Goonhub
10-05-2024, 05:12 PM
The entire set of admin chats basically feel like nicer, more comfortable places now that she's not around. While I don't think Zamu was treated fairly at every moment, she was obviously frequently acting in bad faith and would be mean frankly for the sake of being mean to other admins, in my view. We really were adverse to removing her for a long, long time because she's contributed very good things often and because we're generally adverse to removing admins (and adverse to conflict to some degree), but there's only so much strife one person can cause while seemingly never learning from their mistakes and improving on it. She admitted outright that she wasn't going to change her behavior, even. And it's not just that she held different views about the game or admin team than the rest of us, it was that she'd push her views in a very combative way. It felt like she wanted to get into big arguments and it left seemingly everyone including her very exhausted and upset. We as admins are historically pretty bad about identifying these situations when they come up; it seems obvious from an outside perspective: "If she's being so aggressive why don't you just remove her admin position." but most of us didn't want to get into any argument of any kind with zamu, and we did genuinely think she could work on it and improve until she said she wasn't going to. She has legitimate grievances with the admin team and game and useful insights but they're never presented respectfully.
I'm very glad that we're at least putting our experiences out for people to understand. One of the things zamu really believed in was allowing further transparency for admins, and letting us talk more openly about our individual experiences. Ironically now that she's not on the team anymore we've been moving towards that more, and I think part of that is that any discussion of it would've turned into a big Fight before, now we can actually talk it out in a respectful manner and do it. I don't mean to insinuate that zamu is a horrible person or anything, lots of people saw the contributions she made to the community and the positivity she was able to bring, but I also think it's important that I and other admins share these experiences, because I think we were genuinely treated very poorly by her quite often and I think few (if any) non-admin players know about it and that feels unfair. I think given the mental toll her behavior has taken on many admins and how she's very clearly acting in bad faith and trying to rile people up more than actually make meaningful positive change in the community, I personally think the removal of her from the community is very justified, and I hope our posts here help people understand where we're coming from on this because none of this has been pleasant and I think lots of admins want to just finish this up so we can have a space where we're comfortable working on the game. This whole situation sucks and I don't think anybody is happy that it's gone down like this!! And in the future I personally will be more cautious about this kind of behavior when I see it so it's less likely to go on for multiple years.
I'm very glad that we're at least putting our experiences out for people to understand. One of the things zamu really believed in was allowing further transparency for admins, and letting us talk more openly about our individual experiences. Ironically now that she's not on the team anymore we've been moving towards that more, and I think part of that is that any discussion of it would've turned into a big Fight before, now we can actually talk it out in a respectful manner and do it. I don't mean to insinuate that zamu is a horrible person or anything, lots of people saw the contributions she made to the community and the positivity she was able to bring, but I also think it's important that I and other admins share these experiences, because I think we were genuinely treated very poorly by her quite often and I think few (if any) non-admin players know about it and that feels unfair. I think given the mental toll her behavior has taken on many admins and how she's very clearly acting in bad faith and trying to rile people up more than actually make meaningful positive change in the community, I personally think the removal of her from the community is very justified, and I hope our posts here help people understand where we're coming from on this because none of this has been pleasant and I think lots of admins want to just finish this up so we can have a space where we're comfortable working on the game. This whole situation sucks and I don't think anybody is happy that it's gone down like this!! And in the future I personally will be more cautious about this kind of behavior when I see it so it's less likely to go on for multiple years.