PhilipTheBucket

Yes but that was (a) a very occasional outcome, like every few months in a career filled with pointless arguing (b) not the end of the world.

I'm much more irritated for example with the mods who decided UniversalMonk was a force for good in the universe, who must be protected at all costs, than I am with FlyingSquid for occasionally having a heated argument with some transphobic person and eventually threatening to ban them. Neither one is really ideal but I just don't get what the constant hue and cry about FlyingSquid as the problem with lemmy.world moderation was. Maybe his habit of getting in big arguments (which, again, isn't really ideal) sort of painted a target on his back when other people who were just quietly doing awful moderation behind the scenes stayed out of people's awareness.

The problem is that there isn't that much to do for these armies of people during the early stages, when it's mostly a handful of programmers and designers fleshing out the core concept. Then, during the late stages, you need tons of QA people, grunt workers to create tons of art and fiddly little bits of implementation, localization and bug fixing, and whatever else. But, if you haven't planned ahead so that there is another game perfectly in the pipeline to transition all the grunt-workers over to when the first one ships, they'll all literally just be standing around doing nothing until the next game gets in shape that it's ready for them, and usually the solution is to fire all the people who just made millions of dollars for you pouring their heart into something. It's upsetting.

There are many things that game companies do consistently very very wrong, but this is one thing that isn't completely "their fault." It is possible to moderate the impacts but it's very hard and it doesn't really completely go away even if you work hard at it (which most of them don't care enough to even try to.)

The problem with FlyingSquid was that he would sometimes get upset arguing with people about politics, and there was a really loud contingent that was convinced that was the worst thing in the world and he was a power tripper who was going to break lemmy.world, and get all histrionic about it and make these weird accusations that never seemed to pan out to anything more than "he got in an argument."

The issue, to me, with lemmy.world is that there's a contingent of mods that like to make explicit safe spaces for propaganda (UniversalMonk), or just make baffling decisions that all of the users hate (UniversalMonk). The ones who are making most of the really terrible decisions aren't really well-known names like FlyingSquid or JordanLund or anything, they're just kind of behind the scenes poking at mod controls instead of commenting. I don't really know what they're up to now, but before the election they were spending significant effort actively making big communities on lemmy.world worse (like letting UniversalMonk bait people into arguments and then banning people he got in arguments with).

To me it's very notable that FlyingSquid actually did (in addition to whatever misdemeanors he committed) actually spend time trying to eliminate propaganda and dickheadedness from the communities he moderated, and I think it's interesting the overlap between that and the loud contingent of users demanding at all times that he be removed at all costs. A lot of the time if you look at one of his embittered arguments that's being used as evidence that he was the worst person in the world, he is arguing with someone who is being transphobic or conservative or otherwise just kind of a dickhead, and for some reason he would decide that the right reaction is to get in a heated argument with them. But it wasn't like someone would come in "I like raccoons" and he would say "WELL I LIKE LLAMAS SO FUCK YOU (BAN)," it was usually something pretty significant. Anyway, that loud contingent of users did have some success in creating a narrative that "I heard FlyingSquid is power tripping / terrible person / he's a big problem," which to me is sad.

I don't really trust the lemmy.world admin team, but I think most of the complaint about lemmy.world is that their big communities' moderation is on average very very bad. That doesn't really apply to small communities that are run by people passionate about the content that's in them.

That's my 2 cents on it.

"I tried ordering them all to vote for me, and the shitheads didn't do it, what the fuck is wrong (snort) with this goddamned country I tell you (snort)"

It's not unique but the games industry is worse than most.

There's a natural cycle to the development of a video game that's very atypical for most software products, involving a long slow ramp up of workforce followed by (unless you've been very very careful) a total lack of anything productive for 95% of any of those people to do for the forseeable future. What to do? Toss 'em on the street, that's what to do. Then couple that with it being a glitzy career that will attract lots of replacements for any of the hapless people you fired, which also applies to any way you want to abuse your employees or underpay them, and you have a recipe for lots and lots of abuse.