Just saw that James Shaw is pulling the Relics series from HG. I hope he reconsiders… but I also think the fact that he’s cross enough to make the announcement ought to be a wake-up call.
There’s no reason that a small game company has to have this adversarial a relationship with its online communities, catching up a growing number of authors in the process.
I was a CoG mod years ago. I know it’s a tough gig with constant judgment calls, and anyone who does it for the long haul (as the staff in particular have to do) is going to get some degree of burnout from the steady flow of people being jerks. Malin’s words from earlier in this thread are always worth remembering.
I’m also aware that online moderation culture has broadly moved away from the way we did it a decade ago. The idea that good ideas drive out bad ones, so we should take the time to respond to people who are wrong but not obviously trolling, now seems naive. Staff (for whom this is a tiny fraction of their job responsibility) and mods (volunteer forum members) get too tired to keep up more intensive engagement with “problem users” or explaining and justifying moderation decisions. The CoG forums are hardly the only online space where silencing posts, shutting down conversations, and banning people have moved from being a last resort to a frequent one.
But I think the new content moderation consensus is also breaking down, as its forum management tactics poison communities. The normalization of authoritarian tactics doesn’t produce safe spaces or healthy conversation. Reemphasizing transparency, de-escalation, and diplomacy would go a long way toward avoiding unnecessary blowups like this. I hope we can see that shift, whatever James ultimately decides.