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

[wintersheir]

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.

wat

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,

nnnnno, if Suzanne Collins came to the blog and commented and then you threatened to ban her for commenting on a spork of her own work, then we would have an equivalent situation

to say nothing of your offensive and tasteless comments regarding Sith Droideka’s religious and political leanings behind his back on your personal journal.

wat


Admittedly, I never saw your comments before the entries were made private, so maybe they WERE ~*~super mean~*~, but, y'know. Maybe the comm tagline should be "das_sporking: molehills made into quality mountains while you wait! affordable teacup-sized tempests!"

[(Anonymous)]

So in conclusion, arguing is evil and everyone should just refer to The Authority to solve everything?

Socordya

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

The author of the fic in question came to the community and began to raise a fuss.

Wow.

The idea that maybe you weren't losing sleep over this doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. It's like they saw you were the author and assumed you were there on a vengeance mission without every considering you personally.

[(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.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if possibly they didn't really read the spork or comments beyond a glance to know there was trouble. I was asked to point out where precisely the sexism issue was, which seemed a bit odd to me when the argument was only on two of the posts and even the whole thing wasn't so long it couldn't be read through, especially split across four people.

Also, given I was the one the mod was talking to at the time and I still have one of the comments quoted here, trying to argue it was a matter of consideration for me makes it sound like she was too stressed to even look at what the mod in question said and was only aware that the comments were frozen by the mod.

[farla.livejournal.com]

That's what happens a lot when it's a community formed around a single person - the transition from personal blog to community is one that's delicate and often fumbled. When the person it's formed around hates seeing people fight...it's pretty inevitable.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Oh, I was a terror!

First, I came in picking a fight with:

Well, not that this hasn't been a great example of how weird it is people are drawn like magnets to the decade-old stuff to complain about, but this has gotten repetitive enough that I'll just ask directly:

What's the point? Half of this is yelling about how you weren't in fandom and can't remember any of the stuff I mention, and the other half is yelling about how the chapter illustrated exactly the point I wanted and this is terrible, with occasional stop-offs at "wow, when Farla was fifteen she sure talked like everyone else at the time (and how the people here still do for some reason but that's fine for some reason)."

Also, I'm glad you like my fake OT openings but try reading OT fic sometime and maybe you'll get the problem.

There was a short exchange with one of the commenters who was objecting to the fact the author's notes are violent and there's a scene where a kid is going to get beaten up in one of the stories, and also says I shouldn't care why people care about something that's old because it's still caring about something that's old.

I say:

Because people seem to prefer the decades old stuff and I'm honestly curious why. There's even more recent series of Unoriginality, and the sporker also hates Lucki, which is much more recent.

You seemed in the stories and author's notes that you were meanspirited, and that you hated everybody for not conforming to your standards. If that was not your intended message, it was not clear to me.

Okay. And this would get into why the decade old thing is weird to me. If you think I'm being unnecessarily vicious currently, that's a completely valid criticism of me. If you're offended stuff I wrote a decade ago about stories you never saw regarding fandom trends you don't know comes off like you're not sure who's the target... Well, I'm honestly sorry you're upset by it, the author notes on this and a couple older things are indeed shit because I would be mad when I wrote them and I was copying how everyone else talked. (There's something even worse in the final batch, I think - depends on how you guys rank things, but it is to me.) But there's no real point in tearing it apart unless I'm still doing the exact same thing and need to hear it or you've got a time machine.

[farla.livejournal.com]

When the sweet sporker came to respond to that with:

Here's the thing, though--what was bad however many years ago is still bad now (and to my knowledge no contemporary in-depth dissection of this story exists anyway). I have another spork on this site of a novel that was written several years ago, but which I only discovered recently. The thing is, if you acknowledge that this is an old shame, then what's so wrong with my criticizing it? I don't think you have to have been there to recognize that it's not okay for a professor to cheer on a kid bullying another kid, or that putting the story's message in the author's notes rather than the story itself is a bad idea.

And as to why I'm doing this even if you aren't still doing the same thing...well the honest truth is I'm not doing this for you personally. The reason why I spork is to organize my thoughts for the bad media I see and find an audience for them. Surely you understand that, seeing as you do this kind of thing yourself?

I then show I'm history's greatest monster by replying with:

Then you really shouldn't have kept making it all about me.

