I will keep the snark to a minimum and instead simply present the facts of the situation:
On another mafia site, this policy came into effect at roughly the same time. It was a little over three weeks earlier.
It first started as a user-made thread stating that the word needed to be changed. There were 284 comments in this thread, it was then locked peacefully while a new thread was made by site staff declaring that the word would no longer be used by mods in games - the same ruling originally on mafiascum.
Here are some screenshots of mod to player communication in the announcement thread. The image is blurry for some reason so I've had crop out the right side of the posts so they remain legible:
If you're interested so far, I encourage you to read through instead of just giving it a glance. This is professionalism. The highest-level mods are in thread discussing policy change in a cordial way. There's no shaming of other users, they acknowledge that the word is ingrained in site culture and even they've used it, and having used it does not make anyone a bad person. Real conversations about the use of the word are being had, too, and further explanation for why they believe this change is for the best.
That thread was left open for a little over 4 and a half days, it was locked peacefully with 233 comments. There was dissent, of course, but it was very tame compared to what we saw here.
These are the kinds of people you want on your staff team. And honestly, a whole year ago when I then compared it to the thread we've got on this site, I honestly questioned why I was on this site, and not on that one.
Because let me show you what the staff members on this site did a year ago in that thread:
i
This is reprehensible.
561 and 721 are posts with no purpose but to incite anger and drama and comdemn others. Seriously, this is a site mod in a serious global discussion thread, there's no excuse for this behavior, let alone from someone representing the site.
723 is very hostile and very against the community. They made that thread an us vs them situation for themselves, and it shouldn't be that way.
767 is calling another user a racist. For additional context
another
list mod had made it clear that this was
not
the purpose of the thread. While I'm here, I might as well grab that as well, for context:
What this comment chain above means is that we have one mod who seems to be speaking for the staff team, and another mod who is flying in the face of that and straight up calling other people racist publicly
after the mod team said not to do that.
I cannot stress this enough, this is wildly unprofessional and out of line in multiple ways.
830 continues to instigate drama. Honestly? This isn't even all on xRECKONERx at this point. Somebody on the mod team should be telling this apparent rogue mod member to shut up. It's been three hours at this point and for some reason this guy is still posting in the thread, nobody on the mod team has forced him to step back, or further policed this announcement post which is now 830 posts long in 3 hours, part of which is because of mods arguing with their users and themselves instead of discussing things like adults.
Zoraster, this one is probably on you.
You are frankly too hands off here, I'm guessing you posted this announcement and then stepped back to do real world stuff, not realizing things would blow up so badly... that's totally understandable but somebody has to be the professional in the thread.
To be clear, I don't mean to demonize the mod team,
most of them acted fine.
But somebody needs to take control and stop things from devolving into garbage, not stir things up further. And it doesn't even have to be you! There just needs to be somebody on the mod team who can do that, or action needs to be taken faster, or people need to act professionally, with class, and like adults, not like high school bullies.
841 is a youtube video made to mock a user in thread. People in the thread applauded him for posting this. Seriously?
This thread had 1250 post in 24 hours, and after an abrupt lock riding off the back of a wave of vitrol the mods simply say "thanks for your feedback."
OK. When I spell it out like that, the mafiascum community definitely posted way, way more than the... other one. And that wasn't all the mods fault, but it's hard to say just how much competently handling the situation could have done for that.
So after typing all that out, do you want to know if I think the mods were bad actors in that thread? Yeah, I do. At least in part. I believe I've outlined why above.
And yes, I believe that mods "harassing" other people is a bad thing, full stop. There is no justification for that behavior. The situation was handled unprofessionally and the result was that a lot of people got mad, and a lot of people left the site - not because of the news announcement, but because the mods started demonizing people.
Okay, with all that said, I'm not actually attacking anybody with this post. Especially not Zoraster, who I mostly wanted to make it aware that I considered him partially at fault solely because of his position of power in the community and not having a better grasp over "his" mod team. i.e. laziness and unwillingness to handle the mod team, in my opinion as an outsider. Hey, I could be completely wrong on that as well.
I do think that this ordeal was a bad look, and I am distressed that whenever I enter a thread like this to have semi-serious discussion, I feel like I'm getting dogpiled by a clique of people who I've never interacted with on the mafia side of the site. In a thread focused on the mafia side of the site. I just feel like it's more instigating from people with very low stakes in the matter. That's actually what prompted me to write this all up, I thought that the above posts from davsto and D3f3nd3r were very baitey and I didn't want to take this lying down again when the evidence is
right there
and I feel that I can make a good point.
