NEWS/OPINION — Concluding the town hall coverage.

No one on SCP staff, at least no one loud enough, is demanding the breaks. Someone should be screaming for it. The consensus seems to be to accelerate while moving down a wet slope with no seat belts or airbags, and with a knife sticking out of the steering wheel.

The gist of the town hall coverage is that SCP staff created their own problems by cowardice and poor leadership. Their primary focus was self-preservation in the setting of an internal uprising. Thus, their response — their literal replies to users included — were defensive, emotionally unavailable, and evasive. In a fight-or-flight response, they’ve spit out an ink of sorts. This ink is in Verdana type and coats O5 Command.

As an entity, staff are like any other basal organism in that in times of stress, they prioritize self-preservation. Like one contemplating one’s own death, staff can’t fathom their own cessation. They have not considered carefully enough that maximizing themselves as intermediaries in response to issues already due to that will compound the problem and anxiety into a more and more realized self-fulfilling prophecy.

To demonstrate, here is a list of new policies and responsibilities — or last-minute, as-late-as-possible forced apologies & thin promises; that’s what I’d call them — that staff have created just since and because of the town hall:

1. Staff are now subject to rule zero, even in their super secret cool clubs.
2. Staff will now summarize all private and official chats with a form of meeting minutes.
3. Staff will now allow junior staff into the cool kids club chat.
4. Catching policy re: Death of the Author up to their fracturing of it in February (re: the denial of authorial rights over their works).
5. Re-branding and selling the Site News to users
6. The creation of a new executive staff role for oversight, called the “Vice Captain”.
7. Rushing to nominate and vote for people for the new positions introduced in #2.
8. Admission of Disciplinary Team’s miscarriage and abuse of their powers.
9. Hair-trigger/over-eager disciplinary concern to appease userbase (and then same-old, same-old staff exemption) re: staff talking about people in their private chats
10. An O5 proposal mirror policy to be more inclusive to users and let them comment on staff proposals directly and publicly
11. A redo of the staff chat recap thing.
12. A mini Town Hall aftershock about #11 thanks to #10.
13. A third vote on personnel for #11.
14. The leave/withdrawing/resignation of numerous Staff members due to the enactment of #2 and #3 as policy. (Link coming)
15. A discussion as to what the heck a vice captain is (see #6; this is after they proposed the role, realized they hadn’t defined plain old captaincy, failed to do that, and approved the vice captain role anyway).

(Policy printer go brrrr.)

Each one of these deserves its own critique because they are all bad and flawed to irrelevance. Each deserves its own post. If any were submitted to the same convolution staff have demanded for would-be articles on the site, I don’t think they would make it past the greenlight:

#1 was developed because staff couldn’t admit a problem with their behavior until the users found out what they do and how they talk in private, and did that for them. (This is something that has been apparent for months on that forbidden website.) Some staff are wiping the sweat from their brows because this won’t be applied retroactively.

#2 was developed because #1 didn’t accelerate past the starting line. This zero-day patch to the proposal necessitated the creation of: a new team, a discussion about it, a nomination and selection of who would be in that team (this time actually determined by popular vote), the addition of numerous hours of work to these staffers’ already-full plates, and even more points of centralized failure & potential ire from the users.

#3 was proposed during the discussion for #2. A vote occurred. It is clear that the problem has just been reshuffled into the deck of perceived staff dishonesty; that they will find a new medium out of sight to continue to irresponsibly be unwarranted assholes to their fellow staff and users. This amounts to rearranging the furniture in the room and trying to put the house back on the market.

#4 is interesting in that it shows staff’s lack of integrity, and then their enslavement to their own lack of it. They swear by policy and perpetuate it upwards and onward like a skyscraper, standing tall for all the community to see (with no excuse not to). Yet when something happens that is technically per policy but would hurt the brand, like having to honor an influential author’s request for deletion, they find a willingness to break those rules to escape the corner they’ve drafted themselves into. They exploited the users for this maneuver, the body they typically try to otherwise subject to their decisions, knowing that there was no way they could make a decision without being heavily criticized. They suddenly prioritized the legal technicalities of an inherited CC license at the expense of an ethical right that predated their understanding of that license.

Here, a user takes notes from staff’s cheat-sheet and attempts to utilize the new & official liquidity towards authorial sovereignty to fund a pet project. Staff try to dissuade this individual, hypocritically I might add, but have already endorsed such scavengery and can’t back-track for fear of bad optics. The argumentative technology was turned on them, and they just introduced it, so there’s that… any moral argument they could have leaned on here had long been removed. It’s like a sort of ratchet that locks in place once turned and can’t go back, it can only move forward from that point, tightening a grip. This goes to show that policy can serve to entrap even staff sometimes, in the same way they wouldn’t have been in such hot water if they hadn’t established such a low threshold for the enforcement of Rule Zero on the users, but not on themselves.

