Drew Linky
1th of November
Today, Wadapan and Gitaxian publicly revealed a website they’ve been working on called Shill Seekers. Wadapan compared it to this document, describing it thusly: “... I think the SPAT/Seekers distinction can be pretty effectively summed up as ‘SPAT is about us, Shill Seekers is about the shit we talk about’.” Indeed, the website is filled with an assortment of articles the two have written, concerning an assortment of topics that we talk about frequently in mspa-lit.
This is a pretty interesting treatment of what we talk about, and though the articles don’t necessarily cover what we say about the various topics, they’re still pretty informative and well-written. For the purpose of this document, I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty interesting catalog of the things we talk about--if anyone reading this is unfamiliar and would like at least a cursory exposure to those ideas, Shill Seekers is an effective resource you should look at.
Wadapan and Gitaxian’s website seems to be another in a gradually increasingly list of independent websites run by members of the community, including my own and Skyplayer’s homestuck.info. This is all personal speculation, but after this and conversations I’ve had with other people, it seems that there’s increasing dissatisfaction with the array of “large websites” that we have access to as platforms for discussion. Whatever platform one may use, whether it’s Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. it seems that there’s ever more criticism of them for one reason or another.
I developed my website because nothing that’s already well-established was able to accomplish what I wanted to do. This may also track with the idea I stated in a previous entry about preventing data loss; I know Skyplayer is just as conscious of archiving data as I am, considering that’s a large part of what homestuck.info is explicitly geared towards. More information is inarguably better than less in terms of preserving history, and having more people who are actively engaged in this process--generating and archiving information--is always something I will support, assuming it’s being done responsibly (various forces, which I am being purposefully vague about here, have reminded us that keeping an eye towards privacy is still very important).
Data archival is only one decidedly specific aspect of this though. I’m departing past the realm of speculation and descending into complete wistfulness here, but perhaps this could be the beginning of an era where web nerds begin to forsake larger, centralized platforms in favor of more specific places. It would be a miracle to witness a return to forum style discussion boards and individual websites that are more specifically geared towards personal projects. I think that there’s a gradually more pervasive attitude that large websites suck, both for technical and ethical reasons. The Homestuck fandom in particular could easily fuel its own propagation and management, if it chose to do so.
Nothing more for today.
2nd of November
There were some administrative changes to the server today. For a very long time we’ve resisted adding a global official rules channel based on the principle that leaving rules unspoken makes it easier for mods to be flexible in their rulings on matters. That having been said, we’ve also run into the problem of people using this as an excuse for behaving like utter reprobates--after some well-founded criticism over the current system, Makin was convinced to make at least a few global rules.
He tasked me with writing up a short list, and after some discussion he appended these guidelines to the #welcome channel: Rule 0: Mods have the final say.
Rule 1: Be respectful of others, present or otherwise.
Rule 2: Do not disseminate backer-exclusive material for Homestuck^2. (Discussing it is fine.)
Each channel also has its own set of rules that you are expected to follow. These can be checked in each channel description. If you're confused or have any questions, feel free to contact the related mods for clarification.
The channel has duly been renamed to #welcome-rules, and the hope is that this will give us a better foundation to get rid of shitters without necessarily becoming more authoritarian in how we do things.
Truthfully, these rules are simply codifying how we’ve always handled things, so there shouldn’t be that much of a change in how the server works except we can bypass snarky rulebreakers more effectively. The only actually new thing is the rule concerning dissemination of Homestuck 2 backer material; this is paywalled and, while we disapprove of keeping certain kinds of content only available to backers, we also want to support the team in charge of the project by discouraging piracy of such material.
Otherwise, Makin also announced that he was accepting mod applications from people who wanted to keep an eye on the Homestuck category of channels (because Photino is currently doing it by themselves and they’re usually pretty busy), and more importantly, altgen and althomestuck. There was a recent incident where a couple users said obvious slurs, and we realized that we need more people to moderate these channels because the volume of messages is simply too large for the current team.
To be honest, there’s a larger ongoing debate about whether or not we should just outright delete those channels. The rhetoric is that they don’t add much value to the place and end up just becoming repositories for shitty memes that are hard to moderate. However, when the mod applications were opened up, I suggested the possibility of deleting them, and there seems to be plenty of people who would hate to lose them (Makin suggested that we might delete them anyway just because, and force altgenners to go out among the rest of the community. This might be a joke, but appropriately enough for him, no one is quite sure).
