Posting threads on GAF has always been a little intimidating at first.
I felt the same way back in 1999 when I first crossed paths with that incarnation of the forum. I lurked the whole summer, and my first post after registering a few months later in September was (I hope) mature and respectful and substantial...for my 14 years in the world at the time, at least, but I'm sure it tried too hard and said too little (maybe it's in Goodcow's archive; who knows). I respected the community I was joining, is the point, and didn't want to come off as an idiot or an asshole. Bans were definitely strict and swift back then, in a particular context, but if you kept it civil with your fellow member (100% so), you could debate damn near anything with anyone for as long as stubbornness remained in your bones. And if you were a regular, you probably did just that. We hadn't implemented Off-Topic yet, so this was just console wars and the like, but you still had to develop a thick skin as you argued about sales and software and hardware and speculation about everything, without subsection echo chamber "safe spaces" like most forums split their sections into. No, everyone was thrown into one pit on the deep end and had to just figure out how to behave with all types of folks from around the world, from all backgrounds, age ranges, and respective ties to video games. Just a small, tight knit group, but all the same we had hardcore gamers, press, and industry intermingling concurrently in almost every thread; eclectic characters like Deadmeat and Fafalada and the Gaming-Age staff writers (who were the forum admins originally), the latter of whom in many cases moved onward and upward in the games press or industry after leaving G-A. Gaming-Age was just a little fan site covering the typical news and reviews, with a side forum of some note, but those years were all crucial to the trajectories for everyone involved. Gaming-Age co-founder Sam Kennedy went on to start 1up, Patrick Klepek is over at Vice News/Waypoint these days instead of sneaking his way into E3 to guerrilla cover it as a minor, and lots of other folks on that original G-A staff ended up with notable roles to play across the Video Games space.
Me, too, I suppose, though through completely different avenues: the little forum attached to that thing. That's a long story, but the gist is dot-com bubble burst and hurt ad revenue, Gaming-Age and its forum were apparently sharing a server and the forum was using more resources than the "main" site was, but generating little revenue for the trouble. My understanding is that Jim Cordeira felt that his responsibility was to the news/reviews site primarily since he'd been entrusted with it by the other co-founders, and forums are awful server resource hogs and are notoriously difficult to monetize with ads compared to just about any type of site you'll find on the interwebs (and that was prior to adblock and NeoGAF's current 80%+ adblock rate to contend with, mind). The forum was comparatively small and made no money and apparently was causing trouble sharing server space with the other stuff, so it was a pragmatic call at the time. Jim found a home for the community on the soon to be defunct IGN Snowboards platform and set up a smooth, if short-lived, community migration there. Despite being an obnoxious 14-15 year old kid I had built a rapport with the folks like Hitokage (rip) who were doing the actual forum-running behind the scenes (the G-A staff were all granted admin status but were not regularly involved in any forum concerns aside from one or two), and I stepped up consistently to face the challenges of keeping afloat a small nomadic group of worthwhile bastards...somewhere, somehow, since standalone forums were just plain doomed in most cases, and we had effectively become one at that point.
This was all purely volunteer work for me and Hitokage and the rest of the folks who helped with that migration and the ones to follow from 2000-2004. The arrangements were all made from the lowest possible negotiating position on our side. We needed somewhere to hog a bunch of server resources and not produce much ad revenue in return, and had no money. Infinite leverage! Nonetheless, the community and the discussions and the identity of "GAF" mattered to me and a lot of other folks, so we figured it out somehow. A few more migrations after Snowboards died and with increasingly dire day to day circumstances on the forum, the database shit itself, the company that provided the server in exchange for running ads never responded and apparently quietly folded shortly thereafter, and I stubbornly charged ahead to figure out some way to save "GAF" despite the entire database -- posts, users, etc. -- realdeathing on the spot, without us ever having been provided SSH access to the server to, say, I dunno, allow us to back things up every now and again. It was a shitshow and the bad ads the provider filled the site with made it borderline unusable when it was miraculous enough to even load a page thanks to the underpowered box, and it also crashed completely any time we hit a load spike from some breaking news in the games industry. So...perpetual state of shitting itself, with little hope of improvement, directly into death. Fun!
