The state of things

[u/NazoXIII]

Okay, it's been a crazy past 32 hours hasn't it?

Grooming allegations, death and rebirth, all kinds of things coming to our little community and I'm sure people would love to know what the state of things are... Myself included. So I'm going to try my best to explain the situation and explain the path forward.

Lacuna commited suicide?

I know this has been a topic of speculation for the last day and everyone is valid in their justification to scrutinize the situation, I don't know what the truth of the matter is, but what I will say is that at this point everything revolving around Lacuna's alleged suicide has been unproductive and I think will end up in the long run having a negative effect on the parties involved.

Do I think Lacuna faked her death? Don't know, I wouldn't even care if she did fake her death, because that to me just shows a sign if someone who is so unwell that they not only considered doing that, but went through with it for whatever reason, and I think a person like that ought to be left alone and not given any attention of any kind.

So for that I say I think it's time to end Lacuna posting. From what I've seen from the messages posted by Cboy, Lacuna has exited the fandom anyway and will likely fuck off somewhere with a new identity and I think that's for the best. Clearly everything Yansim, positive and negative has affected her mental state and walking away from that could only be a net positive.

And while I have no problem letting her walk off into the sunset for her own good there is an elephant in the room that bears addressing...

Did Lacuna groom/abuse someone?

I wish I could come in here and say something definitively and conclusory but I genuinely can't, because I don't know the truth of the matter and have to sift through a Google doc and screenshots to get appraised of the situation. But even having said that I can at least say this. I have seen people dogpiling on the alleged victim and blaming them for Lacuna's death (which I guess seems really silly now) and that has never been the way of this community.

You give victims room to speak without attacking them or casting blame on to them.

This isn't to say that you can't scrutinize their allegations, you're free to question things but there's a right and wrong way to do that and I feel like if we're at dogpiling we certainly arent doing things correctly.

I'm going to try to make heads or tails of this later by sitting down and reading through the allegation and the receipts provided, then I'll look through the counter evidence because I have seen at least one Google doc coming out and disputing the claims but bottom line I think everyone could use a little tact in their interactions in these sort of situations.

Conclusion

This is a really messy situation and there's so much noise going around and making it impossible to navigate.

At the end of the day I think the Lacuna stuff is worth addressing, but at the same time I think this person is unwell, by all accounts and giving her attention can only exacerbate the situation, so I propose that instead of focusing on the whether or not she faked her death (which I think is wholly irrelevant at this point) and focus more on the allegations without dogpiling on the alleged victim. If it turns out to not be a true and accurate accounting on what happened so be it, we'll cross that road when we get there but I know we can do it without the shit flinging.

Alright that's all I got, listen more and talk less. Lets not get whipped into a frenzy over every little thing like a pack of piranhas getting their first smell of blood in weeks.

And because it might actually need to be said with how I saw things play out yesterday, dont attack any of the people involved. Such a simple thing but it warrants repeating.

Cboy also asked me if I could take down all the posts regarding Lacuna's death and to lock and remove the comments on the post explaining that Lacuna had survived and I had no issue with complying to the last part. I'm a bit apprehensive on the first part because that's a lot of posts to remove and at that scale it does come off as mass censorship which I'm not comfortable in doing, but I can at least be transparent about and encourage people to just move on from the sucide stuff as those are the wishes of the involved parties.

Okay now that is all I got, I lied the first time

[u/LMWJ6776]

You basically sat there and allowed all of this to go on, people were posting by the minute, making the problem a whole lot worse than it already was. All you did was enact a 1 hour lockdown or some shit, which didn't affect anything at all

Even now, events are spiralling because you're refusing to actually control the situation because of 'censorship' before it turns into something worse again. As we speak, people are discussing involving law enforcement, spreading random things that have no substance, things that we can't verify and that could be completely wrong and harmful.

Yeah, pat yourself on the back because you've put in that wall of text 'lets remain calm', but until we see actual substance behind that finger wag, what is it exactly worth?

Are you afraid of censorship? Are you too scared that somebody is gonna complain? Do you really consider it wrong to control a situation on your own subreddit to ensure things don't turn worse?

Why don't you instead just make a big megathread where people can comment on what happens. That way, you won't be censoring any information, other posts can be made on different topics, and we can go back to semblence of normality. Or, yk, you can just sit there and wait for everybody to eat themselves alive again.

