I dont want to throw the discussion off here so I am going to go quiet again here after answering it but its the same answer as above.
We actually have been trying to bring on more people to help with moderation, but it takes a long time properly find and vet people. We start to get half way into the process then something comes up (usually at my day job) and it ends up getting dropped again.
Once again, doesn’t excuse it but that is the reason.
again everyone stay civil. We’re all on the same side here. No one wants a worse site. We just want to bring attention to some issues that have been around for awhile. There’s no need for any fighting or harassment of staff or other users. Emotions can run high when it’s something you’re passionate about and I myself was guilty of typing first and thinking later when making this thread so try not to make my mistake.
Hey, so - as someone who has been lurking on the site since around 2020, but doesn’t regularly come here anymore… and (more relevantly) someone who has experience modding multiple forums in the past? Here are my three simple notes on what’s going on here:
1.) Your site design and its current active use-case are in conflict. This is something other people have said, but it’s worth repeating. You’ve been talking about the main site for some time, and I understand that you are limited in the time required to bring it into fruition, but realistically you NEED to be looking for even a temporary solution to take over the promotional listings if you want this to function as a development forum instead of a marketplace. Right now the nature of “the purpose of a system is what it does” means that this forum is a sales platform, and it’s bad at that. Itch.io collections work better, a WordPress blog with submissions would work better, legitimately even taking the wiki and sectioning a chunk of it off for promo listings would be better than the current set-up - because it’s drowning any possible conversation about the development of games (which I’m presuming to be the intended purpose of the board, given the forum topic categories) in promotion of sales.
It being primarily a sales platform is also the main driver of most anti-social behavior on the forum, both because people are doing unethical things in efforts to make money and because people are treating everything as a potential monetary transaction instead of treating this as a community of people with a shared interest in games focusing on specific kinks. When I first joined, there were a whole lot of newcomers flooding in (because pandemic meant free time) and people were collaborating to solve development issues and contribute to one-anothers’ projects. That has really died away, and I think that’s partly due to it being buried in promotional posts and partly because the potential income from these projects has become a primary driver (and there really isn’t enough money in this sort of thing to spread around a team).
2.) You need to clarify what you want from this site, and review whether the structures and rules you have in place are supporting it. I mean, I’m seriously guessing that you want this forum to be used for development discussions instead of sales-pitches - because there is very little in the way of activity here to clearly prove it. There is the existence of the board topics and the FAQ statement:
This site is for discussing game design, fat and weight gain related content, and creating content around (though not limited to) fat and weight gain
And… that’s basically it. I can find tutorials if I use the site search, but they are few and far between. Most actual development questions are buried under the aforementioned tide of promo posts. Is this living up to your vision? I don’t think it is, and based on the huge number of complaints about the current state of things as they stand it seems as if there is a relatively broad consensus that something isn’t working here.
If it’s not working, it needs to change. You can change rules, but you can also change the surroundings to influence posting culture and offer alternative incentives to encourage other people to voluntarily do certain things instead of only acting to prevent. You can ban certain posts, but you can’t make people make posts - so if you want more development conversation or guides or shared assets or all the other stuff that makes overall development easier for everybody (and thus reduces the likelihood yet another person is going to opt for genAI+Twine)? You need to find ways to change the environment such that people feel like doing so. Since you’re already using Discourse as your software and that comes with badges, why not add some more admin/mod-awarded badges as a way of recognizing things you want to see more of? That probably won’t work for everybody, but it’s an example of something you can do to move the needle at least a little - and things need to change if you want the outcomes to change.
3.) Put forward what you like to see. I mean it. Your hands-off approach to moderation is probably significantly defined by time-limitation, but at least a good third of your energy should be spent positively rewarding stuff you want to see more of. Praise and engagement is workable for some things, but you have the ability to go further. As the people in charge of this place, your job is to curate it. And that means both pruning what needs to go and lifting up what counts in your eyes as “good content.” You can promote it, you can put your thumb on the scale for the things you want to encourage, and you SHOULD.
