Recap Harder: Oct 2021 Recaps — Part 3
NEWS/OPINION/ANALYSIS — Recapping the Recaps
“These would have been discussions in one of the various higher level rooms or semi-official side channels I wasn’t in, where the stuff happens that’s too secret for super secret staffchat. This is why the idea of staffchat recaps or whatever for transparency is a joke, by the way. The real dealing is done in the equivalent of smoky back rooms.”
— [REDACTED], former SCP staffer
Other entries in this series:
(September 2021 recap did not get a dedicated post, in that its main points were covered spread across blog posts here, and on Confic Magazine — here and here.)
The first two parts of October 2021’s Recap were dedicated to the DrAkimoto Scandal that has been extraordinarily buried by those at the heart of it in a hopeful attempt to save an already bleeding administration any more public scrutiny & private grief. This part will focus on half of the remainder of the Oct 2021 recaps. Yes. There will be four parts in total, my good Lord, please help me.
We will go by sections, and exclude those where nothing is of note. Many sections are avoided here because they can generally be fit into the following mold:
- Staff introduces a topic that they think the passing of into policy can promote their political career (I’m looking at OptimisticLucio).
- Present Staff squabble about the details of the issue, or get onto a tangent and never return to the original point.
- Other Staff finally question whether or not this is necessary, and/or remind others of the original point.
- The topic is dropped because it is inconclusive or not necessary, and the tangent is dropped because it is a tangent.
This general pattern covers: Intro Instructions Thread, Feedback Splash Re-Working, Posting Individual Art Pages, Wikidot’s Broken Search Function, Deletion Rules (to a lesser extent), and Quorum Lowering.
Topic: October Features
We see yet another example of why and how SCPD is an official territory of the SCP Staff. Conversations are directly ported over to Staffchat from it, and conclusions ported directly back to SCPD.
“A discussion in SCPD’s Meta channel… is ported over to staffchat by Pedagon. … it was then ported to SCPD’s Meta channel as a statement on the discussion.”
This discussion occurs because those who love to idolize metrics noticed that there was an uptick in new members in October 2021. So, the idea was of course not to keep on doing what they had been doing. SCP Staff and the Wiki on the whole have a history of not staying with the horse that got them there.
So, they want to make a bunch of changes to cater to this new influx more. We see the unquestioned tendency of the site’s personality bend towards the audience like Charlie Sheen in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. They are never satisfied with how much of an audience they have, and are numb to the idea that at some point this attitude of extended accommodation compromises their product. This is really not much different than Upvote Brain Rot, just in different clothing.
The more historical irony is that initially, this was a faux governmental database that was supposed to be nominally predicated upon the reader not supposed to be finding it — giving the impression, and suspending the disbelief that this is just another website. In an inversion, we see Staff over-extending and designing interface topologies specifically with the uninformed audience in mind, and cajoling them into a soft landing to the experience.
Topic: Navigational Redesign
A long-standing project of MAST (and The Yurt, depending on who you ask), this again is done with the previous catering in mind. Imaginary woes and weaknesses (“choice-paralysis”) are conjured to justify the concern… as if a notable number of people on the internet, upon facing the site, would be stunned (“intimidated”) into a catatonia (meanwhile the series lay splayed in counts of 1,000 titles).
I appreciate the rework and think it is an improvement, motivating factors aside.
The on-site mirror’s discussion shows that the Staff was already OK with removing the “Shortest New Articles” hub, which this blog initially praised, and then facepalmed when the upvote rabies infecting the authors ravaged this new land into desertification within weeks.
We’ll clap for the good humor as we go:
“[Calibold] also postulates the idea that the module could “hover directly in the center of your screen”, an idea which YossiPossi supports. stormfallen suggests that the module should “[burst] out of your screen and [embed] itself directly in your frontal lobe”. stormbreath clarifies that the new translation module will not do this.”
Topic: Guide Hub Changes
We are still doing things to court the new uptick of users, two days later. This is like re-arranging all your furniture to face people who walk in the door because, hey, people are coming over. The actual proposal states:
“This was done to make the Guide Hub less overwhelming to new users… This page will be linked as such on the sidebar and on the various pages that new users must traverse to join the wiki. ” (source)
A vote is bypassed so that it can (hopefully) be rolled out in time to capitalize on this bump in site enrollment. It receives very little discussion on O5, and none in the on-site mirror, then is implemented.
Topic: Comprehensive Guide Hub Refresh
This one is a bit out of order, but I feel it’s best to cluster all the topics that have to do with making the site easier to navigate for the new gaggle of users, as it is an accurate representation of the of the Staff’s concerns and priorities. This will come into play more when Staff discuss why it is that their culture perpetuates reactionary explanations and not actual changes to improve the site.
Topic: Discussion on djkaktus’ Statement on Staffchat Leaks & AHT Warning
This one is a doozy. The main takeaway is that Staff continuously misrepresent directed criticisms as harassment. Here, they are doing this as cover in order to attack djkaktus’ chat leak efforts. They claim they aren’t trying to stop him from doing this, but the entirety of their language, and that of other Staff-adjacent individuals says otherwise.
People have been calling out individuals and Staff for a long time. Only now is someone sent an “official warning”. Why? Because djkaktus has something that the rest of us don’t; a sufficient marketing arsenal. An army of NPCs. A cease and desist message is only sent when the individual has a large audience that can cause some bad PR. Other naysayers and critics can simply be silenced by quick bans and off-site/cross-platform censorship without such warnings. In other words, djkaktus is too big to ban and easily character assassinate, like those of lesser social capital. Staff understand they are powerless to stop someone like kaktus from speaking freely about how crappy they are, but they also know they can’t ban him even if they wanted to. (This has, ironically, been revealed extensively in staff chat leaks.) Staff’s only comfortable picking on the shrimps here, when retaliatory messages are not likely to reach a large number of people or cause an optics stir.
This says plenty about Staff, but let’s move on and get exhaustive, as is the MO of this blog.