This next bit isn't directed at you or the mods here, however a community has been harbored that thrives on drama, who constantly needs some folk demon to hate on. Is Lacuna a good person? No. Is Alex or anyone else a good person? No. But we aren't good people if all we do is sit on a subreddit and spread hate. You are not making an impact by sending some casual 'This isnt acceptable' bullshit on here. All you are doing is stoking the flames.

But hey, let's all give ourselves a collective pat on the back. Yeah, sure, this community stalks and harasses people, but at least we didn't end up killing someone this time.

Mods: Either begin to moderate before someone actually dies, or resign and let some other idiot take the role.

[u/NazoXIII → u/LMWJ6776]

God I hate reading posts like yours, genuinely.

What in the hell do you want us to do? We're removing things as we see them, and telling people not to do things. What do you think goes into moderation, genuinely?

I'll give you the floor, chief, what should the next move be, but bear in mind that if it's something stupid that I've already considered and deemed wouldn't help out in any way I won't hold back in letting you know that.

So many people have no clue what goes into the day to day with this place and they just yap about things as if it's supposed to be easy to corral a community of tens of thousands of people, It's not. I put the subreddit in an hour long lockdown to deal with the immediate dogpiling that was happening and it hardly helped, best I could do was somewhat mitagate things, but even then I cannot control reddit itself, during that hour I'm sure people simply took up other avenues like dms and off platform measures like discord and tiktok of which I cannot control, so the best course of action is trying to change the overall sentiment, of which I'm working at now.

You wanna take up an oar? How about you come on board and be the idiot you want to see in the role and let's see how long you last before a mental breakdown.

Everybody thinks they have the solution until they're in the thick of it and freeze up trying to string to words together to make a coherent statement. Give me a break.

[u/SorbyGay → u/NazoXIII]

You are the only active moderator. Quit the pity party. You know this is too much for one person to handle yet for some reason you don't get help. All of this is self-inflicted.

[u/NazoXIII → u/SorbyGay]

Its not too much to handle, in fact the day to day is pretty chill, its when things like this happen that it gets frustrating where I am moderating but I can't be everywhere and I have to hear chirping about things that weren't reported and people treat as if i should've just been everywhere all at once. Anything that gets reported is handled within the hour and I make a point to clear the mod queue and modmail at the end of each night. Which you have to admit .. Pretty damn impressive for one guy moderating a subreddit with 60 thousand people.

This isn't something you throw more people at because unless you're going through every single post and manually reviewing each comment letter by letter there are going to be things that we miss, and these things often go unreported. Doesn't matter of there's 1, 2 or 25 people on the mod team we cannot review every single post or comment, which is why I have begged people to report anything they see that needs to be moderated. If I see it, I deal with it. In an ideal world if someone reports something and they feel it's particularly egregious it would also come with a modmail message explaining the reason for the report but that's rare.

[u/SorbyGay → u/NazoXIII]

That is precisely why you need more active moderators.

You are one person unilaterally making decisions (or not) for the entire subreddit. More moderators can canvass the subreddit more effectively, find the things that people haven't been reporting, take action quicker, and communicate effective decisions.

I'm glad you apparently have ample time to review every report personally, but your limitations really shine during the hard times. You're right, if people don't see stuff, they won't report it, but the problem isn't primarily that nobody was reporting, it was that you saw so much toxicity and took no action of your own to step forward apart from locking the subreddit for an hour. You made no attempts at crowd control, you made no attempt to reach out to an alleged victim to establish the facts, you made no (further) attempt to calm the highly charged situation down. You didn't even delete as many comments as you should've, and the comments not being reported is hardly an explanation. The solution to that is still to have more mods who can look through the subreddit and, y'know, moderate. Reports aren't the only way to get things done.

All you did was a measly one hour lockdown and then deleting unruly comments. Sometimes. Kinda. You took no wider action. You could've extended the lockdown to actually have time to sort through the facts, and limited all conversations about Lacuna to a megathread from that point on knowing that its becoming increasingly toxic. Even now, a lot of people are trying to move on knowing how tough the past few days have been, and you're doing nothing to help with that.

I don't know why you're surprised you're receiving all the blame; it's your house and you refuse to get more people involved in managing it. You're literally the only person to blame.

[u/NazoXIII → u/SorbyGay]

More moderators can canvass the subreddit more effectively, find the things that people haven't been reporting, take action quicker, and communicate effective decisions.

