Goonhub
05-24-2021, 05:40 AM
Writing this up as a forum post because I couldn't make it to the town hall and it's a bigger think than a single question-response anyway. The short version is there are profound problems with the administration structure, current and past admins have been pointing this out for months, and nothing's been fixed. This is causing Problems. Though I will do my best to be civil in this thread, I am not interested in being particularly quiet or friendly (because I've been trying that for the past year and got nowhere). I am probably going to piss you off, and I'm sorry for that, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong or I don't know what I'm talking about. Okay? Okay.
This is going to be a long read! I am not sorry about this in the slightest! This is a longstanding problem and the admin team has had many, many opportunities to resolve these concerns. If you are not interested in putting in the work to maintain the community when that means five ten minutes of reading, then that is not my problem. What is my problem is the deep issues in the administration team - and it's worth noting that I hold the administration team as a unit responsible for the problems, and actions by individual admins, though they may be reprehensible, are more of a symptom of a problem than the problem in and of itself.
Any declarative statements such as 'X said Y to Z' have proof in the form of links to specific messages and conversations and screenshots (just in case someone decides to edit what they have said). If I can't prove something happened, or I am speaking in a general sense or providing interpretation and perspective, I will say so. I'll put the screenshots and links in a separate googledoc I'll link here: footnotes and references so people who don't feel like checking my work don't have to scroll past it.
PROBLEM THE FIRST: ADMIN BEHAVIOR IN COOL ZONE
Multiple admins have exhibited behavior in cool zone that is against the rules for all people in the discord server and the admin guidelines which apply only to members of the admin team - specifically, statements that if made by a player would be considered 'deathwish / death threat' (01-01 and 01-02 in the footnotes and references document), starting a lengthy argument that complains about 'virtue signaling' (those exact words were used) and is generally dismissive and denigrating to large numbers of people, (01-03 in the footnotes and references document), telling members of the community "Well, you make this discord a worse place" (01-04 in the footnotes and references document) - a statement which he admitted later was inappropriate, but not directly to the person he directed it to because she had been banned in the meantime, and there is no indication he asked for someone in touch with her to relay his apology (01-05 in the footnotes and references document).
This is not an exhaustive list, this is just a few examples I can come up with off the top of my head that have happened in the last three months - and many of these have happened within the last week. There does not appear to be any rules or guidelines that prevent members of the admin team from doing whatever they like in cool zone; or at minimum any rules or guidelines which do apply are ignored with no real consequence.
On the rare occasion an admin's behavior is egregious enough for a member of the admin team to believe it warrants mention later, the mention is never more meaningful or toothsome than 'we talked about it, move on' (01-06 in the footnotes and references document, representative sample).
DESIRED OUTCOME: Members of the admin team should not be above the rules that govern people's behavior on the Discord server, especially in player-facing areas. Those that break those rules should be held to the same standard of punishments as any other member of the Discord server, and if that means temporary or permanent bans, so be it - if a member of the administration team cannot keep themselves under control in this manner, Goonstation is better served with their absence in any case. If it's decided that a simple apology will suffice (judged solely on the scope and magnitude of the offense, admin status should simply not be considered when adjudicating the issue for fairness' sake if nothing else) then that apology should be in the same setting as the offense was - in that same player-facing space, *and* directed specifically at the target of the rule-breaking behavior (like with an @ ping, or a @here if the offense was to the channel in general). If this means the administrator who erred will feel embarrassed, that's a good thing actually, as it will incentivize them to not repeat the mistake. Note that this is to be considered a bare acceptable minimum - if the administration team wanted to seek out free materials for anger management strategies or set up their own no-holds-barred vent channel to give an outlet to admins who for whatever reason *really need* to type whatever they're thinking into a discord window, that would be nice, but the above is a minimum.
