I've stayed out of this thread since my last post because, to be blunt, I see it as little more than a dressed-up version of the recently-locked thread.
Wall of text incoming, you've been warned.
I'd prefer it was worded as "Don't do shit for the sole purpose of causing drama".
Not that I have any say, I think that's a terrible idea. It's entirely subjective and vague, and would only lead to more rage threads here on Backstage.
If you were to sum up the policies/rubric the moderators use, that'd actually be a reasonably accurate tl;dr. Also, "rage threads" are not something that tend to go very far here, as evidenced by the Catacombs. So I don't think that that part would be a problem, personally. It'd just mean a minor headache for Silver until he decided to take off the gloves and get dirty.
Lyn, I would respond to more of your post in detail but I think you and I both know that that will go nowhere productive, so I'm just going to respond to the snippet in response to my original post:
The three basic rules are good rules. Simple and clear, and quite obvious, but obviously needed. No derping is awesome as a policy.
However, you are basically saying that adding several layers of deliberate RP descriptions (yes, you are perfectly right, it is deliberate), is a bad thing for RP ? What the...
Oh well, just refer to what I said above about bluntly denying parts of what makes New Eden what New Eden is.
I've highlighted the one line that is problematic. Nowhere, absolutely
nowhere did I say this. I said that adding descriptions is a deliberate action, and that therefore, obviously, any description you add is done deliberately - and that given this,
certain kinds of description are problematic because they are clearly intended to stir shit, cause drama, or troll. In this particular case, it's the action of explicitly stating that you have a slave visible on camera - not someone handing something to you from offscreen, not an employee, not just a plain old person with no other description, but you are making it
clear that this person is a slave - and that anyone looking at the feed should be able to tell that they are a slave.
It isn't "bad for RP." It
is against the rules of the channel at the moment, and can/will get you in trouble.
Please ask for a clarification next time you don't get what I'm saying, rather than accusing me of saying something I am not.
I would suggest that it isn't a 'cultural' issue. It is a practical issue of eliminating things that are disruptive to the channel. Slaves on screen have a track record of being disruptive.
Hammer, nail, head for the particular policy. There are many cultures other than the Amarr who practice slavery.
Kaleigh/Gyra makes a lot of good points; I'd cherry-pick a few but I'm lacking for time (and not exactly writing this post in top-bottom order as read).
Regarding Esna's
post, option 1 is right out. It'll cause more headaches for everyone with all the "wah wah bias" whining. Option 2 is a possibility, but we'd end up with people loopholing (or trying to) with "oh but this is consensual" or some nonsense. Option 3 has worked so far, and people really seem to be ignoring that the only people who actually run afoul of it more than once are people who are deliberately trying to cause trouble.
[mod]Snip[/mod]
I have yet to see concerted moderator action against people who ,veiled or openly, make statements that cause significant offense to amarrian characters. On the other hand behaviour that is normal and accepted in amarrian society is "outlawed" on the grounds that it upsets characters from other backgrounds.
Today is the first day I've seen you connected to the Summit in months. So while I'm not inclined to put much weight on your statement there as a result, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a timezone issue, because most of the traffic in the Summit is during EU and US evenings, not in the middle of the day. Just because it happens at times when you aren't connected doesn't mean it doesn't happen. (Also, I'm pretty sure public nudity is frowned upon in the Empire. We actually have an explicit rule banning that, in case you hadn't noticed. So there's an anti-Gallente rule, so to speak.)
TL;DR The Summit is biased against Amarr.
This is the reason why new PIE's are told, by Lae', not to bother too much about The Summit, and also the reason why almost no true amarrians are in the channel anymore.
Again, the channel is not biased against Amarrians, and in fact there are quite a number of Amarrian roleplayers in there participating on a regular basis, and a significant portion of them are from PIE. It's also worth pointing out that one of the people who specifically told me they approved of the "no slaves on camera" policy is not only Amarrian, but
currently your CEO. At least one or two other corpmates of yours also approve of the policy, as well.
If the channel is biased against anything, it's shit-stirrers and attention-whores.
I'm not going to quote
this post of Lallara's, but if I understood what he meant correctly, then I agree with the vast majority of what he said. The Summit is primarily a diplomatic venue. Not OKCupid in Space.
Honestly I would love to be able to have more proper, polite, and casual or serious discussions or references to slavery in the Summit. I like to think that every time I've ever brought up the topic myself, or lead into it myself, that I do my part to keep things from getting out of hand. I also do understand that over time the course of such conversations does seem to get repetitive and therefore boring to some people, or that others do take the topic and use it to provoke a heated response.
