*Sigh* I guess I might as well break the silence.
It’s been (nearly) a year since I wrote that piece, and I deliberately took the stance that I wouldn’t comment on it–that I would say my bit and then move on. Of course, I wrote the piece kind of quickly, for fear of losing my nerve and because the internet’s attention span is short, but I don’t think I was as clear as I should have been about what I wanted to communicate, so maybe a couple points of clarification / elaboration are in order, now that the thing is settled.
You know, a lot of people took that piece as a plea for tolerance–and while that was my takeaway, it wasn’t really my concern at all through the bulk to the piece. Rather, it was concerned how community rules and regulations ought to be constructed, and with what I’ll call the three ‘C’s’–Clarity, Consistency, and Communication–all of which the NCMC fails miserably at.
Here was the problem put in those terms. First, the rules the NCMC has to guide submissions are pretty vague. A lot of people wanted to say that the “No characters under 17” rule was precise, but in my piece, I pointed out that the entire question of age in these stories becomes very vague, very quickly. There was a lot of “letter of the law” vs. “spirit of the law” debated back and forth in the comments, but that was the point–if your letter doesn’t match the spirit and intention of the rule, then you’ve written an unclear rule, and maybe you should revise it to make it more accurate. Trying to build a community around rules that shift under people’s feet is not a very good foundation.
Second, the rules were never enforced consistently, especially the final rule restricting the use of copyrighted characters. Goodness, if ever there was a rule that no one seemed to care about on the NCMC, it would probably be that one. If you run a community enforcing rules at random, you aren’t enforcing rules, you’re arbitrarily picking things that are approved or outlawed according to personal preference and whimsy–again, not a very solid foundation for a community.
Finally, there’s no way of communicating with anyone in charge of that website about the nature of the rules. No appeals process, no way to ask how to change a story to make it acceptable, no way to ask ahead of time if this story or that story crosses a line. The NCMC says:
The NCMC aims to be fully automated. The largest tool required to achieve this is trust. Please don’t violate the spirit of the website by posting stories or comments from outside the guidelines.
That’s all fine and good, but that’s not how the website is run at all. Mystery webmaster’s rules are unclear, his enforcement of those rules is inconsistent, and so this strange approach of hands off / hands on is a recipe for disaster. It’s no surprise that the website is struggling with a massive spam problem which crippled it to the extent that comments have been disabled for months now–the webmaster can’t bear to see the website inundated with spam, and yet his doctrine of “automation” urges him to not become deeply involved with the comment process. The result? Just disable them altogether! No spam comments he has to deal with, and still perfectly automated–just a community completely devoid of constructive feedback. You might also notice that, for a while, there was an announcement that a new comment system was in the works, but that announcement has, not very surprisingly, disappeared. The webmaster’s desire to be hands off is running completely contrary to the stated goals of the website, because the website he wants to run requires him to be present. And so, it’s stuck in limbo.
My solution? If you want to be hands off, then be hands off! Let people post what they want. Stop your distance policing, and this strange compulsion to control every minutiae of the website without ever showing your face, or your hand. If you actually want to trust people, then fucking trust them. That, or if you want a community built around a set of firm standards, then be clear about what those standards are,enforce them consistently, and communicate with writers and readers about those standards to be sure they are understood.
So, that’s the upshot of what I was trying to say, and what I said rather poorly. Not that I’m not proud of that snarky little story, it was great fun to write, and I still snicker my way through the comment section on occasion.
Also, people were calling me a pedophile, and I wasn’t about to let that stand without a reply. Who would?
Bracken's Corner 