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Jan 20: So Dat Site Drama...
12 years ago
General
|██████████|BODY
|██████████|MIND
|██████████|SOUL
Status: Depresssssssed
|██████████|Will To Art
█ First I've already address FA's and all drama ever via this old submission of mine:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9986713/
My path was down, left, left.
Second I wasn't really going to talk about it, but since the admins have decided that they need to apply PR to the whole thing then I figure I might as well throw in my two cents about the subject, and about similar... dramas.
Let's be clear about a few things before I start though: I don't know what happened, and the likelihood that you do as well is unlikely; and also before I explain my understanding of the situation please don't 'correct' me on what really happened because a crowd-sourced source of information isn't going to be reliable when it comes to personal accounts of what happened, or didn't happen; it's not like there's going to be citations of unbiased sources or anything.
With all those disclaimers out of the way, here is my understanding of the situation; which again is based on no actual evidence. None, this is all speculation.
Two people were involved with each other: One person said the sex was consensual, the other did not. The person who claimed raped brought the issue up with the admins of FA, presumably because the alleged rapist was part of the admin team. The admin team told the alleged rape victim to "shut up" about it. Drama ensues as one or both parties start to get everyone they know to start slinging mud at each other. The end result is that some people now think FA is 'pro-rape' for defending and having a rapist as part of their admin team.
That's the gist of what happened. No evidence really if what happened did happen, and no involvement from the authorities as I'm aware of. So there's no substance to anyone's claims one way or the other.
█ From where FA is involved I understand the reaction of the admin team, even if I don't agree with the relative insensitivity it was handled in. What reaction was that mind you? That FA are not the police. Exactly what was the proper way to handle the situation? Fire off a member of the team when accused of something awful with no evidence? The reality of the situation is that a person's reputation can be destroyed by the act of accusation of rape even if they are innocent. It doesn't matter if evidence clears their name of the accusation the damage to their reputation is done and is more or less permanent. Which is the current situation I see here today: No evidence of it happening, just a rumor-mill.
Though here's the further damning thing about it: Because I take this stance of "There's no evidence" there's a number of people who will angrily (perhaps even happily) claim that I am "pro-rape" because I didn't assume the default stance when it comes to rape accusations: The rape victim never lies. There's a strong sentiment of "This person was just raped! How dare you not believe their story! You are fucking sick for thinking they're faking it! You're just promoting more rape!"
How can you reason with people like that? You can't. For me it's all unsubstantiated because there's no evidence, was no investigation or even charges that I'm aware of. Since there's no substance to this issue, I just can't be bothered to care that much. If the police didn't care or do anything, that's not an issue for FA to somehow solve in their stead.
█ Though there's a few issues that follow along the same vein, that if you take a neutral stance or point out the extremist tendencies of a group they will automatically label you as scum of the earth. Many of these things run along religious, political, or sexuality veins; as well as feminism (the movement, not the fetish).
I like to live my life with the general premise of "I need evidence if I'm going to take you seriously, or at the very least a well formed and rationalized train of thought." Speculation does nothing for me, and speculation plus imagination tends to lead to disaster. Even when presented with evidence, if I truly care about the subject I like to pry deeper; at least two to three levels deeper. Information can be misleading or outright fake, and most of the time the lie is exposed after one or two levels of digging. Though many people don't care to do that kind of searching, mostly because they have a dog in the race or whatever and want to be right. I personally don't care about being right or wrong, I just want to know things.
Which is why I don't really take much stock in the information about the current drama because it's all opinion. Was it rape, or is a person out to try and destroy another person's life and reputation, or both? I don't know. Don't really care, it's not my job to care; and really it's not FA's job to care either, but seems like they have to because otherwise FA is going to become the 'pro-rape' site or something I guess.
Really all it takes is an accusation to ruin a reputation, and that's what FA is experiencing right now: An accusation that they a protecting a rapist, and as such some users are jumping ship because of it. No evidence, no substance; real damage. All of this could have been avoided if the accused wasn't involved in FA's project, even if was unfair to the accused if innocent; but who ever said life was fair?
Quite amazing how much can be said about absolutely nothing but speculation isn't it?
█ In the end I have no expectations of FA 'protecting' me from anything or anyone. Nor do I expect they have the capacity or ability to protect anyone at all. As far as their conduct goes so far, they've tried to keep it low-key and not something to be talked about. What's the worst they could do? Give out names, give out contact information, addresses, publicly out and attack those involved that they do not agree with; but they aren't the ones doing that, the peanut gallery is. I think FA has been pretty level-headed about the whole situation, but the restless public want a hanging instead.
At this stage of the game, what actually happened doesn't matter anymore; people just want to see a head roll, and those who don't want to see a head roll likely don't care either way; which means the course of action is to have heads roll. After all, people who say "there's no evidence" simply aren't as passionate as the "we know he's evil, get rid of him!"
