This is fabulous to hear. I’m glad you’re here and what you describe means a bazillion times more to me than a version of the democratic exchange of ideas that means protecting users’ ability to denigrate others while facing no consequences.
(I haven’t much gone in for writing reviews and I don’t think I said anything at the time, but I was really impressed by the weird and original setting in Sweetpea and the way the continued and carefully paced surprises in its revelation kept me unsettled, contributing to a strong tone.)
This rings a bell, but I can’t say I remember it for sure! Certainly it’s good to see the drama ended well and, well, the community remains. It’s so tough to predict when any sort of conflict will help us grow & it’s always nice when people don’t rules-monger and at least make some sort of concessions.
I’m gonna be really nitpicky and say you deserved (and got) civility but not flat-out indulgence. And I don’t think you were looking for flat-out indulgence! I mean, there was someone else I’ve half-forgotten who wrote a bunch of works that were basically one choice, and they came out in favor of sensible politics, but there was nothing more to say. They gave up eventually.
Also, this may be logic chopping–and I suspect we may agree generally on the point–but it’s something I’m sensitive to bringing up, as I’ve had people tell me I didn’t quite earn their civility when, in fact, I did, as all people do by default, and we have to be pretty bad to lose that. (These people also wanted more than civility from me. Funny how that happens.)
In general I find it a pain when internet communities try to go in for any sort of hazing. I’m grateful when it’s absent and at the same time it was an eye-opener to me to see that, yes, some people appointed themselves to the role of not just hazer but someone who hazes people who’ve been there longer than they have. (See: twitter trolls who DM and are way more emboldened now.)
Also re: other social media platforms, I thought it was hilarious that the people in charge never considered the possibility someone could creatively troll them. Reading about people who got banned from there was hilarious for a bit, but eventually it becomes just another stunt that distracts us from, you know, doing what we want.
I didn’t expect this thread to turn into one of the nicest to grace these boards, but here we are! Let me just say that you’re a lovely bunch of people and I truly appreciate the opportunity to interact with you in this place. Thanks to the mods too!
I’ve been hanging around the IF scene since around 2003/2004. Most periods had something going for them. The early years, when the community was focused around rec.arts.int-fiction usenet group, were strong in terms of joint theorising. Then around 2010 there was an age of great blogs. But right now, we have the best reviews we’ve ever had (the amount of great IF Comp reviews being written now is amazing) and also by far the most friendly community. There were always a lot of friendly people, of course, but the usenet groups always had some jerks; the blogs were isolated; and the early years of this forum had less moderation, more jerks, and more people struggling against the diversifying of IF. Current times are great times!
I can vouch for niceness. It still didn’t endear me, though. For some reason, I’m on a different, yet invisible, bandwidth that’s different from anybody else that caused my topics to be regularly hijacked and turned into something else.
Anyway, my definition of gatekeeping is to keep the community to a few, select elites, keeping newcomers to stop interacting after awhile. So, look for the ratio of new/old members to increase/stagnates, and there you find the answer whether or not there’s elitism gatekeeping.
This forum isn’t for everyone. I’ve heard people complain that we don’t have a lot of off-topic discussion or general personal discussions that often drives a lot of traffic to sites. While we don’t discourage that (we have an Off-Topic category) most people are here for the shop talk and appreciate that as a feature not a bug. There exist so many other places online for discussion about random subjects or world events and general chit-chat, at least for now it’s a good thing that diversifies us from every other corner of the web. (Some have even called this site “boring” and that’s fine because you don’t need to sort so much wheat from chaff like on those high-traffic sites that love posting memes.)
That’s also why we don’t generally discuss the nitty-gritty of Choice of Games a whole lot - they have their own dedicated forum that is way more active than ours. Similar situation for Visual Novels, though we’d love to talk about them, there are better places online to do that. And Quest games; we appreciate them and they get entered in comps, but most of that tech discussion happens on texadventures.co.uk where all the Quest system devoted fans and creators are.
I don’t know anywhere else with such resources, assistance, and archived content - specifically about parser games and old-school text adventures, and more recently Twine after the Twinery forums became inviable, and our other niche development systems that aren’t trafficked enough to hold their own elsewhere. This forum is an active, solid resource for IF creators and fans whose questions might get lost or overlooked on a Discord server or on Reddit.
