Genuine question: I was not someone who was involved in all of this at all and only got tiny snippets of what was going on. How should I have reacted differently? I am not always a super emotionally aware person and so don’t know how to handle situations like these (this explanation not provided to make it about me, but for context for the question).
But also - I don’t want to put the burden of explanation on someone, but would love ideas on how the wider net of forum users can respond in these situations.
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I like this.
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Seconding this!!
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I’m another person who came to this late and also completely out of the loop about the entire thing. I don’t tend to interact with many people outside of the forum, whether through DMs/texts or in person meet ups. I naively didn’t realize how much was going on behind the scenes, and so it was a lot of brand new information for me.
When I read the original post made by Brute, I had no idea what to think because there were so many missing details/it was very cryptic, and I also was in no way close with Brute, so I had no idea what/who he was talking about. Then when others started to post, more details were filled in and I got an idea of what happened. I actually haven’t stopped thinking about it since those posts, because even the tiny bits that I was able to figure out/was told were horrible. At the same time, I felt like it all happened with a friend group that I’m not very involved/close with, so I didn’t know what would be overstepping to post, even if it were supportive? That is probably the wrong way to think, but I am not the best at judging online interactions, so I tend to “like” things as my way of showing support, when I’m not quite sure what to say/how to say it. I think similar to others who have posted, I wasn’t involved, but now realizing how it comes across that there wasn’t more support, feel terrible that the people involved were further hurt by the experience that the forum kind of moved right along immediately. And I personally am really sorry for that.
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Also like this should be done by the mod not random users. Maybe on a particular thread? and IDK maybe a banner for 24 hours or something?
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I was completely shocked by the whole thing and my first reaction was “I can never trust people on the internet again!”. Brute and I were not friends (nothing beyond commenting on each other’s journals) but I genuinely liked the person I thought he was.
But then I thought more and I think abusers are going to do their thing whether it’s on the internet or in person. Abusers use their charm to take advantage of people, and that can happen anywhere. I don’t want to stop trusting people in general because this one person very convincingly fooled us all.
I feel terrible for the people who were hurt and betrayed in all this. I’m not close to any of them (did send a message to the one person I’m connected to off the forum) but my perception was that the affected folks didn’t want more public discussion where Brute could be following along, which is why everything went quiet so quickly. It doesn’t mean that I and many others don’t care, and I’m also sorry that it came across that way.
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I am home from work and now at a keyboard. I’ve been thinking about this all day.
I want to share my own take on things, which is not the same as everyone else here.
From my perspective, I saw a weird apology post from someone I had been friendly with for years, who hadn’t been online much lately. I treated it as legit, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to have done so. Now, with hindsight, it’s clear that it was not a true accounting of what went down in his personal life, but I don’t follow the other forumer’s journal so if there was another perspective on it, I wasn’t aware of it and I didn’t want to be some weirdo who scoured someone’s journal I didn’t know just to find relationship drama. I figured it was none of my business. I posted a couple of “wow that sucks” and in sum “I hope you get some therapy this sounds like a lot.”
Then, a different forum member privately texted me and, basically, yelled at me for not immediately condemning Brute publicly and immediately, and for not reaching out to her directly for the true story as this person was in the know. A true story I, at the time, had no idea I needed to find out.
This person has since apologized.
But I bring it up because the situation made me very uncomfortable and it was probably not unique.
To be clear, I do not doubt that there was Bad Shit that went down. The details are not mine and that’s okay. But at no point was there, to my knowledge, allegations of physical abuse or harm. Just shitty behavior and a lot of red flags and someone being manipulative and deceitful. I don’t clarify that to indicate that manipulative lying shit is okay. It’s not. But, again without knowing the details, no one was indicating any physical harm had come to anyone.
Yet I felt like I was treated like a rape apologist for saying “I hope you get some therapy” to someone I’d been friendly with for years.
That’s not a forum culture I like, to be honest. I am a compassionate person at my heart and soul, and extending that to people who have done some shitty behavior is not against some forum rule here.
Yes, we all need to be safe, and to look out for one another. I’m glad there are official steps being made via Mods to officially ban Brute as it’s clear his behavior is not in accordance with our community. But as someone who was NOT in the loop of what went down and then told pretty clearly that I needed to stop being compassionate to someone, that didn’t feel good either.
Brute (Or ANYONE) doing bad shit doesn’t mean that others on this community can’t still extend compassion to that person or any person.
Like others, I thought that it was intentional that this situation had not been discussed further in public.
We’re in a situation where some people know things and others don’t. I don’t need or want to know the details, BUT that disparity of knowledge means that people like myself are not always going to follow the zeitgeist of others closer to the issue.
I don’t have any answers. But I wanted to extend a different perspective of someone who was not involved but still left feeling kinda gross by it all but for different reasons.
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This kind of encapsulates my fear, though no one directly chastised me for any comment on the episode.
Sorry @Oro - you are a sweet and kind person.