#5 is sad. The Site News has been around since 2016 or something. It was a ledger, a way to document events and things that really don’t require an editorial column. Now, it is a publication on cultural drama, and an opportunity for staff to front-run their preferred, official narrative. Even the most politically opportunist and kniving member of the site calls this one out. While this blog wasn’t meant to be the counterweight to this new state-sanctioned editorializing, it kinda is now by happenstance. Happy to provide the contrast. The absolute truth is likely a weighted average between the two publications… to which side is up to the reader.

What we are watching happen is the frantic spilling of policy from an injury, like ants out of their damaged hill. In their frenzy, staff only know to seek out space for more policy and don’t understand that while they might repair and expand their ant hill as a result, doing so dilutes their competency, increases the surface area they have to try and hold together, and potentiates another such injury.

The compulsion to solve everything with further centralization is the pitfall of the Web 2.0. Staff’s nervous tic in all of these is something along the lines of “I’m in full support of this” or “Supporting vehemently”. The centralization is a retreat into a rubber stamp that they slam down reflexively, desperately, as if trying to squash a persistent bug. Like with the ratchet, they can only move in this one direction (unless a polar switch is flipped), because they are a strong centralizing vector to begin with. The problem is that centralizing vector arose out of a necessity as the site initially became bigger, as is evident and rudimentary to all of the history of human organization. It was a needed organ in the body.

Now, the centralization is an abused, hyper-inflamed, edematous, purulent, obsolete, and overactive liability to that body. It has been dotted with cancers that kill the off-switch and signal its cells to only replicate and relocate themselves to other organs. Staff do not have the ability to know when to not do anything, or when to remit; they cannot see their cue to retreat. Their territory as potentates is set up to be the last thing that gives, and ceding any ground it is the farthest thing from the strategy table.

To admit as much though would mean less supply and production of their oversight, and would be contradictory to their strong desire for self-preservation, made very visible in these town halls. The demand for their intervention is at rock bottom — even though the users may be slow to realize it and so are still asking for staff-mediated change. So the supply needs to decrease for a healthy product. The authority of staff as it stands is in a bubble, very in danger of popping. The discrepancy in the market explains their futility in supplying more of themselves. It’s staff-borne political inflation of their own supply and value. (Brrrrr!)

The increasing custodial debt on the accountability of staff has resulted in a perceived moral bankruptcy that they haven’t defaulted on yet, and just press the snooze button for. In my opinion, staff model dysgenic behaviors in pushing this button repeatedly, which then inform and trickle down into the rest of the community for them to emulate. Whether proposing liaisons as band-aids in bad-faith, quietly endorsing the continued presence of sex pest AdminBright on the site (who perpetuated at least one chain of grooming and sexual abuse), publicly banning people for things staff do in their protected walls, flogging authors of their rights on the town stocks and betraying the spirit of the CC license for the letter of it, or running away when things get difficult because of user push-back and a long-overdue dose of their own medicine; the issues stem from staff’s mismanagement of their own incompressible status and ambition as the more important users.

To wrap up with a solid example, let’s take a look at the Disciplinary town hall thread. Here, Dexanote (admin) is responding to a user’s concerns about how various disciplinary measures are conducted. Dexanote gives a comprehensive and honestly well-thought-out reply that brings a lot of reason into the discussion. The admission of a lot of poor leadership here almost makes one want to put down the pitchfork and sigh relief.

But then, we get to some staffspeak that turns all of that on its head:

“Our starting point is always ‘How can we encourage positive results for the site going forward, or prevent damage or harm’. That being said, we’re limited.”

Dexanote launches into various circumstances where they can’t meet a rule-breaker halfway due to their hands being tied by clear policy and guidelines that simply weren’t followed; spam, vandalism of articles, not taking feedback for their article, sockpuppetry, sexual expression (?), etc.

“There’s all kinds of other scenarios where we can’t approach and work out a solution with relevant parties (or where doing so would be a waste of time).”

What he won’t mention is that they are not limited in their ability and tendency to meet themselves and privileged members halfway, even in the case of clear policy and guidelines that were broken. While staff are making concessions to increased accountability, they are not at all limited in the one glaring disciplinary and anti-harassment matter that is obfuscated in denial and misdirection. A brick tied to their ankles.

They have every means to cut the rope tying them to AdminBright and do what everyone in their right mind knows they should have done a long, long time ago. They are only limited by their cowardice, and fear of what it would mean for the brand. Happy to do this for less public figures, suddenly staff won’t. They jump into the water to escape the growing outrage, because the water plugs their ears and lessens the sound of the shouts.

Many on staff like Dexanote would like to consider the Bright drama a “valid point of pain, if irrelevant now — [that] left an impact.” But what they are constantly speaking in their thoughts but can’t pronounce in public is that the point of pain is not healed; it is gaping, becoming more and more septic, and it is still impacting the site, the staff, the users, and gradually more and more of the surrounding fanbase, every day. (Certainly more than ever, now that KiwiFarms is mentioned by name in the town halls by staff.)

