Derpy Whooves
All of this does come with it’s own brand of drama and is can be hard to moderate.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with tagging and filtering. People are still expected to tag properly, and to use their filters, and people whinging or whining about filterable content are still going to be asked to stop.
I literally quoted word for word the first paragraph of the Twitter post.
This is one of our core and primary rules; “MLP:FiM is about sharing, friendship, and understanding. Don’t drag the site down into flamewars and angst – keep it constructive and positive.” Attempts to antagonize others will not be tolerated
Both of those options have a lot of baggage on them, don’t you think?
As a site, we fully support the Black Lives Matter movement. As a site, we ask people to keep offsite drama off of our site.
But we can’t control controversy, all we can do is be responsible when it happens on this site. And so far I don’t think the content that I have been involved in deleting has been in the realm of “perception” - the stuff I’ve helped delete has so far been 100% on the nose “fucking racist slur die” levels of “No, you can’t do that here”, or edits of artist’s work clearly intended to fuck with the artist or cast them in the worse possible light - sometimes followed immediately by posts by the OP deriding the artist for having made such offensive art. So … at least for what I’ve been working on this is not ‘it’s subject to interpretation’.
So, yes - as a site, we fully support the Black Lives Matter movement and we ask people to keep offsite drama off of our site. But, as much as I want to say “why not both?”, I can’t because of all the baggage you assigned to each position. If I say that then I’m agreeing that the point of this was to “reduce drama and controversy” - we can’t control that. We’re just an MLP fan site. All we can control is what we host, and how we respond to things we choose to not host.
And, sorry for disagreeing with you, but it seems that the answers have been as ‘conclusive’ about this as we have been ‘conclusive’ about anything we’ve done. And to help you with the ‘contradictory’, maybe pay attention to who is saying the thing you are attributing to staff - there seems to be a lot of people being confused about whether someone is staff or not, and whether they are speaking for the site or not. When I say something about myself, that’s me. If the site deletes an image because of policy, that’s the site. If I talk about my approach to volunteering here, as I am in this post, then that’s my approach to the work I do as a volunteer. If an admin suggests that I change something I’m doing, and I agree with the suggested change, then I will do it. If not, then I can work on something else.
Remember this is like we’re at a convention together, and if I’m wearing my official con staff shirt, then I’m representing the convention. But if I’m drinking a beer in the con suite and wearing an Utena shirt, then I’m me and representing AWESOME. And if tomorrow we have a team meeting and because of something that happened overnight we no longer can allow people to carry open bottles of beer around the convention floor, as inconsistent as it may sound, you can no longer carry open bottles of beer around the convention floor. Yesterday that was fine, someone broke some shit and now we can’t do that any more.
I have, in fact, deleted dozens of posts calling for violence against GOP members and people who were making fun of hurting the President of the US. Today. Like, just a couple hours ago. And the people doing it have been banned from the site.
Does that match your description of suppression? If it does, then, yes - we suppress that too, although I would instead say we don’t want to host that shit.
I’m not implying anything - I quoted the actual text of the Tweet that the person I was replying to was asking about. If that isn’t “the policy” you’re talking about, what is?
I mean, it sounds like you want to know what the giant sign that got posted in front of the store means. And I think the sign means what the sign means. How we implement the new the sign in front of the store is exactly the same way we implement giant signs in front of the store in the past. We’ve had these kinds of giant signs in front of the store before, and we most likely will have them again in the future.
Sure - we do that all the time. Auditing deletions is happening right now … well, 10 minutes ago. Someone appealed a deletion and we reviewed it. It was related to current events. We’ll probably re-evaluate it moving forward, too. But there’s a point where we just say stuff is “grandfathered in”. That’s why we aren’t applying this new policy to past images - if it was uploaded a month ago, we aren’t going to open that box and start poking at it.
Audits and re-evaluations happen here daily. Sometimes it’s just one “Oh, we deleted this 3 years ago. Why did that happen?” and sometimes it’s a giant project with Excel spreadsheets. Like, we have this annual thing we do that audits long term bans.
But speculating about whether an image deleted yesterday might be restored in 3 months? Nah. My crystal ball doesn’t reach that far. Sure - maybe. It all depends.