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^^ this is the same thing I want to say, but I also want to say that I am also stuck in this position even more frequently as a mod. I don’t follow everyone’s journals (it isn’t possible) and I’m often not alerted that drama is going down into an IRL friend texts me something and I have to get online to piece together what happened, which is also what happened in this case. By the time I arrived (which to be clear was only because someone was able to point it out to me, and tell me which thread to go to, because nothing was flagged for moderation) it was over and deleted. I do not read most threads on this forum and I certainly don’t in real time, so if things don’t get flagged, I likely won’t see them. I cannot respond to what I don’t know is going on. I would’ve never seen the original apology if I wasn’t told. Nor would I have thought anything about someone asking me to delete and lock a journal as I do it all the time, so I wouldn’t have known more was amiss.
Sorry that happened to you Oro. This has happened to me several times as well, and it’s a crappy feeling. As a mod, I expect it. But it’s really not fair to community members.
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I’m always surprised when you mention how big the forums are. Like, my most-liked posts have like 30 likes, all whom are people I recognize by forum pic or username if no forum pic. And that represents a whole 3% of the community!! Craziness.
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Yea we should really be making money off the forums so it would be easier to moderate because I could put real resources to making it financially rewarding to moderate (for me and others). But community feeling is important to me so I don’t want spammy ads.
It’s always possible that 30 people are somehow responsible for 600K pageviews a month but probz not.
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I know people said this before but I would totes opt into ads if it meant you got an extra 2 cents from me a month. Then again I could just up my Patreon level.
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I should say this being upset when people don’t react with support quickly enough thing has happened multiple times. Someone is upset, there is a tuffle in a thread in a journal, posts are deleted, and then one of the party gets upset they didn’t get support from other forum members quickly enough. It’s important to remember forums are asynchronous communication and not everyone is online when you are, and not everyone will know what is happening. Often supporting one party can feel like dogpiling as well, which is similarly a bad feeling.
It speaks to how close a lot of people feel to the community on the forums that it can feel alienating when they don’t get enough support.
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The progammatic ads made usability tank, I didn’t even want to login. We are doing limited text-based ads now, but patrons don’t see them. But I have to go out to the advertiser forest and hunt and negotiate the ads on my own for text-based ads, which means I don’t get a ton of them.
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I’m always surprised by how many lurkers every online community has, because I am constitutionally unable to not chime in, but it does seem that there are always more lurkers than actual posters.
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Oro, I am really sorry that you were treated that way. That was a crappy reaction. I’m grateful to you for adding that experience here.
I think especially with fast moving, asynchronous, online stuff, it’s important to remember that everyone will be working from a different context. And just…I hope we can all extend each other some grace around our reactions to these things.
I think it’s important to 1) ban people if needed and 2) leave a record somewhere people can see with a brief summary. And 3) make it clear what kind of moderation exists and how to invoke moderator attention. I assumed that @anomalily would read the deleted threads and that we would have more proactive moderation but that was not the case.
I’m really grateful that brute did not cause even more harm than he did. In some ways I feel like we collectively dodged a much worse outcome.
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s impossible to perfectly balance privacy, discretion, kindness, community protection, safety. But I think and hope that talking about it explicitly makes it easier to strike that balance in the future.
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I do listen to catfish (the podcast of the MTV show) and it is a good reminder that people pour SO much time and energy into creating false personas. Yes sometimes there are clues and sometimes not. And both the catfish I IRL dated and the romance fraudster I IRL got scammed by introduced me to people! So I would have felt safe!
Like how does anyone know I am not a catfish some days. Or a bad wwirdo
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I could read deleted threads on Brutes journal, and I still had no idea what was going on. It was not even clear from the deleted threads. I still barely understand what went down, because 95% of conversations have happened via private channels (most off forum). The conversations I did have with the named other party in DM asked for not much more attention to be paid to it publicly so as to not add more fodder. I specifically asked if she was safe and said to let me know what actions she wanted taken. I still don’t know who all was involved.
So other people really probably can’t piece together what is going on.
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Seriously, this is one thing that makes me think we needed to be clearer about what you should NOT give to people in DMs/PMs. But also the secrecy was PART OF THE PROBLEM. But I also think it’s delightful how many IRL friendships have come out of this semi-anon space.
I’m thinking out loud here, mod hat off, because I don’t have good solutions. I wish there was a Forum Moderation University you could go to, but there isn’t. We deal with these same situations in IRL communities, too, and they are similarly tough.
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Anyway, to return to the topic at hand, it seems in summary most people:
- Did not get the whole story
- Not getting the whole story was intentional, presumably due to maintaining privacy on one side and maintaining deniability on the other.
- Moved on because the lack of additional info from aggrieved parties made people presume that ceasing to speak to or about the at-fault party was what was most respectful to the aggrieved parties.
I think the conversation about how to prevent abuse of the culture of respecting privacy many of us abide by is a valuable one.
I don’t believe it is fair to ask out-of-the-loop people to have behaved differently without having been given additional information or directly told what was needed from them.
Compassion is I believe, for highly involved members, our default, and it was just information asymmetry that caused clashing expressions of compassion and hurt for many people.
I do not love the idea of putting a summary somewhere on the forum. If I were not to be live sharing the saga of gnomes, a horse, and a pile of debt I really wish I had used for IVF rather than for all of that, it would feel shitty if even anonymized it was posted on the forums for an example without my direct request. I feel a brief summary of violated forum norms would be sufficient.
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