Goonhub
05-31-2021, 02:54 AM
Not sure I should be bothering with this thread, considering the kind of response someone as long-standing as pope got, but fuck it. I'm tired of watching this happen and feel the need to say *something*.
Myself and several other people have noticed several problems with the Goonstation administration team in general, which were best outlined in popecrunch's thread, and I don't feel like repeating him too much because frankly he's better at this than me, so here's the general gist of it.
-Admins are very clearly not held to the same standards as players, and no punishment system exists for when an admin breaks their guidelines or the server's general rules that *everyone* has to follow, or even the god damn Discord Terms of Service. Which proves to be incredibly frustrating and hypocritical when the latter two things are so heavily enforced on players.
-Admins treat certain members of the community with very real prejudice, between calling one person "deranged and unhinged" unprompted and treating others as if they have a burning hatred for the entire team, just to name a few examples. This became especially apparent when multiple trans members of the community were kicked and/or banned for ToS violations, as well as pointing out the ToS violations of the admin team, which was met with a virtually meaningless "we talked to them and they are vewwy vewwy sowwy", while multiple cis members of the community, myself included, got off with an official warning AT THE ABSOLUTE MOST (I should point out, however, that this is to my approximate knowledge. If any part of this is wrong, which I have seen nothing suggesting that it is so far, please respectfully point it out to me. With proof.) I am also not at liberty to discuss any specific cases for privacy reasons. if someone posts their experience here, great. If it gets deleted for "peanut posting", I'm going to personally take it as a sign that the administration team is further acting on that prejudice and frankly just give up on this thread.
-The Administration team has several structural and cultural problems internally that a large chunk of the community has noticed by now because it's very much leaking out into player-side channels, and are absolutely refusing to be transparent about whether or not they're even bothering to fix it, and if they are, actively refusing to let the community help them fix it or even let them know. Personally, my hunch says that they aren't fixing it.
Pivoting from the issues that were better explained by a much better and wiser person than I am, there's also some more stuff I noticed that really, really pisses me off, and several other people whom I have privately talked about regarding how much these things pissed them off. I will not state names for privacy reasons.
-A complete and utter lack of transparency towards the community. I know, I know, "but now that we're open source we're as transparent as we've ever been!!!". The fact that you have to frequently use that excuse when transparency is brought up should say something about how you can really, really do better. Talk to us, please. Help us help you. Let us know that you're putting in work to not have you and your community crumble into an unstable mess (like you're on track to right now, actually!). The complete lack of transparency regarding admin issues is frustrating. Yes, I know. You don't want to "expose the secrets to the unworthy". You don't want to just tell everyone about what just happened in a private channel. You don't want to show everyone exactly what you're doing because by god, the racists could steal it! Well, I'm gonna be blunt here: now doesn't seem like the time to be maintaining that kind of secrecy. Now's the time to tell the community that yes, we are fixing these issues that are becoming increasingly obvious. Here's how. Yes, we are doing more to punish troublesome admins instead of talking to them and conducting internal investigations that always end like every other internal investigation. Here's how. I'm not telling you to let everyone see and talk in the admin channels, and I'm not telling you to listen to every rando who tells you to make everyone an admin or some other low effort bad-faith shitpost. I'm telling you to tell us what's going on and let us help in whatever way we can, please.
-Refusal to listen to criticism, constructive or not, and a frankly disgustingly dismissive view of the community in general.. The fact that pope's thread was locked after receiving four paragraphs of non-answers that, to be brutally honest, feel like something I'd receive after calling a customer support line for a big company, should say a lot. The fact that a lot of criticism is met with "take it to the forums" or "open source devs owe you nothing" or "players don't know what they want" or "the devs make the game they wanna make and all they care about is player count" says a lot. The fact that changes that a lot of players absolutely hated the mere idea of never get reverted because "it's been a week and nobody's complaining anymore" says a lot. The fact that the attitude towards the community is explicitly stated by developers to be nothing more than "player numbers aren't going down, clearly what we're doing is working!" says a lot. What this tells me is that the developers don't care about their players. They care about how many players are on. Player numbers not going down doesn't mean that nobody's leaving; people can be dissatisfied with a change and still play the game, because they like the game and they care about it. People who do leave get replaced by new players, or people who have just come back from a hiatus. People typically complain about a game's flaws to developers not because they hate the developers, but because they care about the damn game and wanna see it be the best it can be, because it's good and fun and they've met a lot of good people on it. Especially long-standing players.