All that drama aside, we all know what's really important: The next FA update, coming soon: Never.
|██████████|MIND
|██████████|SOUL
Status: Depresssssssed
|██████████|Will To Art
█ First I've already address FA's and all drama ever via this old submission of mine:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9986713/
My path was down, left, left.
Second I wasn't really going to talk about it, but since the admins have decided that they need to apply PR to the whole thing then I figure I might as well throw in my two cents about the subject, and about similar... dramas.
Let's be clear about a few things before I start though: I don't know what happened, and the likelihood that you do as well is unlikely; and also before I explain my understanding of the situation please don't 'correct' me on what really happened because a crowd-sourced source of information isn't going to be reliable when it comes to personal accounts of what happened, or didn't happen; it's not like there's going to be citations of unbiased sources or anything.
With all those disclaimers out of the way, here is my understanding of the situation; which again is based on no actual evidence. None, this is all speculation.
Two people were involved with each other: One person said the sex was consensual, the other did not. The person who claimed raped brought the issue up with the admins of FA, presumably because the alleged rapist was part of the admin team. The admin team told the alleged rape victim to "shut up" about it. Drama ensues as one or both parties start to get everyone they know to start slinging mud at each other. The end result is that some people now think FA is 'pro-rape' for defending and having a rapist as part of their admin team.
That's the gist of what happened. No evidence really if what happened did happen, and no involvement from the authorities as I'm aware of. So there's no substance to anyone's claims one way or the other.
█ From where FA is involved I understand the reaction of the admin team, even if I don't agree with the relative insensitivity it was handled in. What reaction was that mind you? That FA are not the police. Exactly what was the proper way to handle the situation? Fire off a member of the team when accused of something awful with no evidence? The reality of the situation is that a person's reputation can be destroyed by the act of accusation of rape even if they are innocent. It doesn't matter if evidence clears their name of the accusation the damage to their reputation is done and is more or less permanent. Which is the current situation I see here today: No evidence of it happening, just a rumor-mill.
Though here's the further damning thing about it: Because I take this stance of "There's no evidence" there's a number of people who will angrily (perhaps even happily) claim that I am "pro-rape" because I didn't assume the default stance when it comes to rape accusations: The rape victim never lies. There's a strong sentiment of "This person was just raped! How dare you not believe their story! You are fucking sick for thinking they're faking it! You're just promoting more rape!"
How can you reason with people like that? You can't. For me it's all unsubstantiated because there's no evidence, was no investigation or even charges that I'm aware of. Since there's no substance to this issue, I just can't be bothered to care that much. If the police didn't care or do anything, that's not an issue for FA to somehow solve in their stead.
█ Though there's a few issues that follow along the same vein, that if you take a neutral stance or point out the extremist tendencies of a group they will automatically label you as scum of the earth. Many of these things run along religious, political, or sexuality veins; as well as feminism (the movement, not the fetish).
I like to live my life with the general premise of "I need evidence if I'm going to take you seriously, or at the very least a well formed and rationalized train of thought." Speculation does nothing for me, and speculation plus imagination tends to lead to disaster. Even when presented with evidence, if I truly care about the subject I like to pry deeper; at least two to three levels deeper. Information can be misleading or outright fake, and most of the time the lie is exposed after one or two levels of digging. Though many people don't care to do that kind of searching, mostly because they have a dog in the race or whatever and want to be right. I personally don't care about being right or wrong, I just want to know things.
Which is why I don't really take much stock in the information about the current drama because it's all opinion. Was it rape, or is a person out to try and destroy another person's life and reputation, or both? I don't know. Don't really care, it's not my job to care; and really it's not FA's job to care either, but seems like they have to because otherwise FA is going to become the 'pro-rape' site or something I guess.
Really all it takes is an accusation to ruin a reputation, and that's what FA is experiencing right now: An accusation that they a protecting a rapist, and as such some users are jumping ship because of it. No evidence, no substance; real damage. All of this could have been avoided if the accused wasn't involved in FA's project, even if was unfair to the accused if innocent; but who ever said life was fair?
Quite amazing how much can be said about absolutely nothing but speculation isn't it?
█ In the end I have no expectations of FA 'protecting' me from anything or anyone. Nor do I expect they have the capacity or ability to protect anyone at all. As far as their conduct goes so far, they've tried to keep it low-key and not something to be talked about. What's the worst they could do? Give out names, give out contact information, addresses, publicly out and attack those involved that they do not agree with; but they aren't the ones doing that, the peanut gallery is. I think FA has been pretty level-headed about the whole situation, but the restless public want a hanging instead.
