So this is my write-up of the BTRL commentary selection issue aimed at the SMS community. My complaint is now resolved from the SMS side, meaning all these criticisms have been talked through with the relevant peeps and no further action, conflict or bad feeling is intended (I forgave and am cool w/ erry1). Rather, this is to tell the story of what happened from my side so that we can learn from history, as well as to empower anyone else to voice opinions/complaints. This is entirely in my own words and doesn't represent the mods (I'm not a mod and never was).
- Faults in How Commentators Were Selected
- Faults in Making Amends
- Outcomes
- The Relevance of Mod Inactivity
- Conclusion
This was an event pulling 1000–3000 viewers while it was airing and a big source of new interest in the community, so the community needed to do its best to represent itself well, which made comms selection an important public issue. ESA reached out to Samura1man (Samu) to be the unique community liaison, which I think was reasonable given his moderator status; I don't think ESA needed to look past that. Samu mentioned to the other mods that he would handle comms selection, then didn't consult them at all after that. He agrees that in hindsight, he should've collaborated with mods to select comms instead.
The only additional mod involvement I know of was that EquivocalGenius pressured Samu/ESA into letting some of his friends join the commentary team. It's clear that if I'd been friends with the right people and played politics then I would've been able to comm BTRL. Instead I forgot about it and assumed the community had my back with a fair selection process.
The consequences of this were:
- Samu made a biased selection of comms (see next section).
- The other mod(s) who selected comms paid no attention to making an unbiased selection.
- No mod took an interest in how the process was going (which to me is a basic responsibility given the nature of the event, described earlier).
- The public saw none of this process, not even the final comms list until after arguments had broken out.
I'll set out how I think this came to be later, but for now lemme just state what the flaws were in the comms selection.
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Over-representation of bingo players. The mods agreed on this point. In fact, if we exclude people who were invited to comm only after political pressure had been applied, the invitees I know about are almost entirely people known for commentating bingo. In the context of SMS, bingo knowledge has no overlap with top-level any% meta, which is the most beneficial type of knowledge for a BTRL comm. Bingo is relevant because it shares basic any% knowledge, and it's a prominent place where people are given opportunities to demonstrate commentary skill; I'll mention another such place that was overlooked in a sec. Some of these bingo commentators are indeed knowledgeable about top-level any% and had commentated relevant events; others aren't and had not.
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Under-representation of Guycord discussion participants. As a result of the factionism that is dominating the SMS community, substantial parts of it are now unaware of the role this discord has had in forming the meta for ILs and top-level any% (notably, Samu never took part in this discord). It's certainly a good place to find comms with the most relevant knowledge.
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Under-representation of Speedgaming commentators. We had an event at the start of 2021, the Speedgaming Sandbox Any% Relay tourney, which had open signup for commentary and so was a good place to find people who volunteered comms and showed some skill at them. This was an event that involved most of the active SMS community (again, Samu had no involvement).
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Under-representation of public community participants. This is the most important point. It is right for anyone who heavily contributes to a community to be given privileges for, least of all be considered for, representing the community at a large event. Some of the elected representatives had next-to-no and/or an overwhelmingly negative involvement in the public discord.
See (1), (2). I interpreted this to be Samu saying Jpep and I (prolific community contributors at the time) had inadequate game knowledge, but Samu contested that interpretation. ESA's communication is another matter I will bring up with them, but it's clear what's wrong with that one.
I came at this situation with a constructive post (link to Discord), in the sense that I mentioned many actions that could be taken to undo the negative consequences of the original comms selection, and could even improve things by, say, providing the already-chosen comms with mutually-compiled info they wouldn't otherwise have known, so improving their commentary. I made it clear that I still wanted to comm BTRL.
The only engagement was from Samu. He admitted that his transparency was bad, and showed an intent to get ESA involved in the discussion, which I agreed with. He then later returned with platitudes (3), implying in a mod chat I could read that that was ESA's response to the situation (4). Samu never explained what ESA was actually saying, neither in public nor to the mods. He and the other mods now agree that at this point, the conversation should've become the mods agreeing what to say to ESA, then bringing the response back to the public. As it happened, there's no way to know to what length Samu went to represent my and others' interest in wanting to be considered for comms, but he did say he was unable to push for more slots, which imparts culpability onto ESA.
Furthermore, no mod engaged or commented on my suggestions. After that, I wrote a plaintive post saying again I wanted to hear what ESA was saying, and repeating that I had constructive suggestions – I didn't have the energy to directly ask Samu again to be considered to comm, after being made to feel so unwelcome. No mod replied, at all.
This is kind of a touchy point for me because this is where I was really let down and made to feel worthless. The mods said that the lack of communication with ESA/Samu made it hard to figure out what was happening and so to engage on the stuff I had written, but I don't think this excuses not intervening in an obviously rotten situation. Neither they nor the public had my back.
Since nobody'd had my back, after enough weeks had passed, this was starting to get seen as hard to do anything about cos it seemingly only affected me. So I stepped out with an aggressive complaint, which only then got taken seriously, and this essay here is largely a more neutral rewrite of that. I've added to each point the outcome of the discussion with Samu and the mods that pertains to it.
Other than that, the focus of that convo turned to the question of inactive mods. The next section I'm gonna write is on the connection between this and what happened with BTRL. It's a tricky connection that no mod was willing to comment on. Instead, they looked purely at mod activity in isolation. This has a history going back to the timing method debate, where inactive mods intervened in the debate in a very damaging way. Since then, the active ones have been slowly asking the inactive ones to step down, but they found it really hard on account of their aversion to conflict, and things like the original BTRL argument and my complaint ended up becoming flashpoints that progressed the issue after long periods of silence, which made things tense.