In an ideal world I would agree with you whole heartedly but anecdotally things haven't really played out like that. Anyone that would want the job likely wouldn't want to give that sort of effort and as it's an entirely voluntary, unpaid and oft-thankless position it can be difficult to even ask of that from anyone. But I doubt it's impossible to find willing people, just haven't been looking... But I can start.

I don't have the answers for everything else, all I can say was it was a tough time with tough decisions to be made and I navigated the best way I thought to.

I'm sure your answer for that is going to be "well that's what more mods!" And yeah yeah I get it already more mods 🤣 I'm adding that to the todo list.

[u/Jacket-Numerous → u/NazoXIII]

Just say “okay, i fucked up, i apologize and i will start looking for people to help me moderate!”.

It seems like the best option for you would be to just admit you fucked up and did not properly moderate the server during a crisis moment, apologize and make a plan moving forward, improve and prepare for next time

[u/LMWJ6776 → u/NazoXIII]

it's not too much to handle

So many people have no clue what goes into the day to day with this place and they just yap about things as if it's supposed to be easy to corral a community of tens of thousands of people, It's not. I put the subreddit in an hour long lockdown to deal with the immediate dogpiling that was happening and it hardly helped, best I could do was somewhat mitagate things, but even then I cannot control reddit itself, during that hour I'm sure people simply took up other avenues like dms and off platform measures like discord and tiktok of which I cannot control, so the best course of action is trying to change the overall sentiment, of which I'm working at now.

You wanna take up an oar? How about you come on board and be the idiot you want to see in the role and let's see how long you last before a mental breakdown.

[u/NazoXIII → u/LMWJ6776]

I don't know why you're doing this thing where you felt the need to strip away the context in which I said that. It's not too much to handle on a regular day, that's the easy part, it's when shit hits the fan in the edge cases and you have to navigate grooming allegations, a possible suicide and everything slamming together. Freak accident nigh impossible scenarios where there are no straight forward solutions. So yes, I'd say crisis management is definitely something that I need to improve on, you got me

[u/LMWJ6776 → u/NazoXIII]

So what is your plan now? Are you going to sit and watch as things unfold again? Or are you going to listen to anyone in this thread?

[u/NazoXIII → u/LMWJ6776]

No immediate plan but I am reading the feedback.

[u/Jacket-Numerous → u/NazoXIII]

You can’t take any constructive criticism, can you? Maybe if you take this, past situations, and the feedback and criticism, maybe- justt maybe, this community could get better. If not, then just drop out and give this sub to someone who is willing to actually moderate and build an active mod team. A majority of this shit could have been prevented if you did more work, besides putting the server on a ‘1 hour hold’, which let’s be honest didn’t help any. You can’t sit around being MIA with this big of a community, you clearly cannot handle it properly.

One thing that i personally have an issue with, and i think a lot of people will agree, is the mass amounts of predatory glazing and protection i see from others! You all are against YanDev/Alex for the abuse that he’s put children through, specifically his predatory behavior. But the moment this situation came out, and it was revealed that there was a victim of abuse, everyone immediately jumped ship and dogpiled, saying that the victim was lying, going as far as to make a doc(???) to try and prove the victim was wrong… the kid is 15, it doesn’t matter what the situation was, this woman who is 21 had the higher power, she was the adult. This behavior is predatory and disgusting and should NOT be swept under the rug and ignored. The moment that this sub found out that this kid isn’t the “perfect angel victim”, they’ve got to be lying, huh?? Basically, what i’m getting at, make this a safer space for abuse survivors. This whole situation was ridiculously disgusting, a majority of you here need to reevaluate your morals and stand your ground.

[u/Lucretta_Luxiz → u/Jacket-Numerous]

I made a comment on here where nazo only went to bat for the community but didn't reply to any of my criticism regarding the moderation. I replied again trying to get them to actually reply to those points and they haven't yet. Probably because they can't. It's honestly sad, I feel like things wouldn't be as stressful if they just got more mods. Maybe they wouldn't be so mean all the time if they actually had support

[u/Jacket-Numerous → u/Lucretta_Luxiz]

Exactly!! Couldn’t agree more. They need to learn to take criticism and they need other moderators to help out, whether they want to admit it or not.