Ok, this is speculation. But there’s some hard data points here that we can talk about.
First, we don’t care if it’s well-made. We are not a juried gallery. Someone can get an artist badge here for a stick figure of a pony drawn in crayon. And that’s not to say that ‘we accept bad artists’, we awarded an artist badge to an artist who was hospitalized and that’s all they could do because of their casts - we just don’t judge whether someone is now or is going to be in the future a good artist. If they make a unique copyrightable image that doesn’t break any of our rules, and it is apropos the fandom, then we generally speaking will host it.
So, it doesn’t matter if it’s an absolutely beautiful edit of someone else’s art - if the artist is DNP No Edits then it’s Rule #1. And if someone paints a beautiful, stunning, oh my god this is a high end professional recreation of a racist meme then it’s still a racist meme.
That’s speculative.
However, to make this about something that is not speculative, that is - to use an example of when this has happened in the past, I and no one who I know on staff is starting a project to go back through all of the Brexit images that were deleted to see if any of them should or could be restored. But if someone DID want to do that then they certainly could, and I’m sure some of those images would be restored if they didn’t break Rule #1 or weren’t just shitposts or angry edits.
And some images from that fracas I think were restored when the artist asked if they could be.
Should we go back through all the images deleted during the Brexit? Or all the images from the US 2016 elections? Or all the images from the Brazil election? Or all the images from Twilight Gets Wings?
It wouldn’t hurt, but we’re busy with other stuff right now.
But if the entire point of the post was to take someone else’s art and substitute the artist’s message with “racist slur” - which has happened in the last week - then no, we wouldn’t restore that. Because fuck that.
Yeah. Lots of baggage showing up in these conversations. Lots of people accusing others of having intentions, then asking them to defend those intentions. My apologies if I have unintentionally done that to you, and I forgive you for what certainly appears to be your attempts to do it to me.
Just - right now, we’ve got people accusing other users of being on staff, and accusing staff of thinking what those users said, and instances where individual staff members (myself included) have said our own personal ideas about things, and somehow those statements have been bandied about as “official policy” or proof that almost no one wanted this change.
For most of staff, this is not that much of a change - although what has been happening to the site the last couple of weeks has certainly been a change. The amount of vitriol and examples of people intentionally creating drama or antagonizing others has become a problem.
Any new uploads that we believe promote racism or attempt to downplay the Black Lives Matter movement will be deleted.
That seems pretty straight forward to me.
I am not saying that you are confused - but there obviously is a lot of confusion about this. I don’t know if this is a case of people getting lost in the details, or there is simply so much spin on this being put out by so many different people or tiny groups in the fandom that it’s all becoming impossible to grasp, but for me this is no different than, say, our Rule #5 change a couple years ago, or our new policy about tracing (both of which also had their fair share of drama and turmoil).
The actual scope of the implementation of these things seems to me to be a lot simpler, and less confusing, and certainly less overwhelming than the drama that people create around it.
Overall, I think we’re still under 3 original images in total that have been deleted because of this change (hard to tell because of artist takedowns happening at the same time), and still less than a dozen edits (again - difficult to know because it’s case-by-case and there’s been so many artist takedowns).
What is your impression of this?
Does it feel to you like we’re talking about less than a handful of original images that have been affected by this? Or does it feel like something more?
Either way, I’ve already done two walls of text, so I might not reply for awhile. I’ve got other things that really need to be taken care of here before I spend more time on this again. So, if you reply, and I don’t, that’s not because I don’t care. I just have other stuff I want to do.
Looking For My Doctor
one of the most common counterarguments against the policy
All of this does come with it’s own brand of drama and is can be hard to moderate.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with tagging and filtering. People are still expected to tag properly, and to use their filters, and people whinging or whining about filterable content are still going to be asked to stop.
this was not enshrined in the policy
I literally quoted word for word the first paragraph of the Twitter post.
It’s a very neutral-sounding “do not antagonise others in relation to current events”.
