User added to post moderation: cT

I'm aware that usually we avoid public announcements (I'm the only person on post mod who got an announcement for it previously), but also I've been becoming convinced that we need to be more clear about stating what problems we're addressing, because every time we do, we find out that many other people had similar concerns but hadn't said anything.

Last year, around October and early November, there was some heated discussion pertaining to concerns various users had about cleverThylacine (aka cryptoThelematrix, hereafter "cT"). There's some discussion in a thread in That's So Meta I don't think the no rules thing is working, and more in Rules thread derail which was split from that. There's also some posts in her vent thread from last October-November which are relevant to this: [18+] Thylacine Party Den (Around posts #217-220 or so.) In fact, the proposed conversation did at least start, but ended without much in the way of resolution around November 16th of last year: Me, Spock, CryptoThelematrix

This is by no means a comprehensive list, it's just the most relevant stuff.

After this, we were under the impression that cT wanted to take a break from the conversation and return to it later. That did not happen. What actually happened was, a little over six months later, she announced that she was "taking her vent thread back" ([18+] Thylacine Party Den, post #240), and asserted that the things involved would involve "conversations [she's] not revisiting". And here is where we have a problem: cT is unwilling to revisit these conversations, but these conversations involve a number of things that were never properly visited in the first place.

Which is to say, the problems which are actually the most significant and concerning have persistently been glossed over and disregarded. When people write careful explanations of exactly what they are, and are not, complaining about, that gets disregarded in favor of discussions of completely different things.

The biggest problem is not the presence of sexual content in RP, or the existence of sex-positive posts, or anything like that. It's the way complaints about that get deflected, dismissed, and derided. It's the fact that people end up feeling afraid to comment on a thing that upsets them, because they're worried about being attacked. (And the historical record shows that these concerns are not without a basis; cT does sometimes take shots at people who have previously complained.) And that means that we end up with a fair number of people who are afraid that they'll be attacked, or lose friends, if they comment about their concerns. And we have people who are extremely distressed about posts directed to them, or posted in their threads, but who don't feel safe saying so.

The general pattern where someone says a thing is triggering and upsetting for them and they really need to not see people advocating for it, and get a response from cT explaining why the thing is fine, has not stopped. That's despite multiple specific examples being given of this being a problem. The pattern of cT jumping into people's vent threads or other similar contexts to argue with them or lecture them about sex things has not stopped. Users have been severely distressed, up to and including having nightmares about this behavior, because it comes uncomfortably close to the way their abusers have behaved. They don't say anything publically because they're afraid of retaliation. And every attempt to point out that this, not some vague belief that women shouldn't have sexualities, is the problem gets disregarded or dismissed or mischaracterized as something else.

So, to summarize:

1. People are still getting hurt.
   
2. The normal method for addressing this, "people raise their concerns and the behavior changes", is not working, because cT rarely if ever accepts such concerns as a reason to change her behavior. She's very focused on whether her behavior "is wrong", not on whether the people reporting being hurt are actually being hurt.
3. She has expressed a very firm disinterest in further discussion of this.
4. I have absolutely no evidence that she has even correctly understood what the complaints are, and a lot of evidence that she has completely false beliefs about the actual substance of the complaints.

We can't get her to agree to change her behavior even enough to allow people to directly express their concerns, and even indirect expressions, such as reporting posts, have resulted in snarky comments and vagueblogging suggesting that a given user must be the one who complained about a given post, and this makes it difficult for us to get accurate feedback. On the other hand, it's pretty easy for us to look at posts and say "this seems likely to be upsetting".

Conclusion: cT is going on post mod, and we will be vetting her posts for the sort of boundary-trampling thing that people keep complaining about, because her belief that these complaints are actually really about something totally unrelated does not change the fact that the behavior is causing significant distress for a lot of people. She is welcome to resume the conversation in TCHGB, or to not resume it. I would prefer that she resume it, actually engage with the substance of the complaints, and work on correcting the problem, but that's up to her. In the mean time, since she can't prevent herself from hurting people severely, we'll be helping out with that.

