Jul -- Innocent Town: words about acmlmboards and smwc and other things

RanAS
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Posted on 01-30-19 11:00:01 AM

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Something you have to understand is that I joined this community in late 2014, so I'm more familiar with how all the boards were past this point. Anything before 2014 is stuff I've read afterwards or only witnessed as I was passing by. I've been an official part of "The Internet" only since 2011 as well, which means that I didn't even have any online accounts before then. Maybe Orkut, but I doubt it.

Another I'd like to mention is that, this post isn't meant as an attack or criticism or insult towards anyone. I just want to reflect and understand what's happened to this community during all the time. I mean, it's kinda like learning History I guess, you do it because you just want to document it and know what happened rather than as a personal vendetta against anyone involved. That's more or less what this is, I've just been curious about the past, that's all.

And also, I'm a bit concerned about the future. Not of Jul per se, but of another community. Something about the way that SMWCentral is currently divided and that VileLAB is forming reminds me a bit of the board2 and Jul split.

The thing that's been happening with SMWCentral and VileLAB sounds a lot like what happened with Jul and board2, except with a few differences: Of course, both communities want to be a hub for SMW Hacking (VileLAB is a bit more general-purpose than SMWC all things considered), but SMWCentral wants to me more inclusive and contain less edgy humor (not unanimously, but most of staff + admins want it to get back on track and be taken more seriously by other people), and VileLAB is more like "good-natured entertainment needs no restrictions" and "so long as people are having fun, it doesn't really matter". It contains more dark humor and less moderation.

VileLAB is forming because a lot of people are unhappy with the direction that SMWCentral or feel alienated, wishing the website went back on a lot of its policies.

It specifically reminds me of this thing blackhole89 wrote a long time ago in 2012:

Originally posted by blackhole89
The reason we split from Jul and Jul split from us was, basically, a disagreement over the value of community values; they advocated a close-knit model organised essentially like a somewhat centralised circle of friends, with a single leader choosing who to keep and who to boot based on the informal consensus of some narrow in-group of regulars. This didn't mesh particularly well with the increasing factionalisation of the board community before Xkeeper came around, and in particular resulted in a series of purges that certainly worked in favour of everyday harmony, but increasingly turned the board into a social monoculture. Although the price is non-neglectable, that can be avoided, and we are probably more capable/willing to try to avoid it. I believe there is some value in uniting people with different ideals/values/posting styles as long as we can get past the notion that inconvenient people can just be purged if only you manage to get more like-minded ones in power; whether others do or don't, I can't tell, but if they do, I think board2's claim to greater commitment in that regard is plausible.

Replace Jul with SMWCentral and board2 with VileLAB and this statement fits almost like a shoe. Except for a few things...

First is the fact that this split doesn't seem to have come at the cost of the community leader being thrown away like in board2. I don't think Kieran Menor (SMWCentral's host) would do that to idol (the site's current head admin). But, as time passes on and he starts to get more and more attached to VileLAB and more against SMWCentral's policies, I just get worried that history might repeat itself...again. For the nth time.

Another thing is that Vitor Vilela a very charismatic leader, so I do think he has a way with mantaining a community. I have no idea if that applied to the board2 staff, and I'm not in a position where I can or should make judgements in that regard. board2 may be as dead as a doornail, but it hasn't proved that this ideology is wrong yet. It may be successfull for all I know, given the right conditions and the right people. That's something that Vitor will have to figure out himself.

And there's also Jul, a community that lost a lot of its ROM Hacking aspect, but still mantains as its own community. There's been some issues in the past I guess. According to Xkeeper (can't say this myself), a few people got banned for meaningless reasons and still exist in other side "close" communities. It feels like, Jul has shifted from being "Justus League" and more into the "Chillzone", a place where people chill and talk about random small things that have been on their mind. I also feel this shift by looking at the "plus" forums, which became a place to talk about sensitive topics rather than the previous elite General Discussion. I have to agree that, based on what I read on those forums, the "plus" group used to be kinda elitist, and I'm glad it has shifted its way.

And then there's also the whole deal with Kafuka which I don't even understand to this day, and there's the whole deal with Acmlm's Board I3 and ||board and that's a mess I can't even. I just can't even.

Anyways, back to SMWCentral.

There's been similiar discussions in its past like the Post Leniency policy, where people were wondering if it was fair that people could make borderline useless posts with no substance to them on the forums. Some were okay and sided more on "as long as people are having fun" but more-so the staff adopted a more serious approach to it, meaning posts on the forums should feel more like an actual discussion and less crap you spend like 5 seconds on before posting. I personally like having an actual true discussion, so I agree that posts shouldn't have that much leniency to them.

