Rules thread derail

((This is spock abusing my mod power to say that this is a first step at relocation, not a statement of where the thread belongs. It seems very TCHGB, but since cT has expressed strong discomfort over using TCHGB in the past, for the moment I'm leaving it in a location where she is comfortable participating in conversations.))

You won't even know then, because we will sometimes move posts for reasons other than "you did it wrong" and/or "someone complains". And we will sometimes leave posts alone even if you "did it wrong".

And, at least in your particular case: In cases where I've attempted to explain to you why a specific thing would have been upsetting to people, or how you could possibly have anticipated that, you've reacted badly. Examples include reacting angrily, and insisting that I was actually talking about a different thing instead of the thing I very clearly identified (I think this is the paranoia). When other people have attempted to bring things up, they've ended up with the impression that you were vagueposting about them, sometimes months later. So have their friends.

So the big problem is that your initial behaviors aren't such a big deal, but your responses to criticism are pretty much textbook narcissistic abuser responses, and even though for a number of reasons I believe that's fleas rather than who you actually are, it still results in people being completely terrified to even bring a thing up. And I'll admit, I am way more concerned about that than I am about whether or not you can reply directly to someone's post about how utterly squicked they are by infidelity with a cheerful response about how you actually think it's really hot. Because one of these things is a problem, and the other is also a problem, it's just that the second problem is you being pushy and intrusive and in people's faces about sex things.

And I'm saying that because it's pretty fucking important, because we keep having all these problems, and you keep thinking they're about sex boundaries, and we keep saying "no, actually, that's not the big problem here", and you smile, nod wisely, and say "ahh, but it's actually about the sex thing, isn't it?" And while there's certainly issues there, they are not the most important issues. And we've said this various ways, more than once, in various contexts, and at this point, I'm saying it here because I think some people aren't aware that we've tried to communicate this other thing which is also important.

That sucks. But all I can do is tell you the same thing I tell everyone else about policy shit: I won't lie to you about policy-type things, or what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it. If you ask why a post is getting wiggled, you'll get told why. If you think it's probably actually for another reason, that's the paranoia talking, and you will be a lot happier if you disregard it and listen to the actual reasons given.

And yeah, it sucks that people have weird rules or boundaries that are hard to understand. And if you want help with that, we can try to provide it, but you have to come into the thing knowing that no one has ever figured out how this works, exactly. This is about instincts. We are trying to respect a set of rules that were developed in part by evolution, and there is no way we're going to be able to give a coherent definition, because the thing being defined isn't coherent.

 

I wrote you because I wanted to explain why people might find a post extremely disturbing. I have no idea whether it was "wrong". I was trying to explain what commonly-used social boundaries it hit, because it was a good example of a pattern of things that other people complain about and you don't see any problems with. I am, quite frankly, not interested in the question of whether it was "wrong". I am not sure what I expected, but what I was hoping for was that, since you've often expressed dismay at not knowing why people are upset, being told why would help.

Yes. Which is why I, and other mods, and I think other non-mods, have been trying to explain why people are mad, since it often appears that you are not clear on what the actual problem is, and when you describe the problem, you keep describing things that aren't the actual problem.

If you think specific people are lying, please let us know who and exactly what about, and also how you are sure that they believe something other than what they are saying. You can post in Caring Void if you don't want to escalate the drama.

But I never said "they must be right because there are so many of them". This is not a question of right and wrong. This is a question of "why are people upset, and can we make them less upset by making small changes." You are clearly very upset about how people are reacting to you. I can explain why they're reacting that way and things that might make it happen less. Whether this is of interest or not, only you can decide.

But also, "having meltdowns when people lie about me" is, again, not the actual thing that has been a primary or even major source of concern. The primary concern is that you disregard common boundaries, you disregard explicitly stated boundaries, and your responses to criticisms on these points are invariably much worse than the initial boundary violations. So far as I can tell, this has actually been the primary concern all along, although people have not been great at expressing it sometimes.

I certainly don't require an apology, because I wasn't hurt. But why assume that there is a "the" person in question who was, or could have been, hurt? You made a public post which took someone's statement of a boundary about a thing they find upsetting and do not want to hear about as an opportunity to talk about how the thing isn't necessarily upsetting to you. Do you seriously think that only that one person could be terrified or horrified by this? Because that is a pattern of behavior that many people are highly sensitive to and find triggering and upsetting.

The post disappeared because it was triggering to some people, because it showed a flagrant disregard for a pretty basic social protocol.