Anyway, despite standalone forums being inherently ultra doomed to start with, despite our server provider loading the site with the worst possible pop-ups and malware ads to maximize profit that we obviously didn't see a dime of (which had understandably pissed everyone in the userbase off and stagnated growth terribly due to poor overall usability), and despite the entire forum database corrupting and requiring us to start from scratch when the Doom came to 2004's GameSquad GAF...despite so many short-lived and increasingly bleak migrations under our belts one after the other to even reach that new tier of suck, $0 in my bank account on a good day while I worked retail 30-50 hours a week retail with an hour commute each way AND did full time CC on top, paying my own way from a starting point of poverty and all, so no magic wands in the inventory to cast Not Completely Fucked and Hopeless...
I shot down anyone in IRC who suggested giving up and moving on. Which was just about everyone, haha. We were all weary, no one had the cash to front to get our own dedicated server running and buy the necessary software licenses and all that, and we lacked a complete set of skills to do so even if we could. The clock was ticking, since that was still perhaps the Golden Age of message boards despite the issues with paying the bills and even landing a reputable ad provider whatsoever, so you only had a week or two before your community would move on and find a new home at one of a thousand other spots and not likely look back too hard.
I've told this story before, but I say this all now because, when I look back at why I was so passionate and stubborn and determined about this relatively inconsequential video game message board continuing to exist during that critical week in 2004, I can see why I gave a damn, mobilized everything in my power to see it stick around, and eventually dropped regular life for doing forum-running as a career when that crossroads presented a couple years farther down. GAF was one of many, many forums, and running a forum isn't anything special in and of itself, but GAF was distinct in tone, cultivated with intent by leadership being there to care about it and steer it, with all the rules and policies and bans and all that operating as an extension of what you try to do from the top down for the sake of the end result:
The vibe, which is what will either bring folks flooding to the registration gates to the point where you have to implement a several month waiting list and all sorts of other hoops to jump through to keep everything manageable, or just leave you with shuttered doors eventually, as most have already.
Either way, I've always thought of it as something vaguely like running a bar or social club. You're at the whims of your patrons in many ways, but there's always something that can be done to nudge and shape it at any given time, working toward that ideal resultant vibe in your mind. Your disposition matters greatly, but you can't always play diplomat and get a positive outcome. Sometimes a hard declaration and bans against the inevitable outrage pushback are necessary in the grand scheme, and sometimes that's done deliberately, especially in emergency interventions. See: "den of cunts" thread back in the day to pull back from tone-deaf censorship that had emerged in the moderation while I was backpacking around; or jumping into various powderkeg threads post-election in the past year in off-topic to say something...err, moderating, since no one else was willing, and then take the dozen account suicides back at me in response and gain another group of internet people with too much time on their hands and a new least favorite person in the world to seethe and plot over, whether I was apparently betraying The Left or The Right or Whatever the Fuck at any given time.
Receiving the bulk of the inevitable and standard hatred and obsession that's generated by a very large message board every day, personally, when you run a place like this...isn't fun, obviously, but it's part of the responsibility I took on and that's okay and I get compensated for it. It takes its toll over time, no matter what, but I've tried to have fun with things in my own way, like lightly trolling people here and there, or being responsible for nearly all the (hopefully) humorous and unattributed thread title changes over the years. Recent events, though: mainstream media scandal, mass exodus and mass account suicide (often carried out as maliciously as possible in attempts to harm the site on the way out), awful hate speech directed at me personally, what felt like the whole world using its internet outrage mechanism to tear me to shreds in the span of an overwhelming 24-48 hours, and the majority of my community apparently neither wanting me here nor thinking I provided anything of value at the helm...
Phew.
Inevitably, you reevaluate the "why" from way back in 2004 and apply it to the present. Why keep at it when the thing you're "supposed" to do is step down regardless of the facts instead of carrying forward, and you made NeoGAF the handsomest and most successful forum of its kind from just a handful of regulars as the seed community and a couple grand in grassroots fundraising, sprinkled with ongoing hard work and a steady enough hand....and belief that I was doing something worthwhile, I suppose, echoing back to my first thoughts about '99 GAF and onward.
Well...is there still something worthwhile to do? Is there still meaning to be doing this? A whole lot of people seem to like the sparkly animated gif with the "EVILORE RETIRE BITCH" in all caps these days, at least last I looked on Twitter, which is as little as possible.
Should I retire? Trolling gif mainly used to avoid getting your Twitter account suspended for telling me to kill myself or w/e while conveying the same general idea, sure, but retirement would be pleasant and it's certainly an uphill battle after being falsely #metooed and scandalized on an international mainstream level and experiencing our first major community splintering ever. The instant, overwhelming hatred directed at me from within my community and subsequent attempts to tear the site apart by its own members wounded me in ways you may not be able to fully appreciate if you haven't been running NeoGAF for half your life. That was different from all the gossip or misanthropy elsewhere, which I'm accustomed to. So, I'm wounded and all that jazz.