So it always surprises me that people think we’re “gatekeeping”; people who appreciate what we offer hang around, others who might not wander off somewhere else and that’s fine. That’s a community evolving naturally moreso than someone standing at a velvet rope deciding who gets heard as some kind of gatekeeper. If someone posts an off-the-wall topic that nobody can really contribute to and which doesn’t get replies, that’s not due to any type of active censoring, that’s just natural selection if the community has nothing constructive to contribute.
The only thing we really “censor” is spam. You can’t advertise shoes or offer to write people’s PhD thesis for them. (Oh god, the drone spam we kept getting for a while…) We also tend to shun “drive by” advertisements for games - even if IF adjacent somehow. Someone makes a new account and their first post without reading any of the forum is a long shill for their commercial game (that has dialogue trees between shooting so of course it’s IF!) and multiple links to purchase on Steam with no obvious intention of actually hanging around and discussing that game. We’d prefer to promote actual IF games by our longstanding community members. Exceptions or course for someone like…if Steve Meretzky made a new game we’d be all over that. Or when Inkle makes something new - even though they don’t specifically participate regularly here, they rose up in the history of IF.
That did turn into a bit of a pile-on of “you don’t want to do that.” It was polite, and I think it was supportive, and some of the responses did help get the poster where they wanted to go. (In particular kudos to Daniel Stelzer for writing a whole extension!)
However, I can see that if you’re already in a misery about this forum those threads could look like a coordinated effort to reject a new idea.
Our user base fortunately has enough experience to be able to sometimes ask “are you sure you want to re-invent the wheel instead of just using a wheel?” if they know there are potentially other methods to make a project easier. I’d hope people understand that brainstorming outside the box instead of just directly answering a specific question is usually a constructive suggestion and not necessarily criticism, “Why the hell are you doing it this way…?”
It’s akin to the time at work I was trying to keep track of stats in a Word document by creating tables and doing calculations manually until someone looked what I was doing and went “Hey, have you heard of Excel?”
DISCLAIMER: I am very sleep-deprived today, so there’s a chance I went off-topic. I did my best, though.
Honestly, I feel like this forum definitely has an atmosphere that suggests a certain standard of behavior.
It does seems to boil down to three rules:
Avoid cursing, or keep it to a minimum.
Do not attack other users.
Nearly any topic is up for discussion, as long as it is formatted to keep wandering readers in mind, in case they choose to bail before the discussion gets too intense.
(And I managed to pick up on these, despite my difficulties with autism!)
I’m also going to call these “observed rules” because I don’t think they’re written down, but they are the patterns that I’ve put together after reading a bunch of posts.
The presence of observed rule 3 honestly tells me that there isn’t really any censorship on this forum at all. It comes down to how you structure what you’re trying to say, and I feel like the point of censorship would be to block the transmission of an idea, and not the format of the idea.
I also feel like observed rules 1 and 2 are pretty straightforward to follow.
Honestly, I only have difficulty with observed rule 1, because anyone who knows me irl can attest that I cuss a lot (it’s not exactly a habit; I’ll say “heck” and stuff too, but I’m a person who feels really intense emotions and will use the language that fits the magnitude). It also comes up a lot when I’m writing; my characters go full-on Avasarala pretty often when under stress, and my plot puts them under frequent stressors.
Also, while people generally can write posts with curse words here (infrequently), I mean to say my usual rate of cursing would break that rule, in all likelihood. I actually have to double-check everything I write here to make sure I’m using a civil tone, and then again to make sure my social disability isn’t letting me leave accidental passive-aggression anywhere.
But again, I’d be happy to hold myself to this standard anyway; I’m not doing this because I fear a mod or anything.
It also must be considered that some fraction of people who post and then leave are either socially-overwhelmed (which I almost was, at first), or are either experimenting with IF or doing IF as a one-off project. Also, some people write a question and then get their answer, and the transaction is then complete and they feel no reason to keep posting, because they’re used to doing things alone (which was me after my very first post here).
Internet communities will have a lot of transient users, especially for a forum that is a resource hub for a fairly technical and accessible subject. It’s not exactly a social networking site.
However, I’m not claiming that this explains away your valid observation, but it’s worth considering that a good chunk of what you observe might boil down to this, and not active alienation. I’d be hesitant to say there’s zero alienation, though (that would be a bold claim), but if there is alienation, it’s certainly not intentional and likely stems from being socially-overwhelmed in some form.
You can have an extremely welcoming community that does everything it can to avoid alienation, but the reality I have lived as someone with autism shows that the simple act of forming a community creates an obstacle that others might find intimidating or difficult to access. That’s just the core of human socialization, but if you remove that, then you no longer have a forum. At best, it’ll be Omegle for the IF crowd.