There have been about ten people who submitted applications, but after significant discussion in the mod chat, we decided to go with the following people: Prime has been made a shitposting janitor, Raar is promoted from shitposting janitor to pseudomod, and Jman005 and an old but relatively quiet member of the chat named Dioxazine have been turned into Homestuck channel category pseudomods. Misha was also given the hs-pseudo role because eastern-media is usually dead as fuck, experiencing less than a dozen messages per day on average, so he can handle a little extra responsibility.
It’s exciting to have more people on the team, and I look forward to seeing how they respond to being in a position of authority. All of them seem fairly reliable based on exposure to them over the years; I’m optimistic that once they’ve settled in, they’ll do just fine. Truthfully it could be said that we’ve been long overdue for an expansion of the modteam--the ratio of mods to regular users has been dreadfully askew for a very long time.
Nothing more for today.
18th of November
A strange confluence of events occurred just recently. Makin added a new shill to the list today, mentioned some time ago by tmtmtl30 and officially recommended by Gitaxian called “God-Shaped Hole.” This work is highly controversial even without reading it, because it was written by a rightwing neoreactionary called Zero HP Lovecraft. Suitably, it spawned a lot of discussion--heated and civil at various times--about the story’s underlying themes and messages.
It is difficult bordering on dangerous to try and explain such ideas here--they are too complex and pointed for me to want to try in the first place. As a very brief treatment, God-Shaped Hole touches on ideas of sexuality in modern society and equality (as befitting of the author’s political views). For those unfamiliar, neoreactionaries hold that the democratic system of governance and equality are undesirable, and they actively seek a return to more stratified forms of society such as monarchies or even fascist dictatorships. The logic is that people feel or do better when they have a place or station that is designated to them, instead of having the freedom to choose. Obviously, this idea doesn’t hold up as soon as you factor in ideas of systemic oppression, modern or otherwise.
That all being said, what makes today strange is not simply the addition of a new shill, but the fact that the author of the work discovered Makin’s shill list and began talking about it on Twitter. We found out about this and it led to some very intense self-reflection on our part. We’ve had the opportunity to speak with the authors of a few of these works in mspa-lit, which has always been fun. Given the political nature of Zero HP Lovecraft, however, we wondered if it would even be possible for a civil discussion to occur if they found their way here.
In a show of peace and openness, Makin invited the author to come onto the HSD and talk as long as he remains courteous. The answer to this invitation was purportedly ambiguous; it is thought that Zero HP Lovecraft may join, but it would be on the downlow. I’m sure that any outright confrontation would be fairly intense. Further, I’m vaguely worried how all of this might be interpreted by people who are already critical of the HSD.
Truly though, we’ve done our due diligence in pointing out what we consider to be the moral failings of God-Shaped Hole over the course of the evening. Everyone in mspa-lit who has read it has made it clear that they don’t agree with the work’s underlying ideas--if people who don’t like us want to try and use our discussion of it to paint us as bad people, then all I can say is that it’s a plainly unreasonable claim. I hope I’m finally getting to the point where I don’t care about more unfounded criticism against us.
Nothing more for today.
21st of November
Today I was alerted to a handful of people on the HSD issuing threats of violence--some joking, some serious--towards other people, especially content creators for Homestuck 2 and Pesterquest. One in particular, who does not deserve to be named, specifically created a list they called the “Hussiephant Hitlist,” obviously a play on the word “sycophant”. This sort of idea comes from the idea that Hussie gave direct control over Homestuck to people who sucked up to him, which as far as I’m aware is inaccurate and thus insulting.
Far more important than accusations of obsequiousness are the threats of violence. This goes against all of our rules, spoken or unspoken, and all of the people who participated in it were banned immediately. Unfortunately, even after this was taken care of, the matter inflated rapidly into a bigger controversy and attracted a lot of criticism from various people. It’s understandable to be concerned about such things, but the way that people latch onto this problem is rather aggravating to me.
I had to explain this to a few people, but I’ll record the bare substance of the issue here. In totality there were about four people who engaged in these threats of violence. In the short term that’s rather alarming, but it’s only concerning in the short term. When considered in the larger scope of things--including how many people there are on the server and how rare of an occurrence this really is across the server’s history--it’s far less alarming.