This is one of our core and primary rules; “MLP:FiM is about sharing, friendship, and understanding. Don’t drag the site down into flamewars and angst – keep it constructive and positive.” Attempts to antagonize others will not be tolerated
Answers on what this means have been non-conclusive, and now we’re getting contradictory answers. Is the INTENT to reduce drama and controversy during times of unrest and notable “current events” going on? Or is the INTENT to “support the Black Lives Matter movement and suppress content perceived hateful towards them”? I really want to understand which it is.
Both of those options have a lot of baggage on them, don’t you think?
As a site, we fully support the Black Lives Matter movement. As a site, we ask people to keep offsite drama off of our site.
But we can’t control controversy, all we can do is be responsible when it happens on this site. And so far I don’t think the content that I have been involved in deleting has been in the realm of “perception” - the stuff I’ve helped delete has so far been 100% on the nose “fucking racist slur die” levels of “No, you can’t do that here”, or edits of artist’s work clearly intended to fuck with the artist or cast them in the worse possible light - sometimes followed immediately by posts by the OP deriding the artist for having made such offensive art. So … at least for what I’ve been working on this is not ‘it’s subject to interpretation’.
So, yes - as a site, we fully support the Black Lives Matter movement and we ask people to keep offsite drama off of our site. But, as much as I want to say “why not both?”, I can’t because of all the baggage you assigned to each position. If I say that then I’m agreeing that the point of this was to “reduce drama and controversy” - we can’t control that. We’re just an MLP fan site. All we can control is what we host, and how we respond to things we choose to not host.
And, sorry for disagreeing with you, but it seems that the answers have been as ‘conclusive’ about this as we have been ‘conclusive’ about anything we’ve done. And to help you with the ‘contradictory’, maybe pay attention to who is saying the thing you are attributing to staff - there seems to be a lot of people being confused about whether someone is staff or not, and whether they are speaking for the site or not. When I say something about myself, that’s me. If the site deletes an image because of policy, that’s the site. If I talk about my approach to volunteering here, as I am in this post, then that’s my approach to the work I do as a volunteer. If an admin suggests that I change something I’m doing, and I agree with the suggested change, then I will do it. If not, then I can work on something else.
Remember this is like we’re at a convention together, and if I’m wearing my official con staff shirt, then I’m representing the convention. But if I’m drinking a beer in the con suite and wearing an Utena shirt, then I’m me and representing AWESOME. And if tomorrow we have a team meeting and because of something that happened overnight we no longer can allow people to carry open bottles of beer around the convention floor, as inconsistent as it may sound, you can no longer carry open bottles of beer around the convention floor. Yesterday that was fine, someone broke some shit and now we can’t do that any more.
hey, if there was a case of violence against GOP members and people started making fun of it it would be suppressed as well.
I have, in fact, deleted dozens of posts calling for violence against GOP members and people who were making fun of hurting the President of the US. Today. Like, just a couple hours ago. And the people doing it have been banned from the site.
Does that match your description of suppression? If it does, then, yes - we suppress that too, although I would instead say we don’t want to host that shit.
But now you’re implying that the entire intention of the policy is to support BLM? If that’s not what you’re implying, then I’m not sure what you meant there.
I’m not implying anything - I quoted the actual text of the Tweet that the person I was replying to was asking about. If that isn’t “the policy” you’re talking about, what is?
I mean, it sounds like you want to know what the giant sign that got posted in front of the store means. And I think the sign means what the sign means. How we implement the new the sign in front of the store is exactly the same way we implement giant signs in front of the store in the past. We’ve had these kinds of giant signs in front of the store before, and we most likely will have them again in the future.
if something is banned for “antagonising” in relation to “current events”, once these events are no longer current that image could be re-evaluated
Sure - we do that all the time. Auditing deletions is happening right now … well, 10 minutes ago. Someone appealed a deletion and we reviewed it. It was related to current events. We’ll probably re-evaluate it moving forward, too. But there’s a point where we just say stuff is “grandfathered in”. That’s why we aren’t applying this new policy to past images - if it was uploaded a month ago, we aren’t going to open that box and start poking at it.