Put more of a spotlight on the Curated Projects. You’re putting a thumb on the scale with those already, might as well really make it clear what you like about them and how others can join the club. More than that, though? Promote things that are constructive to, but not bound directly into, a single project. As loose free-form brainstorming of possibilities (not all of which are likely to be feasible):
I’m sure there are other people with other ideas, but basically? If you want this to be a workshop and not a sales-floor, you desperately need to shift the environment. Right now it’s a digital flea market, and flea markets have grifters and counterfeiters and people arguing over whether something is worth five bucks or not. Presuming you don’t want all that? You need to change the risk/reward equation, and I personally strongly encourage carrot over stick. People avoid punishments, but that just means they try to weasel out of the specific wording or simply hide their actions; they actively seek rewards and accolades. It’s much easier to attract people to a method of behavior than it is to try and chase down everyone acting counter to it.
Sorry for the rant, the first two paragraphs are relying to your post, the later are my two cents
If your trying to give and Ai art some game credit that has shown its good you should have used Big Aspirations, the story there is good and the Ai art is decent and consistent, and the game was free to play with the paywall being only to play the next update a few weeks early and for bug testing. It also fully released its main story for free to play, now the paywall is to play the DLC updates that do get released after a 4-5 months which is a better track record over some other games here that have yet to see a devlog in over a year or two.
I though on your comment to just hire an artist for a project is from what I’ve seen of some games more of a risky gamble. I think some people don’t understand something in the world and that is this “you get what you paid for” and if its made by the lowest bidder then the quality will be shit[this more apply to something manufactured] if a game maker is getting art assets for free, they’re probably not going to be that great or will stay mostly as sketch place holders. If a artist does give away good art for free they tend to want to be part of the project to better help with art direction, but the problem there is sometimes the artist will leave the project and demand to take away all of their art assets with them or demand they get removed in fear of a lawsuit. That happened with the game Tower Princess [before is became a pay too much money for a character DLC slop]
The artist Gats was the main artist and lead art director for the game and at some point they stopped responding or passing direction to the rest of the art team. They were discovered to have moved on from the project and was re branding themselves and was starting to remove themselves from the fetish world. So they demanded that all of their art be removed regardless of tower princess having paid for it. It went as far as a lawsuit as tower princess still wanted to keep making the game and Gats claimed IP copyright. That is what I’m seeing with hiring an artist you get the risk of them possibly wanting their art removed from a project, so not only do game devs now lose the art assets for their game but also now wasted their money on those commissions. Even if you get a good artist that won’t try to claw back their art you sometimes have to pay an absurd price, I recall the Vale City game the dev needed to crowed share the cost for the art as each character art cost about $300USD per image or for 3 images, and that’s the biggest issue with artist, it the cost worth it for a game that now many want for free? hence pay walls and 10min demos.
My opinion with Ai art is this, I don’t care anymore its past the awkward age of dis-formed shapes and images, its now the newest form of art medium, and I think myself, Grim, and a couple who are still here might recall the big deal digital art made when it become available to the public and not major art studios or schools. The traditional artist community were in out cry from it as it made art easy and cheap, now people stopped paying $100-200 for a hand drawn and coloured image to at the time get a digital image for $50-75 and that digital art would take their jobs as they could do it faster. Now you can’t find anyone drawing on paper, its all digital with the lowest price being $50 for a flat colour image where in the past is was 5 flat colour images for $50.
What I hate seeing is the flood of Ai chat bots and this infinity world junk, its even lazier work as now they don’t even need to make a game or plot the AI does it all. If we just add Ai-tag and let those that don’t want to see Ai filter it out of their feed then lets do that. There are some decent games that rely on Ai art as they don’t have the skills of the finances to pay for an artist, even when they’ve finished that game, they won’t have the means to replace all of their Ai art with real art and would rather let that game die after that probation period.