(This is also something that is really hard to explain to people, because it tends to be counter-intuitive. “How can I be alienating or gatekeeping when I am going out of my way to be friendly and welcoming?” To most people this seems impossible, but it’s just the side-effect of existing as a group of people. It’s just a problem that can worsen, though, if not kept in check.)
More-or-less: I have a huge amount of personal demons that make any form of socializing and community participation extremely difficult to do, and I’m also a relatively new member who came here for help, originally, and the came back to participate.
There could absolutely be a gatekeeping effect, but this forum absolutely does its best to mitigate it, and the fact that I’m still here can speak to that, because it really doesn’t take much for me to feel like I’m in the outgroup or don’t belong.
I’m just one data point, though, but I’m also the ideal, low-threshold victim for this sorta thing.
The only reason why everyone hasn’t heard from me for a bit is because I got caught up playing Deep Rock Galactic, and I’m also writing a novel, so I haven’t been working on a lot of IF lately, lmao. Oops. I’ve still been checking in pretty often, though!
Shohreh Aghdashloo also has that 2-packs-a-day-for-30-years gravelly delivery that lends some satisfying earthiness to her epithets. It hits in a similar way as Robert Shaw’s portrayal of Quint in Jaws.
Two floating thoughts: first, I agree with Victor’s comment about the general decency here very much and wanted. This isn’t especially controversial, but I’ve realized many places on the Internet are, indeed, horrible, and there have probably been a lot of times I forgot, when I did a google search, got an answer I wanted, and immediately said “yay this answer, but yikes to the community.” But places like this (and it’s not the only place) have been very good at helping me address what I want or like and what I should from others. It’s even helped with stuff in the past, where I thought back to people who seemed nice on paper but turned out to be overbearing jerks or they covertly pushed my buttons.
I also am glad there are some bumpers on what questions to ask in the technical forums. Often it’s forced me to look just a bit deeper, and it’s rewarding to figure stuff out on my own, stuff I know I should’ve known, and I feel confidence the questions I ask here are good ones.
To add to the XKCD graphic which Hanon attached (and it’s been a nice catalyst in my understanding free speech issues, whether that be bigotry or merely a coworker who needs to yack an hour a day in the lunchroom, but I can shift my schedule to avoid them) I’d like to add Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, which many people probably know already, but it puts certain things in perspective. Though the Internet may have oversimplified it, at heart it’s a relief to know that, indeed, failing to tolerate stuff that drives me (and probably others) nuts, long-term or short-term, or even pushing back against it in the “c’mon, dawg” sense, does not in fact make me intolerant. And it’s fun to explore the whys and hows and see how there are, indeed, soft boundaries against intolerance or general bad behavior.
Second, the word “elitist” has always been funny for me. We want welcoming communities, but on the other hand, there are communities where I seemed like I’d be a good fit on paper, but I wasn’t. And it wasn’t because people were being elitist. It’s just, this is how people behave around here, and this is what they enjoy. So in this way, exclusion can be quite good if it’s not heavy handed, and the sooner we move on the better, so we can find something we like. For instance, I’ve visited a lot of political forums (and stayed too long) where I agreed on the issues, but Lordy, I stepped back and realized I didn’t like anyone there.
But then again I’ve been called an elitist for, well, not joining in talks about how stupid person X is, or whatever, or for wanting to keep to myself at the athletic club. I’ve had coworkers and classmates tell me I was being elitist for avoiding a conversation when, in fact, I felt like I couldn’t add to the laughs, and I was in a serious mood and figured I might even bring the conversation down.
So “elitist” has sort of lost its meaning for me over the years!
I certainly find socializing tricky at times but I think it’s also nice to be able to come back here and gave a say after a few months, or to ask a question and not worry too much how silly it is. And it’s nice to be able to sit and think on a message before sending it, and to know that others in the forum have likely done the same thing.
Certainly I’ve been in other forums where there are in-jokes that have built up over the years, and when I stepped in, I was a bit confused and didn’t belong 100%. But a weird thing happened–I couldn’t ask for all of them, but the ones I wanted to stay at, I was able to google the in-jokes and find enough to get by. In the meantime, even if I didn’t know the Really Good Stuff, there was enough to keep me going. And there are forums where I maybe feel I only 50-75% belong, but they are very worth even partially belonging in.