He didn’t define them until about a week later–before it was just a vague list. And even from the start he promised it would go no further.
The behavior I’m seeing is nicely defined as “stalking”–you (to pick on you, my old nemesis ) make a post that the majority of people don’t like over in GD. Then you make an unrelated post in MPSIMS or The Pit and those same people stalk you there and attack you viciously for what you said in GD. It’s hijacking and stalking, IMO.
That’s a valid issue and again, one worthy of discussion–it has squelched a lot of conversation. But Ed’s rules didn’t go anywhere near those issues.
Hell, one of your concerns was off-board reprecussions. One of the most baffling parts of Ed’s rules that have remained through EVERY iteration is that while you can’t call a fellow poster a “cunt”, it’s no problem calling a potentially litigious person off boards a “cunt”…or anything else. Libel, defamation, “verbal assault”, all ok by every iteration of Ed’s rules–encouraged, even in one version–just no “magic bad words that butthurt his mods”.
I’m not dismissing your concerns, but I do want to suggest that you’re conflating two issues-a need for some clear rules about what’s ok and what’s not in The Pit and the mess Ed made with his bizarre multiple rules lists.
I hear you, Fenris. What I think happens is this: All the Mods complain about this metabehavior, so Ed takes a look, sees a bunch of pottymouths and starts there.
What Exit?, yes I did read every word of your original post. I also read every word of every other post in reply to it. I then went on to read every word of many other posts in this and other areas of the boards going back for months to understand the history behind them. My reply was not directly in response to your OP in this one thread, but rather a broad generalization of my overall impression of the situation. I won’t split hairs here but your complaints about the technical, planning, communication, and most importantly community, aspects of these changes still strike me as being the words of a highly disgruntled old-timer here who would not have been happy with any changes regardless of how they were announced or planned and I think my reply, even as a generalization of the distilled impression of all the posts, does in fact also apply directly to your OP.
Ed I don’t post much here. I read many threads and tend to stay out of the pit, but one thing I know is you can’t force people to be nicer to each other. If someone wants to be an a-hole they will be. The only thing that could help is if the community shunned a-holes. The more you try to “force” civility the wore it will become.
Well I can tell you that you are wrong on two fronts. I am not an Old Timer at all. I have been here less than 4 years. I can also tell you that plenty could have been done to prevent this current situation for myself and others.
The communication alone probably would have kept me happy enough to keep my busybody nose out of this. The lack of bizarre interpretations of FOAD and butthurt would have helped quite a bit. I have not been a complainer, in fact I have taken abuse for defending the board and mods in the past. I had never seen so many arbitrary and heavy handed decisions as I have lately. Maybe I was just missing them, but they got through to me this time.
I also still have hope for positive changes as I keep saying. So do you think maybe you could be wrong?
Ed, I respect the fact that you made what appears to be a sincere apology and that you are genuinely shaken by the response. I’m sure it was difficult.
But. (You knew there would be a but.)
Nobody has commented on what to me is the crucial sentence.
Wow. Bells and whistles and skyrockets went off when I read that. How inadvertently revealing.
Look at your history with the boards for the past several months. Maybe years.
You say you’re going to make a decision (or pronouncement or rule or policy). Pretty much everyone warns you against certain moves that would be horribly wrong. Afterward pretty much everyone screams that the decision was horribly wrong. Despite your original derision and snorting, the decision turns out to be horribly wrong, alienating pretty much everyone. You modify or rescind or curtain the decision, looking belligerently inept, uttering half-hearted apologies. Then you make another decision that’s equally horribly wrong for equal horribly wrong reasons.
Would you have confidence that the next decision by such a leader would be worth anything at all?
You know what this all reminds me of? You’re old enough to remember the time when Nixon wandered out of the White House one night and encountered some Vietnam protesters. He tried to talk football to them as a way of making neutral badinage.