The Recap coverage starts off by stating that someone in Staff chat shared that djkaktus posted this to his Twitter:
Staff’s ace-in-the-hole is that they know the person on the other end of the duel, while also pointing his gun in their direction, is a person whose primary pull is ego-satiation, and there will be much less of that if he is off of the SCP Wiki. So, Staff don’t believe that kaktus will pull the trigger, that he will back off from what they tell him to back off from, and they are right. An anticlimactic stand-off exists here where both sides of the battlefield are wetting themselves that the other has noticed them, and both are hoping that they don’t have to shoot.
Kaktus finds a way around this, though not very inconspicuously. It’s mentioned in this that “many individuals” will start a new Twitter account “at a later date” to keep releasing the chat log leaks. The SCP Staff Chat Leaks Twitter was created that very day. It posted 3 pictures and has gone silence since. By this point, either there was that few chat logs to share… certainly not enough to make a hoopla and dedicated Twitter over… or Staff have enacted similar censorship tactics, as they did with this blog, and have a gun pointed at the Twitter’s head via asinine anti-whistleblower and anti-transparency policies.
We again see SCP Staff’s hospitality to SCPD in this, and should more than ever understand SCPD’s position as an un-admitted but official SCP Wiki space:
LadyKatie and gee agree that Yossi’s clarification of djkaktus’ warning should be publicised in a more open space than SCPD’s #meta-scp-discussion channel… A few hours later, a question from SCPD is ported to staffchat.
Djkaktus takes a very high road on the politics here; he is as vague as possible with the description of the letter, and so gives himself a very short noose by which to potentially hang himself. A less restrained move may have made all kind of claims about this private letter that could easily be disproven by Staff. When confronted with the call-out, the Staff seem to think they are being unfairly represented:
“Members of AHT claim the statement misrepresents the team’s warning to djkaktus…”
The only phrases in this initial Tweet that characterize AHT’s warning are “I received an official warning”, which is true, and “over images and statements I have made about perceived injustices”, which is also true. Here’s the actual later, posted after:
Let’s quickly analyze this and point out aspects of it that might otherwise be missed. First, the author DrEverettMann takes the time to mention in parenthetical that the offenses herein stated are against both “staff and non-staff”. Odd that the distinction needs to be made. It reinforces the silent assumption, already evident as self-conscious on the part of the author and the general belief it represents, that this notice is due to bad PR of SCP Staff. It is as if defense is being mounted before anyone has made the assertion.
In order to continue past the next sentences, we will need to cauterize any memory we have for worse behaviors that Staff have not sent cease-and-desist letters over, such as AdminBright’s sexual indecency and grooming of underage members of the site, according to those members. (A message from the future of this blog post: Staff will later on wonder how their actions contribute to repeatedly sub-optimal managerial conditions and administrations rife with incompetence. They will even wonder how people like AdminBright ever got away with the things they did.) We might find it odd that a warning is being sent at all, but again, this is a stand-off where the only thing fired are bladder reserves. Notice the key phrase: “your notable Twitter following”. Not everyone is given the courtesy of a warning.
Next, let’s reproduce all the images in the links here:
“Direct intimidation” is one of the charges. We can see kaktus calling out several individuals by name. However, how intimidated someone is after being called out is not up to kaktus; that is a function of the individual. For example, if kaktus called me out for something I said publicly here on this blog, I wouldn’t be intimidated. Importantly, all of these instances are responses to the public statements and actions of the people they criticize. The conclusion is that Staff expect no one who has shared an opinion openly to suffer any personally-directed disagreement, and certainly not anything that is less than extremely kind.
The next charge is the “direct publication of private communication for the express purpose of humiliating/shaming/harming another user”. Again, to proceed with heads non-exploded, we will have to ignore the tremendous amount of humiliation, shaming, and reputational harm delivered by members of the SCP Staff that, previous to such leaks, Staff were perfectly fine with engaging in; the continuous violation of Rule Zero. We also have to ignore that the disciplinary process for both AHT and Disc is inherently predicated upon the sharing of information that has not been consented to by the offending individual, and whose words are posted publicly on O5 in this disciplinary process. Such O5 posts could and are accurately said to be intentional sessions of shaming and reputation damage.
Ignoring that, again kaktus is not to blame for the leaks; someone inside the Staffchat who is in cahoots with him is. Kaktus by this point is a second-order publisher, and legal precedent exists that exempts such publishers from liability when acting or promoting material that another has already made available. We connect the dots and see that Edna Granbo was the one who brought this up to Staffchat. This tells us that kaktus has a mole in Staffchat, who is more to blame than kaktus is.
Let’s again apply our blinders again in order to get through this without being distracted by the contradictions and hypocrisy in this letter, and ignore that Staff have been perfectly fine with doing all of this themselves in what they believed were private spaces, and that there was a culture of doing so without any sort of accountability to Rule Zero surely “encouraged all of the above”. The idea that kaktus’ spoken desire to humiliate someone is somehow below Staff is ludicrous.
Most of these are kaktus asking questions that are valid, such as why chat leaks are taken to be a more pressing issue than something like power abuse. Calling MalyceGraves a jerk is arguably harassment, but not when Malyace can call the users’ concerns “bitching” and the determination by Staff is that nothing is wrong with that. Kaktus does use the word “humiliation”, which is politically a bad choice of words. A better choice would have been “mock”. But his point remains; when you have a bunch of people who take themselves too seriously and think they are larger than life for very small reasons, mockery is the most effective way to pop that bubble. (He of all people should know.) It should also be mentioned that mockery and humiliation are a less-optimal solution that is being resorted to, specifically because this sort of hypocrisy and political privilege is going un-addressed by those whose stated job it is to address it.
A final question; would kaktus have posted the statement in its entirety publicly if it successfully refuted his “mischaracterization” of Staff? No.