PROBLEM THE SECOND: PREJUDICIAL TREATMENT OF COMMUNITY MEMBERS
As of the time of this writing, ratsofftoya is currently on a weekban from the discord server for a statement that was judged to be wishing death on others (02-01 in the footnotes and references document) - it is worth noting, however, that the offending statement was not challenged by anyone, including the same member of the administration team who later went on to make a statement hoping for the death of a previous president (01-02 in the footnotes and references document, previously mentioned). Later in that same conversation, Rats called out the latter statement as crossing the line, and was rebuffed (02-02 in the footnotes and references document), insulted (01-04 in the footnotes and references document, previously mentioned), and told that the 'deathwish' statement that Souricelle, the administrator in question, had made would not necessarily be considered acceptable if it came from Rats (02-03 in the footnotes and references document), the exact words were "You might if you were doing it just because you were mad at me or something" which is a problem because last I checked, the administration team is not able to empirically know someone's motivation for a given act, and quite frankly I don't trust the judgment of any member of the administration team, past or present, myself included, to make that judgment call without letting bias into the equation. It is furthermore worth noting that Rats has been banned previously for a video which was decried to contain an 'ejaculating penis' (no screenshot or link for this one, it's alleged that the video was referred to as such in admin chat by an unknown member of the admin team, the person who relayed this information to me is someone I trust and who has no reason to lie about it and judging by the fact that it has cropped up elsewhere before I mentioned it, this was leaked to others as well) but contains nothing more offensive than a still image of Biggie Smalls sitting on a sofa while an AI mimic of his voice calls himself worthless and a 'penis sucker' (I have a copy of this video and can provide it upon request). I don't recall the specific timeframe, but the elapsed time from 'Rats was banned for this' and 'the ban is lifted' was at least overnight, and it took rather some doing to convince Huk, the admin who banned her for this offense, to admit that he was in the wrong and give his consent in her appeal thread for the ban to be lifted. At least one member of the admin team has acknowledged this and other handling of certain members of the community was unfair (02-04 and 02-05 in the footnotes and references document), but the mentioned "certain staff" who are "very ashamed" have not apologized to Rats for this to my knowledge, and in any case have not done so in the same context the poor handling (public apology).
DESIRED OUTCOME: Members of the administration team who have something to apologize for should do so, ideally in the same context in which the offense happened (so if the offense happened in a public channel, in that same public channel with a @ ping for the target). Going forward, there should be greater transparency between the community and the administration, instances where a member of the community was treated unfairly should be admitted to, apologized for, and learned from. Occasional "this was discussed in admin chat and handled" and the exceedingly rare "people who i refuse to name feel bad about how you got treated" with an unspoken implication of "but not enough to do anything about it or apologize directly" are simply insufficient and insulting. As was mentioned in the desired outcome for the previous point, members of the administration team should be held to the same standards of behavior as members of the community, *especially* in community-facing spaces. To do otherwise is to, explicitly or implicitly, anoint the administration team as 'above the law' and that is not acceptable. Again, this should be considered a bare minimum - suggestions for 'bonuses' right off the top of my head include greater accountability for the ticketing system (who responded to your ticket? what's the average elapsed time between ticket submission and someone looking at it? how many tickets never get looked at? No idea.) or more frequent townhalls or other situations where a member of the community with a concern can raise that concern, know that it is being taken seriously, and is public enough to provide pressure on the administration team to follow through on the concern.
SIDEBAR: I'm not really calling for anyone's heads here. Admins are screwing up and doing bad things, yes. My perspective is that this is more down to a fundamental lack of structure and the systemic problems within the administration team than it is to bad actors. I figure everyone on the team is there because they want to make the game and/or its community a better, cooler place to hang out, and the problems arise when there is no structure beyond 'don't do these things or... well, nothing will happen, really. but please don't do them.'
PROBLEM THE THIRD: FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN THE ADMINISTRATION STRUCTURE
Currently, anyone who's on the admin team is expected to be at least competent in dealing with ingame issues (including using tools like varedit or build-mode to fix problems with a round), dealing with problem players (including chewing through log files to prove / disprove statements), dealing with the Discord server (including calming down arguments or dealing with people who have broken rules), dealing with meta-issues (like activating forum accounts and moderating the forums), and optionally Coder Things. That is a lot of hats! It does not need to be that many hats! It would make far more sense to have 'admin' have a more granular definition that lets people do what they are good at without expecting them to do things they hate or are not good at. This idea has been floated previously and shot down.
Another issue, and probably a more grave one than the first, is that the flat administration structure has outlived its usefulness. There is no direction or drive to handle important issues, and attempts to resolve issues often wither before bearing fruit because the people who were working on it got tired of dealing with it, or they got distracted by something else. A steering committee that existed solely to *encourage*, but not *require* work on important but unsexy issues would help a lot with this. 'Okay Tom makes a good point that someone should figure out a policy for who gets to use the donglabs company boat.' time passes. 'Hey we haven't heard anything about the boat policy, let's ask Tom where they're at with that and ask them if they need any help or if they have something they can show and get feedback on. Hey Tom!' Everyone is expected to have a hand on the steering wheel, and as a result, the team is rudderless.
