The Mods and Me

This doc is to look into the dynamics at play behind the mods’ position that they gave me chances to address concerns and that my behaviour “continued”, which led to this incredible comparison to Tareq:

No other individual in this community’s history has been afforded so many opportunities, second chances, and good faith, which makes the end result all the more difficult.

I thought it’d be easy to defend this knowing they didn’t give me chances, but it isn’t easy, because they didn’t cite any of these chances, and barely any repeat behaviours I was supposed to change. So I sincerely barely understand what the fuck they’re on about. This ban still primarily makes sense to me as I described it in earlier docs – as a foregone conclusion derived from the accumulation of people who wanted me gone for disparate reasons. (EDIT 2024/06: Well, covering for lumardy turned out to be the clearest reason).

So, let me present what the chances and behaviours looked like from my perspective, and then I’ll talk generally about how the premise of “continued behaviour” is disingenuous and borne out of bias against a person one wishes to socially dominate.

EDIT 2024/06: Be aware that, if the mods claim there were chances, they are required to explain what those chances are (at least in a non–socially abusive culture, they would be).

Contents

  1. What Chances?
    • a | Last Chance: Warning?
    • b | 2nd-Last Chance: Conversation with Warspy
    • c | 3rd-Last Chance: #community-reconciliation
    • d | 4th-Last Chance: Deposition
    • e | If Not That Then What?
  2. What Behaviours?
    • a | Speculative Accusations of Malice
    • b | Public Essays
    • c | Public Discussions Inducing Stress
    • d | Summary
  3. The Gist
    • a | Mod Attitude
    • b | The Flawed Premise of “Continued Behaviour”

What Chances?

Last Chance: Warning?
The most obvious thing wrong with this ban was the lack of a single preceding disciplinary action – warning, restriction, timeout ban, anything. Such sudden bans are usually reserved for heavy abuse cases, which is to say the “trust me bro” allegation of me abusing people in private is doing the heavy lifting in most people’s understanding of why I was banned. I’ll address this better later but I still know I didn’t do anything in private that could reasonably come under ban rationale.

Hence, that leaves this idea of a “cumulative” ban – that I kept doing bad things that previously drew admonishment but never a warning, and the reinterpretation of historic events as evidence of a deeper problem within my personality. Either way, obviously you need to be given an actual warning forbidding certain behaviours in order to have a fair chance at changing. Instead, I was sentenced on a par with a fully-proven harrowing social abuse case. That’s the striking way in which this ban is unfair.

2nd-Last Chance: Conversation with Warspy
This section was reorganised for clarity in 2024/06, and any new insights I added are marked “EDIT 2024/06”.

The mods considered a conversation I had with mod Warspyking, 3 days before I was banned. I will tackle this topic by first looking at (A) how the conversation entrapped me, then (B) at the prejudice that led to this.

A.) Entrapment

Lego shows in the above that it was considered a last chance, but I was portrayed as unresponsive. This is how that conversation went down (full transcript here):

Hey shout, want to talk to you about some important stuff. And also apologize for how long it’s taken me to get around to giving it the attention it deserves from me. When would be a good time for you? I have no idea how long the discussion will be

And secondly, while the purpose of this conversation is largely about you I want to open with the long awaited and, frankly in my opinion, deserved update on things that you’ve been needing. So before we get into the meat of this discussion, what do you want to know

Warspy opened by indicating the topic would be “some important stuff” and “about [me]”, as well as responding to my queries (my complaint about Jeff from ~8 weeks earlier). He didn’t otherwise say what topics the conversation was intended to cover. Only at one point in the middle did he bring up 1 (one) “problematic behaviour”:

The conversation ended like this:

(Aside: I no longer agree with my words about absolute freedom to handle mod abuse as I please; my inquiry over my Jeff doc explains this better).

Warspy’s take on this was:

The reason you were not told about a ban during that conversation is because we were still in very early talks about everything that was going on, and we wanted to avoid unnecessary escalation. My conversation with you was kind of a last ditch hope on my part to sort out some behavioural issues because I felt my perspective may have been crucial and didn’t want to regret not reaching out to you because of my own stupid irl issues. It became apparent that it wouldn’t go that way, though. At least that was the conclusion I drew.

I clearly stated I was leaving this conversation in order to have it with public oversight. I explained in the previous doc the many reasons I had to distrust the mods at this point, and Warspy not affirming the abusive nature of Jeff’s modding was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I wanted the mods to argue their stances, about their own conduct (including Jeff’s conduct), out in the open.