It appears as though someone with the exposure of kaktus is not allowed to make hard statements about the people making decisions at and for SCP, even if/when those people do something morally or administratively questionable. The gist from the AHT notice is that it the team is happy to extort someone’s connection to and reliance upon the site in order to conform them into line; back into the standards they exempt themselves from as long as they are not caught.
The argument that AHT is acting in the interest of protecting users is not well substantiated. They are more interested in going after kaktus than addressing some of the internal problems he is pointing out. They are trying to damage the individual who is seeing clearly their errors, instead of attempting to look honestly at those errors.
Ol’ kak has called Staff’s bluff twice by now; once by making a statement about receiving the letter, and again by posting this letter showing that there was not substantial mischaracterization in the initial statement, contrary to what the Staff in Staffchat had to say.
Back in the posted message, we see a statement of remarkable staffspeak:
“You are still free to criticize staff, specific individuals in staff, and specific individuals in the community, but must not violate our Anti-Harassment Policy while doing so.”
The gist of this rule is “Free speech is good but not when it hurts feelings.” We might also type: “You are free to leave, but you must not exit the boundaries of this place”; or “You are free to criticize, but are not allowed to talk so freely.” How is someone going to be allowed to criticize an individual and it not be taken as harassment, especially if the one criticized cries to Staff about it? What defines whether or not a criticism is “harassment”? Is it the emotional stability of the person who is criticized? That seems like a very flimsy and unreliable manner to enact punishment, bound to be incorrect and unjust. What a problem opens up before us when we inquire into the relationship of criticism and harassment, and the definitions of it being defined by those who are being criticized! Said many times here, there is a slow-creep equivocation of the two on SCP.
Finally, and definitively, we have seen that in fact it is not OK to criticize Staff, who will call an emergency O5 Command discussion to thinly justify deleting a satire posted about them, because it criticized them. And this was a satire that avoided anyone by name! It addressed the Staff in the most abstracted and non-directed manner possible.
The truth is that AHT and Staff at large are not interested in batting down any negative opinion of anyone who is on their site if it isn’t themself. That is an impossible task. Instead, they seem to only take offense in the setting of adjacent Staff chat leaks, and by a very vocal and listened-to member of the community.
Please notice that all of this “rule breaking” behavior cited by AHT happens off-site. There was a time where off-site actions and their relevance were siloed away from the purview and reach of these rules and on-site teams, in places even as proximal as the SCP IRC chat. We can understand here the invasiveness of SCP policing as it now extends to any and all platforms, any and all aspects of their subscribers’ lives. It’s as if a great price of freedom must be paid in order to affiliate one’s self with the SCP Wiki. (And people wonder why they have the lasting reputation of being authoritarian and elitist!) So, SCP Staff believes it is their responsibility to police users actions off-site, but this is simply the Trojan horse. They are more interested in policing their reputation, and how people who find fault with it can be muzzled.
LadyKatie and gee agree that Yossi’s clarification of djkaktus’ warning should be publicised in a more open space than SCPD’s #meta-scp-discussion channel, and LadyKatie states that AHT are working on porting it to 05command. This port is completed, and the log of the warning is posted to the AHT Log of Bans.
It is only after kaktus posts their message that members of AHT feel the need to clarify, and more publicly. Does the stated need to clarify kaktus’ warning not mean that, if any mischaracterization was present, it may have been Staff’s? What is there to clarify, if not?
As we follow the link provided, we are taken to a list of “AHT Bans”, which by no coincidence is a compendium filled with either vocal critics of the SCP Staff, or the pedophiles that such critics exposed (against the great push-back of SCP Staff, no less). It reads like a Most Wanted List in relation to Staff PR problems. Kaktus’ post here is unique in the history of these notices; the individual isn’t disciplined, the point being to “ensure the user does not continue their ongoing behavior, which could likely result in serious harassment.” (Emphasis mine.)
In this post, Staff again emphasize that the movement to warn djkaktus was not in any way due to the chat leaks themselves. They ignore that the criticisms are about damning and hypocritical things revealed in the chat leaks. Staff activity elsewhere reveals their mentality in response to these leaks, and that they are the primary offense and target.
This is a change that took place on the exact day of the two Tweets from Kaktus, the Staff Chat Leak Twitter creation, and the AHT ban list notice. The coincidences are crushing in their collective weight.
An SCP user who has been paying attention writes in reply:
This accurate information is reacted to with confusion on the part of Kufat, who said so himself that no changes would be enacted:
In the Recap, someone in SCPD asks a Staff member, LadyKatie, what Staff’s view on these new rules of Kufat’s is. LadyKatie reportedly replies:
Wiki Staff have no ability to prevent Kufat from doing so, as they do not own the IRC network that hosts the official SCP Wiki chat.
However, this is contradicted by the fact that Chat Staff were hand selected by site Staff, as well as a Tweet from Kufat, who says “A final policy will be drafted by SkipIRC staff in consultation with SCP staff and interested users.”
The inconsistencies likely betray that there is extensive overlap, influence, dialogue, and instruction between the SCP Staff and the SkipIRC staff. Otherwise, we might not have need of an official role for this:
But the doublespeak dispersed on the part of this particular individual, Kufat, is so deafening, the insanity on display here so open, that it has merited its own blog post in length, which will be forthcoming in the next weeks or months. All relevant Tweets have been archived. The reader will excuse the lack of any details regarding SkipIRC’s reflective properties as a measure of on-site Staff’s beliefs, goals, and policies.
Topic: Swamp Critter Roster Archival
This one discusses a defunct Staff team, The Swamp Critters, who are the latest in an ongoing series of failed attempts to defibrilate the spirit of high standards on-site & to re-inject talented literary criticism (something they have discouraged by conflating criticism with harassment, you see). The team only lasted a little less than a year, and its body rotted for an additional 5 months before finally being disposed of here. This is another example of good intention being necessary but not nearly sufficient for a positive change. The page has been nuked.