DESIRED OUTCOME: Fix it! Pick a group, start with Wire because he's the guy who owns the servers, and build a steering committee. Figure out what that means - what powers should it have? What powers should it NOT have? Figure that out and you're most of the way home, honestly, because that gives you structure and foundation to build upon. Hell, opening up the discussion of that to the entire community wouldn't be a terrible idea, because chances are a bunch of people have some real good ideas about how things could work even if their name isn't orange or red. Let admins focus on tasks they are good at and enjoy doing, and don't expect them to perform tasks they are not good at and don't enjoy doing. I know for a fact there are members of the administration who are real good at in-game things and enjoy handling that, but hate dealing with the Discord server. Similarly, there are also members of the administration who are real good at dealing with the Discord server but aren't all that excited at dealing with things ingame. Stop getting in their way! Maybe even pick people whose only job is to deal with the Discord server so the administrators who don't want to or aren't good at it don't have to! Expecting everyone to do everything is bad planning, and the lack of structure and competitive / sniping aspects to a completely flat administration structure (especially given how that power vacuum was reacted to by some) in addition to burnout has cost the administration team a number of people who decided that as much as they love this community, they can no longer help it along. That's bad! If you read and address only one of the three complaints in this thread, please for the love of god let it be this one, because everything else rests on it. Similarly, if you work on this one first, you'll find the other two problems much easier to chew on.
I love this community, I've loved this community for over a decade now and gave about ten years of my life to helping it grow and strengthen. Please understand that this complaint comes from a place of love - i want to see the admin team do better, because that will mean the community i love is stronger. My specific complaints about specific statements and actions are pointing out behavior I believe to be in the best interests of the administration team to address and assign proper consequences for, yes - but the importance, in my mind, is not on 'punishing the guilty' so much as it is 'strengthening the community' and 'rebuilding trust between the community and the administration team'. Trust is a big one, and you're not going to get it by failing to address your missteps - and you can start with casting a critical eye on some recent bans (Rats, Kate) and having an honest discussion with yourselves about how much of those bans were really about being presented with arguments you don't like. Address your missteps honestly and fairly, show a good-faith effort to improving the systemic problems in the administration team, and we'll finally be able to move on and work together to make this a great community where anybody who isn't an asshole is welcome.
OKAY SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE.
If my base assumption of 'the problems we are seeing now are enabled by a fundamental lack of structure and leadership in the admin team' is accurate, then where does that leave us? we don't really have structure or leadership largely because whether out of fatigue or apathy, the admin team didn't set that structure up a year ago after the collapse of wizards. i have no reason to believe the average member of the admin team is *less* fatigued and apathetic now than they were a year ago, and it's easy to see this is likely to become, if it isn't already, a vicious cycle that leaves everybody burned out and jaded.
Y'all, you have help. Most, if not all, of the work of defining the structure of the administration team could be done with the help of players and other members of the community. You don't need the gibself verb to have some ideas about how a team can work together, and someone whose name in Discord is blue has just as good a chance as an orange name to have insight into organizational dynamics. Maybe pick a few people willing to volunteer to run a thread, or even a subforum? You'll probably get better results if you start with a skeleton - maybe write down a list of very basic things like 'how do people join the team', 'how should the team deal with players' and 'how does the team decide things' and ask people for thoughts. not every idea you get is going to be a good one, and of course you won't be expected to codify some rando's shitpost into policy, but hey - you might get something you can use, or at least use as a foundation. Do you really think the community that surrounds this deranged little game sticks around only because they like the way the fart noises sound? We stick around because we love this game and the people who play it, and we would like it to continue.
This flat-structure, everybody-is-in-charge thing y'all have been doing isn't working. it hasn't worked for a long while, if it ever did. adminchat is a toxic hellhole much of the time, ameliorated once in a while by some hail-mary to try and take the pressure off like screaming at the squeakiest wheel until they cower or leave for a while, or making yet another new channel for the team to scream in consequence-free, or or or - and some of them even work for a while. but sooner or later, y'all are at each other's throats in adminchat again, again, again and the pressure builds until someone does something stupid, usually in cool zone. how many people who used to be on the admin team have been saying for months now that there are profound structural issues? how many people have the administrator role and haven't been seen for months because they got burned out or needed a short break and that turned into weeks? Exactly how many people do you need to see pointing at the admin structure and say 'problem!' and how many people do you need to see noping out of the team before you acknowledge that this shit isn't working?
