They silenced their opposition
6 Likes
was likely deleted due to irrelevance to the forums
4 Likes
Some minor updates:
- I listened to most of the “Alt-Right Playbook” videos so far. In particular I found “You Go High, We Go Low” interesting because in the past “democratic process will solve it” has been my thought on things like the server list.
- I added he/him pronouns to all of my account profiles.
- Molt and I didn’t really talk about the post yet because it was the weekend, but I expect we will talk about it today/this week.
11 Likes
I appreciate you structuring this argument with points, as it makes it a lot easier to provide counter-arguments, it is unfortunate that you have experienced bigotry on your own end, however I believe your conclusion is flawed
Counterpoint 1: These are still displays of unacceptable behavior that must be punished, regardless of weather or not it is a “Genuine attack on your character” or not, no one at all should be treated like this, no one should feel unwelcome in a community because of who they are. You must not allow bigots to have a platform whatsoever
Counterpoint 2: Whilst you are correct that it is in fact impossible to completely stomp out this behavior, there are measures that can be taken to reduce it, at this point literally any measure would surpass the whole nothing that the team is doing right now, the fact that unturned is a small community would in fact make it easier to moderate, establish community guidelines and terms of service that server owners must follow, SDG doesn’t need to be going after individual players, if a server has a toxic player base breathe down on their neck to get their act together, or risk a blacklist, This is a Free game with a cartoony style, it is a children magnet, there simply MUST be measures in place to moderate the horrendous behavior in the game, exposing young people to this bigotry normalizes it to them, and facilitates them growing into a bigot themselves
Counterpoint 3: Bad mindset in general, I am not sure how aware you are of how soul crushing it can be to be a part of a thing that you have known and loved for ages, only for it to be insidiously taken over by people who would have you dead on the basis of how you identify or the color of your skin, if you host and cultivate a community, it is your duty to make this community a safe space for everyone in it. E.G SDG has developed the game and made it multiplayer, therefore they have 2 real options.
1: They can provide a safe space to the members of the community he cultivates, extending its life due to its friendly nature
2: They can choose to not attempt any sort of game-moderation whatsoever, this will cause people to gradually leave the game until it gets distilled down to that awful, concentrated toxic player base
You are correct, there is no miracle solution to this issue, but it is foolish to state that “Nothing will change” as there is a myriad of cases where real moderation has led to real improvements, An example to this would in fact be Twitter itself (I will keep this briefed so I don’t get off-topic’ed)
Twitter always sucked, but it was bearable as a member of the LGBT community, after its acquisition by Elon, all attempts to moderate transphobia, homophobia, and other cases of bigotry have almost completely stopped, turning the platform near unusable for those minorities, I’m sure we don’t want the same happening to the Unturned community.
TL:DR This behavior is still incredibly harmful, this game has a large young player base and exposing them to all this bigotry normalizes it in their eyes, creating a new bigot in the process, whilst it’s you are correct that it’s impossible to fully fix this issue, that is irrelevant as there are ways to make improvements to the community, improving it for everyone in the process.
These are changes the team should strive for if they wish to keep a long-standing healthy playerbase.
7 Likes
in my experience, Lots of Imagry and Vile words are Everywhere within the community, Like the Anti-progressive and conflict related context with the Z tanks most of You have seen. I wouldn’t be surprised if more anti-Left stuff will Eventually appear again and try to Evade the rules. then most people will just look for a “REACTION”.
5 Likes
Following up on this, see the statement made by Smartly Dressed Games here: Statement on Hate and Bigotry.
4 Likes
posting here because it proves the point of the orignal post, not meant to be a “bump” of any kind.
“if anyone said anything that seems like its transphobic, you would ban them” this is seen as an issue.
5 Likes
To clarify since Gen worded it poorly, but:
The moderation tools include things such as: verbal warnings, actual warnings, mutes, softbans/kicks, and actual bans.
Internally, we’ve recently been talking about the challenges that can come with trying to identify potential dog-whistling (and other forms of subtle, hateful content). Staff aren’t being supportive of such content – we recently updated rule #2 to explicitly mention it, and users have been moderated for it – but staff are concerned with incorrectly banning people.
1 Like
Why did you leave out the comment from Postman?
Also, if you really had an issue with what I said to you, why are you posting about it here rather than talk to me in the server where it happened?
1 Like
glad that a statement is finally made, but i also recommend posting this in announcements of the discord.
speaking of the discord, i personally advocate for new moderators to help with this issue. im not saying remove the old moderators however.
the main thing that makes good moderation is diversity - this isnt some weird twitter point, when a moderation team has people from different backgrounds, especially from LGBTQIA+. from some of the reports from today, some moderators actually didn’t recognise some phrases or slurs. whoever these new moderators could be, would be able to educate the older moderators (and also deal with issues themselves) as they would be able to recognise and pickup hate against specific groups because of their own experiences.
