NEWS/OPINION — SCP staff are addressing the double-standard they have for themselves after being called out by users.
In response to a popular user pointing out staff hypocrisy in one of the recent town halls, staff have decided to publicly address the double-standards they’ve long brewed and enjoyed inside their private, internal, and presumptively confidential staff chat rooms, a revealing selection of which has leaked into fan and enemy communities alike.
The criticisms come in two flavors; PR and HR. The largest hypocrisy revealed in this is that staff will consider off-site discussions and even chatlogs from private conversations as fair game for disciplinary actions, including up to bans. However, when tucked away in the supposed safety of their private chats, it turns out staff believe themselves to be above their own laws. When their private discussions are made public against their wills, they give themselves the option of just putting up an O5 post about it, and they can consider it addressed.
The aforementioned comment is from the user Rounderhouse, and is refreshing, eloquent, and striking. We will be taking a very close look at the first comment in this post, the PR vareity, but the themes of the second are included in the discussion due to their natural proximity. All quotes will be Rounder’s unless otherwise stated.
“The wiki has a huge PR problem, which doesn’t make a ton of sense considering we have not one but two different outreach teams; despite this, the problems exist.
This is an excellent observation that I’m jealous I didn’t think of first. SCP has a veritable militia of PR stewards. It occupies a large allocation of resources. This should be a dead give away when it comes to SCP’s coddling of their brand, something I have emphasized incessantly in these posts already. Why does a PR problem continue to exist when staff have a two-way outreach program filled to the brim with influential personnel? Instead of diplomacy and favorable brand-recognition emanating in both directions from these teams, it seems as though staff are getting flack from both sides.
Might I suggest that staff are not doing a good job at outreach in either direction because “outreach” is a euphemism here? It’s marketing; the re-branding of what could be more tersely termed “seizing”. “Outreach” gives such a helpful connotation though.
The flaw is deeper than etymological. It’s etiological; Internet Outreach — staff’s outbound arm — wasn’t created for reputational diplomacy, but for reputational control. Expanded after the 2018 Logo Fiasco, IO was an explicit attempt to better mandate what content is in the satellite communities. It set up the content conveyor belt that extends from staff to the most popular YouTube and Discord channels. (A close observation of the #StandWithSCP-RU campaign is a good case study.) IO isn’t diplomats being diplomatic. Maybe they were before June 2018. Now they’re control-aholics afraid of bad PR that could repeat the trauma of that summer.
Thus seen operating on all cylinders, IO is a frictionless broadcast system. A method to coordinate the various unofficial social media presences to push out the official narrative like a shit & prevent future missteps that can incite more brand-battering riots. At its best, it’s a unity in collaboration. At worst, it is a totalitarian propaganda machine. (Which do you believe they tend towards more?) It really depends on the content and subject matter in scope.
Community Outreach is this broadcast system turned towards the choir. A gushing fountain of Koolaid. Contralateral to IO, Community Outreach — the afferent arm of staff’s diplomacy — enacts a sort of metallurgy, striking any heat or friction in the community to shape it wholly as they’d like it; preferably into another weapon. They have an iron fist on in-community truth. That’s the point of the out-reached hand. To grip narrative like a thin neck.
Facts and the sort of information one would have to go to the forbidden places to see… these things are no good here. A prime example is CO’s continued pushing of Dr. Bright as a fun-loving character, when only a month prior on site, the escapade where the character inhabited a 13-year old’s body and remarked at fondling her breasts was finally deleted from the site (instead of just being covered up, which staff hoped they could do instead). CO is the musculature — slight but leveraged — that turns the gaze of the loyal fandom away from blight, and directs it straight into the sand.
This is only surprising if you do not assume that IO/CO was always about control, censorship, diversion, enforcement, disincentivization, and a lack of transparency. For those who have been shouting such things for years though, it is no surprise that the firing of this weapon has recoiled and hit the wielders square in the face.
