There is bad apples in the community that need to be weeded out. But to put the blame on people who are not those people is not the right way to go about it. This is what brings me to the crux of this blog, communication.
I have had too many to count instances where people I care for could have resolved drama well before it escalated to fights if they just hashed it out with one another. If they left not agreeing, at least they talked it out, and if they did find a middle ground, all the better. This fighting on this website over what should and should not be done has not been handled well. That includes people I personally like and agree with. There is a lack of true talks and instead is pointless derailment of arguments to put the other down and raise their own ranks.
This is not a blog taking a middle ground, because I do believe something needs to be done. I don't think this site should stay the same as always and that we do need to take better care to make this place a welcoming environment. I think we have failed in a lot of ways in doing so. For the last several days I once again been spending most of my free time trying to bridge a gap between two close friends of mine. Two people who have been known to be enemies of each other, who have cause both so much unneeded stress and anger. Yet, through diplomatic talks and expressing one's feelings, we have come to an open agreement to talk with one another and put an end to it all. The waters will be clear and everyone will be better off for it. Perhaps will find something to help bring better peace for the future and betterment in how we handle using the site going forward?
I know there is people out there who have said some things to me that have made me go nuclear. And to that, you know what, I forgive you. I may have been hurt, I may have had to deal with so much because of it, but I forgive you all the same and would be more than willing to talk one and one to get to know one another better. To further good communication and help this place be a better place for us both. And, if I have done something that is quite wrong, I am sorry. I'll try to do better next time.
I say this all because I truly want what's best for this site, the people I care for, and the betterment of the community as a whole. And that if we could just stop fighting for just one moment, one single moment, and open our hearts even when hurt to talk with people we find hatred in, perhaps then we could find some peace that could make us all the better and happy with ourselves.
Perhaps I'm being to idealistic, perhaps too sappy and unhelpful to those truly hurt. I do not know, I just want to get my words out there that I feel strongly. I feel so strongly that it makes me sick and I have cried more times than I could count over the past couple days because I've felt so much hurt and just want to find solutions that will help all those I care for.
So I ask, how are we going to better this community? Are we going to fight tooth and nail over the little ground there is to have, or are we going to truly get to know one another and talk things over diplomatically?
I hope for the latter, because a foundation of love, truth and care is much stronger than one built on fear and hate. Even when that fear and hate could be coming from a good place. I think we could overcome those obstacles.
(Art by Jowybean).
This sounds like something out of an anime pilot episode.
5550371
My whole life is an anime pilot episode.
And there's the catch: who decides who the bad apples are, and who decides when the weeding is finished?
It'll end with attempts to deplatform The Enemy rendering the site non-viable and knighty pulling the plug. I'm keeping my copy of the Fimfarchive up to date. So, when that inevitably happens:
You're absolutely right...communication is necessary to further a well balanced community...
That's on the mods. It truly is. The flavor of a community is, ultimately, that of its leaders. The mods have chosen to only minimally enforce the rules on harassment and personal attacks, and that has had the inevitable consequence of those very things taking over the discourse. There's a reason every responsible website has those rules. That they aren't properly enforced is the fundamental reason this community is tearing itself apart. It's not the community's responsibility to self-police, because the average member of the community doesn't have the ability to stop those who would attack and harass; that power resides with the mods alone, and they have, unfortunately, abstained from wielding it. Perhaps, as some have alleged, this is knighty's fault; I do not know. But I do know that a fair few of the bad actors (from all sides) should have been banned or given ban warnings long ago. If you don't clean out the muck, it's going to start to smell.
5550376
Can't wait for a full season.
5550382
Ironic, but w/e.
Very good blog. It's something we need to think about as a community such that we all don't destroy ourselves in mutual bitterness. I want to take a swing at answering the question you propositioned in this blog.
Community degradation has been happening across many fandom and interest groups, both big and small. Hell, this sorta thing even happened in a quilting community. The reasons why this stuff keeps happening across the internet in a lot of the same ways (even across interest groups that don't have anything to do with each other) are still unclear to me, and may not be clear until several decades down the line. I would like to propose a hypothesis, however. I'll try and keep it as concise as I can.
TLDR: for many reasons, right now there is a very potent social contagion going around. This contagion hooks onto people and starts encouraging them to enforce social purity amongst their peers, very "with us or against us" thinking. It can be expressed numerous ways, but right now the most successful way it's expressed is as a "we're fighting nazis, you aren't a nazi are you? If you aren't, you will follow these strict rules and do everything the group says". This expression is extremely effective currently, for a few reasons:
There's definitely a lot more to why things are the way they are now. However, I wanted to make the point that the whole "fandoms being bitter and attacking each other bit" is most likely a consequence of the current times. The worst part about it is that these social ideas are extremely good at dividing people.
