“But deciding a person Does Not Warrant Punishment frequently means a person is deemed "in the clear" or "Good" in the same way deciding a person Does Warrant Punishment often means a person is "bad (for the community)." Both remove room for conversation and growth.”
I’ve never seen someone quite put this into words before, but she’s dead right. This is something that has bothered me for years, especially when it comes to discussing harmful things done by staff members that perhaps don’t technically break the rules. This sort of black and white thinking makes it near impossible to talk about the way a person was harmed by someone held in high regard by the community, and ignores the simple fact that sometimes humans are nice to certain people and incredibly shitty towards others, and your experiences might not match someone else’s.
“Plagiarism is frequently not the result of a person maliciously trying to steal someone else's glory, but it often is something more simple; a simple misunderstanding about where artistic boundaries lie.”
I feel like this is correct. If the SCP Wiki is meant to be a place for people to improve their writing skills and learn from criticism, getting a permaban for an accidental case of plagiarism isn’t going to help someone improve, it’s more likely to frustrate them or just make them give up. If the immediate thought is to jump to disciplinary action than to try to figure out why the problem occurred, there’s no room for anyone to learn. I get that no one wants another SCP-173, but the extreme response isn’t really deserved.
“What is a conversation worth having is whether the interpersonal conflicts reflected here could have been resolved in a way that valued both members of the community, as opposed to pitting them against each other in an adversarial manner.”
“Many issues can be solved not by contrasting people's needs against each other or else simply disciplining both, but addressing that these two individuals may have differing needs and that these needs come into conflict in the space.”
I actually had many forms of this conversation with people throughout 2020 and over time I’ve increasingly come to agree with it. Conflict in the SCP community can be incredibly toxic. There is a huge problem of users blocking each other rather than talking out their issues because they’re scared shitless of their interpersonal conflict being screenshoted and passed around to dozens of other people, or worse, in the hands of the Disciplinary Team. And when conflict does become public property, people feel pressured to take sides pretty quickly, to the detriment of, like, everyone. I won’t lie, I’m guilty of doing stuff like this a few times. I thought I was being brave, or doing a good thing; in reality I was being immature, and just as pathetic were the grown-ass adults around me who in hindsight were probably thinking “how can I use these other people’s conflict to make myself look good?”
Even when it is necessary to report abusive or rule-breaking behavior, the process feels very cold. After making your argument to someone who might be a total stranger, you have to sit and wait for one or both people to receive judgement. It’s not healthy, and all it really does is make people paranoid and miserable.
“But, for example, banning a couple pedophiles and abusers did not make the site's capacity for grooming and abuse just go away.....”
“Another big issue with retributive approaches is that they presume that when an individual is banned from a space, they are not a part of the community of that space for as long as they are banned; the Problem has been successfully Excised. It is clear this is not the case. Banned individuals still participate in community spaces adjacent to the site, meaning that patterns of problematic behavior are not stopped by bans but merely localized somewhere else nearby. Banning a person may even frequently cause an escalation of a conflict to a political level.”
These are things that are definitely a big issue. From an outside perspective, not enough has been done to address the reasons why the SCP community has an issue with sexual harassment and predatory behavior. It’s not something that can be permanently solved by banning enough abusers (not that this shouldn’t happen), it’s a cultural problem and one that leaves room for more predators to replace the old ones. All large communities have to deal with this issue eventually, but there are steps that they can take to make it harder for people in positions of popularity or influence to take advantage of it.
It’s also true that a lot of the people who get banned for predatory behavior continue to exist in other places. Before the Anti-Harassment Team started writing more detailed reasonings in their ban thread, bans for serious things like grooming, abuse, and stalking were described using vague language like “harassment case” and “unacceptable behavior”. This made it incredibly easy for groomers to run off to small Discord servers, other communities like RPC, or keep in contact with the community through other means, all while lying about what actually happened. I’ve seen this happen a few different times, and in two cases I actually had to intervene to get predators banned, one of which involved an NSFW server. And many times, this re-igniting of the situation did result in direct harassment or hostility towards victims. I think in 2019 and 2020, I and many others overly-celebrated the banning of people we hated because we were so pessimistic that nothing would be done. In reality, it was more like a partial solution. Perhaps this sort of thing would have worked better several years ago when almost everyone in the SCP community was using IRC. Now that a ton of people are more active on Discord, it’s not that simple. I’m not really sure what the actual solution should be, but I do agree that there needs to be a greater focus on de-escalation and healing, considering this problem.