EDIT 2024/06: It’s never been very clearly stated why Jeff’s modding was abusive, and since I probably won’t go back to that doc to explain, here’s an executive summary:

Jeff’s abusive modding (optional aside) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

It was established after my ban that Jeff slandered me behind my back about me having unilaterally banned toburr from Shine Heads despite, you know, (1 2). We saw he had good reason to think this, but was culpable because he refused to ask me for clarification (see review). Rather, he had blocked me as a result of me having reported him for trying to get his friends off the hook for bullying me and for arguing the lumardy case was less serious than the urbani case.

I used to call my reaction to Jeff “abusive” but that seems to have given the wrong idea. It’s true in the sense that me openly speculating on his intentions is hurtful and unwarranted. But like, if a moderator has been turning people against you in secret off the back of false rumours, has a pattern of helping your bullies/abusers avoid scrutiny, and has just started undermining your role in managing an event while keeping you blocked, then a paranoid reaction is… expected? People evidently don’t relate to the way I have paranoid reactions but I think Jeff ought rather to be thankful it ended with a public complaint rather than with the bullying victim he was punching down on hurting emself.

Jeff is quite happy to admit his half of the fault in private but in public, as expected, nothing but space for me to continue being blamed. Thanks Jeff!

Warspy never acknowledged this request, not even to reject it; rather, he turned to the other mods and portrayed me as uncooperative. But he didn’t clarify to me that he officially needed to raise “problematic behaviours” with me, nor any possible content that was unsuitable for public discussion, nor did he warn me of the role of moderation – neither the true purpose of the conversation nor any consequences for not engaging. Even in the end, he referred to the purpose simply circularly as “what this conversation is for”.

The biggest hint I got of this purpose was the 1 (one) “problematic behaviour” he did raise, being the fact I wrote “public essays”, which I then didn’t repeat before being banned. EDIT 2024/06: Besides, that behaviour was the direct outcome of the mods ignoring several of my attempts to resolve it privately, like the private complaint and this (in which it was suggested that I handle it on Twitter lmao). Warspy also signalled an apology to me for ignoring the case, and then backed it up by blaming me for everything, abuser accusation etc.

So my question to the reader here is, what was I supposed to do differently? Engage in a private conversation with someone who refused to see my pov, who didn’t explicitly state that he was officially addressing my behaviour under mod caution, or what the consequences would be of not talking? Why was he so entitled for me to talk to him?

And the other side is, what Warspy concluded about me, how he presented that to the other mods, and how that influenced them all to claim I was frustrating chances to change. He disagreed on how much this conversation even counts as a “chance”, so I’ll cite that, too:

Even if I humour Warspy’s notion, which Lego’s evidence (top of this section) debunks, that this wasn’t a last chance from the mods, then it would show ipso facto that the mods didn’t give me a chance of trying to talk thru concerns before banning me.

B.) Prejudice: there are three bits of prejudice highlighted in the above screenshots that show the motive for Warspy insisting I had been given chances:

  1. He referred to my lack of progress on problematic behaviours as a “dead horse”. I will show later in this doc that I and my friends weren’t even aware this was a problem with the mods.
  2. He characterised my “public essays” as a plural that “need[ed] to stop”, despite there not having had been any prior to the Jeff case. Looking at the options, either he was using my writing up what lumardy had done to me against me, or leveraging the lie that lumardy and awesomo had established that I habitually harass people with essays, or he retconned the BTRL essay, which I’d generally been praised for. In each case, it’s the typical social abuse technique of recontextualising a victim’s history and sweeping out eir experience of consensus from beneath eir feet, most obviously deployed r.e. #community-reconciliation (next section).
  3. Warspy characterised the whole discussion as “conspiracy theories”, despite it actually having been an examination of what Jeff actually did and the implications it has/the consequences it should have (see example, transcript).

All of these together show basically conclusion-first-evidence-later strategy – him forging an idea of me, trying to ply me into fitting it, and when I kicked back, committing to the concept that he had tried so hard with me but I was just unreasonable 🥺.

3rd-Last Chance: #community-reconciliation

The channel #community-reconciliation stands as a testament to our desire to find an amicable solution, but as time progresses, we see more and more that there is no such solution.

In life, you have to know your rights, including the right to remain silent. I engaged in #community-reconciliation in good faith despite knowing I did nothing wrong in the case context (i.e. nothing requiring mod action + nothing to deserve being bullied). I had public opinion on my side in that. But still, I felt an ethical duty to give explanations and apologies where I felt I’d wrongfully hurt people. If there’s one thing I hope everyone takes away from my ban, it’s that you should never do this. If you have a social advantage and are not getting unconditional apologies, then you should press advantage despite the community staying broken, because public opinion will protect you, and you won’t do anything that will later be used against you.

