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I'm sure you already knew this was coming, and not just because I haven't been active on this site in a full month.
I returned, initially, because the site was starting to flounder and I felt strangely obligated to help keep it from spiraling out of control while the forum move was happening. When I came back, I was asked by a few people to stick around after the forum move was over. I chose to indulge them. That was a mistake.
I don't have any enthusiasm left for this place. I didn't when I left the first time (although I had other, adjacent reasons for leaving back then), and that hasn't changed since I got back. I go through the motions of this place, ignoring the things I don't like in order to focus on contributing to projects I no longer care about. I stay here out of habit, not because I actually enjoy being here. And I'm not going to do that anymore.
But before I leave, there's something I need to say out loud, because it's something that this community needs to hear from a person who's in my position.
I am not proud to have been a staff member of this site.
As someone who has been staff for close to two and a half years now and has paid fairly close attention to the events of that timeframe, I can say with utter certainty that many supposed "misconceptions" about staff members have a lot of truth to them. We get away with more shit, we're given the benefit of the doubt far more times than we should be, and we can easily maintain our positions for long periods of time just based on how much we've "helped the community" or "contributed to the wiki". (The latter is especially circular; it means our preferential treatment grows the longer we are staff members, which in turn contributes to us remaining staff for longer periods of time.) When we are punished, said punishments aren't nearly as harsh as others' are; we are never banned for any stretch of time unless we do something especially heinous, and it takes multiple warnings and infractions across a lengthy timeframe just for some of us to be demoted to lower positions.
That certain punishments have (or had) taken so long to be handed out, after such extended periods of constant infraction from the offending parties, should be evidence enough of what I'm talking about. And I'm not just talking about recently, because it goes back a lot further than that.
I've spoken to various members (staff and regular) privately, because I wanted to see things from many points of view and not just my own. I've reviewed disputes on old threads, many of which I was never a part of, because I wanted to see how old certain grudges are and how long certain trends have held out. I've looked at as much of our history as I could, from as many angles as I could, because I felt that was necessary for me to see the bigger picture. And now that I've seen what I believe to be the bigger picture, my conclusion is this; We have a long history of problematic staff members (active and retired), and that long history stems from the loose standards that those staff members were held to during their respective tenures. None of them were kept in check in anywhere near the capacity they should have been, and because of that, their behavior was allowed to grow worse and worse over time. There are no two ways around that. We've been ******* up. Plain and simple.
But don't you regular users start rallying behind me yet. Because I have something to say to you too.
A little under two months ago, a public thread was made calling for peace within this community. In that, I came very close to writing a lengthy post on why peace has been so hard to achieve, but ultimately decided against posting it due to the likelihood of it being viewed as an unnecessarily negative take on the situation. Quite ironic, given who I am, but I digress...
That post, which I chose to save, went as follows:
And let me tell you, that list of people is far too long. These socio-politics are not limited to the staff roll in the slightest. Regular users participate in this behavior just as frequently as members of our own staff have done, and I can tell you right now that it's been that way since before I joined this place. This is ingrained into the site as a whole, whether anyone wants to admit it (or is acutely aware of it to begin with) or not.
And that is a problem. Because this is a primary source for the bulk of the drama that flares up in this forum, and if left unchecked, it will continue to grow worse.
I hope, genuinely and sincerely, that this site finds its way into a new direction in the future. I don't think the overwhelming majority of you join this place with bad intentions, and I don't gain anything from wishing this entire community ill anyway. But I'm not going to be here to see which direction VS Battles Wiki goes in after this. I don't have the energy or the enthusiasm left to make any changes myself, and as for whether or not any of you want to do so, all I can say is; the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have one. The issues present within this community are not unsolvable, but it's going to take a very large number of you (staff and otherwise) admitting that those issues exist and then working together to fix them from there.
The choice you make, however, is no longer my concern. I've made my choice and I'm sticking with it. Those who want to speak to me after this can ask me for my Discord if they don't already have it.
To everyone else, this is my farewell. Goodbye.
I returned, initially, because the site was starting to flounder and I felt strangely obligated to help keep it from spiraling out of control while the forum move was happening. When I came back, I was asked by a few people to stick around after the forum move was over. I chose to indulge them. That was a mistake.
I don't have any enthusiasm left for this place. I didn't when I left the first time (although I had other, adjacent reasons for leaving back then), and that hasn't changed since I got back. I go through the motions of this place, ignoring the things I don't like in order to focus on contributing to projects I no longer care about. I stay here out of habit, not because I actually enjoy being here. And I'm not going to do that anymore.
But before I leave, there's something I need to say out loud, because it's something that this community needs to hear from a person who's in my position.
I am not proud to have been a staff member of this site.