“Staff is very bad at communicating from staff-level to user-level... It shouldn’t be, given that we have so many avenues to approach users — Twitter, SCPD, O5, etc.”
Again, you have to ask yourself: is this because staff are truly this incompetent, or is it because there are some things that they don’t want well-communicated to the users?
“… we’ve seen in townhall what happens when staffers crack under the pressure. They lash out and make the whole thing look bad, and undo a lot of work on both sides.”
Yes, staff have a detailed history of this sort of reply to tectonic drama, like a reflex. It’s something that maybe shouldn’t be such a reliable an invariant quality of the people in charge. It is insecurity.
“I’m of the opinion that SSSC’s existence undercuts O5 as a medium of transparency. This isn’t intentional; staffers need to inform relevant other staffers when something needs to happen or they wanna discuss an issue, it’s easier to ping them in chat than it is to make a forum post, then you end up handling it in SSSC instead of O5. In effect, SSSC (which is non-public) is where changes are announced and debates are had, not O5, leading to a drift in what an O5-only community member thinks is going on.”
It is curious that this doesn’t seem to be an issue for other containment fiction wikis, such as RPC. Why? In RPC’s case, staff discussions are carried out on Discord, and the channels are exclusive but publicly visible. Why can’t or doesn’t SCP staff make a move to Discord, where such discussion could be observable?
An expansion into Discord is a question that members of the community ask and bring up all the time. Discord seems to be a popular request that the fanbase would like to see. However,
“… staff have had this discussion more times than anyone could count and the consensus always having been extraordinarily negative.” — ProcyonLotor
Ok but why? Well perhaps this this the quiet part out loud, but:
18:50 Lazar: Hey, people in IO discord are pushing for a official EN discord
18:50 Lazar: Can someone give me more reasons on why this is a bad idea?
18:50 Tuomey: We can’t effectively ban people
[source]
This is not the only reason given, but it is the first. Anyone’s IP address can be deduced and tracked across all chat channels with IRC. There’s also the cozy relationship SCP staff have with the IRC staff, who will help them in recruiting personal and identifying information about users on demand.
The boilerplate and official answer courtesy of staff re: Discord though is:
1) too much extra work for operators 2) voice chat is hell to moderate 3) split between two different chat clients for community and operators is hard to balance 4) discord is hard to get onto for a number of ppl due to being specialized + memory issues whereas irc has tens of clients/programs to access from 5) discord’s extra features ultimately dont matter
[source]
There is a lot of contention among staff about this, and some of the arguments relied upon by those who would eschew Discord don’t seem to hold up under further scrutiny. The accepted reasoning outside staff itself for SCP’s official chats remaining on IRC is because you can’t ipban on Discord. So perhaps, unsurprisingly, a politics of control is to blame… maybe even rewarded.
Additionally, each argument given against moving to Discord only applies to user-involved chats, not staff-exclusive ones. You don’t have to worry about these disciplinary concerns of banning trolls and getting rid of them for good in your channel if you can simply lock discussion as invite-only. You can keep IRC for comprehensive ban controls and have an official staff Discord. This escapes staff, and I believe most see through their flimsy excuse to stay out.
As it turns out, a Discord for staff was intended to be a replacement for SSSC, with the direct hope of breaking it up as a thought-abscess :
17:19:50: <DrMann> Does IO maintain any sort of Discord server for the community, or is it just the unofficial ones?
17:20:43: <Roget> I feel like it might help ameliorate the problem of whoever is in sssc making a rash groupthink decisions
17:20:54: <Roget> it has a community thing where we’ve got youtubers and stuff to talk with
Compare this with Rounder’s statement:
“In effect, SSSC (which is non-public) is where changes are announced and debates are had, not O5, leading to a drift in what an O5-only community member thinks is going on.”
What is causing them to act on this now, as opposed to earlier? I know the answer. It certainly isn’t a newfound sense of righteousness.