You regularly miss the point of them because you're insisting that I must not have meant that and in the comments you keep telling people my opinions that you appear to have gotten out of a magic eight ball. The most ridiculous to me is the outrage that I went out of my way on the spearow chapter to not make them perfect and innocent victims, because good god I was not even subtle here, to say nothing of your ongoing grudge that my pokemon fanfics concern themselves with pokemon and how this is doing pokemon fandom wrong. I'm also annoyed you never pointed out how very old it was and presented it as current, if for no better reason than that half the comments are complaining this isn't about current canon.

I've stated many times that I'm fine with people doing what they want with my fanfiction, but I want them to always link back to the original when they do so. You've acted as an authority on what I think many times and somehow missed that.

Finally - you do not know anything about what you're sporking. You don't recognize any of the stuff I'm talking about and even my saying outright that the point is to illustrate problems you keep whining it's illustrating problems rather than being primarily about jokes - and then you go on to miss half the jokes that are actually there. Your criticism is terrible.

[farla.livejournal.com]

After that, you can absolutely see why another commenter ends up saying on the MY DISAPPOINTED FACE YOU GUYS post that I wasn't much better, getting into it before the comments were frozen when she'd spoken to sweettalkeress like that. I shouldn't have risen to the bait even if it steamed me up to see a fellow sporker on the comm being talked to like that. (http://das-sporking.livejournal.com/773240.html?thread=20661624#t20661624) about her comment at the time:

You regularly miss the point of them because you're insisting that I must not have meant that and in the comments you keep telling people my opinions that you appear to have gotten out of a magic eight ball.
Considering the comm's anti-drama rule of not linking back to the authors to avoid flamewars or trolls appearing, any comments about authors are purely speculative. Considering that rule is in action sweettalkeress would be unable to come to you for clarification, especially with your attitude now. Everything that's presented to you you accuse the person of some new thing making it more and more about how 'right' you think you are--or at least that is the impression I get.

The most ridiculous to me is the outrage that I went out of my way on the spearow chapter to not make them perfect and innocent victims, because good god I was not even subtle here, to say nothing of your ongoing grudge that my pokemon fanfics concern themselves with pokemon and how this is doing pokemon fandom wrong.
Considering none of these works were 'subtle' you trying not to show Spearow as sympathetic creatures flies over people's heads. In fact, reading back over it I still don't came away with that impression at all. Your writing, over all, in all of the shorts was too heavy-handed for people to tell when you were being deliberate with it for a manner other than purely "parody" purposes.

and then you go on to miss half the jokes that are actually there.
Or perhaps your jokes aren't all you thought they were cracked up to be that they're easily missed in such heavy-handed, bland writing.

For someone who cares little about something that is old, by your own admittance, you certainly seem up in arms over it.

With my two cents on the matter said I'm bowing out before this escalates further. I'll leave it to the comm's mods to handle the situation from here out.

Because nothing says everyone is equally to blame like posting an argument right as you call the mods to prevent any response, just as nothing says giant wank like sixty whole comments on a post and nothing says it's being dealt with properly than the people involved apologizing for being tricked into commenting by my sneaky provocation when they shoud've been good and called the mods to shut me up immediately as per the trolling policy.

But don't worry, they're now encouraging criticism on sporks to prevent bad ones. It's just criticism doesn't involve saying it was a bad spork and giving reasons for it, because that's terrible and behaving like an asshat.

[(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

[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.

[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]

I think you often run into a similar problem that I do, which is that articulateness (particularly when coupled with surefootedness of opinion) is interpreted by people online as condescension and/or anger. (I think at its heart it's ingrained antiintellectualism, really.)

People project like, a lot, and in these types of discussions what tends to happen is the other person isn't used to (or capable of) the idea that an "argument" can be devoid of heated emotion, and they see someone saying things with conviction and assume that because they're feeling emotional, the other person must be as well. The result is that even though it's bafflingly clear to everyone here that you were being chill and cordial, that person saw your assertive but innocuous continuation of the discussion as an emotional attack and reported it.

Complicating this is the Fight Club "protect our own" mentality, which means that someone else's feelings are the priority, not the objectiveness of what was actually said, and you can see how a situation can be created in someone's mind wherein you came in guns blazing and started violently arguing with people and the mods don't bother to actually look at all sides of the situation.