Topic: 001 Proposal Page Rework
ROUNDERHOUSE proposes making it so that the list of SCP-001s is randomized, not chronological, and that new ones should be featured prominently in their own <div> box at the top of the list.
This is ridiculous in two ways: first, it removes a perfectly historical and traditional account of the site. Now, a user has no way to know when a given SCP-001 was posted on the face of things, their relative order in representing site development, having to do extensive detail searching, or creating a ListPages Module to do the work for them. There was something about the historical progression of SCP-001s that gave the site a connection to his history, past, and present. Instead, now, it is jumbled up, which I’m not sure really adds anything. It certainly isn’t done for any argument from immersion although randomizing the list does seem like something in-universe personnel hoping to deter insight to the real 001 might do. But of course, this is torpedoed by the spotlighting of new 001s at the top. It is in fact, a concession against immersion after all.
The Recap is sparse on the ideas of why this was taken to be a good idea; maybe there weren’t any reasons stated, just “positive response to the idea”. So, we will do our best to speculate. Why would someone like this? Who stands to gain from it? Well, if you are an author of a 001, and given that people usually read in order, this puts your upvotes at a disadvantage; the new entry being all the way at the bottom. It’s best to reshuffle the order. I suppose there are some egalitarian and/or communist underpinnings to this.
The random shuffling introduces a new problem; new 001s not being as apparent, one that wasn’t there before. So, this problem is resolved by flipping the new ones from the bottom to the top; again a move that will be favored by current authors as it gives their new entries more streamlined traffic. The appetite that is motivating the individuals here is potent and a bit nauseating. The only debate that takes place here is how long new 001s should be spotlit.
So to summarize, someone stirs the 001 pot, dislikes that their new one is not as evident, and so re-applies the chronological basis, but only to new ones this time. Seems like a bit of a confused two step, but I suppose new 001 authors got what they wanted; their smug names up in lights on a sort of marquee.
The changes are enacted. In unrelated news, ROUNDERHOUSE posts his second 001 a few weeks later.
Topic: Working Groups
Recap: After the lengthy conversation about the promotions suspension, stormfallen says that staff need to “Discuss how to better format these long conversations so that people who aren’t around/can’t follow along as easily can still know what happened”.
This one is easy: read this blog.
He suggests that when a subject which requires significant discussion is brought up in staffchat, the person bringing it up would ask for volunteers with relevant skills or experience, who would work on the policy in a public thread or a private group DM in a group of approximately five people, where logs would be sent to Recap Team at the end of the discussion.
Staff are asking to discuss things in smaller groups and then be trusted to provide the DM logs, unedited, with no messages changed or deleted. This is a step away from the purpose and intention of Recap and is the Staff’s habitual preference for deeper and darker caverns of obscurity in which to operate. With the DM option, this functionally introduces a new degree of separation between the Recap team and their role, which is supposed to be increased transparency. Some of the Staff, like Limeyy, catch this.
Dexanote wants to enforce who can and can’t speak up about a given topic, with Croquembouche identifying this as a bad idea. Dexanote also argues that excluding the public eye from some discussions is good.
stormfallen returns to the discussion, and says that he now thinks that private DMs are a better way of running working groups than the public threads he had previously suggested.
Uh huh. What went on in that absence exactly? Any… DMs?
Bleep then says that the current situation, where discussions consist of several people talking past each other in discord, is unsustainable.
A question presents itself; hasn’t this been how Staff has been doing things for a while? Why is it suddenly so unsustainable? Is it because, via this “small groups” idea, Staff is attempting to avoid so confused of a conversation that it reflects poorly on the efficiency and executive ability of Staff in their Staffchat, as made apparent by the documenting Recap team?
Topic: Staffchat’s September Recap Review
We are now recapping the Oct recap of a Sept recap, which is here being recapped by Staff after it has been initially recapped.
A lot of this is about SCP-DISC-J, to no surprise. MomBun attempts to retroactively revise her instincts, which it seems by now, she has realized is very unflattering:
MomBun identifies a statement during the Disc-J recap which she feels does not express her intention when contributing to the discussion. GremlinGroup provides a direct quote to back up the sentence in the recap, and MomBun provides a later statement during the discussion where she expounds on ther thoughts. GremlinGroup maintains that the recap is accurate to the sentiment she expressed during the discussion. MomBun & GremlinGroup agree to an amendment to her wording in the recap, and an additional footnote is made clarifying her feelings during the recap review.
Here’s that footnote:
Here’s the sentence it is from:
Here’s her verbatim statement that Gremlin was recapping:
Like the answer is obvious to me, take the second option, I don’t care if we take a PR hit, I’d rather encourage a healthy environment where people are encouraged to openly air issues instead of writing hit pieces like this, especially with how vile this is?
If you don’t think PR is important when it matters most — that is to say, when PR is directly and solely upon the other side of the scale — then when would you think it is important?
FabledTiefling notes that he is concerned that individual staff members may be uncomfortable with their portrayal in this recap.
Stormfallen suggests a number of edits, which would help clarify or further explain the discussions in StaffChat, as well as pointing out some unfinished sentences in the recap. HarryBlank & GremlinGroup responds to these points; all edits are accepted, and the request for further clarification helps to improve the detail of the Disc-J recap.
Topic: Commissions / Donations Policy
We get the first official documentation of Staff’s approval for the commissioning and designing of custom CSS themes for SCP authors. Commissioning articles is banned, which is actually a sign of life; that writing is still held in some respect that CSS themes aren’t. However, this is the first toe through the door of a large foot, and as explained in my blog post reading the SCP tea leaves, I think paid-for articles will be a thing in the future.
Topic: Censure
Calibold asks when the projected censure of Dexanote and DrEverettMann can be expected to take effect. YossiPossi believes Dexanote has been “considering it”
“Hey Dexanote, when are you going to self-flagellate?”
“Anytime now.”
Pedagon notes that being able to determine the timing of your own punishment defeats its purpose.
And yet, no one has any real issues with DrMagnus being “disciplined” and back in a position of power, all on his own terms.