At this stage of the game, what actually happened doesn't matter anymore; people just want to see a head roll, and those who don't want to see a head roll likely don't care either way; which means the course of action is to have heads roll. After all, people who say "there's no evidence" simply aren't as passionate as the "we know he's evil, get rid of him!"
All that drama aside, we all know what's really important: The next FA update, coming soon: Never.
This statement is too true
but yeah, small communities fighting proxy wars with each other on a micro-level, and we act like we'll ever move beyond actual wars on a macro-level... belligerence is human nature, to think we can ever civilize or intellectualize that nature away will only leave even more devastation in its wake.
/spawn bat mobile
This sentence..is beautiful.
The first being that the accused is not just a dev, but an admin as well, and from what I've seen of his conversations he's not the most tactful person around. This can bring up a fear of intimidation even if the accusations are totally baseless.
The second is in Dragoneer's handling of the situation. This 'We're in the process of making a fine crafted response' post should have been put up within days of the drama starting, not 2+weeks later after a fairly concerted attempt to suppress the drama with comment and journal hiding.
The promise of a new site is nice, but I'm wondering if it'll be enough, FA seems to be fairly stagnated in terms of feature improvement. There should be some look at what the community desires/demands (integrated livestreaming anyone?) then working out ways to implement and support them, including financially.
The first being that the accused is not just a dev, but an admin as well, and from what I've seen of his conversations he's not the most tactful person around. This can bring up a fear of intimidation even if the accusations are totally baseless.
I don't know the name of the person and I don't want to know the name, since I can't do anything to verify truth or falsehood. Let's even assume you're right, for the sake of an argument, and this person is naturally intimidating. Your point being?
If they do fire him now, they'll just be feeding the lynch mob who'll assume (probably correctly) that he was fired for being guilty. This condemns someone for something that's just an accusation. Even if they should have before, due to lack of tactfulness, this seems like the wrong time to "just happen to pick now" to do it.
> The second is in Dragoneer's handling of the situation. This 'We're in the process of making a fine crafted response' post should have been put up within days of the drama starting, not 2+weeks later after a fairly concerted attempt to suppress the drama with comment and journal hiding.
Honestly, I don't know what the right response is. A lot of boards I've been on have a strict, "No person attacks. No flame wars." rule. This seems to qualify as both. Frankly, I wish it was feasible for them to stomp this whole discussion out and send it packing. I honestly can't imagining it helping the community in any way, and no one except the police can really do much of anything.
From a practical perspective, I'm curious why the staff seems to have went for "hope it blows over" approach, considering how almost anything seems to cause long-lasting and out of control drama. Mostly though, I'm just glad it's not my problem since I don't have a suggestion for a short-term solution.
>If they do fire him now, they'll just be feeding the lynch mob who'll assume (probably correctly) that he was fired for being guilty. This condemns someone for something that's just an accusation. Even if they should have before, due to lack of tactfulness, this seems like the wrong time to "just happen to pick now" to do it.
I think firing would be the wrong thing to do yes, however he should not have admin powers in my opinion. The fear of abuse of power and the ability to intimidate accusers is a real one. To be honest I'm not sure why a dev on a new version would need admin powers on a live site, even testing should have a clean dataset to work with until the latter stages. Most of the fear arguments fall apart if it's made clear that he has no ability to ban, look at notes, or whatever.
In general I think FA needs to look at a more corporate structure where there's a CEO (Ostensibly Dragoneer?) to provide direction, HR and PR people to handle this kind of situation, CS/Moderators to handle tickets, development, and so on
As someone who's done a fair bit with remote apps, I can think of three reasons:
1) Permissions are not granular enough. (Hopefully, if this is the case, this will prompt adding more granular permissions to the new site's requirements.)
2) He's been doing work profiling the current site, to get a better idea of the needs of the new site
3) Laziness.
4) He's also fixing bugs in the old site.
But for whatever reason he's already a mod.
> I think firing would be the wrong thing to do yes, however he should not have admin powers in my opinion.
I'll agree that it's very possible he shouldn't have had admin powers, but that's past-tense. At this point, the question is, should he be singled out and have his admin powers taken away, in what just about everyone will see as a response to him being accused.
Honestly, I don't know. If I had to make this lose/lose choice, I don't know what I'd do. Most likely, I think I would:
*) Publicly do nothing immediately
*) Give him a stern private warning that he's not to do anything that might even smell of mod-abuse, and to stay away from his accuser on this site, at least in his persona as staff.
*) Publicly smack him hard if he steps out of line.
*) Try to get enough granularity of permissions/responsibilities in the future that this sort of thing is mitigated by only allowing the minimum permissions needed.
Should he have been given that power? Maybe not, but that's not the question. The question is, should be be publicly demoted?
But your point is still valid, people are taking the whole thing to extremes on both sides.
