In Regards to Wild West

[Elvis Starburst]

No it didn't. I've been posting in WW a long time, and in my entire time there, I have never once been harassed. Not even slightly. I don't even think I was insulted. Furthermore, I've posted a lot of serious threads there and I never once got one of those "kill yourself" kind of responses. And I was one of the more abrasive posters! That leaves one of two possibilities.

1. Everyone is afraid of me.

or

2. There actually wasn't a problem at all and people here are too sensitive.

Or #3. It just never happened to you specifically, and you didn't enter the threads where the problem was obvious

 

[Baffle]

Actual harassment is dogging a user from one topic to the next, not contributing anything and just wanting to flame the other user.

I'm pretty sure just one instance on non-consensual dogging is harassment.

 

[RaikuFA]

StatusNil getting a warning for stating his opinion in a civil manner demonstrates just what is wrong with the site and it's moderation.

You know this post my be the proof that WW was bad. 1. You didn't insult anyone 2. You actual made an argument. Thanks for adding something to the conversation.
As to your argument, I honestly got through half StatusNil's post before shutting it down. I have to read more to make an appropriate comment. You though, in this post, imply that the mods should change to suit your particular needs. I'm going to have to ask for evidence for change over everyone else.

The problem some have with it though is if it were some other members saying the exact same thing there'd be no consequences for them.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

It just never happened to you specifically, and you didn't enter the threads where the problem was obvious

And where was the problem obvious?

I'm pretty sure just one instance on non-consensual dogging is harassment.

So that's it then, huh? One mean name and off with their heads?

 

[Dr. Thrax]

If some really can't learn to ignore a post, are they people who are really worth banishing the entire WW for?

Who says the WW was shut down because people can't "learn to ignore" posts?

When does the responsibilities of the site team end and the responsibilities of the user begin?

A user's responsibilities is to follow the rules. The responsibility of the site team is to oversee the users and make decisions regarding the forum's structure and function. That's it.

When is it no longer the site's fault concerning content that is posted?

When the site explicitly enables certain content to be posted, it's the site's fault. WW explicitly had no rules, which meant that behavior that was absolutely unacceptable outside of WW was acceptable there.

Is it really too unreasonable to expect a certain level of maturity out of our posters?

Apparently, yes. Otherwise WW would still exist.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

If some really can't learn to ignore a post, are they people who are really worth banishing the entire WW for?

Counter point, are the people who were posting posts while claiming they should be ignored worth keeping the WW open for? Do we just cede the Wild West as a shitpost hellhole because some users cry 'but mah freedomz!' whenever they're feet at held to the rules?

When does the responsibilities of the site team end and the responsibilities of the user begin?

Right around the time harassment threads pop up apparently. The mods had 2 choices, either start banning users in the WW for WW post, or close the WW down. If you ask me you Wild Westers got off easy.

When is it no longer the site's fault concerning content that is posted?

What content, when? If the site posts an article, sure they're responsible for that article. If a User posts something, that user is responsible for that post, but the Site has the right to discipline the User because its their website, their rules. The Escapist isn't a constitutional right, its a choice. You are choosing to be here, and part of being here is following the rules of here. You are free to go elsewhere if you want.

Is it really too unreasonable to expect a certain level of maturity out of our posters? Do we really need to be everybody's babysitter whenever others call them a mean name?

The rules are the rules. And the Wild West proved that yes, its too unreasonable to expect maturity from posters. When given a cookie, the mouse pissed everywhere and threatened people.
So now the mouse gets no cookie. The wild west had its shot, it fucked it, and now its gone. The Wild west is responsible for the wild west closure. The mods didn't make anyone post there, didn't force harassment and bullying, didn't force threats and horseshit, it was the users, the unreasonably immature users.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Who says the WW was shut down because people can't "learn to ignore" posts?

A user's responsibilities is to follow the rules. The responsibility of the site team is to oversee the users and make decisions regarding the forum's structure and function. That's it.

When the site explicitly enables certain content to be posted, it's the site's fault. WW explicitly had no rules, which meant that behavior that was absolutely unacceptable outside of WW was acceptable there.

Apparently, yes. Otherwise WW would still exist.

Counter point, are the people who were posting posts while claiming they should be ignored worth keeping the WW open for? Do we just cede the Wild West as a shitpost hellhole because some users cry 'but mah freedomz!' whenever they're feet at held to the rules?

Right around the time harassment threads pop up apparently. The mods had 2 choices, either start banning users in the WW for WW post, or close the WW down. If you ask me you Wild Westers got off easy.