That’s you, Ed. You’ve turned into Nixon, holed up in your bunker, uncomprehending of why anyone would protest your eminently reasonable decisions, unable to hear the words of their differences, unable even to approach them on any human level. And yet you expect backing the next time you come out with yet another restating of what you’ve already said a million times. I know you’re a 60s survivor like me. I hope that comparison hurts as much as it is intended.
Whatever that next announcement you make had better be something fantastic. You have to convince people that you’re not Nixon. How you can do that at this point I can’t even imagine. Unless you want to be the last person in the room, shouting at the walls that you were right all along and see, nobody’s disagreeing, you need to make a big, big break with the past. Apologies won’t cut it.
Again my general comments were just that, a general distillation of my opinions about the whole brew-ha-ha that appears to have been raging for months on these boards, spanning hundreds or thousands of posts, and not only to your OP or the replies to it in this thread.
I apologize if I lumped you into a group of old-timers unfairly. You must see some of the same posts I reference, even in other replies to this thread, and understand how I drew those conclusions. People have asserted that without their personal presence here on the SD boards, Ed Zotti would not have received a paycheck for the past 10 years. That is a disgruntled old-timer. People have refused to accept his apology because he didn’t also rescind the new changes to the boards at the same time, that is not aimed at his communication or management style but at the changes themselves - that’s a disgruntled old-timer.
I think overall this looks like a really great community and there are some struggles going on due to the economic realities of the world we live in right now but that in the end the main thing that brought everyone here, and the tie that binds us so to speak, is in fact the Straight Dope column and books and the message boards are only peripheral to them in terms of economic viability. That was really the main point of my reply. The column brought together this bunch of really intelligent inquisitive and opinionated teeming millions that enjoy the columns, and the boards took on a life of their own from there. Occasionally due to whatever reasons the owners of the Straight Dope might implement some changes to this living community and that will never go over well with everyone, whatever the changes and however they are communicated.
A couple of jobs back when I worked Security for a small University, our Assistant Director, the one who was charged with dealing with personnel issues, worked much the same way. She had all the people skills of a stapler.
She would become upset at some behavior or another in the department and announce some over-the-top, sweeping and punitive measure against the entire department. Or she would change the rules seemingly on a whim, in very draconian ways, with very harsh penalties for infractions.
Time and again, the hue and cry from within or even from without would result in every single such edict being struck down.
She came off as an incompetent asshole and no one had any respect for her. She had a great many stress related illnesses and injuries in this time, resulting in large chunks of time off. Basically, she couldn’t hack it, wouldn’t quit, and the University wasn’t going to fire her because she was the boss’ crony (like everyone else in management in that department). But it was destroying her from within, because things were not to her liking and they were never going to be to her very strict and frankly, irrational likings.
People started making end-runs around her and keeping her out of the loop. Despite the Director’s best efforts to keep herself out of the business of dealing with personnel issues (she was only slightly less incompetent, but certainly a lot less draconian in those matters), everything started flowing around the Assistant Director.
Eventually, they split the duties of the Assistant Director and created a new position with a new person who was charged with the great bulk of this person’s duties, and she was relegated to dealing with paperwork and organizational functions.
Frankly, I would be surprised to see the same thing happen to Ed.
I suspect it may have been all the times you and your staff explicitly said if we didn’t like the way you run things around here, we should go find another place more to our liking. That’s merely a sneaking suspicion, mind you, though I’m not really sure how else such statements were meant to be taken. I’d love to be enlightened on that subject, though given the past history of asking for clarification, I’m not exactly gonna hold my breath.