Like, let's take the whole "Aryanne" situation for example. The accusations assumed that everyone who created or liked content about that OC meant they were a neo-nazi or sympathizer. This approach IMMEDIATELY puts everyone on the defensive, and baits them into rushing to one side ("I'm not a nazi, and Im going to burn bridges and cross metaphorical oceans to prove that!") or another ("Im going to be called a nazi no matter what, so I may as well embrace it"). Not to mention that in general, when people are put on the defensive they tend to be much more emotional and angry than not.
So what's the solution?
The general solution is "assume the best out of people, and that you can have a reasonable argument with them". WAY easier said than done obviously, especially because most people are going to be on the defensive because of the points listed above.
One solution ironically may come from a political community called PoliticalCompassMemes on Reddit. The reason why they are way more chill and reasoned about talking politics may simply come down to how you MUST explicitly state what political alignment you feel closest to before posting. If you don't put your political alignment in your flair (a title that appears next to your username on comments), everyone will chastise you for not doing so and downvote your posts no matter what you say. It seems weird to require people to label themselves, but at the same time the result seems to be that doing so prevents people from pretending to argue in good faith if they aren't.
Anyway this post is WAY too fucking long, but I hope that it's at least interesting to someone to read.
I've probably mentioned this far too often by this point, but I originally joined this fandom back in 2018, in large part because of my exhaustion with the vitriol consuming the Star Wars community at the time. Between the drama surrounding G4's finale in 2019 (and the show's twilight years in general), last year's aforementioned Nazism debacle, and our current state of affairs, more and more I've had to grapple with the possibility that this community risks becoming everything I tried to run away from by joining it in the first place. Granted, the fault may lie with me for being too green and idealistic, but I feel as though the point stands regardless.
Point being, I can’t help but worry that, if things continue along this path, many who would've otherwise gladly contributed to this fandom will be deterred. After all, why would they want to participate in a community that, in their eyes, supplies them with little more than hatred and bitterness — especially if, like me, they were drawn in by promises of their exact opposites?
I'm afraid I don't have much to say about the blog itself, but regardless, thanks for posting it. I can't really articulate why, but I certainly needed to hear its contents for one reason or another.
Apologies for the errant rambling. As you were.
5550385
I really appreciate the long thoughts here, and yes I do agree that reality has been pushing people on edge and that anger and frustration has been extending to this site as well. The system isn't doing anything in peoples eyes, and much the same with the mod staff her in peoples eyes. People shouting, clawing and biting their way to the top to scream to the high heavens.
Which is why I propose open communication over it all, as that puts the people in charge on edge and defensive when they are being slammed by a whole cast of people for change in one way or another. A real talk, I believe is needed. Because at the end of the day that's what's going to happen anyway, people sitting down to talk, and the more it is ignored or fought over the more it's going to continue.
Way easier said than done, as you put it, yeah. But I want to put good faith in people to put the money where their mouth is and bring betterment to this site through talking and letting the boiling water come to a rest. I know it's unreasonable to find that in everyone, but I believe a good lot of people can come together here to do good, because I know the core of this community is good.
5550391
All voices are welcomed, and I'm glad you found something in my words.
5550384
I've had plenty of strong opinions that people have disagreed with, but to my knowledge, I have not instigated harassment nor participated in personal attacks. I have been uniformly and consistently against such things, regardless of the target. I can only imagine the "irony" is coming from the all-to-common guilt by association wherein I'm judged by the actions of that other person that I agreed with on that one point X months ago.
Edit: Unless the irony is that supposedly I'm in the "no-censorship crowd", when in reality I've always been on the "censor calls to violence and personal abuse" crowd. This happens to align with the no-censorship crowd when the topic being discussed is to censor something which isn't a call to violence or personal abuse, but that does not mean I agree with them on everything ever.
This is another good post. The bitterness and division though, I think has brewing for a while, and was bound to erupt after so much went unexamined and unaddressed for so long...
Yeah, I tend to be tad skeptical toward anyone agitating for """creative freedom""" by creating a flood of Nazi imagery.
And nowhere is this more apparent than right now. The two biggest participants even were friends... And I can't help but agree with both of them in large part. It all seems like it could have been so avoidable...