Dexanote reminisces on the old days when people were banned simply for arguing with admins, and scoffs at just how embarrassing it is to think about those norms. This is a statement of remarkable ignorance when compared to the disciplinary oversights of the present day, worse in so many ways. Let’s just say it like it is: Dr. Bright isn’t banned. Bottom line. He isn’t because it would send a nuclear blast through the remainder of the fan base that they have managed to keep, not without a lot of effort, in the dark. The brand would suffer irreparably, their stature along with it. The fallout and consequences of their terrible and ongoing decision-making is too much to face, and so they kick the can down the road, hoping to God it will just spontaneously dematerialize one of these days.

So instead of vomiting the poison that they’ve mixed into their mouths to keep out of sight, staff have chosen to just hold it there, keep it pooled and effervescent to float out in fumes on their speech, let it slowly eat their teeth to where their smile is see-through, and let it seep into their lungs with every respiration, ensuring a mechanical ventilation in the future. They have chosen to kill themselves slowly so they can pretend with everyone for longer that nothing is wrong. (The same delay is true for staff’s stripping of authorial sovereignty… the decision for a long and painful rot as opposed to a quick excision to just get it out and over with, the damage bad but at least done. They and the site look at themselves in the mirror, the tsunami having been sent away with instructions to return another day with more amplitude, and say to themselves and each other “Look! See? We are fine! This was the right choice!”) A KiwiFarmer recently put it succinctly:

“These discussions would be more productive if staff just bite the bullet and redo their internal structures, instead of slapping bandaids on every problem that crops up.” — BurnerPhone

Staff can do as good of a job as is possible with as many disciplinary and anti-harassment cases from now until the end of the site, and respond to each and every concern and complaint with as many pretty words as they’d like. But it won’t matter or amount to enough. They have missed the crux and the capstone to it all.

Plenty of staff understood for years that they had a rabid sex pest in their ranks who was perpetuating inappropriate sexual representation of staff and of the wiki itself, who groomed at least one minor who emulated that behavior in turn, who posted numerous examples of outrageously indulgent material that involve children that they protected to the brink of their authority, who made disturbing comments regularly in both staff-exclusive and public chats, who set the precedent for double-standards, especially regarding sexual inappropriateness, who was eventually exposed for all this behavior by others coming forward (the naturally-selected judges that staff passed on the opportunity to be themselves), and who was allowed to sneak out the back door — the charlatan feigning fatigue and to a standing ovation that included staff & others who knew the truth — so as to choose the lesser of two PR disasters for themselves. It didn’t have anything to do with the users. The users are the excuse.

You do not get to claim that you are only trying to encourage positive results for the wiki when staff’s composite conscious is unable to reconcile itself with one of its most popular members and fictional figures being an avatar of sexual harassment and pedophilia. The inability to admit this to themselves alone has done an untold amount of damage, nevermind the causal chain after it. Staff’s response, which looks as though is literally to ignore it, is just as bad in terms of the wiki’s health because it ultimately excuses the behavior and signals that it is in some way OK.

You do not get to claim that you have the best in mind for the users. That statement and these actions are incompatible.

Here’s the bottom line: staff cannot restore the users’ trust in them until they ban AdminBright. They cannot ban Bright until they grow balls. They cannot grow balls until they ban Bright. Infinity loop. It’s downward-faicng but it’s a positive feedback one where each oscillation amplifies their frustration, incapability, and internal torment. No amount of town halls will fix this in lieu of self-honesty.

Staff can believe they are confused and concerned about how their connection with the users is crumbling, but when it comes to where it counts, they know well that all of the complaints from users in the town halls dance around and brush against one certain failure, that rests on one fulcrum — their inability to see their paragon as unhealthy for the community and discipline him like any other user would be. The lack of transparency felt by the users, the discomfort and disapproval with the anti-harassment and disciplinary policies, the gap between staff and the users; are either caused by or exacerbated by a single gangrenous lysate, slowly diffusing its way through the moral tissue of the site.

Staff’s non-response is the equivalent to their storage of a pollutant in the blood of the wiki. It is coursing its way into all other aspects of their contact with the users. The disgrace of Dr. Bright is their revenant. It is the elephant-sized corpse in the room that they speak, act, and gesture around as if it were mundane furniture. That they start to plug their noses around to forget. Because they cannot address it head-on, it is clawing at them now in a million other directions.

To staff: It will arrive to you either way. May as well reclaim some lost dignity, some honor, and a Wiki while you’re at it. You’ve already lost the genre.

(This post was shared with DrEverettMann, the Master Administrator of SCP staff, via direct WikiDot messaging on 6/19/2021. There has not been a reply so far. We will update this post if he replies. See the sent message below:)

© Lack of Lepers, 2021