However, I take a step back and try to look at EVE as a wider universe. We're talking about a setting where (correct me if I'm wrong) the largest known government and population base either actively endorses slavery or at least simply accepts it as a natural social strata. I honestly think a lot of the passionate responses end up being over-the-top if you look at the whole of the EVE setting as context. Part of that I attribute to OOC bleed-over of modern western morals, the other part I attribute to the simple desire to do something out of boredom.
Now I'm not saying I think it's unreasonable that the average Matari or Gallentean abhor slavery, I'm simply saying I think some of the cases are overreactions. The mere sight of a slave pouring a drink shouldn't provoke huge amounts of bad drama, in my opinion. Is it really that hard to tune down things and make your IC displeasure at something known with an emoted glare or snide remark? Does it always have to escalate to hour long shouting matches that end up crossing the IC-OOC line?
I think most of us would too, and like I said earlier, we do actually have these discussions on a semi-regular basis. (You've been out of the game for a while so you probably missed most of them.) To my knowledge, you have generally done well on your end.
As for representation of the wider universe, looking at the current list of eight mods (Graelyn, Tib, Morwen, Esna, Ava, Inara, Silas and Jek) we have, as far as affiliations go, two Amarr, one Cartel, one Minmatar, two neutral (with various leanings), one openly Sabik and one Sansha. Of those, five are explicitly pro-slavery by association. Ava is the only explicitly anti-slavery moderator in the channel. I can't speak to Jek's views, but Morwen's are hardly easily classed as anti-slavery. A minor correction to Ava's later post on this very thing (quoted below w/ Inara's post), however: Morwen does not own any slaves, but she lives with someone who does. I don't think she could legally own any anyway.
Are there overreactions sometimes? Yes. Without a doubt. (Is this particular case an overreaction? No - it's just the latest incident where someone has deliberately and repeatedly played chicken with the moderators to be a dick, and this time action was taken beyond the usual warning.) That said, things don't usually escalate to "hour long shouting matches" unless someone deliberately goes in with the troll flag flying high. Most of the time we only have to step in to remind people to not go overboard with the direct personal insults, or for excessive swearing (because this isn't middle school, saying Carlin's Seven in every other sentence isn't cool anymore, yo).
Ael's idea might work if people actually bothered to report things to moderators who were active or at the very least online. Newsflash, guys: if you report stuff to only one moderator, there's no guarantee of that report being acted on in anything resembling a timely fashion because you've put all of the weight on one person who may not be able to check their mail anytime soon. Send your reports to more than one of us at once - that way there's a higher chance of someone actually seeing the report while it's fresh. Prodding us in channels works but it doesn't really give us a paper trail either, and will usually (I hope) be met with a "mail us about it with logs" response.
Just food for thought.
Esna, Tib, Silas, Morwen, Graelyn, and formerly, Leopold, all own, or in Tib's case, condone, slavery.
I think I am the sole "antislavery" mod.
Thank you.
Don't forget me ^_^.
But seriously, this is a valid point.
With the majority of the moderators being either slave holders or condoning of slavery, and (as far as I know in my limited time as a mod) there being no issues with disruption of the channel due to their presence... this suggests that the problem has nothing to do with slavery. The more I read, and the more I think about it, the more I'm willing to wager that the problem is with presentation and willingness to interact on a reasonable level with people who have opposing opinions from yourself.
Esna and I are thinking alike I believe. Don't be a dick!
More or less. Like I said in my first post: "We are
not saying you cannot hold slaves and be on the Summit. We are
not saying you can't say you have them. We aren't even saying you can't interact with them as 'background' noise from your character's feed. We
are saying don't have them in view of your "camera" - ie, don't type about them being visible."
If people need a good example of how to do this without causing trouble, look at Evelyn (Meiyi, not Valate). She has slaves, everyone knows she does, she interacts with them, but she
doesn't go out of her way to make a display of them on camera because there's no reason to do so except to provoke a reaction.
Now, I'm sad to see that what seemed to start as a reasonable debate about whether certain rules are sensible or not devolved mainly into two parties calling names. I think that wasn't the intent and/or purpose of this thread.
I think it really doesn't matter whether Leo is protesting here through harmless civil disobedience or whether he specifically or someone else was kicked from Summit rightfully and justly. It really is, in my opinion, largely inconsequential to the question here. Inconsequential as well is, in my opinion the alignment of the Moderators toons with one IC faction or the other. One can very well moderate a channel and RP someone loyal to one faction and still moderate the channel in a way that is partial to another. Or not. It really makes no difference.
"Harmless civil disobedience" is a wholly inaccurate term, considering he's been doing it despite being warned by mods (and, in fact, by other players, some of whom were Amarrian RPers who didn't like it) for over a year - the only reason action was not taken sooner was because he was doing this while a moderator - which meant that Graelyn had to be the one to take action. It goes under the references to "not behaving like a moderator" in the other threads on the forum.