2 Likes
Personally, I don’t think being biased against hateful conduct is a bad thing, but hey, that’s just my opinion.
3 Likes
because i disagree
being biased against hatred is a good thing personally
4 Likes
I personally believe that, to better identify dogwhistling, staff be added that are able to actually identify such things (lgbtq people see it every day and are thus much better at spotting it it). The current unturned official staff seem incapable of identifying it, and when they do, they barely take any appropriate responses besides outright banning the worst of offenders. A moderation staff focused on combatting bigotry needs to apply mutes, kicks and bans to ALL of these offenders, not just banning the ones who directly are revealed to be bigots by their words alone. NONE of the moderators on the unturned official discord seem capable of even REMOTELY understanding dogwhistles, and seem incapable of understanding even the most basic of context clues in regards to these matters. Hell, there was an edit of flodo’s trans flag post with a Soviet flag with the words (in Russian) “For Stalin!” posted and Genestic didn’t see any possible political overtones with support of Stalin. To actually ID these dogwhistles, it seems like it would be important to have somebody “biased against bigotry”, as Genestic put it, to actually be able to understand what these posts are saying (they don’t outright state their bigotry).
6 Likes
gen, im gonna put this simply, i was gonna say this earlier but 15min slowmode
put simply (and also like what romelete said) we are lgbtq people, we are part of minority groups. for the most part, the staff team is not. the staff team cannot identify bigotry on a level we can.
im “biased against bigotry” because i want to LIVE, and dont support people who support arguments that directly contradict the simple idea that we EXIST. especially as you saw the thread under flodo’s art as a “clusterfuck” of people arguing over “pointless things” when these “pointless” things were the mere existance of LGBTQ people.
we cant just make a poll that says “are you a bigot” then ban those who put yes, we have to ween them out, as you did not understand.
5 Likes
“I don’t like when people assault me or my friends, but hey, I don’t wanna be biased against assault”
8 Likes
As I said on Discord, I appreciate your intentions. Banning bigots is a good thing, and it is in the server rules. I’d like to mention that the staff team has been internally discussing dog-whistling, and I admit I am new to the term as of now. We have already begun moderating members for it.
I posted the message that I did because I am concerned with incorrectly banning people when enforcing this policy. However, I do not have a final say on who becomes a moderator - that is a team decision. If you wish to apply, you are free to do so. If you felt that I was telling you not to do so, I apologize.
2 Likes
In addition it’s an insult that all Postman got for his disgusting behaviour is a 20 minute mute is an insult and proves the point that the community is rotten to the core and that the staff team is incapable of doing their job correctly even more.
Also this screenshot is just the tip of the iceberg.
7 Likes
Yeah cause postman is the pinnacle of good takes
6 Likes
I genuinely believe that the Moderation team needs more queer people on it, So much fly’s under the radar if you don’t have the proper experience to identity forms of hate. Random example but, A cis person should not be chosen over a trans person when it comes to the job of identifying what is and isn’t transphobia. The amount of stuff that gets to slide on by because of the lack of willingness to put a foot down on the issue is really upsetting.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, this is one of the points I attempted to educate on in my original post. Nowadays not all the bigotry is gonna be easy to catch in-your-face language. This is something a Moderator needs to understand to do their job or it would be best for them to leave the job to someone else.
I am genuinely hoping that I am missing something from the Postman side of things cause from what I’ve seen far more than a mute is warranted. It doesn’t inspire much confidence in me on the current handling due to temp bans being the previous go-to on handling clear problem people.
“all bias is bad” is the exact kind of neutral stance we are attempting to convey the harm of. To quote myself in the original post:
Being bias’d against bigotry is literally what you should be by default, there is no world where you should look at a statement of clear hatred and think “Let’s hear em out!” I understand applying this to situations where a misunderstanding may be the cause of the problem but 9 out of 10 cases its been intentional.
I am honestly fairly disappointed cause from what I’ve seen in this thread and the discord screenshots Genestic is wholly unable to wrap their head around how this works. “Do you not see the irony in ‘inviting’ people to send transphobic messages if that’s what you’re against in the first place” shows a complete lack of, dare I say, empathy? It sounds to me that Gen is fine with the bigots being around if they just keep their mouth shut. Which doesn’t fix the issue at all cause there are still bigots in the room! I don’t wish to assume the worst so clarification on this would be nice.
I appreciate the internal discussions being held but this is not a problem that is just gonna fix itself with the methods/philosophy the team has previously used. Cause as we’ve seen the past couple years it doesn’t work.
6 Likes
Only gonna reply to the first part of this, because I myself am queer. The only problem with your suggestion of having a queer person decide what’s punishable or not instead of a cis person is that makes the staff have to wait for said person to give advice on the subject, and their thoughts, and in that time the subject could get much worse and we usually dont like having to wait on others words to decide how we moderate.
3 Likes