I’m late to the party, but I guess I’ll still throw in my two cents.
The way the Gojicks situation has been handled is disappointing to me, honestly. Gojicks was quick to brush off the very real concerns about using real people’s pictures without their consent, and when people kept pressuring him about it, he became openly antagonistic and insulting. It should have been obvious that keeping him around would only lead to more trouble, but he was allowed to stay because… why, exactly? If he ever showed a more cooperative side to the staff, the rest of us didn’t get to see it, and his behavior since than has been nothing but spiteful and defiant. Keeping him around just because he technically hasn’t broken enough rules to get banned (somehow… that part alone boggles my mind) is only going to cause people to lose faith in the rules and leadership themselves, as proven by the existence of this topic.
And then the grievances against the leadership resulted in the topic of AI getting dragged out again… joy. I guess the anti-AI crowd has an extra gripe against the site leadership in that regard. Past discussions on this topic haven’t been very productive, though.
One thing I will note on the subject of AI is that while it’s true that it’s enabled the further proliferation of shovelware, that isn’t directly related to its ethical concerns. Rather, AI is just the latest tool that’s lowering the barrier to entry for game development. Before AI became the hot topic, people were still complaining about low-quality games, but they were blaming things like RPG Maker instead, as seen here and here. So yes, banning AI probably would stem the flow of shovelware and cash grabs to some extent, but only via gatekeeping, not by specifically targeting bad actors.
And to be clear, I don’t support an outright ban. Better categorization, certainly, but not a ban.
I haven’t been keeping a close count of how many people I’ve seen on each side in each of these debates in the past, but my general impression has always been that there’s a mixture of opinions, not an overwhelming majority calling for a total AI ban. (Of course, this is just me pitting anecdotes against anecdotes.) But if I did believe that the pro-AI crowd were a small minority, I would find it kind of distasteful to openly suggest that it’s okay to ban AI because we would “only” lose a few people.
Also…
(To be clear, I didn’t juxtapose two quotes from different posts. They were right next to each other like this.)
I’m sure you have your reasons for considering your own engagement with AI to be very different from using AI for a profile picture. Personally, I think that was a rather petty dig.
Yeah, as a user that is starting to stop frequently visiting this site, i noticed that as soon they allowed AI slop, everything started to fall apart really fast
I think AI is a unequivocally a real problem, and anyone who thinks it isn’t is either misinformed on the issues, actively doesn’t care about the very real problems with AI, or is a bad actor who actively has something to gain from trying to improve people’s opinions of it. (That one user trying to equate AI-hate with transphobia and ableism being a great example of the cheap tactics these people like to use. Let’s ignore all the trans and disabled artists being put out of jobs by AI as we speak, or having their art get stolen and fed to a machine that shits out slop while burning down a couple hundred trees while it’s at it. Queer artists have been banging the drums against AI before you probably even knew it existed.)
However, there exists a HUGE chasm between the usage of AI, and the major issue of allowing a sex pest to continue selling his scam of a game on the forum. We shouldn’t still be discussing this. How can you be so incredibly milquetoast in your moderation that you can’t use common sense and see that literally no one wants this kind of person here.
I don’t think this is something to remain civil about, or pull punches with. This isn’t kindergarten. We (should) all be adults here, and be able to tell the difference between right and wrong, rules be damned. The fact that the issue has been allowed to fester to this point is quite honestly embarrassing. This is why fetish communities are so heavily scrutinized, because they refuse to actually push out the predators and misogynistic creeps with any sort of conviction. Polite criticism is useless when it comes to combating this sort of antisocial behavior, only consequences and accountability actually do anything.
I am deeply disappointed in how the mods have handled this entire situation. I’ve been a member of this community on and off for upwards of ten years under different account names. There has always existed a streak of extremely dubious actors on this forum, but it’s grown completely out of hand the last few years.