I don't recall telling you that you have to keep your mouth shut. I am merely pointing out that there are actual reasons for which people are being severely distressed by this. You keep translating things I say into claims about right and wrong, when they're very definitely not. I'm not saying you're wrong to disregard a social protocol. I'm saying it was causing enough problems to justify the post being removed, or at least, we thought so. Wiggling posts is not a moral judgment about them. I am not super interested in offering my moral judgments of things, because I don't think people really need or care about my moral judgments.

I didn't even remember whether it was wiggled or not. My memory is crap and I don't actually think it matters.

Not this. Not even a little. Not ever.

There will be no secret courts whose actions cannot be discussed. There will be no gag orders. There will be no pervasive culture of secrecy about the use of power.

Moderator choices and actions are 100% a thing you can talk about, you can criticize, and you can bring up. In the case where the action involved concealing confidential information like someone's address or legal name, we're not going to be super encouraging of, say, reposting the address to discuss why it was removed. But with that small exception, moderator actions like moving posts or deleting things or whatever are 100% public information. We will not deny that they happen, we will tell you what they were, we will discuss why we thought they were good ideas or why they needed to happen.

Because if we start down the path of "oh, no, we can't discuss that [nods wisely] privacy issues", there is no good ending. There is only the thing where you can't find out what happened or why or ask questions about it. That's how you get a friendly, well-liked, very nice person getting multiple stacking lifetime permabans from her best social site because someone deleted one of her posts and every time she tried to ask whether something was wrong with it, she got slapped with a warning for "questioning moderator actions". Fuck no.

This site will always have its flaws, but we are pretty fucking committed to transparency and openness. Yes, policy is always up for public discussion. Yes, anything anyone sees anywhere on the site is open for public discussion and criticism. You don't have to be active in a particular subforum to be allowed to talk about it if you see something that makes you uncomfortable. You don't have to be super active on the site to be allowed to talk about not liking how it's run. Believe me, it would make my life a ton easier if only people who actually interacted here with anyone outside their immediate circle of friends were arguing about policy, but also it would make things worse, because we'd be one step closer to an echo chamber, and fuck echo chambers.

 

Okay, so I just want to start by saying that it's really hard to have these discussions, because even apart from your responses to Seebs, you do have very strong reactions to critical input. And then in a situation like this, where multiple mods are trying to be engaged, that's... multiple people disagreeing with you. And you even say that people might be afraid of you when because (one sec, direct quoting is probably easiest)

But this is a reasonably-sized community. I don't think it's workable to expect a system where a person disagrees with you, and everybody else immediately backs off, doesn't post, doesn't click reaction buttons (since you mentioned that re: chiomi's post before), etc. Which isn't what you're asking for here. But if someone says a critical thing, then there we go, the next person to react to the situation makes 'multiple people coming at me'. Which people are aware is the danger zone. You react really, really badly when you get upset over that kind of thing. And it isn't just that people are afraid to chime in after one person says a thing, it's also that that first person to say a thing is likely to get hit with a lot of anger, outrage, demands for apologies, and can expect you be bringing your anger into other unrelated parts of the forum for a while afterwards (like comparing the person you're angry at to voldemort in the tiki party, which I'm pretty sure was meant to be a not-fight zone. and a nod-and-wink later that yes, you were talking about that person)

Now, anger over being misrepresented, that's a pretty darn understandable thing. I don't know if you missed it in the conversation you're referencing, but the person you're talking about wasn't lying about the unspoilered nsfw. They were mistaken and were corrected outside the thread, and I'm fairly sure I saw them post an apology for it in the thread at some point. I know there's been a lot of telephone happening over that original RP blowup, and I really get your frustration with people getting things wrong when the receipts do exist and aren't hard to find, but that isn't the only (or even primary) issue driving what Seebs is trying to say.

So, anger over being misrepresented. Recently, someone mentioned in a thread that it seemed like your WT rules were pretty controlling. Okay. I'm not really in a position to comment on that, but even if they are controlling, it's totally allowed, and if your players are happy, it's not an issue. And skipping past your direct reaction to that conversation, at some later point, you posted some rules for how people could interact with your vent thread. That's a thing other people have done, sure. Your phrasing sounded a bit like you were expecting mods to enforce those rules if someone broke them (I know you said you didn't mean that, but it really read that way, just like your opinions about anonymous reporting really read like you want mods to disclose identities). Beldaran responded in the thread to clarify that wasn't part of the mods' job.

I've seen a pretty recent post talking about how supposedly the mods are super offended that you have rules for your off-site RP and we want you to abolish them altogether?