I get it. building organizational structure is grueling, boring, fundamentally unsexy work. but none of that makes it any less important. let us help you. we might have some ideas. You have to be willing to hear them, though. Ball's in your court.
This is going to be a long read! I am not sorry about this in the slightest! This is a longstanding problem and the admin team has had many, many opportunities to resolve these concerns. If you are not interested in putting in the work to maintain the community when that means five ten minutes of reading, then that is not my problem. What is my problem is the deep issues in the administration team - and it's worth noting that I hold the administration team as a unit responsible for the problems, and actions by individual admins, though they may be reprehensible, are more of a symptom of a problem than the problem in and of itself.
Any declarative statements such as 'X said Y to Z' have proof in the form of links to specific messages and conversations and screenshots (just in case someone decides to edit what they have said). If I can't prove something happened, or I am speaking in a general sense or providing interpretation and perspective, I will say so. I'll put the screenshots and links in a separate googledoc I'll link here: footnotes and references so people who don't feel like checking my work don't have to scroll past it.
PROBLEM THE FIRST: ADMIN BEHAVIOR IN COOL ZONE
Multiple admins have exhibited behavior in cool zone that is against the rules for all people in the discord server and the admin guidelines which apply only to members of the admin team - specifically, statements that if made by a player would be considered 'deathwish / death threat' (01-01 and 01-02 in the footnotes and references document), starting a lengthy argument that complains about 'virtue signaling' (those exact words were used) and is generally dismissive and denigrating to large numbers of people, (01-03 in the footnotes and references document), telling members of the community "Well, you make this discord a worse place" (01-04 in the footnotes and references document) - a statement which he admitted later was inappropriate, but not directly to the person he directed it to because she had been banned in the meantime, and there is no indication he asked for someone in touch with her to relay his apology (01-05 in the footnotes and references document).
This is not an exhaustive list, this is just a few examples I can come up with off the top of my head that have happened in the last three months - and many of these have happened within the last week. There does not appear to be any rules or guidelines that prevent members of the admin team from doing whatever they like in cool zone; or at minimum any rules or guidelines which do apply are ignored with no real consequence.
On the rare occasion an admin's behavior is egregious enough for a member of the admin team to believe it warrants mention later, the mention is never more meaningful or toothsome than 'we talked about it, move on' (01-06 in the footnotes and references document, representative sample).
DESIRED OUTCOME: Members of the admin team should not be above the rules that govern people's behavior on the Discord server, especially in player-facing areas. Those that break those rules should be held to the same standard of punishments as any other member of the Discord server, and if that means temporary or permanent bans, so be it - if a member of the administration team cannot keep themselves under control in this manner, Goonstation is better served with their absence in any case. If it's decided that a simple apology will suffice (judged solely on the scope and magnitude of the offense, admin status should simply not be considered when adjudicating the issue for fairness' sake if nothing else) then that apology should be in the same setting as the offense was - in that same player-facing space, *and* directed specifically at the target of the rule-breaking behavior (like with an @ ping, or a @here if the offense was to the channel in general). If this means the administrator who erred will feel embarrassed, that's a good thing actually, as it will incentivize them to not repeat the mistake. Note that this is to be considered a bare acceptable minimum - if the administration team wanted to seek out free materials for anger management strategies or set up their own no-holds-barred vent channel to give an outlet to admins who for whatever reason *really need* to type whatever they're thinking into a discord window, that would be nice, but the above is a minimum.