I keep coming back because I love the creativity, love, and passion poured into the types of projects that wouldn’t get made anywhere else. It’s deeply cool to me that a bunch of weirdos with esoteric kinks have a place to share the things they’ve made out of love for the game, not for any sort of quick, easy profit. But these projects are buried under literal mountains of bullshit.
It’s not too late to improve the reputation of this site, but you guys have to actually DO something. This issue is just gonna fester until it either tears this site apart or forces everyone with any sort of integrity to migrate to more reputable platforms to show off their games.
Been a lurker for four~ years, throwing my two cents in although I’m certain no one wants to hear it.
The site is fine, and caterwauling about the evils of AI art and it’s effects has become much more toxic than the advent of ai has been for creativity. You might morally object to it’s premise, but I don’t believe banning it’s use or deciding what should qualify as bannable behaivour on the fly is healthy. Blatantly being aggressive towards others, or breaking US law should be the only unquestionable offenses.
Grievances related to the site’s formatting, categorization and functionality is all very reasonable, and healthy discussion, but we should keep in mind that it is run out of pocket, and covers subject matter that is very uncomfortable for most, making major renovations somewhat difficult.
Most of the change I see being called for comes from personal grievances, or the desire to see the sight conform to personal vision. As a lurker, I have always seen this as a site to categorize, track, and discuss various fetish - themed projects from across the web, nothing more, nothing less.
The further we stray into creating and protecting a certain “vibe” the further we stray into creating an actually toxic, insular forum run by an indistinguishable, shifting moral code, decided by a cabal of popular creators. Personal discords and circles exist for that. All of the projects that get off the ground, or are hosted elsewhere, maintain discussion outside of this forum. Essentially, it is a convenience. This site should remain a place to simply discuss and categorize these projects, as I presume grot has intended it to, not have a controlled narrative about what is acceptable. I understand this website’s existence creates a platform where developers of any background can launch projects of various quality, and with a relative number of interested eyes on them. Of course this will lead to abuse, but it is in the interest of protecting it’s premise we should remain hands off.
There have certainly been some dubious actors and projects over the years, but their scale and impact has been massively overblown. None of them get very far, their threads drop down to obscurity rather quickly, and the community and mods step in where necessary. Personally, users should know better than to pay for projects that have yet to show meaningful progress or are of dubious quality. Good products prove themselves.
Rose game is certainly somewhat morally dubious in it’s use of images, but the mods stepped in to circumvent what could’ve been potentially harmful. I don’t think any more action would have been reasonable on their part. The project exists, and the thread is toxic as it stands.
A slow cultural, or moral shift began about 3 years ago from my perspective, with the steady influx of new users. I think an ideological clash has been a long time coming since then, and the drama with AI and last gamejam has been a sign.
Anyone remember metrack’s Persona 5 game? Yeah, me neither. I like his art though.
Rose game is certainly somewhat morally dubious in it’s use of images, but the mods stepped in to circumvent what could’ve been potentially harmful.
While it can be applauded the admin team got Gojicks to agree to making a censored edition of their game, it didn’t really address any of the real concerns with using photos of real life models without their consent or a license. If you go to their itch, the problematic demo (which now costs $5) is still available, and there’s been no progress update or proof presented towards obtaining said consent or license for the photos.
I don’t think any more action would have been reasonable on their part.
Not allowing the thread to re-open would have been a reasonable action.
Realistically, the issue is that you can’t both say that this is a toxic issue which is causing damage to the site’s usability and then follow up with:
Blatantly being aggressive towards others, or breaking US law should be the only unquestionable offenses.
As you said, there is a culture-clash issue at play - but the longer moderators are hands-off, the more people who feel strongly about it in some direction will use the only tools available to them (social pressure via argumentation) to try and push people to do what they feel is correct.
Realistically? There is a need for action here, or else this forum will inevitably continue to have toxic discourse about it indefinitely due to the fact that it’s an ethical/moral argument for people. People aren’t just going to go “well, I guess we can live and let live about something I find personally abhorrent from a moral perspective.”
