Sorry, can't afford an editor or someone to stand by and blackjack me over the head after three or four paragraphs, but it's at least 60% related to your post. ;b I tend to work things out by putting them to paper, and this subject requires a lot of looking back and pondering from different angles.
Btw, this might be insensitive, but am I the only one who likes to look over the
Election Night thread for PoliGaf and t
he official election night thread now and then? There's just something about the hubris that's fascinating to me and it's like a shut-off ecosystem, showing how the dynamics of conversations can work when smugness takes over and later hits you right back in the face. That's not to say that I wasn't expecting Hillary to win, but I surely wasn't near as sure as PoliGaf repeating their talking points. And I wasn't really invested in the election, being Norwegian and all, and mostly had an academic interest in the election. Can't imagine the churning of their stomachs through the night.
GAF was one of the top five referring websites in the world to Hillary's campaign site, as reported by Vice. You would've been hard-pressed to find a more intense pro-Hillary stronghold on the internet.
Initially I was all "huh, neat," at seeing such a dramatic statistic for what has always been a video game forum first and foremost, but I became increasingly concerned by it and by how discussion had shaped in such a unilateral direction. Even during the primaries, a handful of people PMed me about how any Sanders supporters were being unfairly suppressed, but when I looked into the specific bans mentioned by the folks who contacted me I didn't spot foul play. Part of the prob was how much political talk was centralized in the PoliGAF megathread. Fast-paced subcommunity megathreads end up resembling chatrooms with cliques and inside jokes and thread-specific jargon and attitudes. I didn't follow the PoliGAF megathread, several mods did and everything on their end seemed to be on the up and up I thought, and I'm not keen on dropping into one of those threads like that and acting heavy-handed with no understanding of the context there (e.g. banning people for calling each other "cunts" in the ill-fated Footie thread didn't make a lick of sense).
Looking back, though, whatever went down in the PoliGAF megathread had repercussions across off-topic and somehow Hillary ended up being the mod-enforced Official Candidate, far as I can surmise, at least as far as some of the politically active mods were concerned. By the time that became somewhat apparent, we were onward to the GE, and while I'm not a Hillary fan and thought she ran a godawful campaign full of cringe-inducing lip service to minority groups and youth demos and any other boxes deemed necessary to check that she clearly didn't give a shit about, etc. etc., (and as someone who voted for Obama I certainly had not forgotten her thinly veiled racially charged attack ads), I was 100/100 Not Pleased with the character and credentials and mob ties and Russia ties of the opposition, and by that point I probably would've had to hire professional masochists to out themselves as Rs on here with how hostile the community had become toward any viewpoint not their own.
I'm sure there were a lot of meltdowns at the election result on here, but there were a lot of meltdowns about it IRL too. LGBT friends were in tears knowing that Obama's executive orders on their behalf would be on the chopping block straight away, etc., and it was sad sights like that all around socially here in Austin. Tensions were really fucking high out in the world in the subsequent days, too. Protests, riots, confrontations between citizens and hate groups, a lot of unrest, and some of it right next to my home. Hadn't ever experienced that kind of election stateside in living memory. Things were different and at times unrecognizable.
It was after the election on here, though, that I became completely disturbed by the the social and political discourse on off-topic. Later I uncovered that bish had secretly banned hundreds of users...basically all the moderate regulars...and everything went completely off the rails at that point. Trump voters all deserved to die, not disowning any family members who voted R got you piled on and vilified, etc. etc. Straight up scary and juvenile and militant behavior. I know a lot of non-US folks here felt alienated by the extremely disproportionate talk and weird identity politics where everyone assumed everyone else was American even though gaf is majority non-US, etc. I tried mass locking and consolidating threads to balance things out but everyone was so worked up and effectively demanded to be miserable and only talk about good ol' POTUS and his latest tweet and how shitty and irredeemable the world was (never mind all-time-high quality of life for the species I s'pose).