I'm aware that we usually do post moderation only by consent, but in this case, we've had more than one person report being mildly suicidal over this stuff, so we're doing the "respond in a relatively timely manner, then sort it out" thing. But realistically, I don't think there's any way this will change until we've actually got confirmation that we've even successfully communicated the problem.

 

I feel like those unreality issues probably don't trump people's privacy unless the people want to volunteer the info themselves, which they mostly seem cool with from my personal experience.

 

I don't think I want to generically show it. We might make a flag that can be displayed, or something, but the default will probably remain that if you want a bit of help with impulse control, you don't have to announce it.

 

not to restate what has been said already 6 months prior to this, but maybe the reason why you didnt get those "I" statements from people you hurt, is because you react like this when something doesnt go your way, and in general, victimize yourself the moment others try to hold you accountable.

that being said, i dont think its on the userbase itself to just click ignore on your repeated awful behavior and pretend you dont exist, when you have very clearly affected a lot of people and made them feel unsafe on the forum.

EDIT: what im trying to say is that this isnt like. avoiding an opinion or a headcanon you dont like or just. not wanting to see a certain someones posts. you have hurt people. you have continued to hurt people. thats something that cannot and should not be simply ignored.

 

Fact check: One post you made to the argument thread was wiggled, for reasons that were described to you in the wiggler itself. Seebs was not making wiggle decisions, mods were discussing it jointly (which frequently happens for wiggling where the issue isn't urgent). Since Chiomi was theoretically moderating that thread, I think ultimate wiggle decision-making power lay with Chiomi, but I know there was group discussion. Just because Seebs said something to you about the reasons the post was wiggled don't mean that they were the wiggler. And nobody ever said they were the wiggler. And since the post went through the mod queue and landed in the wiggler, Spock and Chiomi read it too, and agreed with the reasons for wiggling it.

Kindly leave other unrelated people out of this conversation please. I'll be coming back to that.

See, I don't really believe you, and this deceptively-framed, conditional, hostage-holding language is not helping the case. Seebs did not participate in the tchgb thread. And since you just kicked up a fuss at Chiomi trying to tell you that no, it's not over, and completely ignored my post on the matter, all after you posted about THE DISCUSSION IS CLOSED, this... rings a little false for some reason.

Citation needed, please. Habitual removals, for one thing, but I'm not sure Seebs has ever been the one to make the call to wiggle one of your post.

Hard math says: You have six wiggled posts out of 11,433 posts. This is not habitual

Yeah, so you raised this issue before, and I brought it up even when Seebs was making this post. You'll notice that the precocious thing is not here at all, and I'm not even sure when that specific problem happened anymore.

Actually, fact check, a word search for precocious by seebs on the site turns up one result, and it's about writing code. I can respect being upset by paraphrases that you think distort the meaning of your words and preferring direct quotes, but you might want to apply the same consideration.

So, curious. Are these pings so that these people can come to your defense in here? Because the direct pinging seems a little unnecessary.

Yes, so, I've said a lot of words about why people might be afraid to tell you that you've done something that bothered them, and I put a lot of effort into trying to find a way to say the thing that would click, and it doesn't look like I succeeded.

The issue of continued problems was already there, but the theatrical declaration that discussion is CLOSED, no more of this, is what tipped things right at this moment. But it was going to happen regardless, and soon.

Considering that Seebs was not participating in the argument thread at all, and considering your own anger over inaccurate paraphrasing, I would also like a citation for this. The issue I have been trying very, very hard to discuss is your present behavior.

SEEBS HAS NOT PARTICIPATED ONCE IN THE ARGUMENT THREAD

Seebs would have to butt in first. They made one response to a wiggled post, which informed you why it was wiggled and how far out of line it was. Incidentally, that was six months ago. Seebs made THIS post because they're the site admin. That's relevant. They can't butt out of being the admin, it's got different account privileges than being a vanilla mod, and it's.... their site.

The conversation got taken to argument island because you were refusing to read a thread of "I" messages that were exactly on point. Chiomi quoted them all for you in tchgb. Did you ignore them all there too? Because I put a lot of effort into responding to that thread, and hearing that you're not reading messages from the other people in the conversation is frustrating in the extreme.

Also, a lot of my words were about how people are afraid to confront you directly. That continues to be a thing.

