And that was more disappointing than expected.

[farla]

I was asked if I'd fought with the sporker before, how I'd found out, and what the precisely the sexism complaints were over. Luckily I had all the pages saved and could actually answer the last one.

The result of it? A post and a PM.

So, as I am sure everybody is aware by now, there was a pretty big wank that occurred over a spork. The author of the fic in question came to the community and began to raise a fuss. I was pleased to receive multiple PMs about it, because that’s what helps keep the community in check—you guys all help pitch in and keep an eye on the posts and comments and immediately inform a mod when something bad starts to happen.

But not all of you did that. Some of you ignored the community rules and decided it would be better to just jump right in and start arguing—and they weren’t thought-out arguments, either. Sometimes, it seemed like people were jumping on the author simply on the basis that she was the author of the sporked fic and so had to be wrong. Basically, nobody in this mess came out looking good. Pretty much anyone who got involved was an asshat—EVERYONE. I am not happy with the way things turned out. You all behaved shamefully. I thank everyone who merely messaged me and stayed out of it, but this is not how we behave. We do not act like this. When things like this start up, you are always supposed to come to the mods; you do not just dive in like that and let it turn into a massive shitstorm.

While I get the PM:

Thank you very much for the extensive information. I’ve forwarded it to the rest of the moderators, and we have reached a consensus on how to proceed.

I would like to extend my most sincere apologies for the dog-piling you received, along with some of the nastier comments directed at you; the comm knows better than to do that, and believe me when I say I am very disappointed in their behavior. At least one official warning has been issued by Ket Makura. The comm recently opened up at the first of the year, and we had a very sudden explosion of new members and commenters, and as a result, it’s been somewhat chaotic. We’ve been waiting for the sporkers to get their free-for-all out of their systems before we restored order again, and this unfortunate situation has forced our hands.

As for the spork itself, I have requested the sporker cease the riffing simply because the spork is not up to standards. Said sporker normally produces quality material, but this one was not one of them. Sporkers may only take on fics if they provide thought-out arguments against the material, and it was agreed that she simply wasn’t doing that.

However, your own behavior was not necessarily the best, either. You engaged in several pointless comment wars with the members instead of bringing it to the moderators, and became angry when a moderator stepped in and ended a conversation that was going nowhere. Ket was not silencing you; she was putting a stop to unsavory behavior from everyone involved. That was more for your benefit than anybody else’s; she put a stop to it so everybody would stop attacking each other, and froze the thread until all of the mods could see what was going on and decide how to proceed. Also, you leveled a rather hypocritical accusation towards the comm as a whole—I do not find you telling us that we are wrong for hiding in our community and saying all of these things about stories behind the authors’ backs instead of to their faces amusing at all. You are a sporker. Unless you are personally telling Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer and Margaret Stohl and Veronica Roth what you think of their works to THEIR faces, you are guilty of the exact same thing you are trying to lambast my sporkers for, to say nothing of your offensive and tasteless comments regarding Sith Droideka’s religious and political leanings behind his back on your personal journal.

In conclusion, I am very, very sorry this happened, and I am sorry on behalf of the entire comm, but nobody here behaved in an appropriate fashion. However, you have my guarantee that we are all going to do our best to ensure that these incidents are kept to a minimum.

Sincerely,
Das Mervin and Co.

So in conclusion, the problem is authors commenting on the sporks. But it's okay, they're really just protecting me from the mean people and I should have come to them immediately. You can tell by how very concerned the mod was that I needed to shut up and stop picking a fight and how very concerned they are now that everyone remember an author is a troll and you should report to a mod rather than respond ever. Presumably deleting everything that happened while saying it was a huge fight where everyone looked like an asshat is also done because they really, really want to protect me. And Act, I guess, since she's me again.

As you can see in the comments on the linked post, everything has been resolved in a happy and satisfactory way!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

This is really incredibly disappointing (I wish I had a better word for it than that, that seems too mild), and is causing me to rethink my previously positive opinions of das_sporking as a whole. There honestly is a lot of good material there, but if this is really how they think I wonder how much of it is the stopped-clock phenomenon.