But no. The present isn't it.
*Last year*, before October's Facebook Fuckery, is when I wanted to retire, frankly. After the 2016 US election, amid the overwhelming, perpetual negativity and sensationalism about politics here, I was also treated as the Affluent White Cis Straight Male, aka The Enemy, by default to a *lot* of folks here all of a sudden, no matter the substance of my words or the actions I took to back them up. That's not the GAF I signed up for or the vibe I tried to cultivate. I wrote the rules here, but I wrote them with a specific intent to keep open dialogue possible but respectful no matter how fervent the disagreement, not to build this bizarre and impenetrable echo chamber of militant hostility and endless oppression olympics about privilege. We. Don't. Truly. Know. Each. Other.
As per gaming roots here and so forth, I wasn't too pleased with how the Xbox Live generation caustically treated...well, anything and everything they could identify different about someone over a mic, really. And then I went to E3, and then I saw video game studios...oh god. So I had lots of motivation about wanting to do right by our members here....men, women, cis, trans, whatever ethnicity or melanin count or whatever, shouldn't preclude being able to participate fairly like anyone else in the big thrashing ball pit of thoughts and ideas here. The wonderful thing about the internet is how you can set up shop, set whatever rules up, have the authority to enforce the rules, and....see what happens. Again, much operating a real world social space, you aim for a vibe, try to cultivate it, and try to do right by the people who come populate it and act as decent human beings whenever possible, which is all too easily a misplaced toolkit right when we all hop on the internet. The rules here are easy. What comes next may be hard for the folks who haven't dipped their toes into the water yet, but only briefly.
After Brexit and the 2016 US Election and some good ol' fashioned mass forum sabotage by an ex-admin especially, the Off-Topic community here was poisoned beyond recovery, perhaps. Maybe if I had done more at the time, but it's hard to say. Regardless, I didn't feel welcome at the helm of this ship anymore, maybe something akin to Bret Weinstein being chased around Evergreen campus by angry mobs waiting for one false move or an indication of "microaggressions" to do whatever intended deed to oust him. The rudder broke, most of the mod team was super weary and many had openly intended to resign "once things calmed down" from the post-election radicalization and emerging open hostility here. Then "once things calmed down" exploded into the biggest scandal possible instead, alas.
Good ol' #metoo. Made up story, actionable evidence to discredit it, legal case organized in that first month to formally clear the air...yeah, completely pointless to have even devoted energy or resources to defending myself. You're not allowed to be innocent in a #metoo. That powderkeg was going to explode one way or another, either by a blindsiding Facebook post or something manufactured by interested parties or what have you, and I was so deep in depression and PTSD over the course of 2017 that I don't know how much more of the misery and hostility parade I could've survived logging into GAF each morning anyway. I was not hanging on too well. That scandal was a horrible thing to go through on a personal level, at among my all-time weakest on top of that, and I'm still pretty banged up emotionally by it all and everything else in the lead-up to it that put me in such a bleak headspace.
But that's personally. Personally, forum operators are fucked regardless, right? How many counterparts in this industry do I have left, still keeping it indie and running things directly for that matter? On a personal level, this crap wears on you. That's why you'll see me troll or act snarky sometimes or toss diplomacy. Some of it's calculated for effect (just about guaranteed I'm baiting in service of the wider scope of intent if I'm being needlessly confrontational etc., like when I pushed for a moderating influence on #metoo right before I got #metooed, lol) , but some of it is just...staying sane, too, as I close in on two decades behind the helm here.
Professionally, though, it's a different matter entirely. While I did have to go so far as to hire contractors on duty 24/7 for a month to keep hundreds and hundreds of malicious spam/porn/etc. attacks sent our way from our exceedingly honorable and virtuous, noble, infallibly righteous ex-members over at Reset, so those...individuals...wouldn't have the power to completely destroy NeoGAF on the spot in November with that bombardment (in between encouraging me to kill myself, threatening me, blah blah blah, of course, for good measure; fine lot), and I did need some time to center myself and decide who to trust and assemble a heroic team and a fresh gameplan....