“Oh, “bad faith actors”… the amount of those people who exist on the site vs the boogeyman they’re made out to be are wildly different. The original townhall idea was smothered in the cradle when people got stuck on the idea that bad-faith actors might abuse it…. “What about the terrorists?” is not a valid argument.”
It is no coincidence that SCP staff utilize the same rhetoric that duped a generation or two into endorsing a “War on Terror”. This is propagandizing and domestic psychological warfare 101; take the boogeyman and put it center stage. Who are these trolls a boogeyman for? The users? Doesn’t sound like it. Maybe these “boogeymen” are people who actually have something legitimate to say in criticism. Maybe the staff is simply afraid of that for their own asses, and not for the sake of the users as stated.
“ I don’t think we ever even officially acknowledged or responded to the June stuff for either year, or the Harmony stuff, or the Kiwifarms stuff on O5. Users have a right to know about that sort of thing, and pretending the problems don’t exist doesn’t make them go away; it makes them worse.”
What is interesting here is that some on staff attempted desperately to address the June (2018) stuff. Some wanted to bring it out in the open and talk about it; sunlight is the best disinfectant after all. Others wanted to keep it covered, damp, light-less in its anoxia and left to fester into blister and necrosis. Per usual, those with the least amount of moral assets had the final, higher-in-the-hierarchy say.
Rounderhouse might be the only person on the SCP Wiki who can type the name “KiwiFarms” and not be insta-banned. SCP staff have proven time and time again that they will ban someone for participating in the SCP-themed thread there, even when they have done nothing else; and even when they collectively admit that the user is in the moral right; even when such a user was only pushed to KiwiFarms in the first place because staff censored them.
Unintentionally, the very bias that Rounderhouse lambastes them for is on display. Were this not Rounderhouse, and were not everyone on the entire Wiki witnessing, they would have banned someone for bringing up KiwiFarms on main site. This may mark the first time that the name has slipped out of staff’s lips, excluding their private chats. If people weren’t aware of it before, they will be now. This is the best publicity KF could have asked for actually.
Rounderhouse is referencing the Streisand Effect, basically that when you censor something in an attempt to hide it, doing so usually acts as an exponent on the information that’s censored. This results from a basic understanding of human psychology. A book that is banned sees a spike in sales. This is technically the same phenomenon at play when a famous musician dies and their lives and works are suddenly elevated to a point they weren’t before… simply because they are now gone; silenced.
SCP staff don’t understand this. It has been their critics’ most consistent tailwind; both in the displacement of their messages and in their velocity. This should be concerning for anyone who thinks they are being shepherded by SCP staff. You’d have to have your political and tactical maturity at a playground-level to not get this, and have the emotional sophistication of a chimp. And yet, in looking at how June 2018 and KiwiFarms have been handled, their messy and forensically revealing strategy seems to be to announce to everyone who is over the target and needs to be killed into silence next. Never forget this; someone only gets such flack when they are correct.
“This sort of social chatting is inherently legitimized through its existence next to main staffchat, and that’s a big problem when it’s gossipping about other users who aren’t present, but you ultimately have authority over.”
Let me introduce you to just one snippet of a staff/invite-only private chat (#rogetbox). This leak of a chat is from March 25, 2019. A bunch of staff and higher-end users are talking general shit. Participants include ARD, DrBleep, Rounderhouse, UncleNicolini, Lily, Vezaz, the author formerly known as Roget, and some others. They talk shit about SCPD (a lot), Westrin (a lot), Yossi (indirectly), Cimmerian, Vessel, XilasCrow, Dr. North (“newbie we collectively dislike”), Prototype_Toaster, RPC in general, site19 in general, and even the entire userbase. (Correction: A previous version of this said these leaked chat logs were from SSSC. This was in error; the logs are from #rogetbox, a self-described “cool person club” that was run by staff and invite-only. This is cited correctly in the link provided.)