What I find especially disturbing is that this is (at least ostensibly) a consensus opinion of their moderators. Gehayi at least understands very well what gaslighting is, judging by her work deconstructing Fifty Shades of Grey, and I find it very difficult to imagine her willingly participating in it.

On another note, I've always thought the "religion and politics are off-limits" thing they have going on there to be rather bizarre - they seem to fetishise civility of discourse over validity of criticism, at least within the bounds of their community (which I find very hypocritical considering the level of vitriol they are willing to direct outside the community, but only so long as its targets don't know about it? The ingroup/outgroup nature seems toxic to me). I'm reminded of the Accommodationist Wars that went on in movement atheism a few years back... I am tempted to wonder how much of that ban is motivated by das_mervin's Catholic affiliation and unwillingness to be criticised on that front, but that may be unfair of me.

-MCB

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's an unusual mix of spork/cult of nice, isn't it? I think the breakdown is because criticizing books and being able to handle direct arguments don't go hand in hand. They did on the old sporking comms because those were organized around fanfic and started as an outgrowth of reviewing authors directly and getting blown up at, but book reviews have never had the same issues.

[(Anonymous)]

Heh, yes, that's definitely possible. I hadn't really considered the history of where "sporking" came from, but that almost certainly is relevant here.

Another thing that came to mind is that this seems like the knee-jerk aversion to "drama" lots of people seem to have, which is almost always an unhelpful idea. I'll just link to Captain Awkward (no affiliation, but she does a good job deconstructing the horrible tropes around it):

http://captainawkward.com/2011/09/04/reader-question-106-how-do-i-get-rid-of-my-terrible-roommate-without-causing-mutual-friend-drama/

In these kinds of internet discussions, "avoiding drama" seems like it always ends up with people deciding to silence dissent *because it's dissent* rather than engaging with it. Now I've seen it go wrong and there are times when it is valid to silence/ban people (trolling, harassment, arguing in bad faith, etc) with whom it's imposible to engage, so I'm certainly not going to go all FREEZE PEACH here, but the problem in those cases is not "drama" but something else. People, especially those in a moderator role, need to learn the difference. It may not be easy, but I think it's an obligation for ethical moderation.

-MCB

[farla.livejournal.com]

I've heard part of the issue is a matter of the groups being female dominated. Be in natural tendencies or socialization, girls grow up learning more about how to avoid direct conflict and make sure everyone's happy than how to actually resolve problems. More male spaces tend to fight things out and the mods only step in at all if it's impacting things beyond to the point it's annoying regardless of how abusive the actual fight is or if it's going to end up with long term grudges, while female areas want to avoid it happening at all because what if it did end up with grudges or getting abusive.

(I think this has something to do as well with how everyone accuses everyone else of being the mean popular girls at some point online, no matter how well cult of nice is actually enforced. Even if you can get everyone in the group to be nice to others right there, people have to vent, so they vent about outsiders. Another group vents about their own outsiders. Both groups see the other people making fun of their people.)

Unfortunately the happy medium between no one saying anything in case it upsets someone else and being a pack of rabid dogs is hard to find.

[(Anonymous)]

That may well have something to do with it (though I would definitely put it down to socialisation rather than some kind of biological essentialism!). It's an interesting observation to me because despite being a cis male myself I spend the vast majority of my time online in female-dominated spaces, and in most of those where I go (especially those explicitly identified as feminist) I haven't observed anything at all like this. So in a way I wonder if this comes back to your observation the other day that das_sporking has never really been a feminist space and that gendered abusive language came into play surprisingly quickly...

It's also entirely possible that I'm talking out of my ass.

-MCB

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

"So in a way I wonder if this comes back to your observation the other day that das_sporking has never really been a feminist space and that gendered abusive language came into play surprisingly quickly..."