...as far as I'm concerned, NeoGAF Off-Topic has been given a desperately needed enema. A ResetEnema, if you will. I care little about that site one way or another, aside from how it ended up serving that purpose quite well.
What drew me to that incarnation of GAF in 1999 and prompted me to join enthusiastically, then become a volunteer admin for the community, then step up to run this joint when no one else wanted it or thought it could be salvaged? Mmm. I saw GAF as a Babylon 5 of sorts, where devs and press and gamers argued about things on relatively neutral ground, and appeals to authority didn't tend to accomplish much. You were as good as the content of your message and the inevitable defense of it, to withstand from this bright and savvy and weird group of very different people who'd keep you on your toes and impart some of their knowledge, too, if you kept your ego in check and listened on occasion on your end. Yeah, and I liked video games, too, and I've taken the concept of not splitting everything down into platform-specific sub-sections very seriously despite the thousandfold growth, since that big ball pit we all have to dive into to talk about video games is only a safe space for sound arguments and supporting evidence, not a safe space for however Nintendo or Sony makes you feel in your privates. As we continue to rebuild this place, consider why NeoGAF was special to begin with as a gaming forum and why I fought so damned hard to save it back in 2004,. Let's reflect on what transpired here on Off-Topic across 2017 by contrast.
You must exit your comfort zone and talk to people of different worldviews and politics and preferences, say what you have to say, and get along with each other at the end of the day, because in this place you are surrounded by people who are different. This is a very international forum, and your life experiences won't match the next user's. Your culture won't match the next user's. Your current struggles won't match the next user's. Take a deep breath, stop assuming everything someone's typing is "disingenuous" and consider engaging in earnest regardless, stay respectful because I FUCKING INSIST, for starters, and also because how you react reflects on your character, not just their outbound verbiage reflecting on them in whatever way you think it does.
It used to be that getting along in one giant shared ball pit was the seemingly insurmountable battle against entropy slash awesome unique selling point for NeoGAF's Gaming side, but where Gaming barely needs any proactive moderation these days to maintain its intended vibe, Off-Topic experienced catastrophic failure to an unprecedented degree in this community's history.
I'm back at the helm properly, motivated and with purpose, and our load has been lightened enough to get that rudder functioning as it should. My sysadmin squad and mod team are hand-picked and here for the sake of NeoGAF's future, likewise. That Gaming Side vibe we managed somehow, despite all the stratification across hardware "teams" by default and this idea of "winning" that always accompanies it..........let all that go here on Off-Topic, too, not inhumanly so, but as much as you're able in order to have a conversation in earnest with someone you may have prejudged as on the "opposing team." I have been doing so with my recent posts, attempting to better reconcile my online interactions with how I act toward people in real life.........................and nothing scary has happened, just conversation and occasional insight.
Act like you would meeting a mix of new and old faces at the bar, some visiting from out of town, and a few drinks later you find out what everyone's politics roughly look like. I'm assuming you don't duel them to the death or try to ruin their life by way of viral social media outrage campaign. Since you're not doing that. Either way, I don't care who you are, I don't care what your chromosomes show or what dangly bits you have or who you do or don't share beds with, or your melanin count or your level of education or where you were born, just about. It's all good. Overwhelmingly more important is simply the content you send outbound to our servers and the consideration that went into it, along with your behavior toward the other members of the community as you take part, especially when in disagreement or confrontation. There is no echo chamber police anymore, as you can see. There is just moderation, and moderation -- like moderate -- is not a dirty word.
I want you to be comfortable being "you" here if you so desire in terms of identity (unless your identity revolves around gassing Ze Jews or toppling Ze Imperialist Regime or whatever; be chill), without unprompted hatred or harassment in response as per the rules we've had here since day 1, but I also fundamentally don't give much of a shit about what persona you're presenting on my video game message board since there are fake people abound in real life, never mind on this crazy-ass wild west internet. Aside from the uncommon instances in which we do know each other (or, in many cases, where one party may think they "know" the other party...cough), we're all strangers from around the world, connected by some common interests or the threads of fate (aka fiber optics), and tasked with...well, what are we tasked with, here on off-topic? It bears asking that question, too.
I think...we're tasked with shooting the shit, learning from each other along the way when possible, having fun, sharing experiences and navigating the bullshit that constitutes modern life, while striving for positive outcomes all around. I, for one, am done with misery and hate. Had my fill for one lifetime.
Share this fresh heading with me and my team, and Off-Topic's intended vibe won't be too far beyond the horizon. We're already en route.