Let’s zoom in on Westrin. I don’t know the person, I’m sure they have their enemies. But they are shitting on him pitilessly for an attempted 001 article called “Black Flag”. Not only that, but ARD in particular likes to do this openly in a Discord server (he is not punished for this, as others would be, just to bring back in the motif of Rounderhouse’s criticism and staff’s primary admission of guilt). How do you think this makes not only Westrin, but anyone else witnessing who maybe wants to write for the site? Maybe a 001 one day? They know they’d maybe have to endure this essentially public flagellation by the most respected and looked-up-to users on the site. Westrin’s 001 is now relegated to a much less illustrious place and every time I see it, or think of it, I hope to myself that he doesn’t know just how much they made fun of it.
No, you know what? I hope he does know and posted it anyway. Fuck ‘em.
This is horrid behavior for people who should feel some sense of responsibility. These are people who are not mature enough to handle the notoriety and influence they have been given by their readers… something a lot of them like to attribute solely to themselves. I can’t think of a more damaging status quo. This is a glimpse of that very “inclusive” face of the site, without its layers and layers of chalky makeup on. Rounderhouse was once a part of it, I assume for his sake that he isn’t now.
Continuing the discussion:
“We have staff who are no longer active participants beyond staff spaces, community members with massive outreach capacity beyond staff, and many mixtures in-between.” — Pedagon
This is a problem with a site that has (1) gotten too large and (2) responded by inflating the size of the bureaucracy to try to keep up with it. Staff’s centralization of more and more teams, personnel, policies, rules, purviews, and responsibilities is a cancer. It needs to be reversed. The answer is not more staff, it is less staff. Staff need to let go of the reigns and let their ischemic knuckles regain their color. When the demands of staff essentially require those who were once active and talented writers to not have any more time for writing, what kind of site are you, really? Not a writing site; your leaders don’t write anymore.
The leadership is like a mechanical ventilator stuck down the throat of the users. The site cannot breathe in writing; it breathes in a thick, tarry bureaucracy instead. A site where the most powerful and influential leaders do not write is like having clergy that do not pray. Commanders who do not fight. Rulers who do not sweat.
This is all that is necessary to describe in full the transition of SCP from the nursery of a newborn collaborative writing genre to a quasi-governmental training program that still has some writing on the side for good PR purposes. These are not leaders. Leaders on a writing site should still be focused on writing first. If not, you have people leading others who don’t know the first thing about the moral and just direction to take the matters surrounding writing. The leadership has become uncoupled from the soul of the site.
Now, Dexanote responds. All quotes will be his unless otherwise stated.
“Now, in regards to your examples. June ’18 was a fiasco that occurred three years ago and a third of staff today weren’t staff back then so circumstances then, in my opinion, do not apply now. Harmony was a unique circumstance which we did our best to meet it on a public and private level, and I feel we were fairly successful with how we handled it, though not perfect. We also do not typically acknowledge KF because there’s a lot of hostile doxxing of our own members there, and it is insanely irresponsible to drive traffic in that direction.”
You can acknowledge this blog. It has the same information yet I don’t doxx. Somehow, I think that were this blog ever to be shared in a SCP chat, it would be censored and people would be told to stop. Just my hunch.
But besides that, yes there is doxxing on KiwiFarms. The response that it therefore cannot have any meaningful content other than that is asinine and only someone who is delusional or eyeballs-deep in a cult would buy that. What staff carefully dance around is that many of these “doxxes” are the result of personal information that SCP users have unwisely volunteered to the impersonal and precarious eyes of the entire internet: Eskobar’s address appears in his SCP and he brags about it on #site19 (“<Dave> because it lets me point to exactly what a slut i am for not having privacy”); djkaktus posts his personal cellphone number to LadyKatie in #site12 and also mentions that he used to share it with fans in #site19; djkaktus also makes his general location very visible on his personal webpage, he used to have his full name plastered on his website. These examples (which have gotten some people banned from SCP) are less doxxes, more self-incrimination.
