The real question now is why he left it up so long, and who in the hell were the 210 nihilists who had the score run up so high? Also, notable that he didn’t do it because it was the right thing to do, but because he was tired of being browbeaten.
SCP Foundation - Creepypasta with roid rage - now ITT: SCP fans
- Thread starter Nappy
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It involed 9/11, 210 is low all things considered.
bettermybutter
kiwifarms.net
Sadly not.
Dexanote pulls a BP-style apology for being a crappy admin, DrMann and Dexanote are too big to fail, and DrMagnus committed hari kari. (He was shamed off of the Wiki for essentially using his admin position to whine his childish ass off and attempting to gun down Cerastes over petty muh plagiarisms.)
http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-14129317/statement-on-cerastes-incident
[archive]
http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-14129317/statement-on-cerastes-incident
[archive]
bettermybutter
kiwifarms.net
That was a fantastic read,
. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Nonetheless, the way they describe it makes it sound like they went off to war or something, yeesh. I mean, "forcing multiple into extended leaves through the sheer mental and emotional devastation that came from the event (from which multiple still have not returned)"? Are you serious? Mental devastation?
Haha. Oh yeah. 100% serious.That was a fantastic read,
Nonetheless, the way they describe it makes it sound like they went off to war or something, yeesh. I mean, "forcing multiple into extended leaves through the sheer mental and emotional devastation that came from the event (from which multiple still have not returned)"? Are you serious? Mental devastation?
It seems like they're trying to say that this incident, while a massive fuck-up on their part, was ultimately a series of extremely unfortunate misunderstandings and miscommunications that spiraled out of control. It would therefore be kind of hard to believe them when they say that they're sorry if there was, say, a high-ranking staff member who continued to aggressively push for full demotion even after it was generally agreed that Cerastes didn't fuck up that badly who has gone both unpunished and unmentioned in the statement.
Of course they’d conveniently forget about their most corrosive peer shitting on someone for no reason, nothing ever changes with these people.
It is good to see that Dexanote is self-aware over just how useless he’s always been, but if he actually meant it he’d be giving up power to maybe give somebody competent a chance. Problem there is, Dexanote is mild and genial so nobody wants to hurt his feelings by nudging him out the door. Maybe that’s something they could use Procy’s asshole nature for productive purposes, he could be the one to fire people like he’s Dale Gribble in that one episode of KoTH.
Yeah, it's never someone just being mean. It's always things just "got out of hand". It's really not that hard to just blame something else for your problems at SCP; the only time staff get fired is when they deliberately bring it on themselves.
LordSifr
kiwifarms.net
Gonna go out on a limb and say that if such a nothing incident is capable of pushing you into a blind witchhunting rage, you probably have a problem with power. Seriously, this is not something a mentally-stable person would get so upset about: either the mental stress staff responsibilities place on you is so immense the slightest slipup can cause you to go off the deep end, or (much more likely) the obsession with control and power completely fucked your perception of things.
This is not an attempt to undervalue the real life experiences of people and just how stressful it can get, but it really is crazy how every SCP staff member seems to be "undergoing stress in real life" whenever they're required for something unpleasant. It also is pretty crazy how this is always communicated to interacting users as if it was of particular priority right before downplaying it as "not your fault" or "not an excuse" - at face falue, this is perfectly fine, but the insistence on this particular pattern of communication feels off, almost manipulative.
The light this sort of post sheds into the SCP staff mindset is amazing. Their completely overreactive perspectives and modus operandi regarding the menial crises of the last few years are much more understandable when staff duties are represented as this sort of all-withering obligation that pushes them to the limit of their capacities. My deepest apologies and utmost regrets for the cringeworthy comparison I'm about to make - but the sort of wildly exaggerated imagery this perspective evokes makes me think of Warhammer 40k's Imperium. It highlights just how insanely inefficient and nonsensical their inner organization must be.
What's particularly interesting is that all of these "obligations" of staff don't seem mandatory. There's no definitive requirement for staff to be active, they just moderate because they want to moderate. That means, to me at least, that staff are continously and voluntarily burning themselves out (for nothing). We may very well be talking about people that spend all their free time in Discord/IRC chat. SCP is probably all they have going on, so of course when things start falling apart they believe the entire world is ending.
One has no choice but to rationalize how important staffwork is when all you’re doing is banning kids and ESL speakers from your declining containment fiction wiki, otherwise how can one justify putting enough hours into that work that one could call it an unpaid second job?