It’s clear that if I hadn’t defended myself, the bingo bullying would’ve continued indefinitely, and no mod would’ve cared. I chose to bait out bullying in ways that caused collateral damage, and then I also chose to be the most active participant in this mediation held to promote goodwill and reconciliation.

I can’t be held responsible for how I took down the bullying, because I had to do it by myself and couldn’t have foreseen what method would’ve caused the least collateral damage and still worked. Rudhira’s latest essay hiding away the abuse that Toburr had done proves that what it took to get accountability for their bullying was violence – the social tide turning against them, Rudhira being banned from GB Discord for “harming” 1ups, these kinds of things.

The other complaints that I was being held to account about in reconciliation were of this nature:

And this impression – that, despite there being fault on both sides, the bingo bullying case was one-way abuse against me – was felt by most mods and most observers. This sheds a lot of light on the incredibly malicious nature of this statement:

The channel #community-reconciliation stands as a testament to our desire to find an amicable solution, but as time progresses, we see more and more that there is no such solution. No other individual in this community’s history has been afforded so many opportunities, second chances, and good faith

Another two double standards:

  1. that when I complain validly, the resolution is to talk things thru, but when I’m complained about validly, it’s a ban.
  2. that it’s held against me that my wrongdoing contributed to Jeff and 1ups leaving the community, but ignored that I was able to weather the three counts of abuse (EDIT 2024/06: bullying or social abuse) against me and stay standing – giving the impression that what I did was worse, when it certainly was not. I’m just a tank who stuck around cos he had no IRL to fall back to.

Yet more damning is the fact the nobody has said what I was supposed to learn from and change in the reconciliation, and I genuinely still don’t know (I will do some guessing later). The mods said themselves the intention of #community-reconciliation was as an open discussion not intended to formally reprimand anyone for anything, which makes it being held against me absurd. And in my closing remarks in #community-reconciliation, I said:

d. this sentence is still annoying – “And two, apologies that were given, were never acted upon by the ones who gave them”. – but i did ask twice and am moving on so am not interested anymore. just know that i am always open to changing or explaining my behaviours and sometimes it takes calling them out more than once cos my brain is aspy and adapts slowly, plus sees things v differently to others on topics of communication. i tried to help ppl understand by posting things like the “meaning what you say” article but this problem is also blatant from how divided ppl always get when understanding what im saying

I quoted Lego here, who was obliquely referring to the narrative that the mods (and Mlarvitar) are now leaning into, that I tend to apologise but then not follow thru with change. I did legitimately ask three times for concrete examples so I could understand if I was guilty of this and try to improve, but Lego ignored my request each time. The mods are still not citing what I supposedly disingenuously apologised for, rather are just approaching it via essentialisation – via a notion that I just am like that.

4th-Last Chance: Deposition
In late April 2022, the mods had some consternation over random things – ways I spoke about political issues in public Discords, and me stretching out my IL consultant role to propose rules. Various mods, but most prominantly Lego and Jeff, invented speculative motives for my actions, which I assumed came from their affiliation with the bingo community, which had by then been forming false narratives about me for around a year. At that point, the mods forwarded concerns to me via Despin, which I replied to in the form of a deposition, but the mods say Despin didn’t show that to them. I did show it to them in #community-reconciliation in June tho.

Early May 2022, Lego escalates this to attack me within the il mod channel, defending the bingo community’s right to harass me with speculative narratives, and with no support from the il mods, I was retraumatised (false narratives are how lumardy broke up my friendships) and so immediately and permanently left all mod consultant positions. Lego apologised to me a couple of days later for attacking me, for speculating, and said he understood things better.

The full story (with full transcripts) on how I came to quit my consultant positions is here.

The first half (April 2022) is another potential “chance” that the mods gave me. The second half shows the extent to which speculation was rife among the mods and incited their aggression. Despin wrote to me about how painful and slow the process of correcting narratives was. This gives context to this putative “chance” as appearing, to me, as a situation where I was being slandered and trying to clear my name.

In practice, there were only a couple of valid concerns raised, and no discussion between me and the mods other than via Despin (at the time, a mod). It’s still completely unclear why the mods didn’t engage me in a group discussion, and didn’t directly put actionable concerns to me, or give me a warning. Despin claims the other mods thought I wouldn’t be receptive to criticism, which Warspy denies, but offers no alternative explanation.