WRT the election, I was very much concerned about the potential loss of LGBT rights, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, unnecessary mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, travel bans disproportionately targeting Muslims, the end of net neutrality, and overall corruption and disregard for long-standing decorum of the office that was immediately on display, but there were some folks on here talking about getting together for armed revolt, and even trying to cool off those notions got me painted as "The Enemy," or defending Jon Stewart's even-handed words about his first-hand experiences with poor, rural Americans (where he was repeatedly branded a race traitor here, among other things), or any other time I personally stepped in with an appeal to civility and reason. Any time I posted there would be multiple account suicides @ me on the spot. I assume by then it was just a matter of time before something catastrophic went down and off-topic disowned me or whatever you want to call it. Things got so warped with identity politics that I was being told I wasn't "allowed" to moderate my own site because of the white guy in the avatar under my username. Fuckin' hell. I only ever wanted discussion here to be about the content of the message, not the color or sex or official oppression level of the person posting it.
Should've acted sooner and done more and trusted certain mods less (or not at all). After 20 years sometimes you think you know someone, sigh. 2017 (and some of the lead-up in '16) was one of the worst years of my life, though, so I was not exactly on my A game as the showrunner here when I needed to be the most and needed to be making hard but necessary moves left and right. I don't know if it would've mattered for a lot of the aforementioned, but I'm fairly certain I would've tried to do more after the Bish incident if I had anything left in the tank at that point. I did a big investigation personally and unbanned a boatload of people, but I think the forum and I needed a Talk. Or a lot of Talks. I definitely should've engaged more and been firmer, investigated some other mods and likely removed a few of them, and maybe things would've played out differently and the nuclear powderkeg that formed wouldn't have been as extreme. Dunno. Never could've anticipated getting #metooed tho.
So many moving parts to the whole thing and how politics ended up going off the deep end here. Personal stuff pulling me away, ongoing policy failures on my part that added up over the years I think due to my own biases, internal politics and major backstabbing in the team, current events that all tied in to the culture that formed, a bunch of pent-up resentment off-site that had been festering for a long time (contributed to a toxic us vs them mentality over time I think)...there were people literally full-time, every waking moment, talking about me obsessively on reddit and elsewhere that I was made aware of. Like 16/7/365. Most people on the internet who dislike me prolly just think I'm an asshole or whatever, but maaan, there's a subset of actual crazy in the mix too that wanted me ruined or dead, or so stated at least. Probably not ideal to have that sort of interest your way under any circumstances if there's going to be a happy ending, lol. That sort of stuff made me a lot less comfortable about having an online life on here or anywhere else; hopefully understandable, but unfortunately only increased the distance between me and the community.
There's more to it that I hold myself accountable for: for a discussion forum, there wasn't much discussion on the table whenever it came to the conservative end or people of faith and several other groups, which all got weeded out little by little over time, and that shouldn't have been the case. Way too much emphasis on American politics and social issues, too, for such an international forum. Way too much negativity for a place that was supposed to be escapism from the shitty real world. I was too political myself, at times inappropriately self-righteous. While not determining factors I don't think, everything still adds up.
Considered splitting off-topic into a separate website, too, but there was very little we could even hypothetically do until the platform migration went through (nearly impossible to push any changes or updates to our modded and hacked vb3), and all the BS happened before the migration was finalized. Dunno if I would've gone through with a gaming/off-topic split or not, but it was on the table. Off-Topic in 2017 was MISERABLE. Gaming side was still home, but Off-Topic wasn't feeling that way anymore. Used to be that I talked with all the folks here and shared stories and went to meetups and gave fitness advice and cracked jokes and everything was fun and light-hearted the vast majority of the time. It stopped being that way, and turned into a giant ball of anger and militant groupthink.
Anyhow, just trying to learn from what happened and do better at this point, bounce back from some dark times I barely made it through, keep gaf alive and fun and worthwhile and diverse in the proper sense, etc. There's been steady recovery, though some folks clearly need to get their friends on here ;b, and we need less metacommentary (especially about other websites) and peer-to-peer hostility on off-topic (wtf @ today), but I'm enjoying running things and participating again, and I hope that's contagious! There aren't many traditional forums anymore, and this one's special to me.
You people are so full of shit I wonder how your toilets can handle it.