Machine Gun Kelly - Tickets To My Downfall (September 25, 2020) Album • Page 12

Damn. Jake W got me into some great music by POC. Was he really banned for speaking out?

 

@Jason Tate care to comment on this?

 

I have no idea what’s going on in here. I’ll take a look tomorrow.

 

After doing this for two decades my general policy is to not comment publicly about moderating decisions, not usually ones made by me, and almost never about ones made by other moderators. I've found it virtually never goes well, always leads to outsized conflict and responses, and the public nature of it ends up in a lot of bad faith accusations, attacks, and unneeded drama. I've found private communications and a good faith back and forth leads to healthier outcomes so much more often that I've made this a public policy and codified it in the forum rules since the start. My private messages are open and my email address is very public. I firmly believe for a good faith discussion, with the ability for both parties to take as much time as needed to respond, this is the right way to go, and I have never had any problems speaking at length about topics when I believe it's a good faith talk and being able to explain the reasoning. Even if there's a disagreement about, often, subjective moderation, I've had far better luck in feeling comfortable sharing information when it feels like it's in good faith and about communicating/understanding.

That said, after catching up here, there's a few things within all of this that I want to touch on. Much of it I've said before, but I feel it's once again worth reiterating. The first is an ongoing issue where the mantle of "accountability" is being used to, for lack of a better word, just be cruel to other people. It's a topic that we've talked about a lot in the "accountability" thread and how toxic it can become if the entire goal seems to be to use shitty things other people have done as a cudgel against other users. Even under the best of intentions, which I assume, not only does it not actually move us toward a society, scene, whatever, that can understand accountability and/or restorative justice, it actively turns the very people we should be bringing into our side off. Even when justified, I think it's clear that the mocking and, for lack of a better term nastiness, that seems to come across in the judgement of others has not been working. The repeated cycle seems to make that clear. Anyone that knows me knows I believe there's a time and place for sarcasm, and I can be an asshole up with the best of them, and there are absolutely times where there are really bad posts made, or posts made out of bad faith, or any number of really good reasons to be an asshole, be rude, and take things over the top. And in my 20 years I've done that and I've also done it incorrectly many times as well. (Even very recently.) I've lost potential allies and been cruel. I believe I was wrong in those situations; I want to be better at it. In the grand whole of the internet, that kind of armor or reaction I think can be justified; however, this is a smaller community, one that I believe should be able to have good faith discussions about topics without brigading and open visceral hostility. If not here, where? There's like, 5-15k people here on any given day, a vastly smaller number than the big communities of Reddit or Twitter or whatever, and by and large I think people agree about a lot of the big issues. I think starting from there can foster conversations that don't end with people just shutting down and tuning out.

I'm not going to spend my day going back and forth publicly about specific moderator warnings, because the weekend is coming and I am very busy with personal and professional things at the moment. But I will reiterate that creating duplicate accounts, especially ones meant to be antagonistic, is against the rules. Multiple warnings do lead to bans, and warnings stay for usually about a month at a time. I'll reach out privately to the moderators to get a better handle on what exactly has been going on to get a better feel of this specific situation.

 

So, wait. the fake account caused the ban, but the fake account's post are still there? I'm confused.

 

I saw Jake W’s post and it was not antagonistic.

 

@Jason Tate I know Jakob can be abrasive at times, but he genuinely supports good music from diverse creators. Banning him for aping the clearly racist cmoney reflects poorly on a site devoted to supporting good and diverse music.

 

I miss Jake

Album fucking sucks too

 

Yeah idk what paragraph two is supposed to be saying literally at all but I’m not gonna stop calling out shitheads like MGK for what they do and whoever is offended by that I honestly couldn’t care less about your feelings. Stop tying your identity up with pedophiles and abusers, idk what else to tell ya!

 

Also re: “brigading”, I for one couldn’t be happier there’s a brigade to call this shit out and raise awareness because somebody has to around here.

 

I agree with everything @TylerDrumming said. I’ve been planning on canceling my supporter membership for a bit now but never got around to it, then it auto renewed for the year.
I stick around because there are still a lot of great users on this site who continually introduce great new artists to me, and I’ve mostly just tried to ignore all the bullshit that goes on. haven’t been able to ignore it lately.

I can’t figure out how to do it, so if a staff person wants to help me cancel my membership without going through my paypal account (which no longer exists) pls message me

 

This website is a great method to find new music and discuss great music (from what seems like a small group of the same users), but it’s only like that because of members like Jake W. I personally don’t think having multiple accounts is worth banning over when worse people are given passes time and time again on this website. It’s ridiculous actually. For a website to at likes to promote accountability, it sure doesn’t hold all its members accountable for their words and actions!

 

There’s been people on here basically being openly racist during the protests that happened in Chicago, but hey they get a pass! The same person also flaunted money and insulted poorer people, but only gets a 10 day ban

Honestly it’s comical

 

That was ridiculous but let’s just cut to the chase, that user has been shitty for years. They’ve been antagonistic for no reason towards users, defending problematic people (he defended Tim Lambesis in the accountability thread), and just overall being an asshole at times, yet they are still on this website why? I don’t understand. The posts in the Chicago thread should have been the last straw, not the start of consequences for cmoney.