Thanks.
-Tyler
I felt the same way back in 1999 when I first crossed paths with that incarnation of the forum. I lurked the whole summer, and my first post after registering a few months later in September was (I hope) mature and respectful and substantial...for my 14 years in the world at the time, at least, but I'm sure it tried too hard and said too little (maybe it's in Goodcow's archive; who knows). I respected the community I was joining, is the point, and didn't want to come off as an idiot or an asshole. Bans were definitely strict and swift back then, in a particular context, but if you kept it civil with your fellow member (100% so), you could debate damn near anything with anyone for as long as stubbornness remained in your bones. And if you were a regular, you probably did just that. We hadn't implemented Off-Topic yet, so this was just console wars and the like, but you still had to develop a thick skin as you argued about sales and software and hardware and speculation about everything, without subsection echo chamber "safe spaces" like most forums split their sections into. No, everyone was thrown into one pit on the deep end and had to just figure out how to behave with all types of folks from around the world, from all backgrounds, age ranges, and respective ties to video games. Just a small, tight knit group, but all the same we had hardcore gamers, press, and industry intermingling concurrently in almost every thread; eclectic characters like Deadmeat and Fafalada and the Gaming-Age staff writers (who were the forum admins originally), the latter of whom in many cases moved onward and upward in the games press or industry after leaving G-A. Gaming-Age was just a little fan site covering the typical news and reviews, with a side forum of some note, but those years were all crucial to the trajectories for everyone involved. Gaming-Age co-founder Sam Kennedy went on to start 1up, Patrick Klepek is over at Vice News/Waypoint these days instead of sneaking his way into E3 to guerrilla cover it as a minor, and lots of other folks on that original G-A staff ended up with notable roles to play across the Video Games space.
Me, too, I suppose, though through completely different avenues: the little forum attached to that thing. That's a long story, but the gist is dot-com bubble burst and hurt ad revenue, Gaming-Age and its forum were apparently sharing a server and the forum was using more resources than the "main" site was, but generating little revenue for the trouble. My understanding is that Jim Cordeira felt that his responsibility was to the news/reviews site primarily since he'd been entrusted with it by the other co-founders, and forums are awful server resource hogs and are notoriously difficult to monetize with ads compared to just about any type of site you'll find on the interwebs (and that was prior to adblock and NeoGAF's current 80%+ adblock rate to contend with, mind). The forum was comparatively small and made no money and apparently was causing trouble sharing server space with the other stuff, so it was a pragmatic call at the time. Jim found a home for the community on the soon to be defunct IGN Snowboards platform and set up a smooth, if short-lived, community migration there. Despite being an obnoxious 14-15 year old kid I had built a rapport with the folks like Hitokage (rip) who were doing the actual forum-running behind the scenes (the G-A staff were all granted admin status but were not regularly involved in any forum concerns aside from one or two), and I stepped up consistently to face the challenges of keeping afloat a small nomadic group of worthwhile bastards...somewhere, somehow, since standalone forums were just plain doomed in most cases, and we had effectively become one at that point.
This was all purely volunteer work for me and Hitokage and the rest of the folks who helped with that migration and the ones to follow from 2000-2004. The arrangements were all made from the lowest possible negotiating position on our side. We needed somewhere to hog a bunch of server resources and not produce much ad revenue in return, and had no money. Infinite leverage! Nonetheless, the community and the discussions and the identity of "GAF" mattered to me and a lot of other folks, so we figured it out somehow. A few more migrations after Snowboards died and with increasingly dire day to day circumstances on the forum, the database shit itself, the company that provided the server in exchange for running ads never responded and apparently quietly folded shortly thereafter, and I stubbornly charged ahead to figure out some way to save "GAF" despite the entire database -- posts, users, etc. -- realdeathing on the spot, without us ever having been provided SSH access to the server to, say, I dunno, allow us to back things up every now and again. It was a shitshow and the bad ads the provider filled the site with made it borderline unusable when it was miraculous enough to even load a page thanks to the underpowered box, and it also crashed completely any time we hit a load spike from some breaking news in the games industry. So...perpetual state of shitting itself, with little hope of improvement, directly into death. Fun!