Anyway, Samu said he wasn't planning to be more involved with the community, so he and the mods agreed for him to step down. Now, every mod is active and on the same page – their mod position is contingent on activity, and the public should hold that to account. So that age-old problem is finally resolved 🌈.
Like I said earlier, this section is stuff only I am saying, not supported by any mod. I still think it's important enough to go over though so that future lessons are really learnt.
I'm gonna use the term inactive mod loosely – it's not literal since what I'm really talking about is the thing I previously called a boomer, which was a loaded/controversial word that I defined as this: a closed-minded individual from an older generation who does things out-of-step with eir peers in a damaging way.
Samu being involved with bingo is a merit – the problem was him not being involved with the other three things I mentioned (of course, the right way to solve that was to share the comms selection task with other mods). The Guycord discussion participants were overlooked because Samu has beef with Guy and his friends, and hasn't been in the discord for over half a year. He didn't participate in the 2021 Speedgaming tourney, and most importantly, didn't read the main discord enough to know who contributes to the community. In my time modding the IL spreadsheet, I saw zero curiosity from or interaction with Samu (except one reply to a request to get access to post announcements), which wasn't the case with the active mods (Noki Doki, EquivocalGenius, 1UpsForLife). The key point here is that interacting with fellow contributors is how good working relationships and trust are built, so Jpep and I not being considered for comms in the first place shows that something went wrong here.
People were largely confused when I started attacking inactive mods when the BTRL issue first flared up, since most of them weren't around during the timing method debate. The inactive mods of the time (late 2019) returned to start throwing their weight around the debate, and they and the active mods largely acted as two separate entities, with the inactive ones pushing to shut down discussion and the active ones not able to act democratically as a result (this is a loose generalisation of who was on which side). Samu was caught on the wrong side of this, but I won't elaborate on that cos it's ancient history.
A huge rift in the community arose from multiple inactive mods antagonising activists, obstructing the vote on timing methods and acting with secrecy. These same values of transparency and democracy, which I have seen become established among active mods and have championed myself, were missing in both incidents. And the result was a heavy emotional fallout where community contributors got turned off the community (more on that in the final section). A crucial thing to note here is that the activists of the time identified that inactive mods were a major problem, and the mods we have now (July 2021 and onwards) very closely match those whom they said should be mods back then.
The stuff in my last point shouldn't come as a surprise since values and standards for mods were way different in 2015 – accountability, transparency, democracy are only brought in over time after there's been enough conflict and activism. This ties in with my description of how much effort it's taken to remove inactive mods since the timing method debate, back when it was a far more widespread problem, and finally get on the same page about the importance of activity. June 2021 marks when this finally happened!
This attitude is also reflected in ESA, in their choice of liaison – picking a "trusted" old figure is really just nepotism, and that's shown in how I wasn't allowed to even ask who the liaison was.
Everything is resolved, written, recorded, so all that's left is for me to tell my personal side of the story and highlight the most important lessons I guess.
I took a few shots at commentating the Speedgaming Sandbox tourney earlier in the year and was enjoying learning the craft, looking forward to future chances to do it. I brought one of my comms along as an audition tape and wanted to see what people thought. I asked nicely and hopefully. And got those brutal replies. From a mod who, despite my generosity to the community, hardly knew me, and from an organisation that should've known better. Nobody ever asked to see my tape :(. After I called it out and played a stressful political game, trying to get considered, it just wound up with me getting blanked. I was just worthless. I wasn't able to bring myself to watch BTRL after that at all.
I have a strong tendency to want to improve my immediate surroundings, to put in work in return for the things I get out of them. Working is also one of my greatest psychological comforts, yet I've been unemployed since 2019. So I have to be really vigilant of where I put in work and how I'm treated in return. I feel like generous people often diminish the value of their contributions, and that opens the door to exploitation, but I tend to protect that value and not be modest about it. So, from my position where I was the lead programmer and moderator for the IL sheet, as well as the person designing the upcoming SMS wiki, it should come as no surprise that I immediately quit all posts and stopped contributing to the community entirely.
I have this sense of justice that meant that even though nobody supported me, I was able to carry this complaint and get justice, by myself. I'm quite proud of that, but it cost me a lot of mental energy much as a court case would. I came away with an entirely new perspective on the timing method debate from 2019; I wasn't able to sustain conflict and difficult situations except for carefully-planned battles. On the other hand, Jcool, to whom we owe the fact that we may use hacked file for full-game categories, a decision with a >60% mandate, had to argue with mods weekly and then debate for months just to get a vote to happen, making enemies along the way. Not many people are actually capable of that. We've always seen it as funny/heroic that he waged this epic battle, got hacked-file legalised, then dipped, and hasn't played the game since (16 months so far). But I see a sinister side to it now and wonder about the true cost of having inactive and unrepresentative mods in a community. It's not just conflict; it's positive and valuable contributors never contributing again.
The main things I want speedrunning communities to understand are
- the importance of taking community showcases seriously,
- the importance of protecting your contributors and activists,
- the importance of democracy and transparency for everyone, and
- the true risks of keeping seemingly-harmless inactive mods around.
One final thing I want to add. When I'm talking through an issue like this and sticking to the relevant stuff, it'll come across very critical of some parties, and I don't want that to be seen as me saying, like, they're a complete liability or bad people. I think it's clear from what happened, and the fact that I had no prior disputes or ill-will with Samu, that he didn't intend to do anything wrong by me. It doesn't erase the positive contributions he's made as a mod and provider of tutorials and audiences. The same goes for the other mods; no one person intended to leave me high and dry, and they've handled many things in the past with our best interests at heart. Actions can cause harm, but we make the most progress by divorcing them from the person who did them and looking at them abstractly as bits of history to not repeat.
Thanks
– shoutplenty