I see that the main argument for the rule against explicit displays of slaves in the Summit is that "the particular resonance of slaves" is generally something the moderators don't want to have in their channels. With deciding to ban the behaviour that obviously offends a majority of the Summit and apparently not considering there whether the reactions of those offended are really adequate to the 'offense' it seems to me that the moderators decided to keep it civil by following the wishes of the majority.
It's not as much about 'offending' people as some seem to think. It's about getting rid of deliberately disruptive behavior. If we didn't want people to be offended we'd have separate Summits for each faction so that everyone could coexist in their happy little Hello Kitty Online shards. People are going to get offended in the Summit. We're not going to step in in those cases unless it's particularly egregious - we are, however, going to step in when people are trying to be disruptive and/or trolls on purpose. That this particular kind of thing merited a "specific" policy serves only to show exactly how bad it was before the policy was put in place - but it's only as a specific example of the larger "don't be a fucking derp" policy.
Don't get me wrong here, it's a sound decision to do so, as it is the easiest way to keep the majority of the people within the Summit happy. But it really isn't unbiased. I think no decision would be unbiased as clearly as Tiberious pointed out, the moderators are there for a reason. They (or the owners of the channel) set a goal that they want to achieve with their channel and are necessarily biased towards what is supportive of said goal. I don't think it's in the least about being biased against slaveholders or display of slaves on the Summit. They probably couldn't care less as long as everything stays 'civil'. If not something needs to be done.
This is accurate. The bias isn't against slavers, or Amarrians. It's against
people who are abusing the subject of slavery to be disruptive and/or trolls. We have civil discussions and debates on the subject (and other controversial ones) all the time.
So, the option the moderators go for in this case are pandering to the majority of people in the Summit that are against slavery. I don't think that it is a good choice for the Summit, as the Summit should be about neutrality and being a open venue for all kinds of pilots from New Eden rather than about having a content and big population. Pandering to the majority is good for the latter and bad for the former, it will usually decrease diversity. Similarly, kicking all the people that 'rageface' when they see a slave in Summit would be a solution to enforce civility on the Summit while generally being open to everyone (and would probably solve any trolling issues as well: Not feeding trolls works wonders, usually), but would work against a big and happy community. robably also not the best choice for a channel depending on an active and big community. Maybe there is a middle way somewhere. But how to react here, it's true, that's the decision of the owner/the moderators.
We are not pandering to anyone. Unless "people who aren't trying to troll or be disruptive" counts, in which case, okay, we're pandering to them. Unfortunately, most people aren't brilliant enough to "not feed the trolls", so while that might be ideal, it isn't sufficient - and kicking the people who complain about people being disruptive doesn't exactly seem appropriate to me unless they go way out of bounds with it.
In my experience the Amarr that were in the channel usually didn't complain to any moderators when they were offended by something, but rather left with disdain for the babarians. Leaving the channel open for those even though they didn't feel comfy there. But then, maybe that's because back then there were no moderators to complain to. Still, I think there oftentimes arise issues that are on par with the 'display of slaves' issue. And I like to think that the tiny few Amarr still remaining in Summit deal with those with more decorum than just raging about that fondled Khumaak or the heap of killmails of 24th pilots that's been posted or such. after all you don't win
I think the rules against diplay of slaves don't really hit the Amarrians in general, btw. Their slaves have imho better things to do than handing out drinks. It really does hit those chars that depend on being free to portray themselves as rather gruesome types (and there may be some Amarr among those), as has been pointed out above. Thus I don't understand why some people try to make this into a Amarr versus Minmatar kind of thing.
I would rather people report issues, as I said in response to Uraniae. IC, OOC, slaver, non-slaver, whatever - I don't care about that, if there's something going on that might need a moderator to look at it,
report it. As to the second paragraph here, one hundred percent agreed that these slaves have better things to do.
"Gruesome" character type or not, however, it's still disruptive, and it is still a conscious choice to make. There are other, and better, ways to go about it.
Having said all this should make clear that I'm not really all too happy with such rules against display of slavery or somesuch. I'd like it if the Summit allowed for more conflict, conflict that stays civil, though. I think the ruling we're debating here isn't conducive of what I'd like to see in the Summit.
Nico
We don't have a problem with conflict. We definitely don't have a problem with civil conflict. However, the slaves on camera issue reliably produced non-civil conflict and whining and rage and drama from all sides, and was particularly abused by people who were either simply attention-whoring or were doing it deliberately to cause trouble. Neither of which is really appropriate in a diplomatic venue.
... That's probably a sufficient wall of text for now, especially given:
Then the issue is pretty much settled because I think most of us are willing to relax on the specific rule against slavery as long as we can continue to get rid of the people who are using slavery as a vessel for their attention whoring.
Author
Topic: First: Simmer down Second: slavery Discussion (Read 35755 times)