Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
This struggle session could've been an email.
"Hey users, the mod team has been talking about the dunk_tank having racist origins so we've changed the name to the_slop_trough. We also wanted to gauge user reaction to changing the format of the comm for xyz reasons. You have 3 days to vote and voice concerns etc."
But at every step it seems that some section of the mod team was lying, vagueposting, bitposting, powertripping, or generally just ignoring valid criticisms and concerns.
I'd love to see this resolved and I think this post is a good start. No need to talk about specific grievances, I think the other users are doing a great job of covering the bases...when they're not being banned for it ;)
What you described is exactly how this should have been handled, and we are working to establish a process for every decision along those lines going forward.
The only explanation I can give is that from the perspective of the mods discussing this change the gossip and counterprop communities would be a near 1:1 replacement for the communities just divided a little bit differently, while cth and main could serve as places for anything people did not feel was appropriate for the new communities.
Grave mistakes were also made in how the change was announced as well as the follow-up reasoning, clearly everyone would have been better served by handling this in a more transparent way with the ability for users to give their input, and I hope that the entire mod team and I can do the work to repair the damage done by the past couple days.
Sounds like it's growing pains of an organization which used to be small and informally managed bumping the limits of that.
Its never a bad time to (re)read the tyranny of structurrelessnes.
Thank you for the resource, will share with the others. I think you captured a core element of the problem
Thanks for your comment. I trust this site to get the issue resolved using that framework, with the key word being transparency here. You are always a welcome sight on the admin team.
I'm gonna go touch grass.