Ignoring this, how does it sound when a staff tries to make a boogeyman (something Dexanote is clearly not absorbing from Rounderhouse’s comment) out of a group of people who share personal information of users, when staff designs their IRC chat to supply them the personally-identifying IP address of every person in their chat? Often times unwittingly? Does staff not consider this doxxing when it can reveal someone’s private email address and even home address? Perhaps the activists on KiwiFarms only exist as a reactionary force to their dishonesty and corruption… imagine that.
“My point is that we try to weigh net benefit to the wiki as a whole and our community when trying to follow up on these kinds of things.”
Here’s the real kicker. This might be the most important sentence. Dexanote is saying that staff values the brand over the users, something all of staff have demonstrated sufficiently in their handling and attitude towards the town halls themselves. What group of leaders are looking out for the best for their users who believe that keeping them in the dark concerning some of the most glaring moral failings possible is weighing a net benefit to the wiki? The only way this makes sense is if the staff prioritize the brand above all. And it makes sense why; they equivocate themselves and their authority with the brand. The users’ reputations aren’t on the line; theirs are. They are like CEOs censoring an exposé on the corrupt practices of their accounting department and trying to justify it by appealing to the good of the greater company… all the little people in it who rely on it for income. I call bullshit.
“It can’t be understated how much conversation regarding transparency has evolved among staff, so I could see us conjuring press releases in the future in the event of… something going down. But it would depend on the situation and if a VAST majority of staff believe it’s safe and a benefit to publicly approach.”
Who can’t smell the politician in this? Staffspeak is a helluva drug. I’m sure it can be understated how much conversation regarding transparency has evolved. I’m sure that’s exactly what has happened and that it was stagnated until the users decided to have a problem with it. An abuser will always attempt to convince the abused that they are doing so out of the abused’s safety. Dexanote, your mouth is filled with rot.
“This isn’t by design but is a natural progression of having so much going on at a time…. Just using myself as an example, I’m in 13 SCP-staff-based Discord servers and 7 of those are very active every single day… Like, I can’t really clearly state the scale of work that goes into the SCP Wiki. A LOT of menial upkeep stuff is done every single day, and there’s a LOT of minor routine stuff that goes down, and a LOT of that is what’s talked about, distinctly divided away outside of normal chatter. We literally couldn’t keep stuff running if we didn’t do this to organize and atomize our stuff.”
This is 100% by design. The users didn’t vote to have staff continuously expand their footprint and “duties”. Staff did. The site would not fall apart without SCP staff. The amount of importance staff awards itself by fiat is astounding. Telling the users how important and busy you are is not an excuse for awful management. The answer isn’t more staff, either. It’s less things to do. Let go of all the dogs you are trying to walk. I promise you, they won’t kill themselves without your leash.
“And these discords all have social sections, divided clearly away from work spaces. Some is just talking among one another about stuff IRL, some is shitposting, most servers have a channel dedicated to pets, etc.”
Dexanote forgets to mention the NSFW chat, #site12, that a ton of staff participate in, and that he was/is a regular in. Ha. Or cliques like #rogetbox, where you had to get an invite and be cool enough. These chats must have slipped his mind.
“We don’t HAVE a single staff chat any more and haven’t for a few years, and this is unclear to much of the outer community because it doesn’t really affect them… Back in 2010, old IRC Staffchat was a cool kids club yeah, but it hasn’t been anything like this for a long, long time.”