There needs to be clarity, and there needs to be a laying down of ground-rules. Now, personally? I think AI projects should be allowed - but shouldn’t be able to be monetized. GenAI relies on content which was taken without the approval or notification of creators; fair use and the fan-fiction world prove pretty demonstrably that that’s acceptable as long as the final product isn’t being sold. So it resolves a lot of the moral/ethical issues if you just stop letting people sell it, and new developers can still take advantage of the tool to create placeholder assets so they can get experience in making games. They’ll just need to mature their process and take the leap to sourcing proper assets before they sell things.
But that’s my personal opinion, not my “how to run the site” opinion. My opinion on running the site is - no half measures on moral issues. Either ban AI in some meaningful way or ban AI criticism. Make it clear where you stand and let the opposition to that stance make their own choice to either stop using the site or accept that they need to stop trying to push their side on it. The current hands-off approach is just inviting constant debate and argument due to people trying to use the one tool they have at their disposal - their words - to right what they see to be a clear moral wrong. It doesn’t fix anything, because shame is basically useless on a forum meant for openly talking about a socially-frowned-upon kink, but people do it anyways because it’s allowed and they morally disapprove of what’s happening. They’ll keep doing it as long as they’re allowed, and the people making AI-content games will keep doing that as long as it’s allowed as well.
So pick one to stop allowing. Otherwise this is endless.
I’d say there is a pretty valid third option. Pleases both sides to a degree. Separate AI into a separate category and disallow arguing there.
We still have the morally dubious AI games on one hand but you get the option to look away and mute the category. Staff have made it pretty clear they want to be inclusive to everyone even when everyone includes a tiny minority of people violating copyright law and causing harm to artists everywhere by normalizing the use of AI art. This is probably the compromise “solution” we’ll get out of them.
See, if you do that then you’re all-but-explicitly turning the rest of the site into a designated PvP zone for AI arguments. The AI people will argue they should be “taken out of quarantine” and the anti-AI people will argue they should be “taken out back and dealt with permanently.” It doesn’t solve things, it just moves the lines of the battle. Because this is a morality/ethics thing to people, and they’re not going to stop arguing it unless they’re told they can’t and there are consequences for continuing. You’d have to quarantine “AI discourse” to a separate location as well, to keep the forum clean and avoid turning the “AI games” section into an overt battle-ground, and if you do that? You might as well ban it, because the only purpose of that section will be to shove it all into a hole that pretty much everyone will mute automatically due to toxicity.
No half measures on moral issues. It doesn’t resolve the problem.
ADDENDUM- Creating “toxic discourse containment zones” also creates a huge Missing Stair problem for your site. Newcomers don’t know that everyone has that space muted aside from a few dedicated assholes, and so they’re immediately blasted with the most foul and rancid content your forum can come up with since nobody using the site ever regularly sees any of it. It’s… not great.
I’m not trying to use any kind of tactic, and I have little or nothing to gain from speaking my piece. I’m a trans woman and a lesbian in a male-dominated kink space… I’m only painting a bigger target on my back by expressing a controversial opinion. I’m speaking from personal experience, and from the experience of my transfeminine peers.
People can and do fig-leaf their animus towards us as being “part of a movement.” I have a disabled and transfeminine peer who generates locally and with public-domain data, and even she is regularly told to off herself, “pick up a pencil bro”, and whatever else you can probably imagine if you’ve ever seen a trans woman get dogpiled online. I think this is because it’s not really about the material concerns of it to many people as much as it is their idealism towards art, as something which never evolves, is always comfortable to view, can’t be mimicked, and exists primarily as old Greek statues and golden-age Disney animations… that, or they just really like to mob. I’m sure there’s plenty of those.
The environmental damage is not unique to generative models, such as latent-space image generators or language learning models. Nor is the loss of jobs. There’s a bigger driving force at play than that, and more effective ways to protect people who must sell their labor from it.
