Talking things out time

12:09 AM

@SevenSidedDie Hi! I am contacting you regarding the meta thing where you seemed to think I was accusing you of hate speech. I don't really know how chat works so this might not be working. Anyways, that's not what I was doing and 1) I'm sorry you felt that way 2) we should talk about it so we can figure out why that came across so strongly

hmmm. I have heard about chat summons and I thought you just used '@ name' format. Well, here we go for another try

the dark wanderer

12:22 AM

Welp, I'm gonna explain what happened from my perspective

"If we wink and nod and look away from overt piracy, we signal to the large pirate community that we welcome them. We are our audience, so that's no trivial thing. "

this confused me

It sounds like it is saying 'we should not allow pirates in the community because that would encourage pirates to join the community!' , which is not an argument I'm a fan of. I'm also completely ignorant as to what you mean by 'we are our audience', so I figure probably there's something that's meant to be communicated that I'm missing because you address tht twice and it doesn't make sense to me.

So I post a question:

Right, this is about whether we welcome experts on RPGing that happen to be a part of the pirate community. Am I correct in reading this as saying no? How does including pirates made our audience worse? How would it possibly attract Staff or Legal?

But somebody else responds:

What I get from this is that we don't want is to attract an audience of pirates. If we let people openly and freely talk about their pirated sources, then it makes it look like we don't mind piracy, and more pirates will show up. But if we openly discourage overt piracy, then we send a much different message. As for individual people who use pirated material, we aren't mind-readers. So, if they don't say anything about using pirated sources, we can't really do anything.

and then you aggree that's what you mean

but, that's not helpful because it's the same thing again. I'm not understanding your argument for which this community should be discouraged from joining, and I just keep being told "because if we don't then they'll join the community".

also the whole 'don't ask don't tell' policy is something that bothers me because I think allowing something as long as no one admits to possessing it but punishing it whenever people admit it exists is wrongheaded and bad and dumb. But I don't address that cause that's sort of a sore point and I've learned not to talk about stuff that bothers me on meta (it never goes well). Instead I try to address the other half.

So, I'm like "Ok, your argument seems to be we shouldn't let X group in because then X group will be here. Probably this is that thing where y'all don't so much care about the content of an argument as the pragmatic parts. " So, if we substitute a different group for pirates, since the argument doesn't change probably people will reform the argument in a way that makes sense

So I post that. but that takes, like, three giant comments. Discussion on meta always leads to big posts for me, not sure what to do about that.

Right, but why don't we want to attract pirates? what makes pirates different from other people groups like 'women', 'old people', or 'Albanians'? Our policy in other questions was 'piracy hurts the site so it's not allowed'. But here piracy is not hurting

the site. Should it still be disallowed? The example given is one where the piracy is being used to help answer a question-- this answer claims it can be easily removed to hide that the information was gained through privacy but I don't think that's true.

It's like if I said "I got this information by referencing d20pfsrd" or "I got this by reading dandwiki". Explaining where you got info from and how gives the reader

information about how much they want to believe your claims. Obviously an actual link to copyrighted materials used in violation of the law is unacceptable. But explaining the methodology used to come to the conclusions in your answer is just the right way to do things most of the time. Why is implying that piracy was involved a bad thing for the site?

I don't think leaving one's background at the door makes any sense. I don't leave my Catholic background at the door. I don't leave my 'guy who enjoys watching Firefly' background at the door. All parts of my background necessarily inform my exp

erience and so my expertise in every field. I think the idea that we should somehow divorce our backgrounds from our presence here is weird and contrary to SE principles, and I think asking others to do so is equally problematic. We can certainly ask people to modify their behaviors-- no offensive stuff, Be Nice, Back It Up, no illegal stuff

so that happens.

Then adam is like "gender is real thing, not like piracy, which is performative". Which just seems crass to me.

So I'm like "Actually, identity is complicated and both gender and piracy are at least partially a matter of identification. I still see no real difference being explained here."

and then the thread is shut down and you are upset and I am unsure why or what I did wrong.

Which brings us to the present. I'd be interested in reading your version of what happened if you ever have time to write it.

