Hi, everybody. Jeff’s post talks a lot about FYAD, what happened there and what he’d like to see happen moving forward. I don’t have anything to say about that. I do have something to say about another point that he touched upon. He touched on it only briefly because it is not the main item under discussion here, but I think that it is a crucial piece of information. While potentially crucial, it is also actually really painful and upsetting to talk about so I am unlikely to stay for questions and discussion after this post. I’m sorry. I hope you’re all doing well and I care about you all a lot.
This is going to be a lot of words, and I’m sorry. It is really important to me and so I have to express it right. I don’t even know how to start the actual meat of this post so I’ll just start: There is another reason December and the handling of December was such a shitshow. It was an opportunity. What happened – was about to happen – was clearly something new, something bad, something big, and a few vocal mod team members saw this as a chance to leverage more power, influence, and visibility both within the moderation/administration team and over the site as a whole, served up on a golden platter. I don’t know if securing an adminship was the goal from day one or something that occurred to them later, but when the posts that set everything off surfaced those voices immediately seized control of the narrative: FYAD was actively doxxing and harassing trans posters, the admins were doing nothing, the admins didn’t care, the admins weren’t going to do anything, if the admins intended to act they would have done it by now. Fixing this was all up to the mods and the admins were going to regret their cowardice. The problem with this narrative – merit of content aside – is that it hit the mod forum like a hurricane and it did so less than eight hours after the initial posts were uncovered. It was truly immediate. I remember this beyond a shadow of a doubt. When I left for work the morning of December 9th there was no knowledge or discussion of this problem in the mod forum. By the time I got home admin blood was in the water and the waters were frenzied because the admins were doing nothing, would do nothing, would never do more than nothing. We were on the back foot to start, and the mods with power in their sights knew it and never relented on their advantage. This is not to say the entire mod team had an agenda: far from it. But the members that did were forceful, charismatic, and blazed with righteous fury. New admins were needed, better admins, admins that did care and would raze FYAD to the ground immediately (which was, of course, the obvious solution so why hadn’t it happened yet?). The mods with the agenda knew just the person. Other moderators joining the discussion on that first day saw the problem in FYAD, saw trusted team members on the attack and admins – newly home, newly aware to the situation, new to the realization they were under assault – faltering in panic and confusion, and deduced the former was in the right. There was never a rolling snowball; the ringleaders pointed and the avalanche dropped. And then, over the next three weeks, it didn’t stop dropping. Any moderators who sensed the agenda in the air or who simply thought their colleagues were being cruel and unfair and tried to step up for us was shouted down and labeled enemy. Not all of the moderators were swept up in bloodlust, but within the first couple days it became clear anybody who tried to poke their head up for us was going to make several powerful enemies and when Jeff and I were deposed of they’d probably be next. A couple of the mods kept at it but they too were forced into surrender. The only voices the admins heard, anywhere they turned, everywhere we turned, were the angry ones, led by people who were not about to let this anger drop off, amplified by people who honestly thought they were fighting injustice.
Calling it a hostile environment is so understated it could be laughable. Anything we did was not enough. There were dozens, scores if not hundreds of probations, bans, permabans – starting from night one. The voices in the mod forum repeatedly told the forums we were doing “nothing.” We all worked full time jobs. We all had lives and duties outside of the forums. We were all spending every spare moment trying to fix or solve or help or even just stem the bleeding of this crisis. This was not respected, it was not a factor, it did not matter. We weren’t doing enough, we weren’t doing it fast enough, we were doing the wrong things. We were overwhelmed and overstressed and being attacked on all sides and by this point the stress and hostility and constant, constant assumptions of malice and bad faith behind any action we took had shaken us so badly we were tripping on our own feet and grabbing desperately at air. Just a couple weeks after the crisis started Jeff and I were the only remaining admins: the others had stepped down or been forced out, not due to their own mistakes but because they could not handle the unrelenting, intensely personal hostility being leveled at us.
I say that they could not handle it. This is not an insult, not a slight. I am not maligning them nor belittling them. What happened behind the scenes in December was and is the worst thing that ever happened to me on these forums and if I had been smart I would have stepped down too. Not because of the angry, frightened userbase. Not because of FYAD. But because these mods – the ringleaders as well as the good-intentioned followers – were people that I had been working with for years, people I can honestly say I had never done anything bad to, people that I always assumed the best of, people that I considered friends, and all it took was the span of one work day for them to prove I was a stupid, stupid, naïve fucking person to always assume the best in people, because people had no interest in assuming the best of me, not matter how hard I tried, no matter what the character I had shown in the past. I had two nervous breakdowns that month. I was pulled aside by a colleague for a suicide check. After work I would go to my boyfriend’s apartment and just cry for an hour and a half and then go home and go back to the hostility and the anger and the bad faith and the hatred. I say the former admins couldn’t handle it but I couldn’t fucking handle it either. I should have stepped down too. I am glad I didn’t, because then the person that did all this would have been rewarded with the admin position they wanted and, when Jeff and I hung in there, wanted badly enough to call Lowtax and directly ask him for. But I fucking should have.
Shit sucked all over the forums but I am guessing it was not common knowledge how bad it also sucked behind the scenes. And what knowledge there was of that, well, that was a narrative too. The admins were bigots. The admins were Nazis. The admins were transphobes. FYAD was doxxing trans people and the admins refused to say so.
No: the admins were two humans, two goddamn humans just like all the rest of you, who were struggling to handle a monumental crisis on their own. Two humans that were being actively undercut and sabotaged by the exact people meant to be their allies. Allies – “allies” – whose aggressive fearmongering began as compassion but rapidly morphed into incredible, indiscriminate destruction, destruction with a motive, destruction that accomplished only one of its goals but irreversibly damaged this site, its community relationships, and many, many, many of its individual, human members.
Now that I have said all this, I will continue to say it is not a cry to pity me or pity us. I know it is a lot of words and I’m honestly sorry. I’m not saying we, or I, should be excused for the mistakes we made handling FYAD and the accusations leveled against it and its users, or even forgiven, if you, reader, have yet to forgive us for those mistakes. But I am saying, telling you, bitterly fucking telling you, things would not have turned out the way they did if the fear and anger surrounding FYAD and transphobia had not been seized by certain people as their anvil to strike. That anvil was very, very hot, way fucking hotter than the smiths had thought, and we all got fucking burned. Not just the admins, not just the mods former and current, but the users, the site reputation, the trust between users and mods and mods and admins, all of those, all of that.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, I am not going to stay for question or comment, and it is unlikely I will even continue to follow this thread; I am sorry. I know that this choice reeks of cowardice. But I trusted the good intentions of the mod team completely, and I had for years, and being broken over their knee hurt my heart in a way I still can’t describe eight goddamn months later. This is only the second time I’ve really managed to talk about it. I took some alprazolam before even starting this post and another during. I don’t even know if they’re helping. I know I should be over this but I’m not.
Whether or not the Xanax helped, I did start this post, and I even managed to finish it. I did it because I think it is relevant to the discussion of FYAD, its deletion and return, and everything else that happened and how the admins handled it. So there it is. Thank you for reading it, if you did. If you don’t believe me that is okay but I really, really hope you do. It is all true and I have the damage to prove it.