Calibold has pinged both Dexanote and Mann, and both aismallard and later DrBleep criticize this action.
“Do not anger the Gods!” — aismallard & DrBleep. This kind of elevation is what keeps them from quickly censuring themselves.
aismallard suggests that the situation with DrAkimoto has taken priority; ROUNDERHOUSE counters that said situation was very recent, and it has been months since the censure was decided.
We actually saw that the discussion with DrAkimoto directly entailed and implicated the failure of Dexanote & Mann to censure themselves, as it was ultimately about no reckoning for Admin power abuse.
Pedagon suggests that extending the period in which nothing is done on this issue makes staff appear not to be managing themselves.
Two months after this statement, and after a thread voting positively for a hastening of it in November, nothing has happened.
ManyMeats wants to know if acknowledgment that these concerns have been heard is the action desired by the interested parties,
“Will you be placated if I tell you I hear your concerns?” — Many “Looking for the easy way out” Meats
DrBleep puts a slowmode on the conversation; Lucio and Limeyy note that this favours admins in the conversation, as they are unaffected. Bleep removes the slowmode, noting it was applied to give ManyMeats time to respond.
We see again and again admins tilting the field of play for themselves and their clutched power. This is the only mention of slowmode being applied in all 3 recaps so far. We may have expected it to be applied during the “Promotions Suspension and Communication” tome, but it seemingly wasn’t. We see it used here when Staffers get to the heart of why something that was promised over a year ago still hasn’t happened; something that is at the total and simple control of those who stand to be politically tarnished. DrBleep attempts to handwave the misuse, but ends up describing exactly what Lucio and Limeyy called it out for in the first place. DrBleep believes she has adequately excuses the foul. She is either the most intellectually incompetent of the Admins or the worst liar of them I have seen so far.
Pedagon wants to know if Dexanote will be informed that this is going on, since it seems unfair to talk about him in his absence; aismallard asks that comments on this matter go through her, and she will relay them. stormbreath states that Dexanote is aware of the conversation. The conversation is tabled until later.
This is bizarre; first aismallard gets onto Calibold for pinging Dexanote as it may be disrespectful to include him. Next, aismallard sets herself up as the emissary to Dexanote, as if a Jesus providing intercession to God on behalf of mortal humanity.
ManyMeats had promised the inquiring Staffers a result by Oct 17th, and Dexanote actually delivers on this, perhaps having been told (by the intercession of aismallard I guess) that he has to do something. So what does Dexanote do, besides throw the Staff an all-words, no-action bone?
First he explains that phrasing in the second of Cerastes’ disc threads accidentally suggested that the Disciplinary Team had unilateral control over whether action would be taken; he notes that this is not true, and that the line was instead meant to reassure everyone that Disc was not being influenced by outside actors.
(Good God Dexanote, just concede the point.) If you are an Admin and your statements repeatedly “accidentally suggest” things you don’t mean for them to, are you fit to be an Admin? After a while, this excuse deflates. Furthermore, the apologetics given for what “is really meant” are actually just a rephrasing of the original statement; a slightly less offensive interpretation of it. The clear fact is that Dexanote intended the initial spirit of the words, and this was received as clearly as an Admin order to veto a Staffer’s promotion.
On the topic of censure he states that staff cannot “call for or enact censure on themselves,” and therefore prepares to pass the issue on to Disc.
Dexanote likes to overstep his power on numerous occasions, but when it comes to doing anything about his own disciplinary process, he suddenly is bound by the confines of what you would by this think is a Constitutional system of power checks.
gee notes that while the thread was intended to be an announcement, there’s no reason why, in the interests of transparency, it couldn’t be a discussion thread.
It is a possibility that Dexanote declared the post as an announcement with the avid intent to avoid a public discussion about it, given his general sentiments on restricting speech, seen previously. We can see a delay in his creating the on-site mirror as well; a place where he was sure to receive few praises.
Dexanote clarifies that Disc is not empowered to decide whether it pursues action. It is constrained by the charter and by the administration.
By this point, Dexanote is tripping over his own over-sized clown shoes as he attempts to back away. He just said that he was going to hand the issue over to Disc, but now notes that Disc can’t decide to do anything about it, and that it is answering to Dexanote, an Admin. Limeyy expresses this frustration well:
“Disc can’t just ban people for no reason, there has to be a cause/proper disc matter to deal with’ in response to an incident where a member of the site was almost banned for a fabricated cause, followed by a second even more fabricated cause really does not fill me nor anyone reading this with confidence.”
They loop around the attempted deflection, flanking it in an incursion. In the Cerastes case, Disc was weaponized by the behest of an Admin (two actually) to resolve and enact swiftly the full weight of the public, shaming, and humiliating disciplinary process on a user who didn’t deserve it. In Dexanote’s own handling of his case by almost total contrast, Disc is neutered at the behest of the vague and nebulous Charter, to deny or prolong the weightlessness of that same process and power on a user who did, and many times over.
Topic: SkipIRC Harassment Policy
We alluded to these previously; Kufat the dictator enacted a no-leak policy, and also a no-criticism policy, likely to protect no one but his political peers, but nominally in the name of sensitivity and wanting to make the chat “a safe and fun place”. It’s remarkably strange that according to Kufat, in order to keep people safe and having fun, the potential for exporting abusive statements in provable chat logs, or whistleblowing internal corruption are criminalized. Users are no longer allowed to say critical things of others, who may be doing things worthy of criticism, because it can always be claimed loosely under the new rules as “leaks” or “harassment”. “We have to take away any recourse of bottom-up justice for you in the name of safety and fun.” This begs the question: whose safety? Whose fun?
The initial promise that the controversial transfer of IRC power to un-elected members who previously quit wasn’t going to result in any sweeping changes is broken.
This is given excuse and expository padding by clueless members of Staff.