PROBLEM THE SECOND: PREJUDICIAL TREATMENT OF COMMUNITY MEMBERS
As of the time of this writing, ratsofftoya is currently on a weekban from the discord server for a statement that was judged to be wishing death on others (02-01 in the footnotes and references document) - it is worth noting, however, that the offending statement was not challenged by anyone, including the same member of the administration team who later went on to make a statement hoping for the death of a previous president (01-02 in the footnotes and references document, previously mentioned). Later in that same conversation, Rats called out the latter statement as crossing the line, and was rebuffed (02-02 in the footnotes and references document), insulted (01-04 in the footnotes and references document, previously mentioned), and told that the 'deathwish' statement that Souricelle, the administrator in question, had made would not necessarily be considered acceptable if it came from Rats (02-03 in the footnotes and references document), the exact words were "You might if you were doing it just because you were mad at me or something" which is a problem because last I checked, the administration team is not able to empirically know someone's motivation for a given act, and quite frankly I don't trust the judgment of any member of the administration team, past or present, myself included, to make that judgment call without letting bias into the equation. It is furthermore worth noting that Rats has been banned previously for a video which was decried to contain an 'ejaculating penis' (no screenshot or link for this one, it's alleged that the video was referred to as such in admin chat by an unknown member of the admin team, the person who relayed this information to me is someone I trust and who has no reason to lie about it and judging by the fact that it has cropped up elsewhere before I mentioned it, this was leaked to others as well) but contains nothing more offensive than a still image of Biggie Smalls sitting on a sofa while an AI mimic of his voice calls himself worthless and a 'penis sucker' (I have a copy of this video and can provide it upon request). I don't recall the specific timeframe, but the elapsed time from 'Rats was banned for this' and 'the ban is lifted' was at least overnight, and it took rather some doing to convince Huk, the admin who banned her for this offense, to admit that he was in the wrong and give his consent in her appeal thread for the ban to be lifted. At least one member of the admin team has acknowledged this and other handling of certain members of the community was unfair (02-04 and 02-05 in the footnotes and references document), but the mentioned "certain staff" who are "very ashamed" have not apologized to Rats for this to my knowledge, and in any case have not done so in the same context the poor handling (public apology).
DESIRED OUTCOME: Members of the administration team who have something to apologize for should do so, ideally in the same context in which the offense happened (so if the offense happened in a public channel, in that same public channel with a @ ping for the target). Going forward, there should be greater transparency between the community and the administration, instances where a member of the community was treated unfairly should be admitted to, apologized for, and learned from. Occasional "this was discussed in admin chat and handled" and the exceedingly rare "people who i refuse to name feel bad about how you got treated" with an unspoken implication of "but not enough to do anything about it or apologize directly" are simply insufficient and insulting. As was mentioned in the desired outcome for the previous point, members of the administration team should be held to the same standards of behavior as members of the community, *especially* in community-facing spaces. To do otherwise is to, explicitly or implicitly, anoint the administration team as 'above the law' and that is not acceptable. Again, this should be considered a bare minimum - suggestions for 'bonuses' right off the top of my head include greater accountability for the ticketing system (who responded to your ticket? what's the average elapsed time between ticket submission and someone looking at it? how many tickets never get looked at? No idea.) or more frequent townhalls or other situations where a member of the community with a concern can raise that concern, know that it is being taken seriously, and is public enough to provide pressure on the administration team to follow through on the concern.
SIDEBAR: I'm not really calling for anyone's heads here. Admins are screwing up and doing bad things, yes. My perspective is that this is more down to a fundamental lack of structure and the systemic problems within the administration team than it is to bad actors. I figure everyone on the team is there because they want to make the game and/or its community a better, cooler place to hang out, and the problems arise when there is no structure beyond 'don't do these things or... well, nothing will happen, really. but please don't do them.'
PROBLEM THE THIRD: FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN THE ADMINISTRATION STRUCTURE
Currently, anyone who's on the admin team is expected to be at least competent in dealing with ingame issues (including using tools like varedit or build-mode to fix problems with a round), dealing with problem players (including chewing through log files to prove / disprove statements), dealing with the Discord server (including calming down arguments or dealing with people who have broken rules), dealing with meta-issues (like activating forum accounts and moderating the forums), and optionally Coder Things. That is a lot of hats! It does not need to be that many hats! It would make far more sense to have 'admin' have a more granular definition that lets people do what they are good at without expecting them to do things they hate or are not good at. This idea has been floated previously and shot down.
Another issue, and probably a more grave one than the first, is that the flat administration structure has outlived its usefulness. There is no direction or drive to handle important issues, and attempts to resolve issues often wither before bearing fruit because the people who were working on it got tired of dealing with it, or they got distracted by something else. A steering committee that existed solely to *encourage*, but not *require* work on important but unsexy issues would help a lot with this. 'Okay Tom makes a good point that someone should figure out a policy for who gets to use the donglabs company boat.' time passes. 'Hey we haven't heard anything about the boat policy, let's ask Tom where they're at with that and ask them if they need any help or if they have something they can show and get feedback on. Hey Tom!' Everyone is expected to have a hand on the steering wheel, and as a result, the team is rudderless.
