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stop-him · 3 years

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People Don't Change, Rules Change.

If you saw my last reblog of, and answer to, the poll by @supersoftly - this is further musings on the theme of my response, comparing old and new incidents. I may go on for a while. There may be a cut.

Anyhow, as I mentioned, I was once a moderator on the site Gaia Online. As such, I got to witness some of the worst behaviors that cropped up from time to time. An example: once a user named Cigarette announced that she had terminal brain cancer. This prompted a massive outpouring of support and well-wishing, including the "1000 cranes for Cigarette" community event based around the bit about folding up multiple little paper cranes for loved ones - and it all turned out to be a hoax. Some people noticed that nobody could get any real-life information about the hospital where she was supposedly being treated, and somewhere along the line Cigarette confessed to making everything up.

Most everyone thought that was pretty awful when the news hit. I don't even remember what, if anything, the admins of the site did to Cigarette herself - technically it wasn't against the TOS to lie about one's personal health. But I was involved in a related incident, where another user posted a Flash animation depicting his character, enraged by the news of Cigarette's deception, pulling a gun and (to the theme of the Mentos commercials) shooting her to death. It was actually more funny than my description makes it, and it would be understandable that anyone investing any emotion into Cigarette's purported illness would be legitimately angry and frustrated. But, after some discussion, we Mods decided to remove it from the site, because regardless of the circumstances, it was essentially a personal attack on another user, which was definitely against the TOS.

That was the standard we operated under at the time. You could say, "I think that is a stupid viewpoint to have, that idea is dumb," but you could not say, "you are stupid and dumb for having that opinion". You could not just call anyone a Nazi without direct evidence that they were literally part of a self-identified Nazi group, because it was well understood that calling someone a Nazi was a personal insult, and intended as such. "I feel that this person is like a Nazi" wasn't an excuse.

One's opinion was not a justification.

The teeth of Gaia Online's enforcement was their avatar system - for those unaware, GO's big attraction was that a user had a little anime-styled avatar that appeared by their posts. You gained currency by doing things in and around the forums, and you used that currency to buy clothes and other items for your avatar. Part of the outcry over Cigarette's stunt was that sympathetic users had donated high-value items for her avatar under false pretenses.

As Mods, we had the ability to not only ban users for infractions, but also monitor and undo trades and transfers of items between users. So if a user feared that a post they were going to make was going to break the TOS, they might want to stash their items with friends or in alternate accounts - only the Mods could see these actions and know they were attempts to avoid the consequences of their behavior, so often the items got confiscated anyway. What happened was that many users created a cache of "junk" accounts - no items, not much history, built up around the mass of free email accounts one could get. They would use these accounts to break the TOS, because they risked little if those empty accounts got banned. Some Mods had access to IP address info, so that wasn't a guarantee of safety, but it was a common practice among the more contentious users.

I explain all that for the sake of context in the following tale. After a few years of being a Mod, Gaia Online began to grow in popularity, and its userbase expanded, and after a while the Admins decided to outsource much of their Mod duties just to handle the load. I retired from being a Mod at that point, so no longer had access to any of those investigatory tools. I stayed on the site for a little while longer, but it's one thing to be in your 30s when the bulk of the site is 20-somethings, it's another to be pushing 40 when the bulk of the site is in their mid-teens.

But before I eventually left, i spent a bit of time hanging around in the forum's creator-oriented areas, notably in art, writing and comics-centered sub-forums.

There was a clique in those days of what I call "art snots", people who not only had ideas on what was the proper way to go around making art but who would aggressively advocate for their way as being the best way and anyone who didn't toe their line was not only wrong, but a fool. Many of them were products of formal art schooling, and many of them had open contempt for the trend of art styles emulating "that shiny animu shit".

One thing that could be done in the art community was to "give critique". Ostensibly, if you posted your art on the forum, you were making it available to be commented on, and were expected to be able to withstand a certain amount of unfavorable criticism. This (naturally) led to conflicts between very sensitive beginning artists who did not really want any criticism on one hand versus many of the aforementioned "art snots" who took the opportunity for "critique" as license to utterly verbally savage every tiny aspect of the poster's art, especially if it had any hint of anime influence. And so Mods were often called in to keep the peace, and when it was apparent that outright abuse would be disciplined, the "art snots" would, like many others, gather a collection of throwaway accounts to take the bans, using them as one-shot insult delivery systems. (Though, a few became masters at playing the TOS, making posts that were just within the boundaries of what was acceptable, and never needed alternate accounts...)

Near the end of my stay at GO, there was one user who was "art-snot-adjacent". They were a webcomic creator, whose webcomic at the time was garnering some popularity (as those things go) and critical acclaim. Obviously talented and well-spoken, it was apparent that they were sympathetic to the stances of the "art snots", but without nearly the same amount of vitriol. If they spoke on those matters, they spoke in civil, measured tones. Many of the "art snots" circled in their orbit, possibly due to friendships outside Gaia, or possibly due to simple sycophancy.