Now, this probably isn't an extensive list; I'm sure there's even more problems that I'm either unaware of, or too tired and angry to remember. I'm not pointing out these flaws because I HATE THE ADMIN TEAM AND WANT THEM TO SUFFER A THOUSAND YEAR PUNISHMENT OF BEING TOLD THEY'RE WRONG. I took the time to type this out because I care about Goonstation, even if my way of delivering criticism can be very hostile and cynical at times, (sorry for not being perfect) and I made sure I at least wasn't hostile in this thread. I want this place to be better than it currently is, and we aren't going to get there by pretending that everything is fine, because everything is not fine and Goonstation has become an increasingly hostile and toxic environment to a lot of long-standing admins and individuals. People are leaving the community because of this. And more people will leave. And eventually, some of those people who left will band together and make their own server using Goon's open-source code. And those codebases will start competing with you and drawing away your precious player count. And those servers will outlive Goon, because Goon crumbled under its unstable leadership, because every history book I've read says that the number one reason of failure for countries, kingdoms, empires, religions, factions, political parties, and nearly every other substantial group in history was because of instabilities in leadership which either caused it to fall apart on its own, or made it weak to outside resistance, and there's no evidence that it'll be any different this time. This isn't a threat; it's a warning.
Please take this thread as the good-faith warning that it is. Listen to your players, put in a good-faith effort to solve your own problems. Let your community help you, because there's no shame in asking for help. If you don't, then this entire project isn't gonna last. Once again, that's not a threat, and not something I'd ever act on; it's a warning that your refusal to seriously act on these issues will have dire consequences for you and your community.
Myself and several other people have noticed several problems with the Goonstation administration team in general, which were best outlined in popecrunch's thread, and I don't feel like repeating him too much because frankly he's better at this than me, so here's the general gist of it.
-Admins are very clearly not held to the same standards as players, and no punishment system exists for when an admin breaks their guidelines or the server's general rules that *everyone* has to follow, or even the god damn Discord Terms of Service. Which proves to be incredibly frustrating and hypocritical when the latter two things are so heavily enforced on players.
-Admins treat certain members of the community with very real prejudice, between calling one person "deranged and unhinged" unprompted and treating others as if they have a burning hatred for the entire team, just to name a few examples. This became especially apparent when multiple trans members of the community were kicked and/or banned for ToS violations, as well as pointing out the ToS violations of the admin team, which was met with a virtually meaningless "we talked to them and they are vewwy vewwy sowwy", while multiple cis members of the community, myself included, got off with an official warning AT THE ABSOLUTE MOST (I should point out, however, that this is to my approximate knowledge. If any part of this is wrong, which I have seen nothing suggesting that it is so far, please respectfully point it out to me. With proof.) I am also not at liberty to discuss any specific cases for privacy reasons. if someone posts their experience here, great. If it gets deleted for "peanut posting", I'm going to personally take it as a sign that the administration team is further acting on that prejudice and frankly just give up on this thread.
-The Administration team has several structural and cultural problems internally that a large chunk of the community has noticed by now because it's very much leaking out into player-side channels, and are absolutely refusing to be transparent about whether or not they're even bothering to fix it, and if they are, actively refusing to let the community help them fix it or even let them know. Personally, my hunch says that they aren't fixing it.
Pivoting from the issues that were better explained by a much better and wiser person than I am, there's also some more stuff I noticed that really, really pisses me off, and several other people whom I have privately talked about regarding how much these things pissed them off. I will not state names for privacy reasons.
