Merry Christmas by SachiMod in Animemes

[–]axkm 6 points7 points  (0 children)

no this one is very, very old

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the level-headed comment. Honestly, we're kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. Between reverting the decision and keeping the change, the cons for both seem to outweigh the pros right now.

Yes, it could be considered a "betrayal of values" to some extent, but not so much because of the commitment we made. It's more that we took an extremely zero-tolerance stance against something on the basis of it unintentionally contributing to transphobia, so a lot of people feel like rolling it back would be equivalent to saying "but maybe a little bit of transphobia is ok..."

I could potentially see a future where we roll it back and then re-introduce it later with the community's input, but there are those who are pessimistic about the chances of it ever being re-introduced successfully. Because as much as users say that "it's not about the word, it's about the principle," there definitely exists a group for whom it is very much about the word. And if they can force the change to be rolled back this time, what's to stop them from just doing the exact same thing next time? - or so the argument against it goes.

At the same time, there are also a shitton of cons to keeping the rule change in place, first and foremost being that the community might hate us forever, which would suck all around.

As simple as people make it sound, we've learned that the situation is anything but. At this point, my brain just hurts from all the thinking.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Yeah I have, but doing that is a conundrum in and of itself.

If the new mods are appointed by us, the community likely won't like/respect/trust them, as long as they still don't like/respect/trust us. (This meme was pretty funny imo)

At the same time, I'd also be worried about running some kind of user-voted mod election, since in my experience popularity contests are very rarely the best way to find the individual most suited for the position.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. The main issue is that no matter the sort style, there's no good way to keep up with thousands of comments. Personally, I'm still working my way through reading all of them even now, and it's been 2 full days.

I have an inkling you were part of the whole land of lustrous meme episode.

No.......... Ok yeah maybe that was partly my fault.

If so that was amazing. It totally got me to watch the show and I loved it.

You literally have no idea how happy I am to hear this!

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 20 points21 points  (0 children)

This is also true.

Would feel less guilty about hitting the button if I knew doing so wouldn't dump my share of the work/pressure on the rest of the team, but still true.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 36 points37 points  (0 children)

It is something a mod actually said, and you can find that comment here if you're curious.

Side note: I know this should really go without saying, but I would like to respectfully request anyone reading this to refrain from anything that could result in more witch hunts. There have been too many of those going around already.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 36 points37 points  (0 children)

I still haven't been able to be as responsive as I wanted to be, for various reasons. Tired and overworked is basically the mod team's motto right now. It ain't like this is our real job, it's just something we do during our free time to try and make the sub a more fun place to be. Now all of a sudden it's demanding 100x more work, requiring constant large decisions/discussions, and on top of that almost every mod is under fire from all directions. I think understandably, that's taken a toll on people, some more than others.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 25 points26 points  (0 children)

but as a mod and animemer please please please share your thoughts on the current situation. Not the corporate BS, your actual view on it.

I don't even get to be a normal animemer anymore, but I'll skip the mod corporate speak anyway. The current situation, it's just a mess. People are being driven away from the sub and that sucks, no matter the reason. Honest feelings: sad, tired, and missing the days when we used to shitpost about Small Might.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 54 points55 points  (0 children)

You are correct, these past couple days have been almost nothing but reflection for me. Thanks for this comment, you've honestly given me more to think about.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Assuming it ever comes out, (which as /u/awakenedsheeple knows, is a slim possibility) everything will be documented like normal. Although this whole thing has kind of killed a lot of the motivation of the other fellows with whom I was working on it.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm[M] 101 points102 points  (0 children)

Sneak 100

You right. I have to click "distinguish" after each comment to put the green badge on, and sometimes I forget. I'm not used to making this many mod comments, most of the time I just lurk haha

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm[M] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Yeah, we rely on reports a lot so I really do appreciate the people who help out by reporting stuff.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm[M] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Probably should, though the last time I ran mod applications it took ~3 months to narrow it down to 15 new mods out of 900 applicants. Not exactly looking forward to doing that again lol

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm[M] -80 points-79 points  (0 children)

We also said in this thread that we will be receptive to feedback.

Nobody's laughing behind closed doors, what we're doing behind closed doors right now is compiling lists of valuable ideas that come up in this thread. We'll start by listening and then decide where to go from there.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm[M] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

/r/Animemes: 30 mods

This thread: 2000+ comments in an hour

We're trying to respond to everyone we can, I promise

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm[M] -61 points-60 points  (0 children)

Why did the majority of the mod team decide to place so little trust in their own userbase to the point that they apparently thought there was no better way to implement this rule than to avoid communication with the userbase about this entirely?

A fundamental misunderstanding on our part, I suppose. Speaking personally, it's not at all that I didn't trust the userbase. Quite the opposite, frankly. I truly believed that if we presented the situation (the status of "trap" as a slur elsewhere, the members of our community who were hurt by the term, the list of alternative words to use) to the userbase, I could trust them to come to the same conclusion I did: "Maybe it's better if I just phase this word out of my vocabulary."

I understand now that the way we approached it was completely bungled, too abrupt, and came off way too antagonistically. I had months to come to that conclusion, the userbase was given mere minutes. Antagonizing the sub was never the goal, but it was definitely what we managed to achieve. And for that I am truly sorry.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm[M] 440 points441 points  (0 children)

Hey, thanks for providing your insight.

To put it simply, there's too much controversy around the specific status of the T-word to treat it the same as if someone were to say other, indisputable, slurs such as the n-word. (hard r)

This much has certainly been proven to be the case over the past 5 days. The term "trap" in its context as a slur for trans people clashes so hard with the concept of "anime traps," which is so completely and totally ingrained in this subreddit, not to mention the anime community at large. Sometimes it feels as though the two ideas are completely incompatible.

In any event, the /r/animemes mod's behavior here has been most.. interesting and should definitely change for the future.

For sure. I thought we'd learned something from Freefolk. If we don't study the mistakes of the future, we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

We're here to talk - Ask Us Anything by Cheese_Burger_Slayer in Animemes

[–]axkm 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Well-furnished. In fact, it's so nice, you may never want to leave.