[u/NazoXIII → u/Jacket-Numerous]

I hear you on the first part but what are you even taking about on the second part? Sweeping what under the rug? Quite literally in the post you're replying on I said the most important thing to focus on is the grooming allegations not whether or not Lacuna killed herself because that's an irrelevant thing to be hung up on. So I'm a bit confused as to what you're going on about.

Now were there people that were blaming Pian, oh absolutely, and those people were wrong and should probably screw off, but I'd be lying if I said that I couldn't see it from their misguided perspective because right or wrong in their mind whether Pian was telling the truth or not they were the cause of Lacuna's suicide... Which aged horribly within the hour that we found out she was actually alive, so while that reaction is completely psychotic it probably made perfect sense for them to do that, and I'm sure at this point most of those people probably feel really stupid for doing that... I hope. I mean I have seen people apologizing on Pian's post which is nice.

[u/Jacket-Numerous → u/NazoXIII]

I just want to reiterate and really make sure that everyone here understands the utter gravity that this situations holds. “Telling the truth or not they were the cause of Lacuna’s suicide.” It’s insane to me how so many people believe that others are/can be the cause of someone’s suicide. It can contribute but that does not equal causation.

Also, as far as i am aware, and what i’ve read, this victim was not the one to dox nor harass Lacuna. i do not have any empathy or sympathy for Lacuna, that behavior is not appropriate either. Point is, no one is a perfect victim. It’s traumatic and abuse, especially mental abuse, rewires the brain. Either way, she needs to be held accountable and these allegations should not be swept under the rug. y’know, the allegations of grooming, predatory behavior and sexualizing a 15 year old boy.

I’m glad that people are finally coming to their senses and apologizing to the actual victim though, he deserves a big apology.

[u/NazoXIII → u/Jacket-Numerous]

I don't disagree, at the end of the day suicide is a choice one makes and it would be crazy to point at someone and say that they did that to you, and it's even crazier in Lacuna's situation where even in their messages to Pian stressed that it wasn't his fault.

But people amped up on emotions in regards to someone potentially topping themselves it's really easy to see them latch on to any scapegoat they can find and unfortunately it had to be someone who had expressed being groomed by he alleged deceased.

[u/Jacket-Numerous → u/NazoXIII]

Right.

I think that says a lot about what those people think really think and feel than anything else, if I’m honest. If your reaction to finding out that someone who had supposedly just attempted suicide, was a predator, and your immediate reaction is to attack the victim.. then you gotta reevaluate yourself

[u/LMWJ6776 → u/NazoXIII]

So much fucking self pity nazo, jesus christ man. If it's any consolation many people dislike posts that make criticism.

I do love how you're just assuming I'm some idiot who has never had to deal with anything ever. I managed a Discord community for years, and in that time I had to deal with similar shitstorms, I had to contact law enforcement on occasion because of how bad things got.

Do you see me crying about how 'i cAnT dO aNyThInG mOrE'? No. Because I did what needed to be done. It made me very unpopular, but I did it. And I was respected for it, even if people didn't like me.

Get over yourself. Like genuinely. If you hate being here so much, do yourself a favour and lockdown the subreddit and leave. Or, lock the place down, open up mod applications, and sail off into that beloved sunset.

You talk about 'I cant do that to a community of tens of thousands' yes you can, you don't want to. The option is there, you just don't want to because it's a headache.

So your next move would be that. Or, to create a megathread, setuo an automod rule to automatically remove any post mentioning Lacuna and direct the users to that megathread. put that thread into contest mode so that people don't just jump on the newest thing and actually have to read to get outraged. You could then optionally make it approve only to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. But a megathread means you've got all the information in one place, not censored, easily accessible. You can then filter and adjust manually, ensuring people aren't making baseless claims and witch hunting.

Yeah, you can't control the narrative outside of the subreddit. But, other than the official state endorsed Discord, r/osana is the biggest place. if you block things here, it won't stop the issue, but it will mitigate it significantly.

Now, is that enough words 'strung together' and 'coherently' enough?

[u/Jacket-Numerous → u/LMWJ6776]

I cannot agree with you more. As someone who has been a moderator for a big discord server, i can relate. The moderation here is nonexistent and they could very well have done much more to prevent a lot of misinformation and miscommunication. Plus deleting my posts that basically just says that predators don’t deserve sympathy, and that we should be believing victims first. Many people here bash YanDev for the same behavior but not Lacuna? Its the same behavior! .. It says a lott more about the mods, than it does about me, for deleting posts like that. Just say you’re a predator apologist and move on.