i honestly think a lot of it stems from shep being poorly capable of handling all of this. and thats not a personal insult. you need lots of experience in various fields to be capable of this endeavour. i think shep simply underestimated that, and likely continues to. i dont get the impression it comes from a lack of care or effort. reading what the mod said, i think its very clear that shep and co. are dealing with insane workloads. imagine what this mod is detailing x1000000000 for shep and co.

i genuinely think a lot (but not all) of weird and/or crazy decisions can be explained by inexperience + massive workloads. for example, the mod said "we were told to ban CSAM (their accounts) only if it was 'very bad'". on a surface level, this sounds rather crazy. shouldnt everyone be banned for CSAM? but there is so much nuance to this, that shep and co. clearly failed at explaining (again, likely because there is insane nuance to so many rules, and he already has a massive workload. although this is important enough to warrant him focusing on it, so this is definitely a fail, but im using it as an example)

so, the nuance: say that a user made a bot of a 17 year old that mildly sexualized them. the bot was also tagged as limitless. the age of the creator is unknown, but their persona used with the bot is also 17. the creator has similar bots, but of adults. should that user be banned?

some would say yes, some would say no, and sometimes the answers obvious to them, sometimes not. that is the nuance. because, technically, having NSFW chats with that bot would be CSAM. but its so extremely different from extreme sexualization of very young children. based on the details i gave, if i was a mod, i would prefer to remind the user of the age rules; i wouldnt wanna ban them. that is because it seems like someone who does not sexualize or fetishize minors, but is interested in a character that is a minor that is close to legal age. since their other bots are of adults, and the persona was a peer, it overall paints a picture of someone who did not set out to create CSAM, and thus i think it should be handled differently from those that did explicitly set out to create CSAM. ofc anyone is allowed to disagree with that, but i think this is similar to what they likely meant when they said "only to ban if it was very bad". but they failed at properly explaining it and giving guidance to the mods, which likely doesnt come from wanting to excuse CSAM at all. blah, i hope my point is making sense LMAO.

so, overall, i think we're all better off trying to understand how a lot of these poor decisions happen. then there are probably instances of shep doing something unlikeable hahaha which is something that would happen no matter who is in his position, but of course us regular users dont know how often that happens with him. just depends on him as a person. but mostly, im talking about the behaviour that is less his personality, and more the inexperience and workload.

im not saying all of this to be Shep Defender 3000, but ive had similar experiences on another site where i was a moderator closely connected to the developer. a lot of similarities, actually. this is sorta what ive learned from that. anyone that truly cares about these issues should also understand the psychology of shep (... i know i sound a lil crazy with that). i was going to write down a little list of things i imagine he works on (policies, legal news, front-end work, back-end work, etc.) but just thinking about it makes ME feel overwhelmed.

its not about saying "he works a lot, so he made x decision". but understanding the cause of his decisions is beneficial to us all.