There's also been another policy in the past that says that borderline and suggestive NSFW avatars should also be banned alongside the ones that have actual nudity. I agree with this one, it's just it took quite a bit of time for them to actually do something about it. Overall SMWCentral had kinda of a...weird stance when it comes to NSFW stuff? I can't really explain it myself, but after hearing more and more people talk about a forum called "The Dungeon" which was an invite-only porn forum where people shared stuff, and which had some underage people in it, I started to realize that the forum's been a weird kinda shady place at times. Note: "was", apparently it still exists and people have access to it somehow, but it's dead. Whatever that means.

Anyway, another recent topic of discussion has been..."Culture and Censorship". Oh dear. Basically, one side thinks that as long as you're not doing an ill-intended joke, it doesn't really matter what words you use. The other side says that if your jokes, memes or words come from an (for example) racist, homophobic or anti-semitic origin then, regardless of the context it really shouldn't be used. The literal meaning of a word, and the "weight" that each word naturally has overrides its context.

There's been a few opposing arguments such as "there's too many slurs out there" and "any word can be used offensively". Yet, you guys here probably know that I personally side with "word weight overrides context" rather than "context is the most important thing in a conversation". I mean, in my opinion, no matter what context you give a word, you can't turn it into something that it isn't, and trying to is only going to cause confusion and misinterpretation.

I don't have anything against people using these words in private, since I assume that at that point it's just a friendly jest between friends, if they are acquainted. It's just odd when it gets applied to a public forum as sort of the "default behaviour of everyone". I feel like this is more of a discussion about types of humor, some people like to be edgier and darker, others are more lighthearted. Get these two together and...you see what's the result in the end.

Then there's another matter that I actually brought up on a recent thread:

Originally posted by RanAS
SMWCentral, compared to other websites similar to it, houses both a resource and a community. I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing and I'll tell you why. I've noticed online that there's really two types of communities:
- Ones where the community is held together by working towards a common goal: The Cutting Room Floor (documenting unused things in games), the Ocarina of Time Randomizer (self-explanatory), BoodaMedz's GameSharks (challenge playthroughs of retro games). There is usually little space for off-topic discussion and little reason to stay should your interests shift.
- Ones where the community is held together because the people in it share similar interests, beliefs, ways of thinking, etc. Basically it's like a small circle of friends where each person gets to know each other or at the very least tolerate one another.

Shouldn't the site follow a community more like TCRF with less off-topic discussion? Or should it still remain mixed? There weren't many replies to it...

I dunno if I should post this to SMWCentral or even to a public forum here. I mean, it's like, that's probably just going to cause more drama and more old feelings to pop up. They always do. also oh God I wrote a billion paragraphs again, this isn't good

In reality I probably shouldn't even be posting this here because it's not like this is your guys' problems. It's just, I don't really know where else to post this and I fear that posting it on SMWC is going to cause ruckus so, I just don't really know what to do. It feels weird to type nearly 10 thousand characters worth of concerns and just not post them anywhere.

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Posted on 01-30-19 12:30:37 PM (last edited by dotUser at 01-30-19 12:32:10 PM)

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All I can chime in with is if your sense of humour requires you to marginalise or normalise the marginalisation of any group based on what are considered protected class or hopefully-to-be-protected-class, you really need to find a new sense of humour.

Otherwise, I've only ever been here on Jul where I only knew of its goal as being a chillzone (despite the occasional drama), so..

Also 90% sure this forum's posts still shows in the latest posts page regardless of login and perm status so you've effectively posted entirely publically anyway!

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Posted on 01-30-19 05:35:42 PM (last edited by marrub at 01-30-19 05:37:03 PM)

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cr% cat 67
                                ~/jul
                            

Originally posted by dotUser
Also 90% sure this forum's posts still shows in the latest posts page regardless of login and perm status so you've effectively posted entirely publically anyway!

They also show up on Discord and IRC. (sorry OP was tldr so I have nothing to contribute to the conversation)
E: oh, I guess they don't anymore, huh. but yes this is still correct

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"cr" 14:31 25-Jul-49

Rambly

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Posted on 01-30-19 07:05:42 PM (last edited by Rambly at 05-12-19 04:50:59 AM)

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I don't really know much more about the board2/Jul split than you do, and I know even less about anything that's happening at SMWC, so I can't really comment on the particulars of Acmlm-adjacent message board split history. But I have been part of Internet communities for a very long portion of my life (pushing 20 years now, yikes), so I can comment on the more general patterns I've seen emerge in that time, I guess.