Audits and re-evaluations happen here daily. Sometimes it’s just one “Oh, we deleted this 3 years ago. Why did that happen?” and sometimes it’s a giant project with Excel spreadsheets. Like, we have this annual thing we do that audits long term bans.
But speculating about whether an image deleted yesterday might be restored in 3 months? Nah. My crystal ball doesn’t reach that far. Sure - maybe. It all depends.
Let’s take, for instance, well-made art of zebras rioting
Ok, this is speculation. But there’s some hard data points here that we can talk about.
First, we don’t care if it’s well-made. We are not a juried gallery. Someone can get an artist badge here for a stick figure of a pony drawn in crayon. And that’s not to say that ‘we accept bad artists’, we awarded an artist badge to an artist who was hospitalized and that’s all they could do because of their casts - we just don’t judge whether someone is now or is going to be in the future a good artist. If they make a unique copyrightable image that doesn’t break any of our rules, and it is apropos the fandom, then we generally speaking will host it.
So, it doesn’t matter if it’s an absolutely beautiful edit of someone else’s art - if the artist is DNP No Edits then it’s Rule #1. And if someone paints a beautiful, stunning, oh my god this is a high end professional recreation of a racist meme then it’s still a racist meme.
But let’s say in six months or a year, once the riots are long since past and mostly forgotten, and dozens of new outrageous news cycles have passed …
That’s speculative.
However, to make this about something that is not speculative, that is - to use an example of when this has happened in the past, I and no one who I know on staff is starting a project to go back through all of the Brexit images that were deleted to see if any of them should or could be restored. But if someone DID want to do that then they certainly could, and I’m sure some of those images would be restored if they didn’t break Rule #1 or weren’t just shitposts or angry edits.
And some images from that fracas I think were restored when the artist asked if they could be.
Should we go back through all the images deleted during the Brexit? Or all the images from the US 2016 elections? Or all the images from the Brazil election? Or all the images from Twilight Gets Wings?
It wouldn’t hurt, but we’re busy with other stuff right now.
But if the entire point of the post was to take someone else’s art and substitute the artist’s message with “racist slur” - which has happened in the last week - then no, we wouldn’t restore that. Because fuck that.
… surrounded with baggage …
Yeah. Lots of baggage showing up in these conversations. Lots of people accusing others of having intentions, then asking them to defend those intentions. My apologies if I have unintentionally done that to you, and I forgive you for what certainly appears to be your attempts to do it to me.
Just - right now, we’ve got people accusing other users of being on staff, and accusing staff of thinking what those users said, and instances where individual staff members (myself included) have said our own personal ideas about things, and somehow those statements have been bandied about as “official policy” or proof that almost no one wanted this change.
For most of staff, this is not that much of a change - although what has been happening to the site the last couple of weeks has certainly been a change. The amount of vitriol and examples of people intentionally creating drama or antagonizing others has become a problem.
It’s much less honest to think that, but publicly put out a neutral-sounding vague policy instead and confuse everyone as to what you meant and intend.
Any new uploads that we believe promote racism or attempt to downplay the Black Lives Matter movement will be deleted.
That seems pretty straight forward to me.
I am not saying that you are confused - but there obviously is a lot of confusion about this. I don’t know if this is a case of people getting lost in the details, or there is simply so much spin on this being put out by so many different people or tiny groups in the fandom that it’s all becoming impossible to grasp, but for me this is no different than, say, our Rule #5 change a couple years ago, or our new policy about tracing (both of which also had their fair share of drama and turmoil).
The actual scope of the implementation of these things seems to me to be a lot simpler, and less confusing, and certainly less overwhelming than the drama that people create around it.
Overall, I think we’re still under 3 original images in total that have been deleted because of this change (hard to tell because of artist takedowns happening at the same time), and still less than a dozen edits (again - difficult to know because it’s case-by-case and there’s been so many artist takedowns).
What is your impression of this?
Does it feel to you like we’re talking about less than a handful of original images that have been affected by this? Or does it feel like something more?
Either way, I’ve already done two walls of text, so I might not reply for awhile. I’ve got other things that really need to be taken care of here before I spend more time on this again. So, if you reply, and I don’t, that’s not because I don’t care. I just have other stuff I want to do.