Miniman

7:38 AM

@thedarkwanderer It only works if their name autocompletes, which requires them to have been in the chatroom reasonably recently.

the dark wanderer

@Miniman oh :( well, there's a comment on the post so hopefully that will help

doppelgreener

1:02 PM

@thedarkwanderer I'll have a go at the "we are our audience" thing: once a site collects a significant number of users, we've got a pretty decent cross section of the kinds of people who visit and use the site. Strictly speaking, 99% of our audience are random people from Google and 1% is us, but that 1% could be considered indicative of what the visitors are like.

However SSD might be applying a community building philosophy where it doesn't quite apply, given we deliberately target the random anonymous masses like Wikipedia does, and Wikipedia's (most active) users and editors are definitely not its audience — but its overall user base includes all kinds of assorted anonymous people who definitely are part of their audience.

(SSD feel free to correct me on any level, it is your words after all)

For the purposes of reading SSD's posts i think you should take "pirates" to mean "people who openly and vocally participate in piracy in our posts here and would, in enough numbers, give the impression we're largely all engaging in and condoning piracy."

So this isn't a condemnation of "people who are fine and also happen to have downloaded the pdfs" but "people openly condoning illegal activities regarding publishers property, on a site which would like to maintain a healthy relationship with the law and those publishers."

Naturally people condoning an activity encourages more of that activity. On a site which condones venomous internet arguments i should expect to see tons of them and get insulted within my first ten posts. On a site which does not condone them or lend voice to them i should expect nothing of the sort.

doppelgreener

3:25 PM

oh, also, check this line from SSD's post:

> we signal to the large pirate community that we welcome them in their role as pirates specifically.

(emphasis SSD's)

we are fine welcoming just about anyone in their role as an RPG expert. but we're not interested in welcoming people specifically for playing a role in furthering privacy on this site. similar to how we may welcome people who wish to advertise their RPG platform, but we welcome them as RPG experts, and we sure don't welcome them as advertisers.

SevenSidedDie

6:05 PM

@thedarkwanderer Doppelgreener's largely got my thinking. The difference in backgrounds is that piracy is a behaviour, Albanian isn't. Someone can choose to not pirate, someone can't choose to not Albanian. We welcome experts, but if experts are going to fly a pirate flag, we're going to ask them to take down the flag while they're acting as site members. The pirate flag doesn't fly on our flagpole, if you will.

The strong objection I had was to the statement that the site being anti-pirate was being no different than the site being anti-Albanian, anti-etc. Anti-Albanian is inherently phobic and can only be expressed with hate speech, but being anti-piracy isn't phobic or require hate speech to express. It's a false equivalence.

ShadoCat

@SevenSidedDie From the: can-a-mute-person-play-dungeons-and-dragons where he is asking for advice, how is my advice not related to what he asked? What sources would you like me to spend my day researching for him (all communities in all countries that use bsl as their abbreviation for sign language)? If you don't think that he should be encouraged to find a community that can help him learn bsl while having fun playing, please state so in your comment.

SevenSidedDie

6:25 PM

@ShadoCat To prevent answers to subjective questions from being mere opinion, we expect them to be backed up by experience. That can be personal experience or citations to someone else's personal experience.

16

Q: How do we ask and answer subjective questions?

On RPG.SE, we deal with a fair number of questions that don't have a strict, objectively correct answer. Some game rules questions do, but we also have a good number of questions about how to run a game, how to play a game, which game meets certain criteria, how to handle issues within gaming gr...

10

A: How should I provide examples of experience as support for my answer?

Your question restated: How should I provide examples of experience as support for my answer? Use an organized packaging method (see below). I'm willing to accept that and edit my answer accordingly, but I can't find a way to do that without - in my opinion - lessening the helpfulness ...

the dark wanderer

@SevenSidedDie Ok! Thanks for taking the time to explain, guys. 1) I definitely have less problems with the edited post (not welcoming people in their capacity as a pirate), though I'm not sure that 'in their capacity as a pirate' necessarily includes background support for an answer that seems to imply piracy 2) I think the big difference here that caused the misunderstanding is our dissimilar views on CRGS (critical-race-and-gender-studies) type material.

Like, I'm not sure it's true that people can't choose not to Albanian, and also I don't think that generally 'anti-women' policies are necessarily phobic or hate speech. I mean, probably most and possibly all anti-women policies in the US at present are that way, and certainly many people can't decide their ethinicity or country of origin or whatnot, but just as certainly some people do, and then there are big fights because identity and subject positioning are important to people.