Originally posted by bh89
The reason we split from Jul and Jul split from us was, basically, a disagreement over the value of community values; they advocated a close-knit model organised essentially like a somewhat centralised circle of friends, with a single leader choosing who to keep and who to boot based on the informal consensus of some narrow in-group of regulars. This didn't mesh particularly well with the increasing factionalisation of the board community before Xkeeper came around, and in particular resulted in a series of purges that certainly worked in favour of everyday harmony, but increasingly turned the board into a social monoculture.

I don't think this quote applies to the situation regarding SMW Central as I understand it. In fact, I think that monocultures in communities are probably naturally emergent phenomena to a certain degree, and I don't think that level of monoculture is something that should necessarily be avoided. In spite of that: I think Jul has managed to avoid having a monoculture much better than board2 has, and I think SMWC will ultimately avoid it better than Vile-mid-aughts-flash-in-the-pan-internet-clique will.

I am part of a community dedicated to a fangame engine. It is a horrible place that nobody likes being on, and the common consensus about the state of the community is that it is dying. This community has had lulls in the past, mostly owing to slow progress on the engine, but the pace of development has sped up recently. It doesn't seem to matter what's going on with the engine, activity is still slowing to a crawl, and the circumstances feel a little different than during previous lulls.

In this community, there is a small but active userbase of people that absolutely love spouting conservative nonsense talking points, linking Paul Joseph Watson, Ben Shapiro and the like unironically, talking shit about transgender people and people of color ("race realism" has been unironically argued for by one of the regulars there), et cetera. This has all been happening under the staff's weird insistence on accepting people regardless of their opinions, even if those opinions are obviously harmful.

(I'm not saying that people who disagree on how to handle community matters, or even disagree on what the best economic policy is cause the same level of harm. But people who disagree on whether or not someone is good or should exist — that opinion doesn't deserve the same level of legitimization, because how can you argue with it? It's a non-sequitur. When you start getting into arguing the essential value of certain classes of people, you're not arguing for anything that can be quantitatively proven. And when you render the inherent value of human beings a non-sequitur without applying that same logic to your own stance, you effectively create an argument that certain people shouldn't exist that technically can't be argued against. So, it's not logical, it's not factual. It's hateful. Plain and simple.)

And see, that's the problem with actively trying to preserve every possible permutation of opinion. Consider the following scenario:

• Person A keeps pasting quotes and articles and YouTube video propaganda about how people who have freckl— oh, who am I kidding, I'll just use the realistic example: They try to argue that trans people shouldn't be allowed to participate in society.

• Person B, a trans person, naturally feels a little uncomfortable. They first try to argue that maybe trans people shouldn't be disenfranchised from society, but naturally having to argue for your right to just exist as a person is a little exhausting. On top of that, Person A isn't even remotely arguing in good faith or considering Person B's point of view, and several of Person A's friends continue to basically pat Person A on the back and dogpile Person B.

• Person B takes their complaints to a higher-up. They are concerned because Person A and his friends are creating a weird faction of hateful assholes. The staff member responds, "we're not allowed to moderate people just for having an unpopular opinion, sorry!"

• Person B then gets fed up with feeling alienated constantly and leaves. Many people Person B follow suit, either because they can't tolerate the toxicity, or because they're part of a group that Person A loves to argue about.

• This community is now a monoculture of people that think like Person A. Congratulations. "You played yourself", as the kids say.

In the aforementioned fangame engine community's case, the problem is far worse than just suffering from homogeneity: As mentioned before, the community's overall size is shrinking. All of the fun, creative, smart and vibrant and interesting people have dropped like flies in recent years — pretty alarming for a community that actually historically had an unusually high retention rate. (Someone who'd been a consistently fairly active member since 2002 has been sort of quiet for most of the past year or so.) The problem with trying to retain assholes with stupid opinions is that assholes with stupid opinions tend to alienate people who aren't assholes with stupid opinions. And, frankly, people who aren't assholes with stupid opinions tend to be more valuable community members in most cases.

Jul's split from board2 really does just look like an administrative difference of opinion from where I'm standing (unless someone with more knowledge wants to correct me on that). But SMW Central's fracturing isn't just a consequence of a difference in desired community style, it's a consequence of a difference in acceptable behavior. There's a subset of people that want to normalize the use of slurs and saying "politically incorrect" things, and the staff had to make a decision: Do we capitulate to the people that want to yell slurs all the time, or do we capitulate to the people who feel uncomfortable about using slurs? It's clear that if you're using slurs, told that it's hurtful, and keep doing it anyway, you're being more of a detriment and more abusive than the person who just wants to, you know, exist.