[dioschorium.livejournal.com]

I knew something like this would happen as a result of Mervin's decision to allow universal posting access. Whatever your own opinions of your older works are, Farla, my view is "Unoriginality 1" had no business on a spork community's pillory. "This must be a grudge spork," I thought when I read the sporking of the first two chapters. "There's nothing wrong with the story proper, and the author's notes explain the author's motivation perfectly. Farla's not some bitter crank who wants people to stop having fun with their Pokémon fanfic; she's just tired of seeing the same plot threads and character tropes over and over again and would like for the fandom to create something new. Is the sporker seriously kvetching over that? That you shouldn't write a story specifically to address or deconstruct fanfic clichés? You wouldn't spork a fic like this unless you had a grievance against the author." In fact, I'd go ahead and guess that revenge was the sporker's intention all along: she didn't want to write an incendiary e-mail toward you, so she addressed her vitriol to the author's notes in your fic (thus fulfilling a de facto personal attack, however passive-aggressively) and shared it with a community of people whom she could reasonably expect to sympathize with her. Learning that she wasn't even in Pokémon fandom is the cherry on top of this sundae.

Also, Mervin habitually refrains from laying the blame on any particular party when flare-ups occur on her watch. I only learned about what happened after the fact, but the community had a kerfluffle over Mormonism last year or so, and Mervin painted the situation in much the same way she did here: everyone was at fault and we shouldn't single out anyone. (I don't know whether an actual guilty party existed, since I wasn't there to see the drama unfold.)

Das_Sporking is a community I enjoy reading, but only in small doses. It appears that I was wise to confine my sampling of its contents to the Fifty Shades and "Twihard Idiocy" posts most of the time.

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

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

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

The universal posting decision was absolutely awful, and I think it's safe to say this is not the last time something like this (ie, a grudge spork being posted) will happen, because the internet is the internet and people are people, and no matter how tempting it is to think your community is better, once it gets big enough, it just can't be anymore.

I also think that because the level of discourse was so high in the main sporkings themselves-- Twilight, 50 Shades, etc.-- Mervin and Hyde errantly assumed that all of the readers were willing and able to upkeep that level of discourse and devote the amount of time it takes to it, and people are lazy assholes. The reason that level of criticism doesn't make up the bulk of the internet is because it's an actual skill that's difficult to hone and it takes a lot of time. It was a really tempting way to feel, and I totally don't blame them for it, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense that things fell apart.

The reason I fell in love with Das in the first place was because of the high quality that was hard to find elsewhere... as that's become increasingly diluted, I've found it hard to go back just because how far the average has fallen makes me sad.

Also: how anyone with half a brain couldn't recognize that spork for what it was I don't even know.

[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!)

[farla.livejournal.com]

(I think at its heart it's ingrained antiintellectualism, really.)

Hm. Yes, talking intellectually and people who talk like that being depicted as deceptive and manipulative probably causes some crossed wires no matter what. And intellectual means better at hiding feelings, so the more there's no evidence I'm upset, the more I'm definitely furious and hiding it deliberately.

And if people are used to passive aggression, "No, I honestly don't get why..." = "I hope you fucking die you fucker!"

[farla.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, I bet I could alter the size of that!

[dioschorium.livejournal.com]

I also think that because the level of discourse was so high in the main sporkings themselves-- Twilight, 50 Shades, etc.-- Mervin and Hyde errantly assumed that all of the readers were willing and able to upkeep that level of discourse and devote the amount of time it takes to it, and people are lazy assholes.

I agree. Just because you set a good example doesn't mean others will follow it.

The reason that level of criticism doesn't make up the bulk of the internet is because it's an actual skill that's difficult to hone and it takes a lot of time.

Cosmic Egg, yes. You can't simply gnash your teeth over the target's content or mechanics and expect anyone to congratulate you on your keen literary insight. You have to pinpoint what the problem areas are and analyze them carefully. Even if the purpose of your sporking is comedy rather than analysis, you still have to hold yourself up to standards. (I used to spork Gor novels, and watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped me improve my humor skills, though I made sure to avoid repeating the spirit of their...less sensitive jokes. Without that series, sporking probably wouldn't exist in any significant fashion today.) Farla actually is good at criticism, for that matter.

The reason I fell in love with Das in the first place was because of the high quality that was hard to find elsewhere... as that's become increasingly diluted, I've found it hard to go back just because how far the average has fallen makes me sad.

Me too. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, me too.

[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.