But I think I agree with Narrative Style here, the mods will need to play a huge role in this. Previously, they have taken a very hands-off approach, but this does not seem to be working very well, clearly. And the huge underlying issues that caused all this mess are still there in all their ugliness, remaining utterly untouched for the most part.
5550418
Yeah, open communication with the mods on betterment going forward is something I highly agree with. I don't hold ill will towards any of them, nor will I ever shout at them to get their asses in gear. I, however, think there needs to be an added effort to talk all of this through, as their is a powder keg brewing on this site as it gets more and more hostile. It's disheartening.
Man, you got good intentions, and I don't mean to sound like the party pooper, but... you're asking us to find a way to solve a problem that has been getting worse all over the world lately. If we manage to find some cure, the entire FimFiction community will earn itself a Noble peace prize
.
That said, I believe there are a few things we could try to do:
1. Discourage and call out bad behavior. If someone acts like an ass - even if (or maybe especially if) he is your friend, don't encourage him with upvotes but tell him his behavior is not OK.
Ask yourself how many times did you push that upvote button on your friend's post, even though he was acting like a jerk to someone? Or maybe you downvoted someone's answer just because you didn't like the guy. I know I'm guilty of both - especially the first one.
In the real world, a reasonable person would come between the arguing people, grabbed his friend and said, "Man, calm down! You may be right, but you're acting like an ass right now!" Instead, on the net, people acting like a-holes too often get anonymous prise in the form of upvotes that only fuels their bad behavior further.
Acting like an ass should never be treated as a virtue.
2. If someone tries to clarify, actually LISTEN and assume he was misunderstood as he claims. Don't assume that he's an a-hole that only tries to save his ass.
Let's take DumbDog's blog as an example of what I mean:
Unfortunately, this seems pretty common - assume the worst, and don't let another person explain his view. Or even if he does, ignore it and assume the worst anyway because he 'must be' lying. Add AD1 to that, and you have a recipe for disaster that leads to a quick escalation you see in many posts/blogs. If people could just listen to the explanation, many misunderstandings would be avoided.
If we could manage to somehow implement those two, IMHO's number of senseless dramas would drop significantly.
Fundip!
5550453
Yeah, it's true a lot has been asked, but you bring up good points as well as others here. I believe there has been a fundamental issue with talking things out and seeing people as a target to attack and not get to truly understand. For whatever reason there may be. And that we should call out those people who we are friends with when they are in the wrong. That is very true, I have done that multiple times now.
5550454
Choccy milk!
5550391
Wanna write articles for my friends Star wars news website?
5550461
Thanks for the offer, but I'm good.
Despite all that's happened today...thank you for this. This is the kind of discussion I like to see on here, where everyone is largely respectful towards each other, and where a positive environment is paramount.
If we had more people like you, this site and this world would be a far happier place.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you, and God bless you. So, so much.
5550569
Thanks so very much, comments like yours make my stance on this feel so valid, and bless your heart too!
My sentimental side wants to believe that Friendship Is Truly Magic, while my rational side keeps doubting "Is that so?" Don't want to kill the mood, but my faith in people behaving themselves has long since lost. How can you know your kindness won't be seen as weak by others? How can you know they won't take advantage of that? Well, trust is built on both sides as the saying goes, so if there's any possibility people can truly become better, what you did is the first step.
Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to a better community, a website where friendship is magic. I do admire your efforts in making contribution. All the best wishes for you, friend.
5550593
Yes, those are reasonable doubts, and I think maybe sometimes being unreasonable and getting a little sappy like I have could help. If we are to find any common ground it is gonna be through wanting it, and wanting to do it through good communication and care for others. Best of luck to you too, and I hope the rest of your day goes well.
5550404
Double ironic.
Also:
If you're saying this, then you have no self-awareness.
5550871
From my perspective, somebody who I only vaguely recognize as having seen around the site before has decided to try to start a fight with me under a blog that is emphatically pleading with people to not start fights. Why? Who gains from this?
5550871
I agree with narrative. You are being a bit rude and unreasonable with him over something inconsequential. I don't mean any offense, I'd just prefer if we didn't try and antagonize anyone.
5551733
Basically all of this, yeah. It's idealistic, but if we are gonna overcome a lot of the trouble in this community right now, we gotta be able to come together for just a moment and talk it out as civially as possible.
The 'le epic ownage' stuff can be funny, I am guilty of it myself, but it just rules people up more on what should be a serious discussion.