Alix is out, for now

so, i have multiple questions,

1) why did you think this was appropriate to post immediately after maya detailed to you about how much this situation affects her as well as others, especially given how long this has been happening. what part of maya's post welcomed this sort of response?

2) are you going to engage with anything anyone says here at all with some sembance of good faith and consideration, or are you going to just continuously be a haunting spectre of alix on the userbase she terrorized and continues to seek to terrorize, for years on end?

3) is there ANYTHING that you can actively contribute to this discussion or anything like it? is there genuinely a point to this?

4) what the fuck

i know it all means very little to you, given that we do have to keep explaining to you that the userbase beyond solely alix are people as well, but the VERY least you could do is defer to the people who have dealt with her behaviour much longer.

barring that, you could, hear me out here, genuinely try to sympathize, at all, with the people who have been deeply affected by alix's actions and behaviour. instead of brushing it off in the face of multiple people that she's hurt because you dont like to hear it.

 

This would play better if you had ever dignified it with a serious answer, but you really haven't. You've never actually engaged with the question of why you're posting. You don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea at all what happened here. And you get mad when anyone suggests that, just maybe, just possibly, "what happened" is an important question to know anything at all about before you start declaring who is or is not at fault, or what should have been done differently. You get mad, and you get smug and condescending, but you don't change the behavior. At all.

For fuck's sake, Alix has complained about what you're doing here. Like, "how do I get Knives to stop" type of complaints.

You aren't willing to do anything that could lead to a productive conversation, but you aren't willing to stop, either. You just insist on picking fights, insulting people, and getting really vicious whenever someone suggests that maybe you should read even one fucking sentence about the situation before continuing to spout off about how everyone is wrong and it's all their fault. It's really sort of weird.

 

Knives is on warn and I'm locking this thread until at least the morning.

 

so before knives came in and turned the thread into the Everyone Notice Knives Now Thread, i had opened a discussion of our ideas about when and why to proper ban someone.

by ‘proper ban’, i should clarify, i mean a ban without an expiration time. as opposed to timed bans, which are used as a “whoa settle down” button rather than to make someone go away. people talk about ‘perma bans’ as this very big deal, final solution kinda item, but there isn’t really any such thing. there’s also no functional IP ban these days; IPs are mutable, and it’s trivial to change yours if it doesn’t happen incidentally. so a ban, as discussed here, is simply a box we can check in the admin interface, and lasts until we uncheck it. the purpose of such an open ended ban is basically to tell someone, “stop being here.”

that being the case, i’m of the opinion that a ban should happen when someone’s being here is a total negative. not a net negative— if it’s a mix of bad and good, we should welcome the good and work on the bad. but when all someone does is hurt folks, make trouble, trash talk the mods, lie, shit the bed and whine about it, i don’t feel it’s right or fair to spend months of mod time trying to talk them into wanting to change. other users are slighted, mods burn out, and no one benefits, not even the troublemaker.

and the frustrating thing is, we see this happening, and then we carry on doing the same thing for another three months.

so i propose that we be willing to consider an open ended ban as soon as it becomes clear a person is a forum-eating black hole and isn’t even benefiting from the attention.

edit: whoops, thread lock happened while i was writing, sorry beldaran.

 

Okay, let's be cool everybody.

 

In which Knives demonstrates that this was all, all along, actually bad faith.

Then why did you say something about "if I don't dignify it with a serious answer"? What were you responding to? You were referring to that question as one you were specifically refusing to answer, now, because it had in fact been asked or implied. No one cares whether it was in that one specific post; you brought up the fact that you were not talking about that question. I pointed out that you never had.

The qualifier "in this thread" is moving the goal posts. Throughout these many conversations, here and on Discord, you've regularly brought up complaints about how Alix is treated, and in those complaints, you have clearly communicated distress that other people are behaving badly. You know this, because we've been over it before. You have done that often enough that everyone is aware of that subtext. Your posts have no other meaning or content.

No. You're getting lambasted for not being willing to read even one fucking post. When someone links you to even a single post, you call it "demonic chanting" that they're asking you to read the thing. Even one post.

It's not that you don't know everything. It's that you don't know anything.

(1) What makes you think no one cared? I thought it was thoughtful of you. (2) What's that got to do with anything? It didn't cause you to have any information on the topics you were talking about.

Sometimes, people are not talking about that one specific post, but your previous behavior. You do a lot of denial and goal-post shifting. You say things, then you adjust and say different things, then you claim you never said the first things, and complain people didn't read the message you just wrote -- but pretend you didn't write the previous one right before it.

People aren't making shit up about what you're saying. People are correctly and accurately responding to things you have said over the course of several conversations, and using your previous attacks on them to inform how they understand your current posts.

People aren't looking for community validation. They're looking for you to fucking stop with the pattern of abuse. And you are doing exactly what you have done every other time you have engaged on this issue, which is (1) attack people, (2) get facts wrong, (3) directly refuse to even look at one fucking post that would correct the factual errors, (4) complain that there's too many people arguing with you, (5) declare that you're leaving because it's not fun.

Your sole purpose in this endeavor is to attack people, make them mad, get a response, then run away because you don't want to deal with the outcome. You are 100% trolling. You knew Alix was "just fucking with" people, but you made a big stink about it anyway, because the point isn't to solve her problems, the point is for you to get attention. Congratulations. You got attention.

You know what's really hurt Alix's reputation and popularity lately? You. Because you've been trolling people about Alix, and making them mad about Alix, and pushing them to all go read up on all the bullshit Alix did so they can argue with things you said, so then they're mad about all that bullshit again. Honestly, you're why Alix is banned now -- because while you're here stirring shit, Alix's behavior is a bigger problem than it was when you weren't stirring shit.

 

Also, I'm not going to claim something as strong as 'none of these concerns have ever been sincere' or anything, but I'm angry at myself for being suckered into engaging so many times even after you described your own engagement style in shit-stirring terms like these and continued to follow this exact same goddamn pattern for months.

Spoiler

I'm not going to continue pouring time and effort into this shit when you keep. doing. this. You light a fire and run off and come wandering back later to laugh at these idiots trying to put out a fire.

If you want people to thoughtfully take in your concerns and treat them in a serious way, ESPECIALLY while you're being insulting and dismissive and refusing to do your homework, you really, really, really need to make some major changes in how you engage with this issue. Everything you are doing is counterproductive in terms of your own goals, and you're sabotaging any hope of future productive conversations as you go.

 

For the record, I think that post was angrier and less charitable than is fair. I'm not editing it or deleting it, but I'll say for the record that I was unduly grumpy, and I apologize.

 

ok there’s like half a dozen Yeling At Knives threads, and while i understand the urge, and am not 100% convinced she’s being deliberately obtuse to keep the attention flowing, i’d like to discuss the other thing here please.

 

Not sure there's much to discuss that hasn't already been discussed approximately enough.

Here's hoping that Alix is right, and it really is just the long history of triggers here setting her off, and she'll do better elsewhere.

 

well, re my post, do you agree that bans should be considered sooner?

 

i mean, people can be genuinely Working On It for a long ass time. i think when we had the first clusterfracas over alix, that’s where she was, and all signs pointed to slow but real improvement.

it’s when she took that improvement and used it to be even worse that i think we should’ve gone “nope, that’s enough blood sweat and tears spent on your behavior, go away and work on your shit somewhere else.”