• 2 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • They’re not sealioning, they’re responding to a bunch of strong, reasonably insulting allegations. Maybe not responding gracefully, but they’re not sealioning.

    In fact, I don’t even think it’s possible for one reply to be sealioning, the whole point is that it’s repetitive harassment (as stated in the wiki link you posted). That’s why the original comic strip that defined it has so many panels.






  • Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.

    There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn’t staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don’t read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn’t a general unthemed instance for everyone. It’s broad, but not ‘reddit’ broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source

    Edit: I realize this may come off as “why aren’t other people doing more things!”. I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I’m not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we’re seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming ‘reddit but here’.








  • Haha Xonotic is a blast to drop into, and the online community were great (partly because they want new players to stay ;), one even taught me how to properly use the grappling rope in CTF online mid-game. I’m more used to Call of Duty ‘run-and-gun’ gameplay than Halo or anything with more tactical movement, so someone experienced in this kind of game would have even more fun. It’s worth pointing out that all the games I mentioned (and it’s only partly coincidence) are Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) which is community developed rather than commercially developed, similarly to Lemmy, Mastodon and others.

    Alright here’s a quick rant for you:

    The SuperTuxKart situation is a bit annoying, in mid-2019, a large chunk of the core staff stood down or left, including the lead, the co-project leader for 10 years and the social media manager. Two new leaders were elected (Alayan and Benau), and in the next couple of years Alayan has apparently disappeared.

    Benau is a good dev, but not a good people person. They often give trollish replies in the main chat room antagonizing people who are reasonably annoyed and then laughing at them, I’ve seen them call two different volunteers ‘trolls’ and alienate them, people who very obviously weren’t malicious and did nothing but politely suggest actually useful and applicable improvements or contribute amateurish addons and ask why one wasn’t approved. Add on top of that randomly posting Musk and Donald Trump reaction stickers constantly in regular conversation. And the icing on the cake is that they’re too dismissive of suggestions to accommodate to artist who are less technically experienced. They’ll accept merge requests if someone has volunteered and made those technical or documentation improvements ready to add, sure, but it’s about a 0 on their priority list. And this isn’t trivial, it’s probably the critical important task: I’ve talked to an industry professional 3D artist and teacher who couldn’t get the tools working and was unable to contribute after (allegedly, I don’t know the details) not getting any help in the chat room. With the improvements later made by someone else to the tool setup process, this person probably would have made the major, much requested improvements they had set out to make (like the redesigned overworld map).

    Now, look, Benau is a bit stressed handling more roles than they should have, and that probably doesn’t help, but they’re the lead decision maker for a lot of things and very active in the chat and feedback channel so they’re important when it comes to people’s impression and experience. It’s toxic to behave like this in a room for a family-oriented game. I mean, it would be toxic for a FPS too, but I’d just expect better from this genre of game. And when you’re a volunteer driven project, that can be enough to kill it. There’s certainly lost potential when experienced artists leave.








  • I came over about a year ago. Reddit has had big issues for a while, so I was lurking through alternative frontends, and when I learned a Fediverse alternative was getting pretty decent, I felt an obligation to help make it happen. I might have come from lurking on /r/piracy when they started banning piracy more actively.

    Ultimately reddit is a for-profit capitalist venture. Has been from the very start, and that profit motive has directly driven it further from the userbase year after year. Advertising, badges, money-grabs, abusive staff, blocking high-quality communities, API blockages, all this was basically inevitable and it’s only going to get worse.