 

You can't create situations built upon bad faith and then complain that people are commenting "in bad faith". And the direction to take this to private conversations is a classic deflection by those in power. It's the definition of bad faith because you know no one will take up that offer due to the imbalance in power dynamics. It makes it seem like you're trying to help when really you're just trying to squash the conflict instead of actually resolving it.

 

Jason Tate also threw his mods under the bus and said he would look into it when he’s the only person that can IP/permaban accounts. So maybe he could be full of shit sometimes.

 

This is flat out not true. And no one was IP banned. There's like ... 15 IP bans we've ever used, and pretty sure it's all been spammers.

 

by all means please set the the record straight then

 

All laid out in the forum rules, and has been for years: Any “point” over eight will permanently ban an account. A mod could also theoretically give 8 points to do it, but that’s not what happened here. And no one was IP banned. Dunno how more clear to be.

 

You could be clear as to why we're being so selective about doling out punishments. You had an instance a couple weeks ago where a user was openly insulting several users and the staff actively chose to do nothing about it and yet here we have someone bringing up a valid issue with an artist that is by all means a pedophile (and yet promoted by this site, which seems hypocritical) and he's banned despite bringing far more to this forum than other users who seemingly can do and say whatever they want.

 

I know Ky-Ky won't get banned since he's a supporter but I have to say if his goal was to somehow discredit what @dadbolt and @CarpetElf and others have been saying in here it has backfired spectacularly

 

the guy was sexualizing children man wtf

EDIT: this was in response to Kyle Max posting his top three songs on the MGK album

 

Ok, so, a lot has happened here in the last two days it seems.

From personal experience, as a mod, I am far more likely to hear about instances in posts like this than through the reports function or to come across it as it is happening. At the end of the day, I think it's often forgotten that there are... 8 mods total (I think) and thousands of users on this site. We're not going to see everything. I hate to be the person who is like, "Report things more." But like... it's the best way for it to get addressed. (This response is to you, but also so hopefully more will see it.)

I can't speak to the part of your post that I moved into a second paragraph.

Yikes, dude. This is not the sort of thing you say out loud once you've thought it.

Is there a reason you popped in looking for a fight tonight? In the grand scheme of the clusterfuck of this thread, this was highly unnecessary provocation on your part.

It's hard to fault you for responding/egging on others, but by responding so much it definitely escalated what happened in here. I'd suggesting blocking Kyle going further.

Working on it. Three pages blew by quite quick

MGK is really the hill you want to die on this combatively?

This is highly unnecessary, albeit extremely invited by the user.

This is what Jason meant by brigading. Not that the initial cause (calling MGK out on the sexualization of children) is horrible. By all means, keep on doing that. It's all the user vs user attacks that follow.


Now to actually sort all this out, delete some unnecessary posts, and get points added to people. So, if y'all could... chill against each other, I'd appreciate it.

 

Alright I’m sorry if any of this sounds harsh, I do wish the best for him off this site. But:

Jake has spent more time publicly asking — begging — for his account to be deleted, and spamming multiple threads to announce he’s quitting the site than any user that I can think of in AP/Chorus history within this year alone. It’s happened like 5-6 times since January — he has *literally* been asking for it. It’s like parody by now. He will post long farewells about how he’s never coming back, and every single time he slides back in about two weeks later like nothing ever happened, until it inevitably all goes down again. Tbh it’s wild that anyone thinks this has anything to do with calling out a pedophile when so many others here have done the same with no consequence

And it’d be one thing to focus the problem on other users if he was always clashing with the same person or something, or if others exhibited the same behavior as Jake. I would even understand the outrage over his banning if he always found himself in these positions for standing up for non-male artists or condemning the disgusting ones. Because yeah, calling out problematic shit is important! But that’s not always the case with Jake — for example, 6 months ago the dude made a scene and bailed from the site over not liking a video game that other posters liked. Pretending like posting about problematic musicians is the only time he has a rough go around here is a weird look.

Above all of that, he has talked publicly on these forums about how his interactions on this site have contributed to disastrous effects on his mental health and directly led to some really scary episodes. And most of us do not want to see him in distress! But he routinely comes back just to talk about how much he hates this place and what it does to him, and is now apparently making extra accounts just to stick around and keep it going for some reason? Like, this seems like an impossibly toxic place for him, and in my opinion he very obviously should not be here. This is all without even mentioning the context of what I assume are numerous reports. And if I’m betting, he was kicked because a mod felt the same way, and likely not for calling out a pedophile or having an alt. Again, he’s quite literally asked for this multiple times.

 

And just to be clear for any MGK heads that may think I’m defending him — that post is not a dogwhistle for you. MGK is a disgusting person that stands for terrible things and it’s embarrassing that anyone supports him.