You know how my life changed when I got kicked out of SCP? I got organized, channeled that effort into two jobs that are actually paying me, and I still get to live inside staff’s heads heads rent-free. Plus, I’m no longer friends with people who think it’s okay to steal ten years of someone’s creative labor if the alternative is inconvenient or poses any difficulty. Win-win.
It's heartening to know you're not completely insane
I gotta speak up here because this is really the core, terminal problem of SCP staff imo. Their answer to everything is more centralization. On a collaborative Wiki. Imagine that. I don’t wonder why it doesn’t seem to help; it’s the wrong answer. Maybe it was the right one once, but their oversight isn’t helpful anymore, it’s invasive. Malignantly, imo but we’ll see.
Nobody voted or asked that they annex more and more oversight, they give that to themselves by fiat. It’s more and more centralization, more positions, more teams, more capitans of those teams, more policies, more votes on policies, more policies on votes, on and on and on. As a composite, they are a one-trick pony that tries to solve an overbearing obsessive compulsion with more overbearing obsessive compulsion, and the problem just compounds. Staff is a giant lolcow on auto-milk that plugs back into its own saggy udder.
The site becomes less and less about writing in the process, certainly at least for staffers, and I’d argue for everyone else under their leadership too. There’s an issue? Push button, policy printer go brrrr.
Now they are basically so involved in the work they made for themselves that they are nearly a separate body to the users, and close to severed from them if the town hall is any measure. Their ambition is too far-reaching and strained, so people burn out and quit quick. They’re basically a government at this point in their runaway self-expansion, complete with sanctioned propaganda, a GDP (the lawsuit is lost but still accepting donations!), and a sort of its own nationalism, them being very proud of their flag they wave atop the site. They’ve morphed it into a pseudo-surveillance state too; interacting with the site is to submit yourself to a panopticon.
They can’t admit that the very hands-on (pun!… touchy feely even) approach isn’t helping and that maybe less is more. That would be contradicting their purpose and ceding the territory they clutch. It’d be a very bright light on their frail qualifications as leaders, which thanks to the perpetual policy printer, is like a bubble, overvalued & ready to pop. Also you’re right I think, in there are festered self-esteem issues that get them limelight drunk and sloppy on whatever small morsels of power they hyperbolize to themselves.
The 6 sweeping policy changes they’ve proposed since the town hall are most like ants pouring from a damaged hill. Just frantic and chaotic. Biting anything their jaws find and holding on for dear life.
bettermybutter
kiwifarms.net
The pool of people captaining teams is comically small and once people become captains they usually stick around long after they cease being useful or energetic due to burnout and divided attention. They’re also extremely territorial which is why I was surprised when Dale Gribble consented to Diet Rounderhouse’s Bad Idea Contest brought to you by SCPD existing. Only thing worse than a colleague muscling in on your sphere of influence is the rabble thinking they can have fun without staff oversight.How do you think this could've been avoided? Wouldn't dividing the staff into several teams reduce centralization? Or do you mean that it's the same people getting all of these roles?
Other than that,
The issue of staff burnout is and has always been completely avoidable. Staff are getting burned out because they have to do an absurd amount of work, but a huge chunk of that work is completely unnecessary. They do it to themselves.
The problem isn't that the structure they've created to do all this work is too centralized, the problem is that they don't need to be doing this much work. Most of this structure is unnecessary. Their solution to every problem is to create more work, to involve themselves more even when nobody wants them to be more involved. The Introductions team on Community Outreach was, at one point, so large that they considered making it a separate team, and the rate of burnout was so high that they had to completely change how the team worked to stop burning through 5 people every 3 months. At no point during any of this did anyone stop to consider that nobody ever asked them to reply to every newbie's introduction. In fact, I'm not sure if anyone actually wants there to be an Introductions forum that badly. For another example, look at the list of MAST responsibilities on O5 Command. Did people really want them to do all of this? Wikiwalk is one of the largest teams there, and I've literally never heard anyone say that they found a really cool obscure article via a Wikiwalk crosslink.How do you think this could've been avoided? Wouldn't dividing the staff into several teams reduce centralization? Or do you mean that it's the same people getting all of these roles?
Other than that,
Staff could easily stop doing so many things without the site getting noticeably worse.
This is a very good and big question that I’ll sit with for a while. My gut answer is that they need to quit believing that they are so essential. Everyone on staff should be forced to have a month off at the same time so they can come back and see that things didn’t fall apart or grind to a halt without them. They should be working as hard as they are now, not to expand their purview in an attempt to fix and moderate everything, but to find ways to successfully take themselves out of the equation as much as possible; democratize any truly essential duties, or even automate them if they ever get off WikiDot. They need to find a way to operate trustlessly.
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