What content, when? If the site posts an article, sure they're responsible for that article. If a User posts something, that user is responsible for that post, but the Site has the right to discipline the User because its their website, their rules. The Escapist isn't a constitutional right, its a choice. You are choosing to be here, and part of being here is following the rules of here. You are free to go elsewhere if you want.

The rules are the rules. And the Wild West proved that yes, its too unreasonable to expect maturity from posters. When given a cookie, the mouse pissed everywhere and threatened people.
So now the mouse gets no cookie. The wild west had its shot, it fucked it, and now its gone. The Wild west is responsible for the wild west closure. The mods didn't make anyone post there, didn't force harassment and bullying, didn't force threats and horseshit, it was the users, the unreasonably immature users.

You know what, I don't think I can proceed further here because there's apparently a completely unfixable perception that the WW was some awful awful place where only pedophiles and nazis post. Where just because someone was mean to them once, that automatically makes the entirety of WW unsalvageable.

I'm just gonna say this though. If it's not here, where should one go if they want to post somewhere without having to worry about a ton of rules? And don't say 4chan. 4chan sucks ass. Do we have to go to the deepweb now just to have some true free speech? I mean, I'd make my own forum, but as I already discussed, I can't do that at all at the moment. So now, the people who genuinely liked the WW are stuck.

And it's not like I can't follow the site rules. It's not like they're completely and totally unreasonable. The problem is that there is no choice whatsoever now. You all say that's a good thing, but if that's true then maybe I don't really belong here anymore...

 

[Dr. Thrax]

You know what, I don't think I can proceed further here because there's apparently a completely unfixable perception that the WW was some awful awful place where only pedophiles and nazis post. Where just because someone was mean to them once, that automatically makes the entirety of WW unsalvageable.

You're literally the only one saying this.
EDIT: While I won't deny there were plenty of other threads that weren't utter shitshows, this is a case of a few bad apples spoiling the entire batch.

I'm just gonna say this though. If it's not here, where should one go if they want to post somewhere without having to worry about a ton of rules? And don't say 4chan. 4chan sucks ass.

Go to 4chan.

And it's not like I can't follow the site rules. It's not like they're completely and totally unreasonable. The problem is that there is no choice anymore. You all say that's a good thing, but if that's true then maybe I don't really belong here anymore...

... "There is no choice anymore"???
Before the WW was introduced there was no "choice". Rules are not optional unless there are no rules.
Maybe the mods will re-make the WW into something that's got relaxed moderation instead of the unmoderated landscape it was. Maybe not. If following the damn rules is too much for you then maybe you really don't belong here.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Beggers can't be choosers dude. You can't ask for a place to post whatever you want, then say 'Not that really famous place everyone knows you can post whatever you want, I don't like it!'
Try the YouTube comments. Try 8chan or memechan or 9gag or chanchan.

As for not having a choice, yeah, duh. You're on this website. It has rules. Rules for this website are not optional. Same with literally everything else.
You want to drive on the road, follow the laws. Want to walk down the street, well we got laws for that too. There is no place on earth you can do literally whatever you want, all the time, consequence free. Even streaking in the antarctic has the consequence of being really cold - its not the antarctic clamping down on your freedom to be warm.

No one is saying you have to leave. But if the WW was the only thing keeping you here, then we'd understand if you showed up less.

 

[NewClassic_v1legacy]

I think it's telling that so much of the discussion in here, what was in Wild West, and what happens in Religion and Politics comes down to an Us Against Them argument.

So much of the discussion dwelling on there being an Us and Them means no matter the decision we make, it's always Against Us and For Them. This is the nature of the discussion because it's an inescapable frame, no matter what, it always looks like someone's playing favorites because every decision simultaneously benefits one group and spites the other. That's the framing you've made it, so having a productive discussion will always devolve back to "You did this to Us, so you're favoring Them." It's untenable, you know it is, and you don't care because no matter what you'll always feel like we're part of the Them.

I hope you consider that when we're making decisions, it's not an Us and Them. We don't pick which group we're siding with on a binary. We look at behaviors, we consider how those behaviors interface with the forums at large, and we try to keep track of the results. This is no different from the editorial side of the Escapist having an editorial voice, nor is it any different than what video series got commissioned, nor was it any different than which mods were chosen, or what Community Management application was picked. All of these were a long-string of measured decisions made resulting in the forum growing from a Featured Content and Gaming Discussion board to a large forum with a Reviews section, badges, usergroups, premium members, and for a while, a rules-free forum where users were given a lot of leash. All of these decisions came from trying to make the community around this site an ideal place to visit.