This is a subject that should be brought up, it concerns a lot of people and makes them uncomfortable, to put it lightly.
I know it's silly and naive for me to expect civilised discussion on the Internet... but hey, I can dream, right?
And this image may be a bit related, or rather which I find rather true. http://static.lolyard.com/lol/self-control-owl.jpg
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5434971/
Here, try reading this.
Though talking about picking friends over people who know what they are doing would have taken another journal to write about.
Nor, I suppose, can I really blame them for taking a stand they feel strongly about. Even if there's no hard evidence, apparently the various logs and testimonials were enough for many. In general, I'm very wary of a trial by mob and of reputations being ruined, but I don't deny anybody the right to leave based on whatever criteria they find important. Besides, being passionate about a subject like this certainly isn't a bad thing.
Personally, I feel FA is made by its community and not by its admins (although I acknowledge the work they do in running the site) so I'm not going anywhere just yet.
In practical terms, and without going into any judgment of morality I feel Dragoneer's decision to promote and defend such a controversial figure was unwise. But I don't feel less comfortable using the site than I did, say, a month ago. Maybe that will change in the weeks to come, but we'll see.
Although I admit, I do feel a little bit uncomfortable using the site, but it's not enough for me to leave.
Besides, some (not all) people who decided to leave really made me feel like I'm not welcome on Weasyl, as they decided to attack everyone who's not leaving immediately like they do.
So yeah, can't blame them for taking a stand, but attacking people who want to keep quiet is unneccesary.
http://ransomdracalis.tumblr.com/po.....-ashes-im-gone
http://nishimikan.tumblr.com/post/73650195082
What about these then? Or is it impossible to believe without a video showing it happening?
I can't be bothered if I don't see logs and if there isn't an actual legal affair going with that. Even if the accusation on Zaush are truthful someone should at least bring the situation to the police, 3 years later and nothing has been done. Only now do, suddenly, people talk about his acts as he's put in charge of coding.
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/...../#cid:13296105
The other part of the bottom line is unless that person has been convicted of the crime in a court of law by their peers we are to assume them innocent.
As well as the fact that we cannot go around mudslinging anyone unless the law has done it's due justice.
Taking the position of neutral does not make a person or persons "pro-rape" it just makes them someone who is choosing not to get pulled into the hype of the masses.
We have laws and we have a system in place to take care of the accused and the victim when that system is not used so many now try to and do hold court in the media and public forums. This matter of action only leads to more unrest instead of a healing that is needed for life to go on.
I am not here to judge or take sides, I am not for "pro-rape" What I am is being a part of a site like FA that allows us to express our artistic tastes without the judgement of those who are not like minded. I wish to continue doing so.
I think what you have stated is brilliant and I do hope that level heads pro vale and that this whole business will stop.
I am simply keeping myself in the middle of this subject. RAPE is wrong, yes... but an issue involving private parties should be dealt with privately. General Fad furries do not have the best logical sense on being able to assess a situation and decide a solution without somehow inflating the situation, and being one-sided in opinion.
It is the Salem-Witch Hunt all over again... or the Big Red Scare. Labeling someone something and then demanding punishment. Hypocrites is what I call the majority of people on this site. Sexual deviants, Baby Furs, Bondage Furs, Drug-ridden Furs, Vein Furs, Bestiality Furs, Preying Furs (adults pursuing young kid furries), fetish furs etc. People whom have imaginations and sometimes act upon their fantasies and calling themselves "the innocent bunch".... and meanwhile demand the head of someone whom they do not quite know, and do not know if their actions were in fact acted upon. We are all guilty in somehow raping the mind and deviating the innocent into the fantasies of a darker world without law and limit.
FA was hacked, yes. The subject is not new, yes. NEER is not the smartest, yes. Rape is wrong, yes. But to jump to conclusions and say "I have had it... no more" when the issue has absolutely nothing to do with the one offended.... that is just ridiculous.
By all means, I wish a good life for the ones who are quick to jump ship. But no one has even called mayday. Now if it were in fact obvious that the issue was in fact true without a shadow of a doubt, that is another story. And for NEER to attempt to silence the situation, that would be aiding and abetting and would result in jail time.
Now I admit that I am definitely not the smartest furry on this site.... but I know a emotional fad wave when I see one. People wanting to be part of a group to appear to be the next BIG CHANGE AND PROGRESSIVE TRANSITION. That is why this site is so limited, and furries are incapable of evolving.... mentally that is.
unfortunately this is internet.... accusation through the web of the internet can't be certain to be true or false
The lack of evidence only makes this drama worst... if there was solid evidence proving one way or another this would have pass beneath the radar of most people.
Where is the drama for the actual documented rapes? Everyone's flinging shit left and right from their high horses but how many have actually done anything to actually help the victim?