I ended up talking with people trying to claim that the entire server and the subreddit fomented this sort of culture or even celebrated it. The former is simply untrue, and the latter is a baldfaced lie. If this happened more commonly then I could maybe see where the accusation comes from, but in this instance it’s just ridiculous.
It feels like people try to leap on these edge cases to try and make broad assumptions about how the whole server works, which actually really frustrates me. Typically what happens is that the offenders are newer users or people who never say anything. It’s impossible to detect these things before they happen. As soon as they do happen they’re taken care of, but the fact that it happened at all is enough evidence in some peoples’ eyes to condemn us. This is completely unreasonable; we aren’t psychic or omniscient, it’s not possible to predict these things before they happen. I guess being sour about this won’t help though, as I mentioned in the last entry, I need to stop caring so much about unfounded criticism.
To pivot topics, Wadapan suggested I write about things that have been happening in #general. I haven’t considered this of much note given that it’s happened before, but perhaps it’s at least worth a mention: the activity of #general has been increasing substantially. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is often associated with a now-expected inverse: the decrease in conversational quality.
There have been more and more complaints from the pseudos taking care of #general lately, with regard to topics being broached or people misbehaving for fun. WoC finally snapped recently and started “going ape shit,” unleashing himself on the populace and bringing it back under control. I’m not sure how effective that’s been in particular, but all of the affiliated pseudos seem pleased with it. We’re probably going to have to be more forceful about people going to #altgen at this rate.
Nothing more for today.
26th of November
Following up on the previous entry with regard to #general becoming more shitposty, we had a lengthy discussion in modchat about how exactly to deal with the problem. I condensed our options into two choices: we can put #altgen back at the top of the channel list so people more easily see an alternative place to shitpost; or, we can get rid of altgen entirely and ban shitposting for good, serverwide.
The first option is clearly more preferable for anyone who even vaguely understands how to relax. Banning shitposting outright is completely unacceptable given how much of our overall culture is rooted in it. I have to admit that I’m being slightly disingenuous--there’s a third option that simply relies on us doing more work to keep things under control. That idea fucking sucks though; the other two I suggested are far better because it leads to less for us to deal with in the longterm.
Some hours after these deliberations, Makin came back and settled the matter by putting #altgen back at the top of the channel list next to #general. I’m pleased by this, although I’m not quite sure what will happen. It should drive up activity as has happened in the past, but I’m afraid that it’s become so inactive that it might actually be effectively dead. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re able to shock some life back into it one of these days.
Nothing more for today.
27th of November
I’ve talked occasionally about this seeming mutual enmity between What Pumpkin and various pieces of the fandom. Some fans continuously attempt to draw conclusions from incomplete or ambiguous information. As if this wasn’t enough, some of them also use this to fuel their suspicions or misgivings about how WP works or what it’s doing.
WP dislikes this for obvious reasons and, combined with an admittedly flagrant disrespect seen on the part of some fans, they use it as reasoning not to clarify things as much as they otherwise could. However, this lack of transparency and explanation just leads to increased misgivings from more and more fans, and so the hostility between both groups intensifies as time goes by.
I’ve seen this enough over the years that I have no reason to expect it’ll change, unfortunately. There seems to be no end in sight and, while I understand why each group behaves the way they do, neither party’s actions seem truly justifiable to me. At this point all I can wonder about it is whether it’s even possible to break the cycle of animosity and mistrust.
I guess another thing to think about is who carries the larger responsibility in all of this. I guess I’m of the opinion that, due to being a much smaller, cohesive group of people and given the inherent nature of their position, the onus is on WP employees to ignore the irascible members of the Homestuck fandom in favor of keeping better fans informed and happy.
There will always be a subset of people who aren’t pleased with what you do, no matter what. However, it’s not appropriate to point to those people as an example of why well-behaved people should be punished alongside them. It’s not fun to deal with, but mistreating large swathes of the audience due to the actions of a few is petty and shows a distinct lack of appreciation for the good fans. Like I said though, I’m not sure if I’ll ever see a true resolution to this conflict. I’m not sure if other fandoms go through this process, and whether they go through it once or if it’s a constant problem.
Nothing more for today.
Makin
(No commentary for this month)