What I didn't realize was that they would hand the keys to the most prolific and dogmatic GAF off-topic posters.
This is not what happened. It might look like that but, from the inside, I can tell you there were many different forces at play, over time, that led to resetera being what it is in just two months.
It's been a disaster. At this point I'd say the old GAF mods and admins were, on the whole, preferable.
I have a lot to say about this. Much of it I don't want to say in public out of politeness. Besides Sweet Nicole's irrepressible tendency to detonate at even the slightest possibility of transphobic content (which comes from some deep seated paranoia and insecurity), I think the admins' hearts are all in the right place. They are not interested in any kind of ideological crusade or social authoritarian project. The best way to tell what their original intentions were is to return to the site's beginning:
- they set up rules designed to discourage dogpiling and toxicity
- the rules broadly concerned themselves only with hostility and civil conduct
- the rules were enforced even (and especially) when it defended conservative members and viewpoints from vicious posters like cream and lime
- internally, debates about this were always resolved by admins who said (paraphrasing and ad-libbing to recreate tone) "ffs, if they're not breaking the rules, not promoting hateful or prejudiced content and they're keeping it civil, they're allowed to post".
- in my memory the people who ever "got got" were those who broke other rules like sharing questionable sources. This rule also includes left wing propaganda! I warned someone (or closed a thread, I can't remember) for spreading alternet nonsense.
- the most arbitrary thing that would happen is warning someone for a "thread derail". I could justify this but I doubt the bore cares. I'll simply say that we made sure to distinguish between "a person on the wrong end of a dogpile" and "some jackass that really insists on being a moron".
You can tell these were all mostly good things because in the first few weeks of the site the amount of engagement in this thread over the site was... really low. Now, I can check this thread daily and get a good laugh out of it. This isn't to say the admin are perfect. I have a million grievances I've shared in private with a couple of people here and wouldn't volunteer to be their internet hall monitor again even if they paid me for it. I'm just saying the admin aren't the problem.
I'm not going to describe exactly what did go wrong because that would involve naming specific people for specific reasons. But just so this post isn't an "I know something you don't know" post, I will say what I think should happen. The admins (the "mod captains", specifically) need to do put their foot down. They need to look over every mod action in the mod logs and say "this is inconsistent with what we're trying to do or what we want our mods to do". They need to make sure the mods have the baseline intelligence and competency to be trusted with telling people off. This is more important than it was on GAF because warnings are transparent, so if you're going to be the world's biggest jerkoff and tell someone to stfu, you better be right. And at minimum you should know how to write an english sentence. It might seem funny (it certainly did to me) that a video game forum is "serious business", but everyone here who makes fun of a spelling error obviously agrees that it shouldn't be unserious business. And, although I'm not sure how to accomplish this, they need to not feel pressured by the warning system which should be renamed the tattle-tale system. We kept track of report-abusers while I was there but that doesn't change that one controversial post would always get a storm of reports.