As I said above, the new rules are so insane, so blatantly authoritarian and China-like, that they merit their own blog post on the subject, upcoming. To summarize what was discussed previously here, Limeyy again voices it nicely, with a supplemental nudge in tow from Recap team:
Limeyy considers the rules reactionary, and considered alongside earlier controversial changes regarding leaks, finds the pattern concerning… The question of whether Kufat is aware of conversations on other platforms is raised, as the new rules address issues which were being discussed by staff in other channels. CuteGirl explains that her presence in both conversations explains the similar topics, and that similarities in wording are merely coincidence.
Topic: No-Team Staff and Promotion Changes
My summary: Staff decides that if you aren’t balls-all-in to Staff work, you should be auto-retired. Fuck your availability and IRL stuff.
Gee0765 states he has been considering proposing a policy requiring all active and reserve staff to be in staffchat. ManyMeats responds that he has already recommended a similar idea for the charter review.
Limeyy states that asking staff to be in staffchat if they wish to keep their position is not unreasonable, and ManyMeats and Gee agree.
Vivarium is asked by lily about his in-progress policy that will cover staff without a team.
Topic: Plagiarism and Metaphysician Discussion
This is another topic that has budded an entire and separate blog post. However, it also has been in the queue of Confic Magazine article jobs, and will likely require a Confic Wiki article first. So, commentary on this section will be deferred to those two posts. Suffice it to say here, the SCP Staff have a harsher punishment for un-cited copy/pasted text than for blatant abuse of power to ruin people. Metaphysician’s ban in 2020 was 9 months prior to the Cerastes disciplinary logs, and Dexanote can be seen outraged in them:
Dexanote calls for the immediate ban of Metaphysician, full stop, and says the repeated offenses are “infuriating”, and then takes over a year to enact any sense of discipline for the culmination of his own repetitive abuses, constantly passing the responsibility between the teams resting in the palms of his hands. This is its own commentary for now.
Topic: Changes to Disciplinary Chat Access
Another previously cloistered Staff space is now open to more of Staff. Leaks are guaranteed. aismallard, she of Yurt, is the announcing Admin. No funny business here.
Topic: Deletion Rules
WikiDot go sqoosh.
Topic: Staffwide Jira Board
The Jira board from the mile-long discussion in the “Promotions Suspension and Communication” topic is announced. By force of habit, this is made private to Staff only despite it being an excellent opportunity for transparency in ongoing projects for the public; a decision Staff will surely later be forced to correct to the better option.
Topic: Censure Delay
Haven’t we been here? No, this is another one. Another topic where Staff asks why the censure has been delayed. The reason this time is that upper Staff want to do things right, which is to say slowly. This is a cop-out from the last discussion, which was explicitly concerned with the amount of time it was taking, and how that has become its own problem. Bringing this up prompts aismallard to add to the O5 Command thread that Dexanote started over a week prior, also prompted by persistant nudging:
As an update from last week, Administration and Disciplinary having been extensively discussing the foundations of staff discipline (that is, actions taken against staff members for miscarriage of duty). The original estimate of one week has proved to be too optimistic given the scope of policy and procedure that needs to be thoroughly examined to ensure this matter is handled properly. (source)
Zyn replies that “There’s discussion happening about revising the staff disciplinary process in general.”
Let’s ask an obvious question; does any of this require Dexanote to not be censured? It seems as though the answer is no; these reforms could in fact go on during such a censure, and may be best fit for that time. The question is not whether Dexanote abused Admin power; that seems to be settled. However, the distance between that surety and a promised action of good-faith justice on the part of the Staff only seems to widen. It’s as if they are at the end of a diving board for the first time, and keep telling the people behind them that they just need to take a few more deep breaths and calculate through a few more trigonometry problems before jumping off. It really shouldn’t be this complicated and the edematous supply of complexity that is being forcefully injected into the situation, conveniently delaying it, seems incredibly suspicious; that or an incomprehensibly inefficient.
If an Admin abusing power that has not in any way been pre-emptively mitigated by a system of checks & balances sends the disciplinary world into a topspin where it has to settle so that it can be re-oriented, dismantled, and re-constructed prior to reuse, then what does that say about the disciplinary process? One that usually is so efficient and deliberate in its execution of woeful punishments? It says that the Admin as the object of that process is so alien to the concept and operation that it breaks. In other words, the disciplinary process was never meant to address Admins; whether out of optimism, or out of self-service.
TheDeadlyMoose indicates that they have recommended no further progress be made on the censures until a detailed review of the disciplinary policy is carried out, so that issues and obligations are understood in full. They note that the work is ongoing, and will likely lead to fiat reform (and may tie in to the rewrite of the Site Charter). Moose underlines their goal: get the issues addressed quickly without adding more mistakes to the existing litany.
Moose et al. are resistant to the understanding that the delay of disciplinary action for a clear violation of power is the “adding more mistakes” here.
“They also… note that Dexanote “wants this over with as soon as humanly possible (and desires to be censured).”
“But my punishment! I have to have a punishment! Please! Let me be censured! Oh how I wish I could just be censured!” — Totally Dexanote
So now, a total overhaul of Disc and the Charter has to be completed prior to Dexanote (or Mann) seeing one second of censure; an Olympian task that at this pace and rate will take years to complete. Maybe Dexanote will finally be censured when Project Foundation is complete. Why is no one else afforded such a stay of execution? Such luxury?
Topic: Assigning Mod Permissions to JS and OS
Cyvstvi requests to know why stormbreath would be hesitant to give page lock powers [to OS/JS], to which stormbreath responds that anyone with such powers could unlock locked pages and allow for malicious editing to take place. Furthermore, locking and unlocking are not able to be logged anywhere, so it would be incredibly difficult to catch anyone abusing such power.
This is curious, in that any edit on the SCP Wiki is logged here. Unless mods have the ability to hide their edits to pages, which I don’t think is the case. If it is, then Stormbreath is letting us know about a method of power abuse that can’t be prosecuted fairly. Kind of like Kufat’s utopia SkipIRC.
