What’s the Real Conflict?
You can have a place where really good, intelligent discussions take place and the level of discourse is high, with productive debates, or you can have a place where trolling has to be tolerated and posting misinformation, lying about past takes, and straw manning are all allowed and pretty common from a subset of posters. You cannot have both, I have no interest in participating in the latter, and this place has clearly chosen the latter over the former repeatedly.
My mistake is that I should have respected that and acted accordingly. After reflecting on things, I realized that the problem really wasn’t me against jalfrezi, it was me against the forum. Ultimately that makes me the problem because I spent months trying to change a community that works for hundreds of people who want a little fun, a little discussion, news aggregation, and some trolling, and if some people want to blast away with personal attacks so be it. The community seems to feel that it’s just not a big deal.
I tried to change that into a community that works for me and a smaller group of people that want more in depth discussion, high level discourse, factual accuracy, and intellectual honesty above all else – who believe that trolling and all the other stuff is hugely detrimental and should be eliminated. Of course, I thought that community would work best for 95% of the people here, but most people here seem to feel otherwise and I should have accepted that a long time ago and proceeded accordingly.
Perhaps the fact that some of my most liked posts were not my best posts IMO and that some of my best posts were among my least liked posts should have been an indicator that the community had long ago moved away from the direction I wanted it to go in.
I think the smaller group of people mentioned provides a disproportionate amount of the best content here, but that’s my opinion. If people who feel the way I do don’t want to participate here, that’s their choice – it’s not up to us to force change on people who don’t want it. And when I say “us” and “group” there’s not currently a secret group discussion going on (to my knowledge – if there is I’m not in it), but there are individual discussions about staying in touch, moving elsewhere, being disappointed in Unstuck, wanting something different, etc.
Anyway I’m sorry, I should have left for good a long time ago. I was weak and kept giving in to the addiction of posting here, and to the hope of trying to change it, when I should have accepted this place as-is and taken it or left it.
I kept asking the question, “When will the community realize that jalfrezi is a major problem and do something about it, what will it take?”
I should have accepted that the community didn’t find his behavior to be problematic enough to take enough action against to dissuade it, and thus asked myself, “Is this a community I want to spend a lot of time in? Is his behavior something I wish to be around?”
Why I Cared Too Much and Some Apologies
For a long time I cared a lot about what this place became, because I think it’s extremely rare to have as many bright minds in one place to analyze the news and politics of the world as Unstuck has had. Caring that much was a mistake, and putting Unstuck on that pedestal was a mistake. That’s what I wanted it to be, and maybe what some others wanted it to be – but it’s not what everyone or most people wanted it to be. That has become clear to me finally.
Between that and playing a big role in pointing us from 2p2 to our own site so that some talented folks who were generous with their time could build this site, it made watching this all transpire disproportionately painful to me, to a degree that people would rightly call irrational.
This drove me to fight really hard to make this the community I thought it could and should be, rather than just accepting that I was wrong about what it could be and spending way less time here.
That’s on me, and it says a lot about me that I made poor decisions on that, but it also says a lot about the community in my opinion. I don’t think what it says about me is good, and I don’t think what it says about the community is good. But that’s for the community to decide for itself.
My opinion is that this community as construed is going to continue collapsing on itself due to a lack of proper moderation, and as a result the people that want more in depth, high minded discussion without straw manning, without baseless claims/lies, etc, are going to decrease their time here or leave. I think the ship has sailed on fixing it, but maybe I’m wrong.
People think it’s changing this time, but I just see the same old cycle playing itself out. I don’t see a strong enough mandate to give the moderators enough confidence that they can do enough to stop it, and I see enough determination and skill among the people who want to troll and hurl attacks that they’ll be able to get away with most of it.
The mods are basically expected to function as glorified spam deleters here, and I don’t blame any of them for their individual roles in the moderation. None of them feel like they have a mandate to do much of anything, even after a vote for more moderation, and I think they’re right – they don’t have that mandate. I know they think they do now, but I’m pretty sure that would last right up until action was taken.
None of them want to waste their time following feuds to figure out who’s to blame while doing a thankless job for free and having half the forum hate them at any given moment. I get that. It’s why in my opinion, in any good online community, this stuff should be nipped in the bud by giving moderators the authority and mandate to do so early on in a dispute.
At any rate, I’m sorry I created a bunch of extra work for them by making ghost accounts and trying to speed up the permaban process, I shouldn’t have been such an asshole to them in that way – they’re just doing the best they can with what this community wants and my frustrations were thus misplaced, unfair and wrong. I’m sorry @skydiver8 @RiskyFlush @goofyballer @MrWookie @microbet.
This place is never going to be what I want it to be, and what this place wants to be is completely incompatible with the type of experience I want in a political forum. RiskyFlush keeps mentioning that I’m a danger to posters here or seeming to indicate that I’m abusing a large number of people. I’m honestly not sure what is meant by that, and I PM’d him but haven’t gotten a response yet. So I’ll just say that it’s pretty obvious the people who I absolutely dislike, and it’s a pretty short list with IMO very justifiable cause who did the vast majority of the instigating. So beyond them, if I abused or offended anyone else, I apologize.
Anyway, I need to take personal responsibility for not participating on a forum where behavior I cannot silently tolerate having directed towards myself or others persists, rather than trying to change any of it, allowing it to bother me, or allowing the community’s acceptance of it to bother me. So I have chosen not to subject myself to it anymore. Jalfrezi has all but admitted on the forum that he was on a campaign to run me off for months, which is why I’m so confident this would never end. Ultimately, it worked, and this is my best course forward.
I don’t know, maybe that’s exactly what I deserved for being the guy who aggressively calls out bullshit while also being quite possibly the worst person in Internet history at ignoring incessant trolling. But I’m not doing this again and there’s exactly one way to make sure I don’t: permaban me so I have no temptation to return.
So @moderators, this is a formal request for a permaban. Process it however you see fit, but it’s been well over two weeks since my original request, and there was a poll that got 70% so I think it’s reasonable and proper to just do it right away.