Anyway, despite standalone forums being inherently ultra doomed to start with, despite our server provider loading the site with the worst possible pop-ups and malware ads to maximize profit that we obviously didn't see a dime of (which had understandably pissed everyone in the userbase off and stagnated growth terribly due to poor overall usability), and despite the entire forum database corrupting and requiring us to start from scratch when the Doom came to 2004's GameSquad GAF...despite so many short-lived and increasingly bleak migrations under our belts one after the other to even reach that new tier of suck, $0 in my bank account on a good day while I worked retail 30-50 hours a week retail with an hour commute each way AND did full time CC on top, paying my own way from a starting point of poverty and all, so no magic wands in the inventory to cast Not Completely Fucked and Hopeless...
I shot down anyone in IRC who suggested giving up and moving on. Which was just about everyone, haha. We were all weary, no one had the cash to front to get our own dedicated server running and buy the necessary software licenses and all that, and we lacked a complete set of skills to do so even if we could. The clock was ticking, since that was still perhaps the Golden Age of message boards despite the issues with paying the bills and even landing a reputable ad provider whatsoever, so you only had a week or two before your community would move on and find a new home at one of a thousand other spots and not likely look back too hard.
I've told this story before, but I say this all now because, when I look back at why I was so passionate and stubborn and determined about this relatively inconsequential video game message board continuing to exist during that critical week in 2004, I can see why I gave a damn, mobilized everything in my power to see it stick around, and eventually dropped regular life for doing forum-running as a career when that crossroads presented a couple years farther down. GAF was one of many, many forums, and running a forum isn't anything special in and of itself, but GAF was distinct in tone, cultivated with intent by leadership being there to care about it and steer it, with all the rules and policies and bans and all that operating as an extension of what you try to do from the top down for the sake of the end result:
The vibe, which is what will either bring folks flooding to the registration gates to the point where you have to implement a several month waiting list and all sorts of other hoops to jump through to keep everything manageable, or just leave you with shuttered doors eventually, as most have already.
Either way, I've always thought of it as something vaguely like running a bar or social club. You're at the whims of your patrons in many ways, but there's always something that can be done to nudge and shape it at any given time, working toward that ideal resultant vibe in your mind. Your disposition matters greatly, but you can't always play diplomat and get a positive outcome. Sometimes a hard declaration and bans against the inevitable outrage pushback are necessary in the grand scheme, and sometimes that's done deliberately, especially in emergency interventions. See: "den of cunts" thread back in the day to pull back from tone-deaf censorship that had emerged in the moderation while I was backpacking around; or jumping into various powderkeg threads post-election in the past year in off-topic to say something...err, moderating, since no one else was willing, and then take the dozen account suicides back at me in response and gain another group of internet people with too much time on their hands and a new least favorite person in the world to seethe and plot over, whether I was apparently betraying The Left or The Right or Whatever the Fuck at any given time.
Receiving the bulk of the inevitable and standard hatred and obsession that's generated by a very large message board every day, personally, when you run a place like this...isn't fun, obviously, but it's part of the responsibility I took on and that's okay and I get compensated for it. It takes its toll over time, no matter what, but I've tried to have fun with things in my own way, like lightly trolling people here and there, or being responsible for nearly all the (hopefully) humorous and unattributed thread title changes over the years. Recent events, though: mainstream media scandal, mass exodus and mass account suicide (often carried out as maliciously as possible in attempts to harm the site on the way out), awful hate speech directed at me personally, what felt like the whole world using its internet outrage mechanism to tear me to shreds in the span of an overwhelming 24-48 hours, and the majority of my community apparently neither wanting me here nor thinking I provided anything of value at the helm...
Phew.
Inevitably, you reevaluate the "why" from way back in 2004 and apply it to the present. Why keep at it when the thing you're "supposed" to do is step down regardless of the facts instead of carrying forward, and you made NeoGAF the handsomest and most successful forum of its kind from just a handful of regulars as the seed community and a couple grand in grassroots fundraising, sprinkled with ongoing hard work and a steady enough hand....and belief that I was doing something worthwhile, I suppose, echoing back to my first thoughts about '99 GAF and onward.
Well...is there still something worthwhile to do? Is there still meaning to be doing this? A whole lot of people seem to like the sparkly animated gif with the "EVILORE RETIRE BITCH" in all caps these days, at least last I looked on Twitter, which is as little as possible.
Should I retire? Trolling gif mainly used to avoid getting your Twitter account suspended for telling me to kill myself or w/e while conveying the same general idea, sure, but retirement would be pleasant and it's certainly an uphill battle after being falsely #metooed and scandalized on an international mainstream level and experiencing our first major community splintering ever. The instant, overwhelming hatred directed at me from within my community and subsequent attempts to tear the site apart by its own members wounded me in ways you may not be able to fully appreciate if you haven't been running NeoGAF for half your life. That was different from all the gossip or misanthropy elsewhere, which I'm accustomed to. So, I'm wounded and all that jazz.