… only if deletions could easily be logged and reverted, which is presently impossible under Wikidot structuring… Aismallard brings up deletions as another case of Wikidot’s lack of nuance, how all deletions are “hard” deletions, being completely unrecoverable, and are also not logged.
As is any log of deletions, which is why Staff record all of them and require “witnesses” (now changed to “confirmations” to make it sound less ominous, per a topic in this Recap). If a moderator wanted to maliciously delete a page, there is no way to retrieve it, and there would be no proof that they did. Thank goodness a power abuse of this level hasn’t happened in the history of the SCP Wiki…
This topic boils down to:
Admin: “Yeah, JS and OS, we’d love to give you more power — our powers — but WikiDot.”
Topic: Anti-Harassment and Disciplinary action on Public Figures
Recap team is by now delirious and obtunded due to the sheer volume of text their job requires them to pay uncompromising attention to. They tap on the glass of the zoo cages, the Staff within equally as relieved to entertain a break from the stale, sheer boredom of bureaucracy that has made a mockery of their free time and social lives. In their only Recap appearance, Siddartha Alone performs a grammatical error (“states “Look mom I’m in a ironic recap” (sic)”)
This whole section is pretty funny.
Speaking of which:
Yossi makes a joke. (Yossi requests the joke be expunged from Recap during the Recap Review.)
Could it have been an insensitive joke that was OK because it is in staff spaces? Who knows. Certainly is the suspicion.
stormfallen notes that the conversation has become more serious, and states that it would be fine, but low priority, to make an addition to the rules allowing for bans to be made for conviction of serious crimes. He further states that AHT could be involved if this was not the case, if users did not feel safe. Finally, he notes that pre-banning the president would be “dumb and meaningless virtue signalling.” aismallard agrees that pre-banning would be pointless, and notes that the Internet Outreach team would probably be involved.
stormfallen is correct in saying that the Disciplinary team cannot ban someone for misconduct not covered by the rules (but that “severe misconduct” on-site, is bannable). Moose notes that adding a clause for serious crimes to the site rules would be “meaningless” as the Disc team could ban someone for something so extreme without a particular clause. stormfallen stated that the site’s Anti-Harassment team could act if users on-site feel unsafe, which Moose clarifies as only possible if the user crosses the AHT policy.
Finally, moose states that banning a president sounds like an attempt to bait trolls to the site, rather than legitimate action… stormfallen states it would be funny for people not on the Wiki’s Internet Outreach team (prompting “:point_up_2:” reactions from aismallard and Moose). Calibold clarifies that banning the president would be a bad idea.
AHT does not have the ability to ban people who are not members of the site or community without Admin Fiat.
At this point, we have to wrestle with the established compulsive character of Staff, and I genuinely don’t know if they are being serious or not here. We have witnessed the dissolution of previously clear boundaries of satire — the memes becoming reality in a phrase — and so if this is still intended to be humors, it trips and comes off as serious here. If this truly is serious then… well… wow.
Stormfallen notes that the recap of this conversation will be “a little awkward” given some parts deal with exceptionally serious topics while others are filled with lighthearted intra-staff communication.
Exactly. Exaaaaactly.
Topic: Past Administrators
ROUNDERHOUSE feels PixelatedHarmony’s involvement in many aspects of staffwork has been regularly used to distract from conversations about addressing systemic issues.
For example, from the Metaphysician discussion:
Yossi points out that Harmony was the main driver in Metaphysician’s ban; gee0765 and Limeyy respond that Harmony was far from the only person in aggressive support of a permaban and that her role is ultimately minor. Yossi says he’ll “save [his] grumpiness about that case for later”.
Rounde — I mean, ROUNDERHOUSE doesn’t want Staff to use Harmony’s past involvement in issues and decisions to be a crutch; he believes the culture of the site is the root of the issue, not one of the plants that previously sprouted from it. He is correct.
LadyKatie states: “We all know what Harmony, Bright, et al did. We need to talk about what let them get away with it.”
I told you that Staff would wonder why and how their previous heroes had gotten away with such horrible behavior and gone unpunished. They say this while they prioritize their coddling of a mildly participatory gaggle of new users, while they ignore the issues under their own noses.
The answer to this question is partially that Staff, at the highest levels and in a way not dissimilar to the top-down refusal to enact Dexanote’s/Mann’s censure, gave their paragons political immunity in the face of overwhelming wrong and evidence supporting; at least until a boiling point is forcefully reached.
Moose notes that AdminBright accrued far too much power, which required a great deal of effort to prise [sic] free, and that the Charter was written and staff teams were created in the aftermath…
If you know anything about Harmony’s philosophy, you know that she along with Sorts consider the creation of the Charter to be a defining moment in the eventual downward trajectory of the site. Thus, according to this, AdminBright’s centralization of too much power was the catalyst for the site’s eventual collapse into an identity crisis:
DrKondraki engaging in harassment and Fishmonger demanding that his articles be deleted are also discussed, as well as the difficulties inherent in working with right-wing users to achieve positive change.
The SCP Wiki Staff is a political club. It is mono-dimensional when it comes to free, critical thought. Read it and weep. Staff have no idea how much this cripples them.
Moose reminds everyone that they are working to prevent the abuses of the past from being repeated, noting that structures created by previous admins tended to allow such abuses.
Moose enacts the misstep that ROUNDERHOUSE began this topic pointing out; it isn’t an individual. It is the culture. The same culture that equates right-wing users with negative value. It’s a pilot in the cockpit of a falling plane that refuses to take the responsibility to righten the nosedive.
“We should be solutions oriented rather than explanations oriented as site staff,” he states, as staff’s tendency to provide explanations without solutions can look like making excuses or ignoring concerns entirely.
This is the most honest and important moment of self-reflection on the part of any Staffer I have ever seen. It’s the most important single statement in this monstrosity of a Recap.
Moose is not entirely convinced…
Le siiiiigh.