Which is to say, this wasn’t really a chance at all. I agreed to change a couple of behaviours (which I’ll cover later), but otherwise just wrote down explanations, mostly corrections, and that was that. Here’s the deposition: link. This situation established a pattern whereby the mods complained about me but not to my face, never clarifying what I needed to do to satisfy them. And unbelievably, with all these criticisms, I have never had a group chat with all the mods to talk things thru.

UPDATE 2022/10/16: Evidence from mod chat sheds light on the misunderstandings that caused this situation.

If Not That Then What?
I’m trying to understand what else I was supposed to react to. I’ve so far cited the only two actual conversations I had with mods, with Despin where I addressed a couple of behaviours but was mostly debunking false narratives about myself, and with Warspy where only a single, one-off, behavioural issue was raised. In #community-reconciliation, all of what I was guilty of were either historic modding errors I’d apologised for, the mods’ fault, or were activism by which I myself took down bullying against me w/o the mods’ help, so entitled me to amnesty.

The mods seem keen to leverage the idea that non-mods engaged me in conversations to fix my behaviour, which makes no sense because it seems like a terrible captivity to have to do what any rando tells you to. I was always happy to explain myself, but was only obliged to react to things the mods told me to change, and I didn’t get any non-mod complaints proxied to me by mods, or get warned about anything at all. With good reason – most of these non-mod complaints were invalid to my understanding. The example that best summarises this is peaches recently complaining that I shouldn’t have banned Toburr from Shine Heads, after he himself, while a mod, silently dropped my harassment complaint against Toburr and instead leaked mod chats to him to stoke his bullying of me, then resigned as mod over the guilt.

I’ve acknowledged that the general feeling of discomfort around me had a reasonable basis, tho saw the blame as split between myself for bringing conflict out in public and the mods for not providing a reasonable alternative. But such a feeling is held by a minority of people, and ought to be handled by modding – via the rules – not by me having to care about non-mods opining vague resentment, usually motivated by me wronging their friends, with shaky factual basis.

What Behaviours?

I don’t know what continued behaviours the mods are talking about. Looking at the official notice first:

In addition, we did provide behavioral issues in the notice that we sent shout regarding his ban.

  1. Serious accusations of malicious behavior, made flippantly or under undue speculation.
  2. Lack of attempts to solve concerns civilly despite being presented with multiple opportunities.
  3. Purposeful disregard of the emotional impact of words chosen.
  4. Cases of private conversations where you engaged in bullying or purposefully malicious actions and intents.
  5. No evident progress to addressing any of these issues when raised

Justifying point #5 is the crux here. It contends that I was warned about points #1–#4 and then repeated them, so it implies that:

None of these are true! If they had just wanted to discipline me for what I did to Jeff, then I would’ve understood. Let me then speculate into the behaviours they allude to that I can myself perceive, from other evidence. I did ask the mods for details twice (Warspy 9/28, Dingle 10/3) but got no response.

Speculative Accusations of Malice
I used to be reserved about understanding people’s motives, but that led to me being too lenient with lumardy and awesomo, which in the former case resulted in 7 months needed to overturn his false narratives about me. That was something I couldn’t afford to repeat, so I started using speculation to expedite the process by baiting the truth and hidden motives. I accepted the criticism for it within the bingo bullying case, but as I said, I relied on it to get anyone to pay attention to the bullying itself, and I didn’t know if I could achieve the same result without it. But it got out-of-hand with Jeff, because I was expressing unguarded feelings/suspicions in public, so I am guilty of this once but I dispute it being considered a “continued” behaviour.

I know Mlarvitar is like, really mad with me about this, because I expressed opinions about him that he really disagrees with in a DM to Jpep that the latter leaked w/o me being able to give context. He does the same to me but he’s soft like that. He also took as evidence an accusatory letter I sent to 1ups, in which he decided I was wrong therefore speculated malicious motive and manipulation. Obviously, he doesn’t actually know anything about that situation. But those two things were his entire basis for turning against me and starting a crusade.

Public Essays
This is the only thing Warspy raised with me during our conversation right before my ban. I did it with Jeff, but I wonder what “continued” behaviour I’m being blamed for here. Exposing my abuser? Or expressing a substantiated opinion on an obviously-corrupt mod who cost me a commentary slot at a large SMS event?

Public Discussions Inducing Stress
The main takeaway I had from the concerns the mods “forwarded” to me w/o having an actual discussion, which I wrote about in the deposition I mentioned, is that I was causing unnecessary stress in the way I discussed political issues – “mod terms” was the one cited at the time. I took responsibility for stuff like dropping serious issues with little context, turning joking situations into serious stuff, and generally causing negative emotions with my tone.