The reason that people are opposed to slurs is that they normalize bigotry. That's all there is to it. Anytime you have a community that normalizes the use of slurs someone is going to interpret the community as being broadly bigoted and thus feel empowered in their bigotry. Anytime you have a community that normalizes the use of slurs, younger folks are going to take the leadership to be role models and the overriding community for granted, and thus they're going to grow up believing that bigotry is okay.

The idea that words have an essential weight is commonly pinned on people who are opposed to wanton slur usage, which allows them to claim that there's no difference between calling someone a slur and calling them a dipshit, because any word can be hurtful, where do we draw the line etc etc. But it's not just about the "weight" the words have. It actually is about context. It's about the context that they have outside of the scope of the forum. All words have a context, and all words have a weight that's derived from how they're used socially because our vocabulary is inescapably social.

Slurs are harmful because they have a broader societal context that makes them harmful. Bigots frequently use slurs and bigoted jokes as a sort of shibboleth and a way to endear themselves to other bigots — they become self-perpetuating insular toxic cultures, and because nobody can act as a check on their behavior, they have more time to build that bigotry into a deeply held value.

Most slurs have been consciously deployed to dehumanize and disenfranchise people of color, queer people, disabled people, etc. When that culture is rampant on a forum, it sends an implicit message to women, trans people, queer people, people of color, and the disabled. And as a result you get people feeling like they're not welcome, or that their leadership doesn't care about them, and they leave, and the forum becomes dominated by white straight cis guys. How's that for monoculture.

Plus, to what end is allowing slurs working towards? It's supposed to be funny? I actually love dark humor, but there's really no humor or shock in using slurs for no reason. It's not funny. There's no reason that slurs or random off-color statements divorced of context are funny — it's certainly not funny in a "shock value" kind of way given that it's not even shocking anymore. (Half of all goddamned political public figures in a lot of Western countries say shit that's way more shocking regularly.) So that renders it either literally monkey cheese humor, or the kind of humor that's supposed to have a kernel of truth in it. In which case, you know, it's clearly bigoted.

So, I don't believe even for a second that the split between SMW Central and Vibewhatever-who-gives-a-shit has anything to do with a mere difference of community style. I don't believe that allowing slurs would actually further the goal of allowing everyone to co-exist in the spirit of pursuing Super Mario World ROM hacks, or whatever. It's the same reason you don't allow rampant flaming, or spamming, or whatever — that stuff causes harm to the community. So, if anything, it seems like the new off-shoot community where they do slur jokes are the ones who are being exclusionary and pursuing homogeneity. Color me shocked.

Look, to summarize my points, if you let racism go around all wild then you're going to drive off all the people that are racism dislikers. I'm pulling my weight for SMWC here cuz it seems like they made the right choice

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RanAS
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Posted on 01-31-19 09:42:40 AM

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Originally posted by dotUser
Also 90% sure this forum's posts still shows in the latest posts page regardless of login and perm status so you've effectively posted entirely publically anyway!

Well, "unlisted" I guess. People can't just stumble upon the thread on the front page. Takes at least a little bit of effort to find.

Originally posted by Rambly
The idea that words have an essential weight is commonly pinned on people who are opposed to wanton slur usage, which allows them to claim that there's no difference between calling someone a slur and calling them a dipshit, because any word can be hurtful, where do we draw the line etc etc. But it's not just about the "weight" the words have. It actually is about context. It's about the context that they have outside of the scope of the forum. All words have a context, and all words have a weight that's derived from how they're used socially because our vocabulary is inescapably social.

You've explained this a lot better than I could have. Not only that but the whole point about the monoculture, making the "having a community with multiple viewpoints and none shall be censored" as the sole goal falls apart when someone takes advantage of that to promote ideas that are clearly or back-handedly actually racist or the like.

At one point, it stops being "just for the sake of humour" and it starts going into "okay you're actually trying to promote your bad opinion onwards and you're just using humor to try and hide it". And that's when it becomes toxic. I don't actually see many slurs being used recently in that side community but I doubt they'd do much about it if they were used. Like they said:

Originally posted by Alcaro
censoring anything said with friendly intent, such as calling friends 'ma ni---', is outside the bounds of what I consider acceptable.

(dashes were added to the above post)

But all it takes is for someone to try and stretch this "friendly intent" thing (which has happened before) and, well...

Originally posted by Rambly
Look, to summarize my points, if you let racism go around all wild then you're going to drive off all the people that are racism dislikers. I'm pulling my weight for SMWC here cuz it seems like they made the right choice

I also agree that this is the right choice.

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