And, like, we don't yet have a clear definition of what a pirate is. If we made a pirate 'anyone who ever participated in anti-US online activity' then people couldn't stop being a pirate, they could only choose to never become one (maybe).

But regardless, this can all come up some other time; It's clear that the community wishes to oppose piracy on political grounds as well as financial ones, which covers the scope of this question.

SevenSidedDie

7:22 PM

@thedarkwanderer But people can refrain from being piratical here. So too can someone refrain from being woman-y here, but that's not something we would ever require — where the speech problem comes in is that requiring such a thing would necessarily require speech. (Arguably RPG.se is already structurally less-accessible to women for [reasons], but to counteract that we visibly enforce Be Nice's provisions that prevent overt unwelcoming-ness.)

So it is reasonable to visibly discourage piratical behaviour here in a way that discouraging Albanian behaviour would not be okay, because it's not an identity class that SE considers protected nor worthy of protection, nor worthy of making a show of inclusiveness for.

the dark wanderer

Yeah, that's exactly the question I was trying to ask in my original analogy ^^; We could refrain from this stuff here, but we don't and I think it would be bad to. I don't think suggesting "SE should be genderless!" necessarily means hate speech, I just disagree with it. We welcome men, women, non-binary people, people who reject gender as a system, whatever. So when we say 'don't bring your pirating background', that's unusual. Why do we want to do that? And the answer seems to be

So it is reasonable to visibly discourage piratical behaviour here in a way that discouraging Albanian behaviour would not be okay, because it's not an identity class that SE considers protected nor worthy of protection, nor worthy of making a show of inclusiveness for. Yes, exactly

ShadoCat

@SevenSidedDie, It seems not worth trying to help people who are asking for help. As a Moderator, you obviously trump the 5 people who upvoted my answer. Please delete it if you must.

the dark wanderer

which is totally fine, just that, and not 'pirates aren't a group' is the answer

@ShadoCat you need help editing something, dude?

SevenSidedDie

@ShadoCat These are the rules the community itself came up with. I'm just the messenger. Also this seems to be the wrong room for this conversation?

@thedarkwanderer Cool, okay. I think we're on the same page now? As in, no, this isn't a weird aberration from our normal aim to be inclusive, and it's an exception that makes sense in its own context.

the dark wanderer

@SevenSidedDie Yeah. We could choose to make pirates a protected group, but we are choosing not to based on the special circumstances/context of that group, namely that we want to oppose piracy. (this a fair rephrasing?)

SevenSidedDie

7:44 PM

@thedarkwanderer I think so, yes!

the dark wanderer

cool :) have a good day

SevenSidedDie

Though maybe not so much oppose piracy, as just don't want it here.

the dark wanderer

Ok, that's fair.

SevenSidedDie

I mean, personally, I have complex thoughts and feelings about the copyright regime we're in.

the dark wanderer

7:58 PM

@SevenSidedDie Alright, I'll bite, what's your stance on copyright overall?

SevenSidedDie

@thedarkwanderer Overall I think the US Congress is suffering regulatory capture by Disney and US copyright is horribly broken, and exported around the word via trade treaties, but the fix is non-obvious, so I like all these copyleft initiatives. :)

the dark wanderer

@SevenSidedDie Copyleft?

Google ftw

^^;

SevenSidedDie

@thedarkwanderer It's part of why I like SE so much — everything here is Creative Commons.

the dark wanderer

Yeah, that sort of licensing is cool. My problem is that licensing enforcement of any kind just is so broken right now. But I don't much care for the US judicial system so ^^;;;

Plus, I want people to be able to make and sell games. Or at least make games for income, which is sort of the same thing. Trademark and copyright are important, but at some point they stop being a reasonable protection of intellectual property and start being something else bad.

Yep! It's pretty great that we are fully wikipedia compatible XD

SevenSidedDie

8:31 PM

@thedarkwanderer I hear you — built on the back of broken copyright as it is, license enforcement (and civil contract enforcement generally) is ruinously untenable for most people.

And there's some of my complicated feelings about copyright too: part of me wishes all RPGs were copyleft, but when I think that I know it's not exactly true, because I know how many would never earn anything, and there are few enough dollars to feed most creators in the RPG industry as it is. So I appreciate the game designers that can copyleft, and those who choose not to, and generally curse the name of Disney ('s lawyers).

Transcript for

Talking things out time