Where do you draw the line between "I" messages and saying nasty things, because I also said a lot about how strongly you respond to even mild criticism. Also, nobody was responding to the tchgb thread except me and Chiomi. There was at least one message from someone else that got wiggled because they weren't part of the conversation. You can't have it both ways.

NOBODY IS ASKING FOR THIS, PLEASE DROP IT.

If this was all it took, we wouldn't have heard from people stressed from the situation. I'm not breaking down complicated social dynamics when I'm getting every indication that my work and effort was ignored before. The people who have issues aren't idiots, and aren't totally unaware of basic site functionality. This sounds incredibly condescending.

Oh good, I was waiting for an opportunity to bring this up. So, remember when out of the blue you were like 'lmao kathy=voldemort' in the no-fighting-no-drama tiki thread and were super pleased with how clever that was, even though it was out of nowhere and inappropriate for the venue?

Kindly leave Alix the hell out of this. Fun story, on my end, apart from frustration over the tchgb thread itself and the conversation you unilaterally declared was over, here's where I'm getting some major irritation from. You posted your little thing about 'discussion is closed, conversation is over, not even the courtesy to say it AT the actual discussion or TO the people involved in the conversation with me, putting the drama behind me'. And then you went right to UA's thread, where they laid down a pretty reasonable boundary (alix, don't respond) and an explanation (broken trust), and that was that. And you took the opportunity to shit-talk someone else, after the explosion was over, in a location where UA.... hadn't really prompted that conversation???

And it was unnecessary and unkind the same way as the Voldemort comment, where, what the fuck? 'I've never see anyone say they trust Alix except... Seebs'. Okay, apart from meltdowns/spirals, which are a temporary state, I trust Alix. That sounds awkward because you know what, people don't typically make big public declarations of positive trust that way. I respect the emotions of anyone who feels differently, but I very much dislike even the implication that someone is speaking for me on a subject like that, and using me as a tool to be unkind with, so here we are. I have no idea what you were even trying to do except say something cruel and hope your friends would laugh along, which, again, like the Voldemort comment. So I'm personally pretty sure that the issues I tried to discuss in the tchgb thread are still an issue, and again:

When you go out of your way to talk shit about people you dislike, consider why people would be afraid of telling you that you've done something that upset them.

 

Just for data, I'm not sure that Seebs has ever directly wiggled one of your posts. In the tchgb thread Spock and Chiomi had final say, and outside of that thread I did most of the wiggling with input from the other mods. We moderate as a team.

 

I know that, which is why I didn't make any posts about it at the time. Your behavior was very reasonable on all counts, and I appreciated very much how you handled it. I also appreciate that when you asked, she stopped. She is allowed to say this kind of thing as much as she wants, which is why it's still in public and not in the wiggler, but it is a perfect example of why the behavior I tried and failed to discuss before is still relevant to the present, and why people (not saying anything about you, just a general statement) might be afraid of the consequences of upsetting her.

 

That wasn't my intention at all, and I apologize if I gave that impression. Since a lot of the things that come up in the conversation have to do with her actions in a public forum, where more people are touched by the the behavior than just the person she is speaking to, it can be difficult to segregate discussion of her actions from specific users, which has come up in several tchgb discussions in the past, not just conversations about cT.

I recognize and respect that you have a good relationship with her, and moving forward, I plan to continue keeping discussions of other specific parties to a mininum, but removing context completely can make the discussion impossible to read. I can't think of anything else involving your friendship with her that is relevant to the conversation at hand, and I can't guarantee you won't come up at all, but the intention is definitely not to use you as a tool, or protect you from her. If users feel threatened or like they need protection, they're free to reach out to the mods, but we aren't making that assumption about anyone who hasn't indicated that is the case.

 

Actually, it seems like the vast majority of the stuff you're having a go at Seebs about is stuff that I did. You misrepresenting my arguments and attributing them to Seebs in order to seem more sympathetic isn't very effective. This is a text medium, the evidence is right there.

 

That's fair! It isn't an organizational thing that makes sense to me, but that doesn't have to be the case for this to be true. It isn't something I'd seen my circle of friends do, so it struck me as odd enough to comment on, but my personal experience isn't representative of wider truths.