When you get upset, you hit back really, really disproportionately hard, and you distort the facts. It means a lot of the times when someone tries to say you did [thing], and that upset them, it gets turned around into them trying to tell you you're a bad person for [thing]. And it makes it really frightening for people to confront you, because the moment they try to say that they're uncomfortable that you're posting about [thing], then it's pretty guaranteed that you'll double down on your right to do it, you'll be really aggressive and refuse to listen, and you'll probably shit-talk them in other parts of the site. Honestly, I think that's a fairly understandable response to an unfair attack. But your history makes it feel like this is a likely response to any kind of disagreement at all.

'So message me privately,' you've said in the past. Okay, let's look at that example with Seebs up above.

Summary: You misunderstood their participation in a chat that upset you, and you had the impression that they only wanted to talk about how wrong you were, and didn't care about your side of the story, even though that's not what they meant to convey. If they weren't involved in the chat and they weren't trying to tell you that you're evilwrongbad... how were they supposed to expect an explosion?

It's a problem that... kind of repeats. I do believe you checked out your PMs and that was the only big blowup. But I've also heard from people who found you really confrontational and aggressive over PM, and that's... still a frightening thing to deal with, especially when it's one-on-one, your word against theirs, and the person is being loud and aggressive and you're all alone. I haven't had PMs with you, but from your public posts, I can see why people would be afraid to reach out privately, without any other eyes on the conversation. So often, these disagreements turn into you refusing to apologize for anything and demanding an apology from the person who was upset in the first place. PMs means asking them to take things to a private room where the existing evidence suggests it's a place you can be corner and be angry at them until they admit that yes, this was all their fault and they're sorry for attacking you so unfairly. Based on the history, people don't expect a more reasonable private conversation, they expect a spot where you can whale on them without them having any chance of support.

So.... no, this isn't just about the sex thing, but that's the only angle mods can kinda sorta address. It's about posts that upset people and meet the criteria for 'potential to do major harm', where the established situation means people are afraid to contact you directly. The nsfw angle is just about the only angle it's possible to address with site guidelines, the rest is all down to context.

For example, the infidelity post. First off, mod discretion is in play when it comes to the wiggler, and I think most of the time, there's no call to discuss the contents of the subforum. It doesn't seem like it would usually be necessary to discuss the comment threads following the wiggled posts. But if here, we weren't allowed to talk about wiggled posts period, that hobbles the whole entire discussion. Discretion isn't the same as a vow of secrecy, and we don't have a vow of secrecy.

In isolation, the infidelity post is pretty innocuous. And Seebs did get it wrong, it wasn't about you being into it sexually. I don't think it would even need spoiler tags in the sfw parts of the forum, and the contents are pretty harmless. In most contexts. I heard from multiple people through private contact and the report function that it made them incredibly uncomfortable. It's because that was a thread where people were supposed to be able to talk about kink things that bother them, nominally without having to deal with being challenged. And being told that actually, infidelity was one of the best things that ever happened to me, that's... getting real close to telling someone they shouldn't be bothered by infidelity at all. The fact that it went up weeks after the post it was responding to gives it even more of an 'agenda' feel instead of a casual conversational aside. In that particular thread, which was supposed to be a zone to talk about things that squick you out (where there are a number of squicks with trauma-based roots), it felt like being challenged on your right to be squicked at all. So, even if the original poster had seen it and hadn't been bothered, other people were significantly bothered, mod judgment was that it was inappropriate, and it got wiggled.

And regarding how the wiggler works, blaming 'some other mod' and the idea that Seebs might have known.... nnnot really? I think general policy is 'neither confirm nor deny' regarding who makes a call, but any wiggled post shows up as a new post alert in the pear wiggler subforum. It would be possible for someone to miss it, but it's pretty obvious. And mods do stay in touch off-site, so if there's any question over whether to wiggle a post, there's probably either conversation in the comment thread for the original report(s), or in the discord. We're not a bunch of lone gunmen. We aren't in perfect lockstep either (I'm spending parts of every workday in discord-free gay baby jail), but we do try to work together.

So, like... if someone had replied to that original thread, and said that the infidelity post made them uncomfortable, would they have gotten a thoughtful, reasonable response, where you conceded that they had a point? Right now, maybe, now that you've had time to privately think about the context, response, etc. But at the time, I kind of doubt it. If they'd confronted you in the thread and people had agreed with them, then that's multiple people coming at you, and we're in explosion danger territory. If they contacted you privately (without being a preexisting friend), I'm not sure they would have done any better. In either case, I'm not sure if you would have pointed to the OP and said that they weren't bothered, so the post is fine. That might be right, but it's also not the point.