But no. The present isn't it.
*Last year*, before October's Facebook Fuckery, is when I wanted to retire, frankly. After the 2016 US election, amid the overwhelming, perpetual negativity and sensationalism about politics here, I was also treated as the Affluent White Cis Straight Male, aka The Enemy, by default to a *lot* of folks here all of a sudden, no matter the substance of my words or the actions I took to back them up. That's not the GAF I signed up for or the vibe I tried to cultivate. I wrote the rules here, but I wrote them with a specific intent to keep open dialogue possible but respectful no matter how fervent the disagreement, not to build this bizarre and impenetrable echo chamber of militant hostility and endless oppression olympics about privilege. We. Don't. Truly. Know. Each. Other.
As per gaming roots here and so forth, I wasn't too pleased with how the Xbox Live generation caustically treated...well, anything and everything they could identify different about someone over a mic, really. And then I went to E3, and then I saw video game studios...oh god. So I had lots of motivation about wanting to do right by our members here....men, women, cis, trans, whatever ethnicity or melanin count or whatever, shouldn't preclude being able to participate fairly like anyone else in the big thrashing ball pit of thoughts and ideas here. The wonderful thing about the internet is how you can set up shop, set whatever rules up, have the authority to enforce the rules, and....see what happens. Again, much operating a real world social space, you aim for a vibe, try to cultivate it, and try to do right by the people who come populate it and act as decent human beings whenever possible, which is all too easily a misplaced toolkit right when we all hop on the internet. The rules here are easy. What comes next may be hard for the folks who haven't dipped their toes into the water yet, but only briefly.
After Brexit and the 2016 US Election and some good ol' fashioned mass forum sabotage by an ex-admin especially, the Off-Topic community here was poisoned beyond recovery, perhaps. Maybe if I had done more at the time, but it's hard to say. Regardless, I didn't feel welcome at the helm of this ship anymore, maybe something akin to Bret Weinstein being chased around Evergreen campus by angry mobs waiting for one false move or an indication of "microaggressions" to do whatever intended deed to oust him. The rudder broke, most of the mod team was super weary and many had openly intended to resign "once things calmed down" from the post-election radicalization and emerging open hostility here. Then "once things calmed down" exploded into the biggest scandal possible instead, alas.
Good ol' #metoo. Made up story, actionable evidence to discredit it, legal case organized in that first month to formally clear the air...yeah, completely pointless to have even devoted energy or resources to defending myself. You're not allowed to be innocent in a #metoo. That powderkeg was going to explode one way or another, either by a blindsiding Facebook post or something manufactured by interested parties or what have you, and I was so deep in depression and PTSD over the course of 2017 that I don't know how much more of the misery and hostility parade I could've survived logging into GAF each morning anyway. I was not hanging on too well. That scandal was a horrible thing to go through on a personal level, at among my all-time weakest on top of that, and I'm still pretty banged up emotionally by it all and everything else in the lead-up to it that put me in such a bleak headspace.
But that's personally. Personally, forum operators are fucked regardless, right? How many counterparts in this industry do I have left, still keeping it indie and running things directly for that matter? On a personal level, this crap wears on you. That's why you'll see me troll or act snarky sometimes or toss diplomacy. Some of it's calculated for effect (just about guaranteed I'm baiting in service of the wider scope of intent if I'm being needlessly confrontational etc., like when I pushed for a moderating influence on #metoo right before I got #metooed, lol) , but some of it is just...staying sane, too, as I close in on two decades behind the helm here.
Professionally, though, it's a different matter entirely. While I did have to go so far as to hire contractors on duty 24/7 for a month to keep hundreds and hundreds of malicious spam/porn/etc. attacks sent our way from our exceedingly honorable and virtuous, noble, infallibly righteous ex-members over at Reset, so those...individuals...wouldn't have the power to completely destroy NeoGAF on the spot in November with that bombardment (in between encouraging me to kill myself, threatening me, blah blah blah, of course, for good measure; fine lot), and I did need some time to center myself and decide who to trust and assemble a heroic team and a fresh gameplan....
...as far as I'm concerned, NeoGAF Off-Topic has been given a desperately needed enema. A ResetEnema, if you will. I care little about that site one way or another, aside from how it ended up serving that purpose quite well.