Pedagon…: “this discussion is the undercurrent of everything we do. And, since I joined here, it seems like people are constantly playing catch-up to deal with issues and broken policies but there really is a need for a discussion of what assumptions we are all making that form our approaches. Like we can talk all day about “what should we say to this person” or “how do we word this policy” but those don’t really address the fact that many of our approaches are rooted in systems of binaries and knowing rather than understanding and acting.”
Staff is and has been on their heels for more than a year now. Previously, they enjoyed the opulence of their political privilege, self-awarded, but that time is ending. The free reign of Staff as a ruling class is toppling. People like Pedagon are instrumental, not for any dramatic reason, but for the simple ability to reflect honestly on the situation; what should be simple, but is complicated by ego and fear. Staff is losing a war. Look across the discussion threads, the scandals, the community drama, the temperature in the userbase, and ask yourself; where is a win? Is there a single one?
Moose feels that they and other past staff are responsible for this problematic paradigm and wishes to help correct it. Pedagon expresses appreciation for Moose’s earnestness and willingness to discuss, but notes that the conversation has not made it past the explanation phase yet. Moose feels that the solution needs to start with admins; Pedagon feels that “the current initiatives of getting wide opinions on things and bringing people in who have different approaches to things (restorative justice vs punitive justice, new plagiarism understanding vs old plagiarism, etc.)” will be important.
Moose, the veritable, is humbled by Pedagon’s innocent wisdom. It’s not unlike seeing the poor and unkempt figure of Jesus collapse the supposed wisdom of the most gold-decorated and oiled pharisee (… not that moose is crooked like the archetype of a pharisee is). Moose is incorrect here. The needed change won’t come from Admins. That’s the point that is trying to come forward. This mode of thinking is the disease that continues to pollute the body of SCP.
Over the last year and a half, Staff has lost the longest standing administrator in the site. An individual who was untouchable was brought down and finally faced the music for his mistreatment of other people. That was not my doing, it was not an Admin’s doing, and it wasn’t the Bible-like law guidance of the site Charter; that was the individuals reading this blog and the greater community of SCP. It was the most humble and invisible of us.
The community brought down the most acidic and verbally-abusive moderator on the site, someone who got away with whatever he wanted to do including doxing, and who had been on the site for over a decade. The community forced the previous head of anti-harassment to step down due to long-standing negligence and dismissal of cases against a protected class of people.
These are massive losses, all huge victories that would never have happened had the community not come together and overcome the dishonesty of a state-led, ruling-class-orchestrated set of propaganda and lies by omission.
The people who have benefited most from this culture of toxicity and exploitation at SCP are now facing their long-coming personal storms — both in private and in full public view. The blade of grass doesn’t worry about getting struck by lightning. All those blades of grass — very small, but very numerous, very decentralized — don’t have to worry about getting struck; they’re fine in a storm. It’s the conspicuous large tree that likes to boast its size and refuses to bend in the gusts that has to be worried.
This storm has not let up. As the writing culture of the site decomposes under the throne of detritus the Staff have let it fester under, toxic ooze is pooling around their feet. There is no one left to blame. They have a culture of refusing responsibility and deflecting blame… here on people who are no longer around — empty seats in which to pile all wrongdoing.
Pedagon and those like him will either help the site transform back into a writing project first and foremost, by having the strength to minimize their own importance when given the opportunity; a writing site without the need for this great engine of a partisan Staff constantly being fed and oiled with the exploited exertion of an increasingly burdened and herded production class; or, the beast that is the SCP Wiki will simply digest this honesty out of Pedagon and leave him a husk, like those who have come before him and failed at the taste of social capital & insatiable privilege.
What greater signal is there that Staff needs to let itself collapse — relax and complete the exhale — and be reborn again in a renewed invoice of only necessary roles? How else will the publish-or-perish mentality be ceased and promotions be based upon quality reasoning? When will a trade-off occur in order to be more powerful on the SCP, as I suggested and as was laughed out of town in my author page prescriptions, for improving this very problematic culture on the site?
Not to minimize the difficulty of being an Admin; Moose, Conwell, and a few others carry the role nobly. However, they are stuck in the rut of an insanity; expecting different results with the same status quo and input, with change mostly talk and little action. What motive could be strong enough for those at the top to truly reshuffle the system if their egos and statures are not shaken?
“Moose does not wish to see admins become powerless, but feels that most users think admins have more power than they have and that most admins use less power than they ought to.”
The issue is not the measure of power in any particular role, as any amount can create the Watchman’s Syndrome, and subsequent misuse. It is that the surface area of those roles is outsized beyond reason. Sadly, this Recap only promotes the forecast that Staff will continue in this direction. Most discussion is around Admins’ abdication of responsibility (Moose aside) and how to best cater to the most superficial of site users. The Staff constantly set in motion new policies that will require more Staff and more responsibilities; more opportunities for errors and abuse and their accompanying scandals. The word “proposal” appears 44 times in this Recap. That’s an average of once per topic. The growth is exponential.
Is Staff not a runaway proposal machine?
Calibold suggests writing a new charter from scratch, as the “convoluted structure” is causing problems. Moose is making reforms a priority.
The Charter from scratch is a step in the right direction, but it is too afraid of what needs to be done. I’d like to see Staff try their hardest to not have a Charter, and then be forced into creating as minimal of it as possible as they go along. That way, only the truly necessary parts would exist; less being more. All the potential for infection’s seeding, corruption, and abuse of power would be given the shortest of leashes while increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the site’s operations, reducing burnout, and denying people who would abuse the system away from the focus of writing from every trying. But, I suppose this is too “right-wing” of a mentality to be considered positive or useful to this political gang.
The Staff will either humble themselves, cede ground, and continue to exist in a healthier site; or they will refuse to bend with the wind and snap. A new tree will next be the tallest.
The goal is Part 4 before the New Year. Stay tuned to this blog, Confic Magazine, and the Confic Wiki for the mentioned stand-alone articles.