This is something that I did actually then repeat with Jeff, but the context behind it is completely different. The first time, I was just doing political commentary for fun, so it was easy to let go of it; the second time, I was under emotional duress from Jeff having harmed me as a mod and the mods not giving me anywhere publicly-accountable to discuss it. I feel like it’s pretty low to then exploit this as a continued behaviour but it’s also somewhat in tune with the irrelevance to the mods of the pain I’ve suffered from others’ actions. The same goes for me bringing my worries about lumardy out to a public audience.

Summary
I get that these points show that I have a propensity for toxic behaviours, which came to the fore with how I wrongfully handled Jeff. My issue with it all is that I want to be judged only on where the propensity actually led to wrongdoing that was my fault, which here seems to mean only regarding Jeff. It’s illegitimate to dig a pile of historic behaviours out from the context that justifies them, just because they resulted in the same actions on the surface of it. That’s a reason there are typically restrictions on admissibility of evidence.

The Gist

Mod Attitude
I’ve done my best to answer for the vague case of being afforded many chances to deal with behavioural problems. This, together with the different way that the bingo bullies were/are treated, mostly just shows me bias. Particularly on the topic of the nature of the chances the mods claim to have given me. The best proof of this would undoubtedly be from Despin giving proof of how the mods handled me behind closed doors. But I find his public statement about this from the day of my ban credible. In the “Context” section, it describes how the other mods refused to talk to me and the extent of their narratives about me, which resulted in Lego bullying me out of my consultant roles via “assuming a lot that wasn’t true”. Despin’s “Rationale” #2 then connects that to the general weirdery around what the mods have said about me in my public ban rationale, which this document went over.

The Flawed Premise of “Continued Behaviour”
I think that by now, “continued behaviour” is visibly just a cover for people being uncomfortable with me for any reason, but humour me, cos this is the most important thing I’ll say in this doc.

People don’t really change. People only get exposed, and with help, they (and we) learn to work around their flaws, if they’re not too awful. The emergence of yet another false bingo-community narrative after I got banned, and the efforts by Toburr and Rudhira to walk back apologies and rewrite history in light of my perceived weakness, demonstrate this starkly. I also showed in my account of quitting mod consultancy how Lego repeated a toxic pattern he had previously apologised for.

It is true that I am predisposed to putting inappropriate stuff out in public, that I communicate abrasively, that I seemingly for no reason initiate tense situations, turn jokes serious and this kind of stuff. I tried to carefully separate out my motives, in recent situations where I felt forced to bring up conflict, from previous cases where it was needless. But I do have ways of doing things that pose genuine problems to others. Sometimes, a situation like with Jeff can arise that merits a reprisal against me.

But remember what I said when, in my #community-reconciliation closing statement, I called out Lego’s appeal to “continued behaviour” narrative w/o citing explicit examples:

just know that i am always open to changing or explaining my behaviours and sometimes it takes calling them out more than once cos my brain is [aspergersy] and adapts slowly, plus sees things v differently to others on topics of communication

When people apologise and then repeat behaviour, that doesn’t usually mean the apology was fake. Rather, renegotiation of behaviour hasn’t succeeded yet. It’s a process that takes ongoing work (and mod oversight) to help one strike a balance between settling problems that previously motivated one’s bad behaviours, and clamping down on the behaviours themselves. It’s not just throwing out one person on the basis of “continued behaviour” and completely dismissing the continued behaviours of everyone else. Jeff’s secretive/uncomfortable stuff had done harm before, so ought to have been more carefully navigated now. The mods’ refusals to properly engage me in conversation had done harm before, so ought to have been more carefully navigated now.

But ironically, in the process of banning, the floodgates of “continued behaviour” were opened, everyone regressed into picking a side and it looked like nobody was sorry. For me, who can see the perspectives and the reasoning that led everyone to their stances, it just feels like a childish false-economy approach to reconciliation.

In Lego’s administration, bullying was never actually punished, and PK was allowed to walk away and remain bingo mod with no apology. So I doubt the bullies’ recurrent behaviours like the latest Toburr slander will be reacted to. But the mods’ intolerance of me, and the disparate reasons a dozen people have for disliking me (not least, me being abused by lu, awesomo, bingo people resulting in me falling out with 3 separate sets of people), have led to a situation where they’ve skipped trying to work with me or to give me a genuine chance. They just kind of banned to try to wash the problem away.

if a lot of people are uncomfortable with someone, and mods receive that those members are uncomfortable with him, then that alone should legitimise them to take action.

– Mlarvitar