That was me, for the record. :P

I should really just change my account name to "AlsoFarla" and give everyone what they've spent the better part of a decade asking for. Dx

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, Act :( I must have just remembered I read it on a site Farla posts to and assumed she'd written it.

-MCB

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

No worries, honest mistake. It happens all the time on DQ because the "Posted by" text is so small xD

[farla.livejournal.com]

That's probably a matter of hanging out in the sane spaces - the right way to handle things tends to be the same (the nicest forum I'm familiar with, with a lot of rules about not being terrible to people and very intensive modding, is very male dominated) but the wrong ways are different.

(I actually really hope evolutionary psychology gets over its creepy seething nice guy phase because I wonder if girls do start off with different tendencies - I've heard that men form groups quickly for goals because hunting, but not why this wouldn't be just as useful for women. But maybe there are differing advantages!)

[dioschorium.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think evolutionary psychology continues to exist because the more misogynistic members of the scientific community are still searching for a justification for sexism. If nature "intends" males and females to fulfill different biological functions, then surely society is justified in forcing women to stay at home, bear and raise children, and soothe men's weary brows. Never mind that A) the idea that nature intends for anything to happen is a tremendous fallacy, B) everyone evolved to navigate social situations, not just females, and C) humans are not the same as other animals, just as different species of animals are not analogous to each other. No, really, the "male brain's" naturally superior mathematical and scientific skill set is a myth.

A century or two ago, when the scientific fields were almost exclusively male-dominated (at least in the West; I don't know about the East), scientists liked to dredge up tenuous "proof" that white males were the natural masters of the world, such as likening Africans' skulls to those of apes and claiming that women's brains were "missing five ounces." The purpose of this malarkey was to provide a justification for the Empire's continued existence: the "white man's burden" was to "civilize" other nations, and the white woman's burden was to make life comfortable for the white man. Of course, later developments discredited this glorified propaganda, but you can still find people, even people who should know better, who point to such things as MRIs as evidence that nature intended for men to be smarter than women. Most of them don't say that in so many words, but that's what they mean. And the misconceptions are the legacy of imperialism.

You can read about this phenomenon in Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender. She doesn't talk about the British Empire—I came up with that hypothesis on my own—but she debunks the gender essentialists' flimsy cases. I would declare that the book should be required reading in schools, but that might kill students' interest in it.

[(Anonymous)]

I think this is right. Which is a real shame, honestly, because I think the core idea of evolutionary psychology has merit (something like "our brains evolved with the rest of us, let's explore the implications of that") but in execution it almost always appears to be an exercise in rationalising stereotypes and defending the status quo (or some imaginary 1950s status quo, as the case may be).

-MCB

[dioschorium.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately the happy medium between no one saying anything in case it upsets someone else and being a pack of rabid dogs is hard to find.

For some reason, it seems that only RPGNet got that right. You're allowed to discuss controversial topics, but you're not allowed to express bigoted views. If you say something racist, sexist, anti-gay, or anti-transgender, you'll get a firm warning from the moderators, and if you persist in spewing venom, you'll get banned. You're not even permitted to complain about "political correctness." The mods will ban you. And it's glorious. We need regulation in online communities, which is what makes Mervin's decision to allow posting access in a spork community to just anyone baffling.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's the exact one I was thinking of. But they don't just have great policy but a legion of mods and do stuff like ban individuals from particular topics, which is such an amazing idea but must be a headache to keep up.

It might also have to do with size. The forum is huge and old and had a lot of time to find patterns in what trouble looked like. As far as I can tell, the comm has made it this long without any author ever finding out.

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, the comm has made it this long without any author ever finding out.

I think a lot of this was the direct result of us being very, very familiar with how these things work and them having virtually no experience. Even if you don't like the open-and-honestly policy (which let's be serious, it's infinitely preferable), it certainly makes you learn how to deal with people and also teaches you how to distance yourself emotionally.

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

I am tempted to wonder how much of that ban is motivated by das_mervin's Catholic affiliation and unwillingness to be criticised on that front, but that may be unfair of me.