Well, in all fairness, while all that is most certainly true and you should be sorry, I think it might not have been such a huge ordeal if that hadn’t been the standard operating procedure here for so very many damn years. Any time there’s been any sort of remotely big controversy in the whole time I’ve been here, the pattern has been the same. First, the stonewalling, an absolute refusal to explain anything about what’s going on or to address our concerns. Second, the disbelief that we’re asking questions about it. Then, the insistence that it’s none of our business and we should all sit the hell down and stfu about it. Then the half-explanation that only raises more questions, all of which you (plural) refuse to answer on the grounds that you’ve already said your piece, and we should all sit the hell down and shut the fuck up about it, and if we don’t like it, we can leave. Then, the insults. Our concerns are stupid and petty and we have no reason to be bothering our pointy little heads about such things, but you’re willing to throw us a bone, and if we sit down and shut up about it already, you’ll give us something shiny at some point in the future. The shiny surprise, of course, never materializes, and if we don’t like not getting our shiny surprise on this, the greatest board on the internet, we’re perfectly welcome to go elsewhere.
Any of this sounding familiar to you? Off the top of my head, I can think of every bloody time we talked about server performance up until the last year or so, Tubagate, the Google ads, the P2P transition, your pet book forum, the Chicago-specific forum, and the banner ads. And every time the cycle was repeated, you guys burned through a little more the community’s goodwill and patience. An increasing number of people just don’t have anything left in the “Give TPTB the benefit of the doubt” tank, and a huge lot more of us are sucking fumes and the engines are sputtering.
It makes it really hard to read your post without :rolleyes:, it really does, because this smells remarkably like the same tired old bullshit. If you really want to make things better around here, you have to convince us that this isn’t just another case of same shit, different day. And you need to do it SOON, because unless the tanks are refilled fast, those sputtering engines are going to cough to a stop before long.
OK, so at least part of the uproar has soaked in. Now lets take these lessons and act on them. Undo that second change and lets move forward with this more pragmatic plan.
No! No! No! People aren’t angry that you changed the rules in the middle of the game. Almost no one has said that or implied that. Accusing us of being angry because of that implies that we are childish and are reacting in a kneejerk fashion. We aren’t pissed that our blankey was taken away.
People are angry for two reasons. One, that trying to censor us and protect us is incredibly condescending and ultimately ineffective. Two, that the new policies are frighteningly non-specific and arbitrary. A big part of the distrust and frustration in the community, not just in this recent drama but for years now, is the often inconsistent and capricious Moderation and Administration. Creating new rules that are so open to interpretation (and therefore abuse and manipulation) create a very untenable position for posters who never know when I Mod will decide something we said is abuse or vulgarity. There’s evidence in this thread of Skip overreacting and Lynn is famous for it. Now you’ve given them more rope.
Ho-kay. So, give us your opinion of someone, anyone, who admits to taking foolish actions but does nothing to amend or correct said foolishness.
Hah! “Staying the course” sure worked out well for the last guy who tried it, eh?
Well, let’s be fair before breaking out the torches and pitchforks. Ed has just come off what I suspect has been a somewhat fraught weekend, quite possibly spent on the phone to CL, so let’s just see what he comes up with this week, shall we? Let’s not forget that things have been moving pretty quickly around here, and he hasn’t ruled out rescinding his rules, which to me would be the necessary next step in repairing the damage.
The time to claim do-overs has already passed, I think. A good time to admit that he fucked up would have been way back when people were first objecting vigorously to his plans–maybe he could have taken a step back, said, “Hold on, folks, you’re making some fair points, let me start over again clean. Let’s just reset the Dope, and particularly the Pit to ‘Start,’ while I consult with all of you as to how we’re going to go, and only then will I roll out changes that we seem agreed on, generally. Not everyone willl dance a dance of joy in the end, but I won’t just start instituting radical changes that have my best mods resigning and everyone up in arms. I’m sorry I went that way. It was impetuous and condescending and I won’t do it again. I’m really sorry I tried that.”
But getting a mulligan after he insisted on ramming his policy changes down our throats, banning some, suspending others, and repeatedly telling us all that if we don’t like (or even understand) his changes, we can get out right now? I don’t think so.
) make a post that the majority of people don’t like over in GD. Then you make an unrelated post in MPSIMS or The Pit and those same people stalk you there and attack you viciously for what you said in GD. It’s hijacking and stalking, IMO.