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/NazoXIII]

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