There's been some misinformation going around, so I thought I would set the record straight. There's a lot of groundless/baseless rumors. Since this is my page and I do what I want, I'm going to clarify my actions/thought process.
Doreen Ford and I were roommates from roughly fall of 2016 to March of 2019. We stopped speaking to one another around September of 2019 until I did an interview with them for a local publication called Manchester Ink Link regarding the Antiwork subreddit. Whether they consulted other moderators or users of the sub at the time, I don't know. There's too much content to parse through except for the most exhaustive researcher.
The interview went well. The piece ended up in the top 10 trending stories on the website for several days in a row. Subsequently, I have continued to write for this publication while my work has also appeared in another local newspaper, the Concord Monitor. The interview was by no means a show of favoritism or nepotism since, as I said, we weren't in regular contact for some time. I am uncertain whether we could still be called friends but, at the very least, we remained on friendly terms.
There are rape and sexual assault allegations going around about this person. I would like to preface my remarks by saying I find rape, sexual assault, and sexual harrassment unacceptable. I knew there was something in their past they were ashamed of, which weighed heavily on them. However, I chose not to inquire but to instead respect their privacy. I also chose not to go to the police because I did not know the victim and was not certain if this person would be comfortable with such.
I was a moderator for a while in Antiwork, dating from perhaps 2017 to 2019. Various circumstances forced me to commit my time elsewhere, and I was removed for a lack of activity. I was not aware of any Fox News interview or the reaction thereupon until I logged in to the Antiwork sub a few days and saw what a mess users had made of it.
Whether Doreen deserved to be removed or not, whether charges should be pressed against them or not, whether they should face consequences for their behavior or not, I could not tell you. There was a facebook message they wrote; I have not read it, nor do I intend to. As I have been unable to contact them, possibly because their discord account was deleted, the matter is closed as far as I'm concerned. I have nothing more to do with it.
I volunteered to be a moderator in for Antiwork Friday evening. I do not have any alternate accounts, and have only used this one. Frankly, I don't feel always logging in and out of different things. One is enough. This period lasted for about four hours, during which time I banned people and deleted threads, left, right, and center. There was concern trolling going on, which I believe was intended not to raise questions or begin discussions, but simply to de-legitimize the sub itself. Since then, more people have been banned. Regularly, the main reddit site mods respond to one of my reports saying they have taken disciplinary action or given a warning against an individual found to be in non-compliance with the site's behavioral expectations and rules.
I do not regret banning so many people. I regret having to resign as early as I did so I couldn't ban more. I resigned because the other moderators felt uncomfortable having a connection to Doreen in authority, a point I find reasonable enough to agree with. Some will say I have been banned; I have not. Others will say I've had my access restricted; as far as I know, this is not the case.
There's a cancer at the heart of the Antiwork subreddit at the moment. It's a cancer that should be excised immediately, as soon as is practically possible. There are a group of users, regular people or sock puppet accounts I cannot tell, who have come en masse simply to troll, disrupt, inflame, and distract everyone as much as possible from the usual goings-on in the sub.
Their goal is not to seek a resolution of a conflict, but simply to express concern over wrongs, real or imagined, whether such issues have already been taken care of or not. It is called concern trolling. At times, this has taken the form of emotional abuse towards moderators, many of whom have since quit due to the stress of being raked over the coals for a volunteer position. Many of them were simply trying their best during a difficult situation.
One positive I've seen come out of this has been an assertion of transgender rights on the sub, something that perhaps wasn't prevalent before. Or, at least, it wasn't quite so noticeable. Bigots and trolls will continue to out themselves for who they are, no matter how unsafe or unwelcome they may make others feel.
There are several flaws in reddit's design as a website that have allowed this to occur. The first and foremost is the inability to make the sub an invite-only page subject to moderator approval. Doing so would allow moderators to search through a user's history to find anything which may or may not be objectionable. Though, at 1.7 million users and rising, it's unclear whether this would be logistically feasible.
There is not an option, naturally built in, to select moderators of any sub by election. With the inability to screen out new users during a time of voting, it's possible to have new people flood in en masse to disrupt the voting process. This would elect moderators who may not be representative of what the sub stands for. In other words, it's a recipe to torpedo a subreddit entirely- if handled incorrectly.
Those who insist on moderator elections do so in bad faith. Their goal is simply to cast aspersions on the current team of volunteers in the hopes that new ones will come along who will behave better. So far, as near as I can see, running people off who have put in years of their lives to help the sub grow and prosper has solved nothing and changed very little, fundamentally.
The message of antiwork remains roughly the same in that no one actually knows what it really is. Do we want fewer working hours? Do we want to abolish work completely? Do we simply want better conditions on the job? Each person will probably have a different answer. I think there's room for everyone to figure out what antiwork means for them- just so long as it doesn't include excoriating, harrassing, humiliating, and trolling people who were not otherwise involved in the initial controversy in the first place.
Yes, trolls, I see you reading this post. And if you made it all the way to the end, please for the love of cacti, get fucked and get out.