-A complete and utter lack of transparency towards the community. I know, I know, "but now that we're open source we're as transparent as we've ever been!!!". The fact that you have to frequently use that excuse when transparency is brought up should say something about how you can really, really do better. Talk to us, please. Help us help you. Let us know that you're putting in work to not have you and your community crumble into an unstable mess (like you're on track to right now, actually!). The complete lack of transparency regarding admin issues is frustrating. Yes, I know. You don't want to "expose the secrets to the unworthy". You don't want to just tell everyone about what just happened in a private channel. You don't want to show everyone exactly what you're doing because by god, the racists could steal it! Well, I'm gonna be blunt here: now doesn't seem like the time to be maintaining that kind of secrecy. Now's the time to tell the community that yes, we are fixing these issues that are becoming increasingly obvious. Here's how. Yes, we are doing more to punish troublesome admins instead of talking to them and conducting internal investigations that always end like every other internal investigation. Here's how. I'm not telling you to let everyone see and talk in the admin channels, and I'm not telling you to listen to every rando who tells you to make everyone an admin or some other low effort bad-faith shitpost. I'm telling you to tell us what's going on and let us help in whatever way we can, please.
-Refusal to listen to criticism, constructive or not, and a frankly disgustingly dismissive view of the community in general.. The fact that pope's thread was locked after receiving four paragraphs of non-answers that, to be brutally honest, feel like something I'd receive after calling a customer support line for a big company, should say a lot. The fact that a lot of criticism is met with "take it to the forums" or "open source devs owe you nothing" or "players don't know what they want" or "the devs make the game they wanna make and all they care about is player count" says a lot. The fact that changes that a lot of players absolutely hated the mere idea of never get reverted because "it's been a week and nobody's complaining anymore" says a lot. The fact that the attitude towards the community is explicitly stated by developers to be nothing more than "player numbers aren't going down, clearly what we're doing is working!" says a lot. What this tells me is that the developers don't care about their players. They care about how many players are on. Player numbers not going down doesn't mean that nobody's leaving; people can be dissatisfied with a change and still play the game, because they like the game and they care about it. People who do leave get replaced by new players, or people who have just come back from a hiatus. People typically complain about a game's flaws to developers not because they hate the developers, but because they care about the damn game and wanna see it be the best it can be, because it's good and fun and they've met a lot of good people on it. Especially long-standing players.
Now, this probably isn't an extensive list; I'm sure there's even more problems that I'm either unaware of, or too tired and angry to remember. I'm not pointing out these flaws because I HATE THE ADMIN TEAM AND WANT THEM TO SUFFER A THOUSAND YEAR PUNISHMENT OF BEING TOLD THEY'RE WRONG. I took the time to type this out because I care about Goonstation, even if my way of delivering criticism can be very hostile and cynical at times, (sorry for not being perfect) and I made sure I at least wasn't hostile in this thread. I want this place to be better than it currently is, and we aren't going to get there by pretending that everything is fine, because everything is not fine and Goonstation has become an increasingly hostile and toxic environment to a lot of long-standing admins and individuals. People are leaving the community because of this. And more people will leave. And eventually, some of those people who left will band together and make their own server using Goon's open-source code. And those codebases will start competing with you and drawing away your precious player count. And those servers will outlive Goon, because Goon crumbled under its unstable leadership, because every history book I've read says that the number one reason of failure for countries, kingdoms, empires, religions, factions, political parties, and nearly every other substantial group in history was because of instabilities in leadership which either caused it to fall apart on its own, or made it weak to outside resistance, and there's no evidence that it'll be any different this time. This isn't a threat; it's a warning.
Please take this thread as the good-faith warning that it is. Listen to your players, put in a good-faith effort to solve your own problems. Let your community help you, because there's no shame in asking for help. If you don't, then this entire project isn't gonna last. Once again, that's not a threat, and not something I'd ever act on; it's a warning that your refusal to seriously act on these issues will have dire consequences for you and your community.