The Wild West did not fit that metric. It was boundless in its energy to argue, to spite. So boundless, in fact, that what happened in its walls were spilling out into the rest of the forums. Personal fights found there way beyond the fun-loving free-spirit walls of the place. And further, much of its comings and goings weren't that fun-loving, just free to be vitriolic. That isn't the shape for the Escapist.

If that's what you want, you're welcome to leave. Please find somewhere you'd enjoy more; life is to short to dwell someplace you're unhappy.

 

[The Lunatic]

Well.. sorry to say it, but too bad.
The mods and CM are the only ones "running" this place now, with Defy seemingly sitting on their thumbs and twiddling them. The shitty thing about making promises while running a place is that things change and sometimes promises have to be broken. That doesn't necessarily mean that they like having to break a promise, but sometimes it has to be done. And no matter what the mod team did - aside from just doing nothing - people would be crying "Power trip!" "Mod takeover!"

Making the Wild West lawless and utterly separated from all but 3 of the site's rules - one of which was introduced after the infamous Wynncident - was a mistake. I'd have been all for a relaxed moderation forum where people could have their image threads and whatnot that wasn't made to strictly adhere to the CoC but still had rules, but the WW was poorly executed and it allowed people to harass other users without reprisal, and they did.

Y'all were given a thing and abused it, so now you have no thing.

Of course, I'm not saying otherwise, but, you don't get to pretend you're not ignoring and breaking promises when you are. Call it what it is, don't try to bullshit it.

As we saw, the majority of people being abusive and harassing were people who didn't even want Wild West around to begin with. Not use their attempts to get the place closed as an excuse to do so. As was done with Wynn, effort should have been made remove those trouble makers. It feels an awful lot like this was the plan all along given it's something people in charge have been trying to do repeatedly.

Just as Fiz has said, Defy holds the keys, they could turn this place off tomorrow, that doesn't mean they should.
Likewise, just because the mods can remove the wildwest, despite us already having a vote and saying "No", doesn't mean they should.

 

[Red Sentinel]

B. It's not what the original staff of the site implemented.

... several times it's been noted that the mods or staff did not ask for the WW to be implemented, it was a 'higher power' as Noe describes it that put the WW in place. The mods didn't ask for it, so I think they can do whatever they want with it since they're essentially the ones in charge now

Exactly.

And this time the disgruntled people can't go whining to Archon on twitter in order to get their way.

 

[RedRockRun]

I don't really talk about it on here that much, but yeah, I have a STRONG interest in all things paranormal/supernatural. X-Files and Coast to Coast AM had a pretty big impact on me when I first encountered them.

Coast to Coast AM is great. I used to tune into that when I was at university. One guest claimed to be part of a research group that was working on time travel and power from frame-dragging. When asked if they had successfully traveled to the past and future, his answer was, "Short answer: Yes." The way he described it, they had been able to travel time in a lab setting, and I envisioned some scenario where someone steps within a chamber which contains a localized pocket where time has been altered.

Although thinking back on it, time travel doesn't really seem like it could ever be viable for actually travelling into the past or far into the future. Given time and space are proportional, if you travel any distance forward or backward in time, you'd also have to travel through space, and if you're going backwards, then you'd end up in empty space since the Earth is moving something like 50,000 mph through space. Likewise, if you were somehow able to travel back in time without travelling through space, you'd also end up in emptiness because the Earth had not yet reached the position in space that you'd inhabit upon making the jump. If you were to travel through time and space and end up on Earth in the past or far future, then it would be an alternate universe.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

I think it's telling that so much of the discussion in here, what was in Wild West, and what happens in Religion and Politics comes down to an Us Against Them argument.

So much of the discussion dwelling on there being an Us and Them means no matter the decision we make, it's always Against Us and For Them. This is the nature of the discussion because it's an inescapable frame, no matter what, it always looks like someone's playing favorites because every decision simultaneously benefits one group and spites the other. That's the framing you've made it, so having a productive discussion will always devolve back to "You did this to Us, so you're favoring Them." It's untenable, you know it is, and you don't care because no matter what you'll always feel like we're part of the Them.

I hope you consider that when we're making decisions, it's not an Us and Them. We don't pick which group we're siding with on a binary. We look at behaviors, we consider how those behaviors interface with the forums at large, and we try to keep track of the results. This is no different from the editorial side of the Escapist having an editorial voice, nor is it any different than what video series got commissioned, nor was it any different than which mods were chosen, or what Community Management application was picked. All of these were a long-string of measured decisions made resulting in the forum growing from a Featured Content and Gaming Discussion board to a large forum with a Reviews section, badges, usergroups, premium members, and for a while, a rules-free forum where users were given a lot of leash. All of these decisions came from trying to make the community around this site an ideal place to visit.