Nope. My understanding of this issue goes way farther back. I knew before it was cool!!!
I’m too tired to quote any of the rest so I’ll just throw my hat in and say that I do agree about misogynistic behavior being an issue in these male-dominated spaces (that’s, in fact, part of the culture I was wink-wink nudging about) but I believe that’s unlikely to drastically improve or be more proactively moderated against without women on the staff, and since there are already so few of us, and it apparently takes so long to vet… I’m not holding my breath.
With what all is being mentioned, maybe a revamp of the site is needed? It was mentioned in at least one post how difficulty finding folks, especially volunteers, to fill in the gaps for some of these projects leads to a reliance on AI. I think someone has already posted and discussed this topic in a way;
I propose setting up a category that’s pointed to more prominently, like a job board, would probably alleviate some of the issues regarding AI and human effort in projects. Two birds with one stone.
This is a buzzword that’s been used in too many unpopular circles. What I would go for is “discouraged language”, ie:
There’re several rules that apply on-site, but these I think are the language topics that apply to off-site. When it comes to behaviors though, anything outright illegal should be pretty cut and dry: the person mentioned essentially enacted non-consensual voyeurism on the people in those photos, and given it’s a weight gaining site associated with video games, moral guardians are bound to tie this person with the site and all those affiliated, no matter how “hands-off” the admins try to pretend to be; if the guilty party gets in trouble, the connections and coincidences will be brought to the forefront. Which also makes this person a legal and PR liability if say, the women in those photos end up suing or there’s some other legal repercussions that somehow get attention. They could end up dragging this site with them into it, no matter what claims of innocence the admins try to make.
In regards to other site revamps, like someone else said, AI projects need to have their own category; something like “AI asset dependent, pending volunteers/hiring”, “AI based”, etc. At the very least, maybe come up with some prototype categories/discussions regarding AI categories and usage. To those that say this wouldn’t do enough and outright banning is the better option, they forget something that pro-AI and anti-AI folks do when they complain in a public place: they tell on themselves. If someone is complaining “my project isn’t getting enough eyes” then you can point them at the aforementioned job board and tell them to get someone to help you - if they go towards it, we can give them the benefit of a doubt, but if they’re resistant without good reason, then they’re likely not doing it for the art. Even if they try to scam the artist/programmer/etc, a protection can still be offered in that they’re making an offer in a public forum, so there’s a chance for some accountability. If they do it once, it’s a black stain, and a second time is probation, third can be the ban. Plus, making a disclaimer for AI projects mandatory, like if the project is permanently or temporarily going to rely on AI assets, another measure that can discourage AI-bros. Basically, have a system to make it extremely laborious for those folks to cheat. They’re here for quick and easy money, not to make their actions an achievement.
In regards to shovel ware problems, I suggest there be a review system, which might be difficult to do with Discourse. I’m talking less just leaving a comment and more having a system similar to what DeviantArt had for a while with their short-lived critique system, where critics could leave a 1-5 star rating for different categories along with commentary. If it’s a certain rating, then it’s given a title, like “shovel ware”, “legit”, or “masterpiece”. Basically, categorized ratings to separate the slop from legitimate projects. This at least alleviates some burden from admins and gives a stronger voice to the site users. Granted, it has to be front and center on the project’s topic display.
Granted, a system like that can still be vulnerable to abuse. It would have to be woven with the badge system this site uses from Discourse for who gets to leave critiques - to filter bots, as AI bros and others would certainly try to circumvent the restrictions to review bomb their score upwards. It wouldn’t be perfect but it offers a solution.
If none of that is considered enough, there’s a topic someone has already opened for discussion on some of this:
Any of these can be taken into consideration by site admins.