What drew me to that incarnation of GAF in 1999 and prompted me to join enthusiastically, then become a volunteer admin for the community, then step up to run this joint when no one else wanted it or thought it could be salvaged? Mmm. I saw GAF as a Babylon 5 of sorts, where devs and press and gamers argued about things on relatively neutral ground, and appeals to authority didn't tend to accomplish much. You were as good as the content of your message and the inevitable defense of it, to withstand from this bright and savvy and weird group of very different people who'd keep you on your toes and impart some of their knowledge, too, if you kept your ego in check and listened on occasion on your end. Yeah, and I liked video games, too, and I've taken the concept of not splitting everything down into platform-specific sub-sections very seriously despite the thousandfold growth, since that big ball pit we all have to dive into to talk about video games is only a safe space for sound arguments and supporting evidence, not a safe space for however Nintendo or Sony makes you feel in your privates. As we continue to rebuild this place, consider why NeoGAF was special to begin with as a gaming forum and why I fought so damned hard to save it back in 2004,. Let's reflect on what transpired here on Off-Topic across 2017 by contrast.
You must exit your comfort zone and talk to people of different worldviews and politics and preferences, say what you have to say, and get along with each other at the end of the day, because in this place you are surrounded by people who are different. This is a very international forum, and your life experiences won't match the next user's. Your culture won't match the next user's. Your current struggles won't match the next user's. Take a deep breath, stop assuming everything someone's typing is "disingenuous" and consider engaging in earnest regardless, stay respectful because I FUCKING INSIST, for starters, and also because how you react reflects on your character, not just their outbound verbiage reflecting on them in whatever way you think it does.
It used to be that getting along in one giant shared ball pit was the seemingly insurmountable battle against entropy slash awesome unique selling point for NeoGAF's Gaming side, but where Gaming barely needs any proactive moderation these days to maintain its intended vibe, Off-Topic experienced catastrophic failure to an unprecedented degree in this community's history.
I'm back at the helm properly, motivated and with purpose, and our load has been lightened enough to get that rudder functioning as it should. My sysadmin squad and mod team are hand-picked and here for the sake of NeoGAF's future, likewise. That Gaming Side vibe we managed somehow, despite all the stratification across hardware "teams" by default and this idea of "winning" that always accompanies it..........let all that go here on Off-Topic, too, not inhumanly so, but as much as you're able in order to have a conversation in earnest with someone you may have prejudged as on the "opposing team." I have been doing so with my recent posts, attempting to better reconcile my online interactions with how I act toward people in real life.........................and nothing scary has happened, just conversation and occasional insight.
Act like you would meeting a mix of new and old faces at the bar, some visiting from out of town, and a few drinks later you find out what everyone's politics roughly look like. I'm assuming you don't duel them to the death or try to ruin their life by way of viral social media outrage campaign. Since you're not doing that. Either way, I don't care who you are, I don't care what your chromosomes show or what dangly bits you have or who you do or don't share beds with, or your melanin count or your level of education or where you were born, just about. It's all good. Overwhelmingly more important is simply the content you send outbound to our servers and the consideration that went into it, along with your behavior toward the other members of the community as you take part, especially when in disagreement or confrontation. There is no echo chamber police anymore, as you can see. There is just moderation, and moderation -- like moderate -- is not a dirty word.
I want you to be comfortable being "you" here if you so desire in terms of identity (unless your identity revolves around gassing Ze Jews or toppling Ze Imperialist Regime or whatever; be chill), without unprompted hatred or harassment in response as per the rules we've had here since day 1, but I also fundamentally don't give much of a shit about what persona you're presenting on my video game message board since there are fake people abound in real life, never mind on this crazy-ass wild west internet. Aside from the uncommon instances in which we do know each other (or, in many cases, where one party may think they "know" the other party...cough), we're all strangers from around the world, connected by some common interests or the threads of fate (aka fiber optics), and tasked with...well, what are we tasked with, here on off-topic? It bears asking that question, too.
I think...we're tasked with shooting the shit, learning from each other along the way when possible, having fun, sharing experiences and navigating the bullshit that constitutes modern life, while striving for positive outcomes all around. I, for one, am done with misery and hate. Had my fill for one lifetime.
Share this fresh heading with me and my team, and Off-Topic's intended vibe won't be too far beyond the horizon. We're already en route.
Thanks.
-Tyler