This is a bold-faced lie. We have Roget/pixelatedHarmony’s leaked staff chat logs going back to 2012. It still happens. #site00? #rogetbox? #kaktuskontainer? Right… no cool kids club. Here’s just the smallest snippet, from 7–24–2018. This is pretty routine:
14:51:21: <ARD> You asked if DSc was a good choice to bring into rogetbox and then brought her in two minutes later before anyone could say whether or not she was
14:51:38: <Roget> I made a decision on my own
14:51:44: <ARD> — it’s your box and you can bring in whoever you want but if you are going to ask could you wait a few minutes or ping people for their input? It feels like you’re only asking for the sake of asking rather than actually soliciting feedback
14:52:05: <ARD> Input, not feedback
14:52:08: <ARD> That’s all
14:52:22: <Roget> Sorry if that upset you, I wait sometimes but I figured there weren’t going to be many people awake
14:52:54: <ARD> Alright. It’s not upsetting, it just felt somewhat disingenuous — like you’d already made up your mind before asking
14:52:54: <Roget> did you have an objection
14:53:10: <Roget> I hadn’t made up my mind I was more thinking aloud
14:54:45: <Roget> I’m sorry if I upset you
14:55:10: <ARD> I had some reservations — DSc runs in the same circles as kinch and scantron and for the most part she doesn’t do much in 19 that would indicate she’d be a good fit for rogetbox. But I’m not really upset — like I said, it’s your box and your choice
Dexanote continues the incontenence of his character as a leader and denies that the original proposal for the town halls in 2020 wasn’t stymied by a concern from staff about how bad it could make them appear to their public:
“The previous town hall proposal you linked didn’t die because of bad faith actors, but because it was proposed to go down on IRC, which is a terrible idea. he only responses that got to 05 were the few people bringing up bad faith actors, which we were having an annoying saga of time-wasters at that time; perfectly reasonable at the time, but like, not really on our radar now…. I distinctly recall irc/discord discussions being about how much a pain it could be to upkeep and moderate a real-time IRC town hall, but we had the bigbrain idea to host on the boards here this time around and have liasons for non-wiki-members, so it worked out.”
We have already covered why the staff didn’t do anything with the original town hall proposal for a year, including this, in detail in an earlier post. A majority of the discussion was about the possibility of bad faith actors. A very small minority of the discussion was about IRC. It was quickly and unanimously decided in the thread that it wouldn’t be on IRC, but on the forums. Staff is in a perpeutal saga of time-wasters in IRC; this statement about it being of temporary relevance is also a fabrication. I can’t communicate how dishonest and cowardly it is to suggest this. The evidence is out in the open, I assume that Dexanote just believes that no one will have the drive to simply look. He thinks the users are stupid.
Dexanote is lying through his teeth because he is scared shitless. Rounderhouse has him in the corner and shaking like a lamb. He retreats into the unfalsifiability of “irc/discord discussions”… oh right there’s where all the crazy concern and non-consensus was about the IRC difficulties! In private where the users can’t verify it. And the “bigbrain”s finally thought to do it on the forum, not immediately, but 1 year later? Please.
Oh and hey Dexanote, I know last post I told you to stop using aggrandizing words like “amongst” and “whilst”, but doing your best airhead impression and throwing in “and like… but, like”s is just as bad. “We finally bigbrained.” Stop playing dumb. I hate to say it, but it doesn’t suit you.
There’s too much else to cover. Just understand that staff is more dishonest than the users have been let on to believe, even after these town halls. Their priority is self-preservation. It is the brand. And they will throw whatever and whoever under the bus to keep themselves basking in the carcinogenic glow at the height of their dystopia that they have made the SCP Wiki into. It is now in their image; the disfigured faces of the gods of SCP.
We’ll end this post the way we started. Take it away, Rounderhouse:
“I was going to do this in my semi-serious folksy manner so as not to offend but this is legitimately an almost insultingly poor response that just tries to refute everything about the specific examples I raised without engaging with any of my larger points… This, and a number of the other responses through the town-hall, feel like refutations rather than responses addressing any of the concerns raised in a meaningful manner and offering or accepting solutions. We can’t have a space where people feel comfortable raising criticisms against staff and have it also be a space where staff are undermining or arguing with those criticisms, because that’s the difference between a complaint box and a debate tournament. People will not want to say anything if they are going to simply watch their points be gradually whittled at in a public forum.”
(Update: This post was shared with Rounderhouse via direct message on Wikidot. His reply was the correction noted on the article.)
© Lack of Lepers, 2021