Edit: This is something I just remembered, but in relation to helping admins, I understand that monetization, while not desperate, can always be improved. I think that’d be a case of needing stronger promotion, as there’re plenty of good actors out there at least that don’t know about this site. DeviantArt’s one, but I’ve made a list of several video websites the site could be promoted from without worrying about moral guardians:
Ah yes, the classic approach of “I’ll build my own theme park, with hookers and cocaine!”. That always works out well, doesn’t it?
Please, be patient and let the admins and owners speak first. People are getting so steamed but we are yet to start discussing the consensus with people actually running the site.
There’s two primary prongs to the problem that I care about, which haven’t been directly addressed.
The first is that generated images present an impossibly high barrier of entry into drawing for anyone wanting to get into art as a career. Professional-grade art has a skill-set gathered over decades, not months. Despite the potential for more creation than an unthinking plagiarism machine, people that would otherwise commission them for smaller things (the sort a junior artist might be able to do while learning) don’t necessarily see all that. Why bother becoming good if you can’t make a living being ok at it?
Without demand for mediocre art, great artists will dwindle over time, with a smaller pool of professional artists that predate the advent of LLMs. That impact is one that actually matters for the scale that this community is at.
I, personally, used to enjoy text-based adventure games but thanks to the proliferation of LLM images, there seems to be an unrealistic expectation amongst the young’uns that every narrative-based game needs visuals, solo devs be damned. There was a whole tradition of games being made in groups of three on platforms like Newgrounds that has been forgotten and abandoned thanks to individualist notions of doing everything solo, even if the end product is worse.
The second is that the people with means to use LLMs and profit off the use of LLMs are inherently wealthier due to the cost of the equipment, production, etc. Any argument attempting to use ‘culture war’ language to obfuscate a class-tinged issue is inherently going to get push-back. You can’t use one privilege to shit on another, that’s not solidarity. Does that mean I support brigading? No, but that’s why this justification is almost laser-guided to make artists and their friends mad. Especially since art has been and remains today a haven for queer, non-white, poor folk that are pushed out of other careers. One anecdotal example is not going to erase the hundreds of artists (yes, some of whom are indeed trans and disabled, join the club lol) I’ve been in community with as a writer.
The whole issue of ‘is AI bad/good/tolerable’ is a red herring from my perspective in the sense that I think there’s enough disdain for it that developers have an incentive to use non-generative art. The actual problem IMHO is having enough community outreach and social cohesion for those with art skills to want to work with developers that need their skillsets.
That’s partly the server platform being unsuited to community-building (see earlier complaints about Discourse) and partly the lack of strategic vision for the site beyond ‘try to make our own itch-adjacent monetisation platform in the background’.
It’s not a matter of how difficult it is. If you’ve been in a few communities, people tend to take the “hookers and cocaine” approach too eagerly and too quickly before even managing to reach a proper solution with the owners or simply talk it out.
What I’m saying is: Please, take it slow and be patient. Let the owners speak. It’s easy to get lost in all the emotion when people are just bouncing negative opinions back and forth.
Perhaps I’m missing context, so let me ask:
I believe that the community can talk out some sort of an agreement with the owners. If the owners are incapable of listening and it’s clear that they don’t care, only then such measures like people splitting off should be taken. I do hope that this thread and sentiments contained within it are indeed something that would wake them up, perhaps they just didn’t think of it much beforehand.
I have no doubt about it not being that hard to make a site better than WG on a technical level, but this wasn’t the first attempt to create a game-focused forum for WG stuff. There’s going to be incumbency bias and I don’t think there’s a pool of both talent and users sufficient to have two sustainable fora. That said if you can eat the cost of hosting indefinitely, then there’s nothing stopping you.
What you’re witnessing is a sort of convergence of grievances that were swept under the carpet at different times.
Past attempts at staff reaching out to users have not led to positive outcomes, so there’s a lot less patience this time around and enough past examples of rejecting transparency and preferring silent inaction that there’s a lack of trust across the board.
Still a bit early to go straight to a schism, sure, but I can understand the impulse.