A new YouTube channel run by a team of people that goes by the name of “HGAD Productions” made a doc as part of a new series called “untangling the Internet” about the community as a result of a Reddit/Twitter meme about a community member which I’m not gonna bring up but you can find out in the video.
I have not gotten a chance to watch the full video yet, I have only seen a small part but I can already recommend the video based on those small parts. I would recommend to check it out.
unrelated chris but i pinged you on discord, if you could respond to that please i’d appreciate it.
I will when I can get on discord which I can’t rn
That’s a really interesting video
I really hope it doesn’t make this community look bad: we are not that kind of community! (if anything it’s the 1% of jerks who ruin it for everybody)
I think the way he presented it does not make it look bad
It’s unbiased. It shows the good, the bad, and the ugly. It leaves room for interpretation, and that’s exactly what people will do, and that’s their right.
The video is fantastic, and speaks to so many points, most importantly:
As we are meant to be a community of professionals. There are some kids in there that will want to take drama seriously for a little inconvenience that the creators like to do. It seems to happen in every kind of fandom/community that is out there even the most professional kind.
On another note I’m glad they were able to make aware that most of the popular creators (especially us on here) are perfectly innocent and do not deserve to be victims of drama and hatefulness. It’s quite relatable for example how furries are not doing anything bad to children or animals yet one slight innocent incontinence and yet they would make us look like zoophiles when there is absolutely nothing to prove it.
All in all those grounded and bullying hateful channels just have a goal to commit defamation which is definitely illegal to do and possible opens up an opportunity to be able to file a lawsuit if it happens.
It’s genuinely a great video. I do have a few thoughts toward it. Part of me wants to make a response/companion video about it, but I’m not sure I want to put myself out there in that way.
Obviously, I don’t hold with harassment, abuse, the usage of slurs, or bullying of any sort. It’s expressly verboten on this board for a reason and ought to be enforced on the Discord server as well. When we turn a blind eye to that sort of behavior, we are tacitly enabling and encouraging it. It has no place in this community and we should hold each other accountable. Unfortunately it seems like it’s becoming a big ask to expect people to conduct themselves civilly and keep a filter on them when they talk to people on the Internet.
This board unfortunately no longer has a custom rules page, so let me restate this from the Discord server: “Would I say this to the person standing next to me at the grocery store?”
If this is such a hard thing to do, then I don’t think this community has any right to get up in arms about how we are being painted in a bad light. I just got through a pretty unproductive discussion on the Discord server that essentially resulted in a collective “yeah we need to do better but [insert other person here] said [bad thing] so he started it!”
I am concerned that this very corner of the community is harboring the sort of people who are making the problem worse. Unless we address the problem head-on and deal with that inconvenient truth, then we can’t kid ourselves into thinking that the problem will just go away on it’s own.
When I was first introduced to this niche hobby, I was around 13 years old, and that seems to remain the average age of entry into the community. We should do well to remember that most of the people in this community are children. What does that say of our character when this kind of behavior is being directed towards (but not always exclusively) children? Adults too, to be sure, and some of these adults and children have conditions that may affect how they see the world.
All this is to say that, there is nothing that excuses bullying a person with autism online, regardless of how poor their response to said harassment may have been. We are not the Kiwi Farms, we are a community of enthusiasts. And if this behavior continues the way it did as it played out in that video, I don’t think it’s a community I want to have my name connected with.