The Wild West did not fit that metric. It was boundless in its energy to argue, to spite. So boundless, in fact, that what happened in its walls were spilling out into the rest of the forums. Personal fights found there way beyond the fun-loving free-spirit walls of the place. And further, much of its comings and goings weren't that fun-loving, just free to be vitriolic. That isn't the shape for the Escapist.

If that's what you want, you're welcome to leave. Please find somewhere you'd enjoy more; life is to short to dwell someplace you're unhappy.

But there wasn't really a compromise made at all. It was just a total and complete shutdown of WW with no dialog, no change in the rules planned, or even any forewarning. Hence the "Us vs Them" mentalities that are here. There is no middle ground because the decision you guys have made has given us no middle ground. And I'm not arguing for total and utter lawlessness. That really would be awful. I'm not an anarchist. But the WW wasn't /b/. Not even close.

Once again, I understand that you are just trying to do your best with the information that you have, but our choices define us. In this case, your choices define what kind of site this will be, and as administrators and moderators, that is and will be inescapable.

 

[Baffle]

I'm pretty sure just one instance on non-consensual dogging is harassment.

So that's it then, huh? One mean name and off with their heads?

Ha ha ha. Dogging.

 

[Veldel]

good riddance

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Ha ha ha. Dogging.

Baffling.

 

[Dr. Thrax]

As was done with Wynn, effort should have been made remove those trouble makers. It feels an awful lot like this was the plan all along given it's something people in charge have been trying to do repeatedly.

Wynn's case was an extreme situation because he was literally breaking the site. They can't simply "remove" the troublemakers because the entire point of Wild West was that it had no moderation aside from removing any porn, illegal content, or site breaking. Do you not remember the response to Wynn's Pub Club being revoked??? People were going all "Well if they can just revoke Pub Club like that then what else can they do???"

Just as Lack has said, Defy holds the keys, they could turn this place off tomorrow, that doesn't mean they should.
Likewise, just because the mods can remove the wildwest, despite us already having a vote and saying "No", doesn't mean they should.

"Just because you can doesn't mean you should" isn't a compelling argument in this case.
Defy holds the keys, they could turn this place off tomorrow, that's their choice and whether or not they should is a matter up for debate that involves details us regular users don't have access to. The mods moderate the forums, stuff like this is literally their entire bloody job, and just because the users said "We want this!" doesn't mean the moderation team has to abide by it to infinity and beyond. There are limits to things, and whether you like it or not a limit has been reached, and this limit is not and will not be dictated by the common user. This forum is not a democracy. That the moderation team allowed users to give their input months ago was a courtesy to us.

 

[The Lunatic]

As was done with Wynn, effort should have been made remove those trouble makers. It feels an awful lot like this was the plan all along given it's something people in charge have been trying to do repeatedly.

Wynn's case was an extreme situation because he was literally breaking the site. They can't simply "remove" the troublemakers because the entire point of Wild West was that it had no moderation aside from removing any porn, illegal content, or site breaking. Do you not remember the response to Wynn's Pub Club being revoked??? People were going all "Well if they can just revoke Pub Club like that then what else can they do???"

Just as Lack has said, Defy holds the keys, they could turn this place off tomorrow, that doesn't mean they should.
Likewise, just because the mods can remove the wildwest, despite us already having a vote and saying "No", doesn't mean they should.

"Just because you can doesn't mean you should" isn't a compelling argument in this case.
Defy holds the keys, they could turn this place off tomorrow, that's their choice and whether or not they should is a matter up for debate that involves details us regular users don't have access to. The mods moderate the forums, stuff like this is literally their entire bloody job, and just because the users said "We want this!" doesn't mean the moderation team has to abide by it to infinity and beyond. There are limits to things, and whether you like it or not a limit has been reached, and this limit is not and will not be dictated by the common user. This forum is not a democracy. That the moderation team allowed users to give their input months ago was a courtesy to us.

Better to remove one or two people who never wanted to be there in the first place than everyone, surely?
Harassment itself is pretty illegal, so, I mean, it's not like there isn't grounds.

Well, the entire purpose of WW is that it doesn't really require moderation. So, the idea that it somehow added greatly to their duties to... Not moderate it doesn't quite make sense.
Added to that, if they were struggling even with the load of moderating a unmoderated forum, it's not moderators are such a rare commodity.

The staff can and do more or less do whatever they want. They bring back moderators with histories of abusing members of the forum, they ignore what people want, have obvious bias and so on. I'm not saying "You can't do the, the internet police will get you!" I'm just saying "Don't pretend otherwise".