I think you have half of it here, but as someone who is culturally Catholic and identifies as Christian, I really empathize with her on the other half.

I think the reasoning behind the seeming " unwillingness to be criticised" is more that on the Interwebz, identifying yourself as a theist tends to set you up for really vicious ad-hominum attacks ("So why do you hate gay people?"), and I totally understand her just not wanting to deal with that because it's really exhausting and demoralizing. I get that IRL on a macro level the dominant group can't be opressed, but on micro level and ESPECIALLY on the internet (here's looking at you, Reddit), there's a lot of bullying. I've been a victim of it and I'm sure she has as well, and frankly she's a braver person about it than I am: I pretty much erased as much evidence of my religious background as I could; she still talks about it openly.

I think where she went wrong was overgeneralization of the rule: It went from "Let's be nice to everyone and let them feel safe," to "No one is the comm can be wrong ever because that makes people sad." And as we know, sometimes people are just wrong. For example, the guy who essentially told me to stop being hysterical about supposedly "sexist" things. He and I were not equally culpable in that situation.

[(Anonymous)]

I see where you're coming from, though I'll admit it's a struggle for me because I'm coming at this from almost completely the other direction (I am an antitheist atheist and spend the majority of my time in atheist or at the very least secular spaces), I'm much more used to seeing religious trolls showing up and behaving obnoxiously while making really terrible arguments, then getting upset when it doesn't immediately convince everybody. Or, to be fair, misogynistic, racist, or transphobic atheists flogging their bigotry; there are plenty of those and they make me even angrier than people whose bigotry stems from a religious source, but never mind that for now. I don't generally see people being bullied for identifying as theists until they actually attempt to bring theistic arguments or reasoning into discussions. But of course that's just what I see and I don't doubt the bullying you describe happens.

That said, when I see, for example, Mervin saying something like "As a Catholic, Stephenie Meyer's portrayal of the Volturi pisses me off. But don't talk about religion here I warned you!" (obviously not a direct quote but you know what I mean) I find it difficult to see anything except hypocrisy. I remember a similar thing that came up in discussion of Bella's pregnancy in Twilight, where she went into detail teasing out what the text was trying to say (or not say) about abortion and then said "don't argue about abortion in the comments, or I will ban you", it seems a bit off to me. "I can talk about this thing but you aren't allowed to".

Maintaining safe spaces is complicated and difficult and can be incredibly emotionally draining; I did a brief stint as a forum moderator myself and the stress was too much for me, so I can understand that. But I don't think that's a valid excuse for doing it poorly, or for going into "positive feedback only, all opinions must be held as equally valid" or similar bullshit reasoning. As you say, when a nasty argument breaks out it does not automatically mean both parties are culpable.

That said, it's her space and she has the right to moderate it however she likes.

-MCB

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

I totally understand where you're coming from, and like I said, in the real world, there's no question that I have the privilege in that area. I also don't think, for the record, that that kind of trolling typifies discourse in atheist communities. But I do understand why she would really really want to try to avoid that kind of thing in her own comm.


I've actually never thought about the "As a Catholic, Stephenie Meyer's portrayal of the Volturi pisses me off. But don't talk about religion here I warned you!" thing in that way before. It actually makes me wonder what would really happen is someone tried to engage in a discussion of, say, whether the Volturi are meant to represent the Papacy. I missed out on the Great Mormon Debacle of yesteryear (and I was so sad about this), but I kind of wonder now if perhaps all that happened was someone dared to say, "X part of Mormon doctrine is offensive to me."

I also think, and take this how you will, the it was the same person who set off both that shebang and the whole sexism thing.

[(Anonymous)]

Understood, and acknowledged.

That is a very interesting question; I'd love to know what would happen but I'm not qualified to start that argument myself :P I don't really remember the Mormon debacle either (I'm a chronic lurker everywhere and very rarely comment, so I wasn't paying much attention; for some reason this particular kerfluffle has made me want to speak out), but you may very well be right.