As someone who has been staff for close to two and a half years now and has paid fairly close attention to the events of that timeframe, I can say with utter certainty that many supposed "misconceptions" about staff members have a lot of truth to them. We get away with more shit, we're given the benefit of the doubt far more times than we should be, and we can easily maintain our positions for long periods of time just based on how much we've "helped the community" or "contributed to the wiki". (The latter is especially circular; it means our preferential treatment grows the longer we are staff members, which in turn contributes to us remaining staff for longer periods of time.) When we are punished, said punishments aren't nearly as harsh as others' are; we are never banned for any stretch of time unless we do something especially heinous, and it takes multiple warnings and infractions across a lengthy timeframe just for some of us to be demoted to lower positions.
That certain punishments have (or had) taken so long to be handed out, after such extended periods of constant infraction from the offending parties, should be evidence enough of what I'm talking about. And I'm not just talking about recently, because it goes back a lot further than that.
I've spoken to various members (staff and regular) privately, because I wanted to see things from many points of view and not just my own. I've reviewed disputes on old threads, many of which I was never a part of, because I wanted to see how old certain grudges are and how long certain trends have held out. I've looked at as much of our history as I could, from as many angles as I could, because I felt that was necessary for me to see the bigger picture. And now that I've seen what I believe to be the bigger picture, my conclusion is this; We have a long history of problematic staff members (active and retired), and that long history stems from the loose standards that those staff members were held to during their respective tenures. None of them were kept in check in anywhere near the capacity they should have been, and because of that, their behavior was allowed to grow worse and worse over time. There are no two ways around that. We've been ******* up. Plain and simple.
But don't you regular users start rallying behind me yet. Because I have something to say to you too.
A little under two months ago, a public thread was made calling for peace within this community. In that, I came very close to writing a lengthy post on why peace has been so hard to achieve, but ultimately decided against posting it due to the likelihood of it being viewed as an unnecessarily negative take on the situation. Quite ironic, given who I am, but I digress...
That post, which I chose to save, went as follows:
I want to make something very clear to all of you; I grew wise to all of these behaviors years before I was made staff, and as far as I have seen, they have not gone away. This community has a uniquely distressing set of socio-politics that several of its members (past and present) have perpetuated throughout their time here, and like real politics, this has bred opportunism, manipulation, mob mentality and a moderate yet borderline-justified paranoia within members of the site. Tearing down verses that offend you and raising up verses that are your favorite are the two main objectives that many users in this place like to follow, and those who do so purposefully manipulate the wiki's very unique systems of tiering, upgrading, downgrading, matchmaking, powerscaling, et cetera through the methods listed in above (and many others; again, I can be here all week with this) in order to achieve those goals. It's all very spiteful and vindictive, and if the people who've participated in it have any conscience to speak of, then they should feel ashamed of themselves.We're not toxic because we're obsessed with the strength of fictional characters, or because we're mad about current events and taking it out on each other all of a sudden. We're toxic because we keep cultivating that toxicity with many of the behaviors and conventions we perpetuate every day we're here. Every time we scheme behind each other's backs, act passive-aggressively towards anyone who disagrees with us, use Discord as a staging point for organized actions against verses, characters and even other users, deliberately stall CRTs we don't want passed, try to downgrade whole verses whenever they beat one of the ones we like more, and so on and so forth (because I could be here all week listing off the things we do to each other and the entirely selfish reasons behind them), we steer ourselves further and further in that direction.
And until the vast majority of us sit down and acknowledge that, we're going to keep going in that direction until we end up hitting a proverbial glacier.
I want peace in this community as much as anyone else should. But I'm not going to sit here and act like this is a new issue resulting from something extraneous like the stresses of current events or some widespread VS-centric fanaticism. I'm also not going to pretend that this problem is going to solve itself if we just gather together in a thread for a few weeks and say 'we want things to improve' without actually addressing what needs improvement to begin with. This is something that we as a community have turned a blind eye to for as long as I've been here, and it's reaching the point that it is now because we've been letting it reach that point for several years.
And let me tell you, that list of people is far too long. These socio-politics are not limited to the staff roll in the slightest. Regular users participate in this behavior just as frequently as members of our own staff have done, and I can tell you right now that it's been that way since before I joined this place. This is ingrained into the site as a whole, whether anyone wants to admit it (or is acutely aware of it to begin with) or not.
And that is a problem. Because this is a primary source for the bulk of the drama that flares up in this forum, and if left unchecked, it will continue to grow worse.
I hope, genuinely and sincerely, that this site finds its way into a new direction in the future. I don't think the overwhelming majority of you join this place with bad intentions, and I don't gain anything from wishing this entire community ill anyway. But I'm not going to be here to see which direction VS Battles Wiki goes in after this. I don't have the energy or the enthusiasm left to make any changes myself, and as for whether or not any of you want to do so, all I can say is; the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have one. The issues present within this community are not unsolvable, but it's going to take a very large number of you (staff and otherwise) admitting that those issues exist and then working together to fix them from there.
The choice you make, however, is no longer my concern. I've made my choice and I'm sticking with it. Those who want to speak to me after this can ask me for my Discord if they don't already have it.
To everyone else, this is my farewell. Goodbye.
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