I would therefore agree with at least a short general ban for BasedNecoScaler, on the grounds that poor behavior is not a new thing for them. Agnaa mentioned one week: I think this is too lenient in-context, and would argue for a month.
Yeah fair. Initially, that post suggested "At least 1-4 weeks", which I revised down after some further thought. But now that you mention Neco's history of bad behaviour, a longer ban does seem more reasonable.
It is not 'tame' to accuse people of being 'disciples of Epstein' and 'Epstein defenders'.
Hey now, that's not what I said. I think my
previous posts make it clear that I was calling
this screenshot tame.
Nothing about it being stated about a large amount of people makes it any less severe.
I think it does. I think we should treat the statement "You're a dumb ****" quite differently from how we'd treat the statements "There's a few dumb ***** among the staff" and "Some of this verse's supporters are dumb *****". And from what I've seen, we typically do.
Nor does taking action against it constitute a precedent that could be reasonably used to ignore serious, legitimate accusations in the future, because these comments were obviously not made as legitimate accusations. NecoScaler obviously doesn't actually believe the VSBW staff body is made up of people associated with Epstein. He made those comments for the purpose of targeting and insulting people he took issue with. We would not refer back to this situation if there was real reason to believe staff members were involved in serious crimes in the future, and I consider it ridiculous to think we would.
I don't so much think that we'd have people come forward with evidence, who also say "X user is {allegation}", and that we'd just ban the accuser and ignore the evidence.
Rather, I think it'd make it less likely for such allegations to gain evidence, traction, and an ear to hear them out, before the user involved gets banned.
And I'm not just inventing a scenario here; that exact thing happened with Sera. Some users were talking about the possibility of her having multiple socks, and using the photo of a model to claim as herself, on Discord. A dozen or so users involved with this were banned, with the situation not being properly rectified until years later, as their later attempts to substantiate it were labelled "doxxing" and "destabilizing the wiki".
While we've improved in this regard, I think banning NecoScaler for
this statement would be a backslide. But I do think some amount of ban for the message wall comments, especially given his unsavoury history, is justified.
But ultimately, this isn't about Chase, and it hasn't been. NecoScaler doesn't think the staff are 'disciples of Epstein', and he doesn't think calling people 'Epstein defenders' is going to change anything. He's leveraging the situation to make wholly inappropriate replies under a a shield of justification that he himself knows isn't legitimate.
Bit more of a minor point, but this is what I meant when I said the "disciples of Epstein" comment was
shitposty. The laughable absurdity of such a claim is one of the components that makes it hard for me to take it too seriously.
I will also add, for those who may be later evaluating this, not long after this report was made Marshadow posted a
meme about pedophilia in an unrelated One Piece revision.
I find this representation of it a bit sparse on context. That thread already had rampant derailing and shitposting for 10 posts beforehand. The way you say it makes it sound like Neco jumped into a serious thread to post jokes about it. Rather, a thread was already derailed, Monke brought up this situation to NecoScaler, and NecoScaler responded in kind.
Also, if the screencapture we were shown was accurate, I personally think that we should permanently ban Chase from our community without a chance for any appeals in the future. I do not want extremely malevolent and degenerate people being a part of this place, especially given that the majority of our members are quite young.
Since this sentiment ended up being expressed in a lot of ensuing posts, I'll use this as a proxy for all of them.
I largely stand by the view that we shouldn't care about off-site behaviour except in cases where:
- It directly impacts the site and/or its users (directly harassing, threatening, or impersonating someone, plotting malicious actions against the site itself).
- They engage in online criminal activity that makes them a heavy liability to our site.
I don't view having reprehensible views as falling under either of these. Those views become a concern when they're acted upon, leading them to become a heavy liability.
The only thing making me reconsider this is the excessive vulnerability of potential victims in this case (children using our site). But even then, until there's a hint of Chase having attempted grooming (or worse) before, I find the idea of banning for an off-site thought-crime too hard to stomach.
Don't we have any rules for "beyond the point of no return" ridiculously extreme cases at least? If not, I think that we should institute them.
I'd find such a concept pretty hard to judge, since I think whether they're past that point is more dependent on their age than the extremity of the statements. When I was a teenager I was immature enough to laugh about things like
dead baby jokes, so I can easily imagine Chase's comments being in the same vein, but if Chase was a decade or so older it would be cause for significant concern.
I've said it once and I'll say it again. Any kind of off site behaviour that reveals up straight up predatory and racist behaviour should be applicable on the forum in terms of taking serious action. I don't care if it wasn't on the site. If you know somebody is a predator/racist, why would you allow them on the site? Just because its on another site doesn't mean they're a totally different person on the forum. If we actually give a shit about our policies against that kind of stuff, then we need to actually prove it and take action against these people. Its legitimately disgusting that just because its off site, people will shrug and say "nothing we can do". We're better than that, like come on
Chase absolutely needs to get booted and we need to remedy the "restriction" we have on the off site stuff
I'm not looking forward to the deluge of reports, against both staff and non-staff users, such a change in philosophy would make, if applied retroactively. I've seen many users comfortable making bigoted jokes on Discord since they knew it was allowed.
