SCP Hemorrhage Staff
NEWS/OPINION — The Staff updates page on O5 Command is a hot and bumpin’ place to be lately.
Staff has always been, as a more prominent member of the team and site over the past decade has reportedly put it, “a burnout machine”, and temporary leaves for mental health reasons, or total abdications of roles after burnout are not rare.
Here’s more of said staff member’s take on it:
05:01:49: <thedeadlymoose> in some ways, I’m comparing myself to you and realizing you were the smart one :P
05:01:57: <Roget> How so?
05:02:14: <thedeadlymoose> “I’m gonna go ahead and not campaign for admin because I prefer my life to not get fucked up”
05:02:16: <thedeadlymoose> lol
05:02:34: <thedeadlymoose> not that I campaigned for admin, but I did work towards it during a certain period of time
05:02:44: <thedeadlymoose> (after being asked to)
05:03:03: <thedeadlymoose> it, uh, did help fuck my life up. lol
05:03:23: <Roget> I figure why ask for this kind of job
05:04:18: <Roget> It just seems like it grinds the fun out of the wiki.
05:04:23: <thedeadlymoose> it kinda does
05:04:43: <thedeadlymoose> which is why I feel somewhat sad that we are definitely going to need to promote some more people lol
[…]
05:16:21: <thedeadlymoose> I /can/ say that we are nominating at least some person or people for admin that we are afraid might burn out
05:16:25: <thedeadlymoose> sadly this is, um, common :(
05:16:36: <thedeadlymoose> we literally had to drop it from the disqualifications list
05:16:47: <thedeadlymoose> if we were gonna get more than one or two candidates
05:18:39: <thedeadlymoose> I don’t regret becoming an admin overall but I do regret some things about it, and I will not be long for my current overpowered position
05:18:46: <thedeadlymoose> fun fact, power doesn’t always corrupt
05:18:51: <thedeadlymoose> sometimes it just ruins you
05:18:53: <thedeadlymoose> lmao
05:19:00: <thedeadlymoose> waxx felt similarly, and I understand why now XD
05:19:23: <thedeadlymoose> (and troy does too, troy does not want to stay being ‘mr dictator’)
[…]
05:24:49: <thedeadlymoose> admins sure as hell can’t, only troy and I are active/qualified enough to do so, and I’m inactive and Troy doesn’t even read the wiki regularly anymore due to exhaustion
05:26:01: <thedeadlymoose> I do admit that it’s a real shame about kaktus :/
05:26:11: <thedeadlymoose> he was a really great admin candidate, but this community just… got to him
05:26:40: <thedeadlymoose> hell I’d have tried to promote him myself up until a month ago
05:26:57: <thedeadlymoose> being honest, I knew he’d burn out by a month ago, but
05:27:01: <thedeadlymoose> idk, kinda desperate >_>;;
05:27:33: <thedeadlymoose> he actually mentioned that to me when he quit, that he thought he’d be a great admin a month ago, then stopped thinking that because of all the crap that kept happening
05:27:48: <thedeadlymoose> I hope that trend doesn’t continue with other great people :/
[…]
05:36:54: <Roget> being on io made it easy to be a bit of an outsider
05:37:50: <thedeadlymoose> true! what’s funny is that other teams are being pushed to be more like that, a bit
05:38:14: <thedeadlymoose> “team chat room is most important” “junior staff no longer in 67 to promote team specializing”
05:38:36: <thedeadlymoose> that actually is partially to cut down some of the drama, tho not totally
The Staff updates page on the O5 Command shows that this happens pretty regularly. One might point out that the tremendous amount of work that the Staff assume for themselves and at the perceived need of no one has something to do with this. It turns out that the pathological need to assume one’s self as essential in an ever-centralizing fashion (“Watchman’s Syndrome”) has its adverse outcomes.
However, recently this has been kicked up a notch. Or eleven. The fault lines at SCP — largely created by Staff’s ineptitude, clumsiness, and lumbering lack of self-awareness — are deepening and people (I decided against the less flattering analogy here) are jumping ship. Since the start of August, we have seen:
- Three staff leave for mental health reasons (1, 2, 3)
- A moderator and team captain move to reserve status and then resign from all positions completely 8 days later. (This is the newest in a habitual absence from staff duties, as seen by multiple vacations and sabbaticals for mental health reasons over the last months.)