It's entirely possible, but I wouldn't make that bet myself, because I'm pretty sure zie is not the only Mormon-identified-person who comments there... that said, I wouldn't be surprised.

-MCB

[dioschorium.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'm sorry for being misleading. The community didn't have so much as a kerfluffle as it did a number of people who made comments that disparaged Mormonism. Mervin didn't like that, so she admonished the entire community in a mod post.

[farla.livejournal.com]

That said, when I see, for example, Mervin saying something like "As a Catholic, Stephenie Meyer's portrayal of the Volturi pisses me off. But don't talk about religion here I warned you!" (obviously not a direct quote but you know what I mean) I find it difficult to see anything except hypocrisy. I remember a similar thing that came up in discussion of Bella's pregnancy in Twilight, where she went into detail teasing out what the text was trying to say (or not say) about abortion and then said "don't argue about abortion in the comments, or I will ban you", it seems a bit off to me. "I can talk about this thing but you aren't allowed to".

I think it gets into the public/private problem of the internet. Just because you're saying something doesn't mean you want to argue about it, even when what you're doing is itself an argument.

I know in various blogging communities, LJ sometimes included, they've had times when arguing with the blog poster is against norms. Instead, you make your own post. But that doesn't work if the community is supposed to be a hidden one and no one can talk about it except on the posts itself.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I get that IRL on a macro level the dominant group can't be opressed, but on micro level and ESPECIALLY on the internet (here's looking at you, Reddit), there's a lot of bullying. I've been a victim of it and I'm sure she has as well, and frankly she's a braver person about it than I am: I pretty much erased as much evidence of my religious background as I could; she still talks about it openly.

I think that the internet really is a great leveler in this. If you have information about yourself, someone will attack you over it.

For example, the guy who essentially told me to stop being hysterical about supposedly "sexist" things. He and I were not equally culpable in that situation.

That's a particularly dismal example given how upset they were about what you said here, presumably because he was complaining about it. It's like it's based on who can throw the biggest temper tantrum, probably because they're the one you have to appease to end the drama.

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

That was something that made is seem like they paid absolutely no attention to what actually happened-- just a cursory look at the timestamps was all it should have taken to see what actually went on. It should have been pretty clear that he pissed me off by saying some pretty shitty things, I left the conversation to avoid escalating it, and after still being angry after a little while, let off steam at you. Instead they're acting like I went off on him behind his back, and then starting calling him names in the comm when he oh-so-nobly tried to defend himself.

1) The implication that I somehow was asking for being gaslight-zergswarmed is fucking disgusting.
2) The idea that they can somehow police conversations I have with other people is fucking idiotic.

[farla.livejournal.com]

The key bit might be when she says the comments are terrible because they were about religious and political leanings. I assumed the religion/politics ban was for the usual reasons that it's just wanky, but there are lots of different ideas about what's acceptable to comment on and what's inherently rude to judge people for, and it may be those are banned because she feels they're personal and should never be questioned, in which case I don't think there's any way to communicate.

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

You know, I stand by the assertion that that kind of crap is what gives all religious people a bad name. They're acting like I said, "All Muslims eat puppies for breakfast," or something.

edit: And I mean, I accept it was a dick thing to say to a person, but that's exactly why I didn't say it to him! I knew I was too pissed to conduct a cordial conversation so I didn't. UGH.

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's not like any of what they were doing was good faith arguing and deserved respectful treatment. While there they were insisting they argued only out of the deepest respect for Ivy's important role in the anime and what a great character she was, he went to his tumblr to wail about how he'd been called sexist just because he didn't agree about about some random COTD (http://prettyflyforaciswhitemale.tumblr.com/post/77088918912/im-pretty-sure-that-someone-on-das-sporking#post-notes) (and someone else is cackling about what idiots we are tagged with my name (http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/farla), but you know, how dare you break the veil of secrecy or suggest this was grudgewank).