This is getting unmanageably long, but last thing, the 'posts that condemn an entire group' business. Okay. So I definitely do see your point, sweeping absolutes do make me uncomfortable. I think that as a community we do pretty decently at trying to steer away from unfair absolutes, though of course we don't have perfect performance or anything. But what's really frustrating me is that you just spent a lot of this thread hammering on us for not having better guidelines, when of course anyone would be able to understand there are exceptions to the rule.

Now, turn this around and apply this to conversations about minors sleeping with adults.

If someone is posting about how they, as a minor, were sexually taken advantage of as an adult, and that the adult should have known better, they don't want to hear 'not all age gaps.' You've posted a number of times about how you slept with adults before you were 18, yes. Other people on here have done the same thing, one of my very best friends was 18 when she started dating her 14-year-old now-fiancé. If people are supposed to naturally understand that there would be exceptions to the site rules/guidelines, why is it so different when you feel like your personal life experience exception needs to be explicitly acknowledged, every time? But people are afraid to confront you, or tell you that you're making them uncomfortable. If someone is upset over being exploited by adults when they were young, they don't generally want to read that statutory rape laws only exist to control the sexualities of our daughters. I'd dare to say that people are pretty darn upset to read a sentiment like that.

It's the 'not all men' of sexual conversations. It's not possible to acknowledge every exception every time, it's not a workable way to have a conversation, and it's not fair to ask that of people. When people talk about age gaps, they generally aren't talking about how your friend in his fifties doesn't think he's allowed to date friends in their thirties. Maybe some people would be upset by it, I don't want to use absolutes, but people would generally defend his right to do the thing. If you're fifty, you can date someone eighty for all I care, someone ninety. The age gaps get less tight and less relevant as people get old, and treating a fifty-year-old like they're dealing with the same thing as someone barely out of high school is disingenuous and derails the actual point of the conversation, all while turning things in a direction that carries the feeling of 'if you were young and exploited by an older person, actually nothing was wrong.' I'm sure that's not what you're trying to say, but it's how it reads.

But then the most frustrating part of it is that you want these acknowledgments for yourself, but aren't very willing to give them to other people. Someone is bothered by the idea that Twilight is a happy, healthy romance, because it reminds them of their personal abuse history? I've seen this conversation, I've seen the steamroller that hits them. Maybe there's lip service to the idea that other people are allowed to read things differently, but anyways there was nothing wrong with this relationship and you're wrong about x, y, and z. Maybe you don't know that this conversation has upset people, because... people are afraid to confront you.

 

All of that said, there does need to be space to unambiguously talk about what's legal and illegal.

California's first penal code in 1850 proscribed sex with girls under the age of 10. The age of consent was raised to 14 in 1889, to 16 in 1897, and finally to 18 in 1913, where it has remained since that time. So unless cT is waaay older than previously implied, what happened was unambiguously criminal regardless of how people felt and continue to feel about it. Putting aside individual circumstances for a moment, people need to be able to talk about the legality of underage sex and why those laws exist without being condemned.

 

The point of TCHGB being on moderation is to better keep a handle on participants so things stay focused and there's less commentary and only invited people. There was a whole thing.

 

I think that depends a bit on whether or not they were also hurt by the thing. Sometimes people find a thing triggering to see, even if it wasn't personally directed at them, and if it was in a public place, then they were also affected.

 

How do you know what other people know, as opposed to what you think they should know? I know my memory is crap and that I remember things pretty close to correct but not actually correct sometimes, but I also know that this isn't lying, it's having a bad memory.

I described it about the way it came across to me. Maybe I misread the tone. That happens! But it happens to other people as well, and if a lot of people take the thing that way, then that's going to be the effect it has on them.

Maybe. But maybe they could say that and you'd not be fine with it. And whether or not it's your intent, a lot of people have felt really bullied, and of course they're not telling you directly, because they are afraid you will bully them more. So of course they can't tell you. So other people say "hey there is a concern here". It's up to you where you go with that.

 

This is what I was trying to get at in my post. Given your history with public yelling, even if you say it only applies in these very specific circumstances, I don't know how many people are left who believe you won't tell at them if they speak up at all, or that you'll be any nicer in private. I've seen you get hostile at posts questioning you even when they were presented pleasantly, directly, and without a dogpile. Maybe your close personal friends trust you not to shout them down, but other than that, I really, really don't know.

 

Khan has asked for moderator assistance in saying she is not comfortable with you using her experiences in support of your arguments. Since the two are not directly related (ie. this argument does not involve her), I'd like to ask that you please refrain from doing so going forward. Thank you.