DESIRED OUTCOME: Fix it! Pick a group, start with Wire because he's the guy who owns the servers, and build a steering committee. Figure out what that means - what powers should it have? What powers should it NOT have? Figure that out and you're most of the way home, honestly, because that gives you structure and foundation to build upon. Hell, opening up the discussion of that to the entire community wouldn't be a terrible idea, because chances are a bunch of people have some real good ideas about how things could work even if their name isn't orange or red. Let admins focus on tasks they are good at and enjoy doing, and don't expect them to perform tasks they are not good at and don't enjoy doing. I know for a fact there are members of the administration who are real good at in-game things and enjoy handling that, but hate dealing with the Discord server. Similarly, there are also members of the administration who are real good at dealing with the Discord server but aren't all that excited at dealing with things ingame. Stop getting in their way! Maybe even pick people whose only job is to deal with the Discord server so the administrators who don't want to or aren't good at it don't have to! Expecting everyone to do everything is bad planning, and the lack of structure and competitive / sniping aspects to a completely flat administration structure (especially given how that power vacuum was reacted to by some) in addition to burnout has cost the administration team a number of people who decided that as much as they love this community, they can no longer help it along. That's bad! If you read and address only one of the three complaints in this thread, please for the love of god let it be this one, because everything else rests on it. Similarly, if you work on this one first, you'll find the other two problems much easier to chew on.
I love this community, I've loved this community for over a decade now and gave about ten years of my life to helping it grow and strengthen. Please understand that this complaint comes from a place of love - i want to see the admin team do better, because that will mean the community i love is stronger. My specific complaints about specific statements and actions are pointing out behavior I believe to be in the best interests of the administration team to address and assign proper consequences for, yes - but the importance, in my mind, is not on 'punishing the guilty' so much as it is 'strengthening the community' and 'rebuilding trust between the community and the administration team'. Trust is a big one, and you're not going to get it by failing to address your missteps - and you can start with casting a critical eye on some recent bans (Rats, Kate) and having an honest discussion with yourselves about how much of those bans were really about being presented with arguments you don't like. Address your missteps honestly and fairly, show a good-faith effort to improving the systemic problems in the administration team, and we'll finally be able to move on and work together to make this a great community where anybody who isn't an asshole is welcome.
OKAY SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE.
If my base assumption of 'the problems we are seeing now are enabled by a fundamental lack of structure and leadership in the admin team' is accurate, then where does that leave us? we don't really have structure or leadership largely because whether out of fatigue or apathy, the admin team didn't set that structure up a year ago after the collapse of wizards. i have no reason to believe the average member of the admin team is *less* fatigued and apathetic now than they were a year ago, and it's easy to see this is likely to become, if it isn't already, a vicious cycle that leaves everybody burned out and jaded.
Y'all, you have help. Most, if not all, of the work of defining the structure of the administration team could be done with the help of players and other members of the community. You don't need the gibself verb to have some ideas about how a team can work together, and someone whose name in Discord is blue has just as good a chance as an orange name to have insight into organizational dynamics. Maybe pick a few people willing to volunteer to run a thread, or even a subforum? You'll probably get better results if you start with a skeleton - maybe write down a list of very basic things like 'how do people join the team', 'how should the team deal with players' and 'how does the team decide things' and ask people for thoughts. not every idea you get is going to be a good one, and of course you won't be expected to codify some rando's shitpost into policy, but hey - you might get something you can use, or at least use as a foundation. Do you really think the community that surrounds this deranged little game sticks around only because they like the way the fart noises sound? We stick around because we love this game and the people who play it, and we would like it to continue.
This flat-structure, everybody-is-in-charge thing y'all have been doing isn't working. it hasn't worked for a long while, if it ever did. adminchat is a toxic hellhole much of the time, ameliorated once in a while by some hail-mary to try and take the pressure off like screaming at the squeakiest wheel until they cower or leave for a while, or making yet another new channel for the team to scream in consequence-free, or or or - and some of them even work for a while. but sooner or later, y'all are at each other's throats in adminchat again, again, again and the pressure builds until someone does something stupid, usually in cool zone. how many people who used to be on the admin team have been saying for months now that there are profound structural issues? how many people have the administrator role and haven't been seen for months because they got burned out or needed a short break and that turned into weeks? Exactly how many people do you need to see pointing at the admin structure and say 'problem!' and how many people do you need to see noping out of the team before you acknowledge that this shit isn't working?
I get it. building organizational structure is grueling, boring, fundamentally unsexy work. but none of that makes it any less important. let us help you. we might have some ideas. You have to be willing to hear them, though. Ball's in your court.
![[Image: chop.PNG]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/833713782063890472/847952211518685194/chop.PNG)
![[Image: guillotine.PNG]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/833713782063890472/847952214978592788/guillotine.PNG)