I took up reading this person's webcomic - it was pretty good - and while I didn't always agree with the opinions they stated on Gaia, I appreciated the way they kept their tone nominally respectful.

The front page of this webcomic had a few widgets installed, one of which was a feed of the author's Twitter account, back when Twitter was a lot newer and less ubiquitous. So there was a little sub-window on the page that displayed, say, the last five Tweets the author made.

One day I went to the webcomic to check if there were updates, and saw that one of the recent tweets mentioned Gaia, so I looked more closely. It has been ages at this point, but the general thrust of the message was:

"Looks like I'm going to have to burn another Gaia account so I can set this other user straight about how stupid they are."

And now immediately I knew that this webcomic creator that I had somewhat respected up until now was not any different than so many others, they were simply better at putting up a polished public face. They were just as eager to hide their true feelings in order to keep all the little virtual clothes on their Gaia account, until they could let fly with an alternate sockpuppet, and be abusive to their heart's content.

[As an aside: I think this was one of the only times I've ever been unable to separate the artist from their art. For a little while I still kept up with the webcomic, but one day, I found myself about to click the bookmark for the page and I just didn't feel like reading the story anymore. Just - "meh", and I didn't click to it, and never went back. It wasn't like seeing that Tweet enraged me, I wasn't scandalized, I just... didn't respect the creator anymore. I'm not sure why that killed my interest in the story, when I have few problems engaging with art by artists who I know have done far, far worse in their lives. But there it is.]

These Gaia anecdotes establish something I think is true: people were just as nasty then as they are now. But a site like Gaia - at least at the time - enforced a code of behavior that said, "as long as you're on our site, you'll behave with a minimum of respect towards other users."

And now, let's come to the present day. As I write this, YouTube has been sending me recommendations for videos about a bit of drama. Of course, YouTube has no shortage of drama. But in this case, it reminds me of Gaia in some ways, because it's an artist-related drama.

At one point, YouTube proposed I watch an artist draw a picture as they told a story about the worst commission they ever drew, and I did, and so of course YouTube then bombarded me with a thousand similar videos. Some I watched, if they had interesting subjects. Many I didn't. And one type I stayed away from was the callout videos, where while drawing some pic, the artists would detail the various sins of some other YouTuber and make the case for them being an irredeemably awful person.

But, I've been floating around the edges of this drama, because for a while I was watching the videos from Girl Artist 1 (actual name/account redacted - probably if you're actually an active part of that community you can guess who it is, and if you don't have any idea, well, count yourself fortunate). Only now I no longer get videos by her recommended to me, now I'm getting videos about her.

First it came to light that she was sockpuppeting on some site, pretending to not be herself in order to stir up drama/make herself look good/whatever. Then it seems she was involved in a harassment campaign, and even more serious charges involving downright illegal shenanigans are being leveled.

I'll make it clear that I don't know all the details, or whether any of this is true or not. I watched some of Girl Artist 1's videos when the subject interested me, but ignored many when it was clear she was calling out other artists, YouTubers and the like. I noted the name of Girl Artist 2 come up a few times, and even in the titles of other videos by other people. Apparently Girl Artist 2 had her own moment of being condemned. But now she's back, with her own video to speak out against Girl Artist 1, along with a host of others all dogpiling on the current object of ire.

Is Girl Artist 2 forgiven now? Will Girl Artist 1 undergo her own journey of redemption? Will that be possible? Who knows, and outside of the community, who cares?

YouTube doesn't. And finally I come to my point: This is the difference between an older site like Gaia Online and newer platforms like YouTube and Twitter - the incentives.

Gaia had its own economy based around its avatar system, and its own motivation to promote an even keel and keep drama to a minimum. The latter was achieved by using the former as both carrot and stick. The reward for good behavior was getting to keep your virtual items, punishment was their loss.

Twitter's reward is internet fame, reinforcement of things you say with likes and retweets and new followers. Drama is a path to this - sometimes a much easier path than actually creating a work of art to attract attention. YouTube is much the same, only with the added incentive of real money for select users. YouTube does not mind controversy in and of itself, because controversy drives views, and views pay off for advertisers, who pay YouTube.

Therefore, there is often little incentive to not be an asshole. Every judgemental soul can freely pontificate about the sins of others, and condemn them in the most explicit terms. In a practical sense, the accusations don't even have to be true. My example of calling people Nazis as an insult? Go ahead! It gets clicks. YouTube and Twitter like the clicks. Not only do you not have to show anyone any respect, it's almost expected to be actively disrespectful to anyone who annoys you in the slightest.

That's my thesis: the overall nastiness of the human race is, I think, much the same as it's always been. A lot of people have always been judgemental pricks. It's just that the rules have shifted just so, and now the nastiness is being rewarded instead of discouraged.

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lunamysteria-blog · 7 years

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photographer peter lik

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