- One staffer return to duty after taking 2 weeks to decide if they want to remain on staff
- The Admin whose tenure has been the most troubled yet go on yet another sabbatical immediately after new Admins were added to the team
- A recently-promoted staffer leaving all positions and citing an inability to be a part of staff anymore due to discomfort with recent policy changes
- A staffer resigning hastily and saying that they’d like to give more notice, but that their hand has been forced
- A staffer put duties on the back burner due to IRL things (legit things it seems, like college)
- The staffer who was put on trial (headed by someone recently promoted to Admin) for calling the users’ concerns and pushes for reform “bitching” has moved to reserve.
- A staffer withdraw for a time due to “not currently in the condition necessary to actively participate in staff duties”.
- The clarification of a long-absent staff member as to their intentions to not return in any capacity.
- A clarification of another long-absent staff member as to their upcoming unavailability, due to a new job.
While some of these leaves are understandable, e.g. college, or clarifications, most of them point to cryptic turbulence and discontent beneath the surface; a few of the resignations do so explicitly. There very clearly seems to be a line that has been drawn in the sand, and a more coordinated effort unfolding from the privacy and opacity that Staff remain in.
Three of these resignations, and the two more dramatically worded explanations, have come in on the same day, August 21st:
What could be going on?
There is at present an active voting thread on O5 that will confirm the non-staff and junior staff participants in the staff chat recap team. (If you need a refresher of the rat’s nest of convolution and frenzied policy printing going on since and as a result of the catastrophic Town Halls, first I don’t blame you and second, see this conclusion post.) Given that, at the time of writing, this has 4 hours left, it is positioned very suspiciously to be the reason. The writing seems to be firmly on the wall.
This is not surprising, as we saw the amount of disagreement and discontent between the splitting staff over the inclusion of non-staff (and junior staff, but primarily non-staff) participants in the act of recapping what staff are talking about behind their private and closed doors; something many of them clearly have taken as a luxury and rule-free haven in which to be unaccountable.
Furthermore, we can see nearly every one of these newly dissatisfied staffers express their discontent for the developments leading up to and including this:
It is important to keep in mind that the origin point of all this is the new revelation of the users that Staff exempt themselves from site rules within the privacy of their own, exalted chatrooms. This has been going on for the entire duration of the site and Staff. At one point, this was not hypocritical, because the locker-room chatter of Staff was what everyone did. However, over time, Staff began implementing more rules and restrictions on what could be said and what couldn’t. They, conveniently, failed to see the need to apply this to themselves. So, over the years, there has been a separation of the two realms, until today, where the allowances within staff chat are hypocritical enough to piss off an entire userbase.
From the initial O5 thread, suggesting a new policy to remedy the problem:
“Recently, there have been concerns with how staff have been acting in the staffchat (both on Discord and in IRC, though the former more so) with the leaking of various comments by staff members belittling/being flippant of non-present users in private. Concerns about staff chat are not new, however, and this is merely a single incident in a much larger chain, which suggests it is reoccuring. [sic]” — Yossipossi
[source]
And the question as to why Staff does not have a public-facing channel of communication, as exists in other communities and even in the containment fiction one, and their pitiful attempts at justifying such a thing to the benefit of actual transparency have been thoroughly covered in these blog posts as well. A summary:
“The singular real disadvantage Discord has in this regard is that you can’t really blacklist VPNs, which makes ban evasion easier. It’s not impossible on IRC, but it is easier on Discord. Of course, there is also the secondary (primary?) disadvantage for SCP staff, that you can’t see the IPs of users on Discord.”
— Furret
Therefore, all of this potentially stems from the fact that staff would rather keep their control over their users, and from their refusal to let that go.
This makes the case with Kufat exceptionally hypocritical. Readers will recognize him as someone who we gave special attention to in an earlier blog post for explicitly designing code to rip users’ IP addresses without their consent. And yet, he is seen here feigning morality for un-permissioned data and trying to respond to the criticisms we pointed out, in one fell argument against this measure of returned surveillance:
The double standards have become so common, they are no longer surprising. In any case, and at some point, you have to admit the fairly obvious and observable. It’s as one observer put it:
“Turns out minor accountability is too much for them to handle” — Almarduk
© Lack of Lepers, 2021
