The callous disregard for volunteers' wellbeing is pretty nuts. Everywhere online you have platforms that depend on the masses for their wellbeing with paid staff looking down on them as if they're children. You mentioned Reddit and AO3; StackExchange/StackOverflow is also going through a protracted struggle between its moderators and the VC overlords who bought the company.
At least with Reddit and SE, there's a profit motive at hand, so while they're pig-headed, you can kind of understand their motivation, as shallow as it is. With AO3, there's... What? I mean I know first-hand that the non-profit corporate world is still a corporate world, but how low do you have to go before unintentionally setting the whole thing on fire because your ego cannot tolerate being called out for incompetence?
Greetings from the Society for Creative Anachronism, the nonprofit that had to be sued by its members to force the board to comply with the pertinent nonprofit financial reporting law(s).
There's this thing I have seen multiple times where a volunteer-run nonprofit gets horrifyingly wedged because the people setting policy become absolutely convinced they know how things should be done, and they are deep, deep in Dunning-Kruger land. They are tremendously, wildly wrong about basic facts like, "what the law even says", and have no idea of how ignorant they are. They don't know what they don't know. And that includes not realizing they don't know how much peril they are in, their org is in, or, the other people in the org are in.
And because they don't know how extreme their ignorance is, they treat correction as a debate of opinions where the other side is being outrageously rudely insistent on winning the argument, to the point of bullying the poor, poor, org leadership.
OTW just seems to have found one of the most terrifyingly extreme forms of this failure mode I've ever heard of. Unless the Boy Scouts of America's handling of known sexual abusers is another example of this phenomenon (might not be, looks more like a cover up.)
P.S. the thing I am most fascinated about, here, is that this is now the second time AO3 has been around this block. They had a similar - way, WAY lower stakes - issue where someone had to publicly shame them to change how their software development was being done, with a whole presentation with GitHub screenshots on how normal software development projects behaved vs what they were doing.
That's serious yikes about the OTW's ability to react quickly and well to situations. And how little they seem interested in projecting their volunteers from the worst of fandom.
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At least with Reddit and SE, there's a profit motive at hand, so while they're pig-headed, you can kind of understand their motivation, as shallow as it is. With AO3, there's... What? I mean I know first-hand that the non-profit corporate world is still a corporate world, but how low do you have to go before unintentionally setting the whole thing on fire because your ego cannot tolerate being called out for incompetence?
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Greetings from the Society for Creative Anachronism, the nonprofit that had to be sued by its members to force the board to comply with the pertinent nonprofit financial reporting law(s).
There's this thing I have seen multiple times where a volunteer-run nonprofit gets horrifyingly wedged because the people setting policy become absolutely convinced they know how things should be done, and they are deep, deep in Dunning-Kruger land. They are tremendously, wildly wrong about basic facts like, "what the law even says", and have no idea of how ignorant they are. They don't know what they don't know. And that includes not realizing they don't know how much peril they are in, their org is in, or, the other people in the org are in.
And because they don't know how extreme their ignorance is, they treat correction as a debate of opinions where the other side is being outrageously rudely insistent on winning the argument, to the point of bullying the poor, poor, org leadership.
OTW just seems to have found one of the most terrifyingly extreme forms of this failure mode I've ever heard of. Unless the Boy Scouts of America's handling of known sexual abusers is another example of this phenomenon (might not be, looks more like a cover up.)
P.S. the thing I am most fascinated about, here, is that this is now the second time AO3 has been around this block. They had a similar - way, WAY lower stakes - issue where someone had to publicly shame them to change how their software development was being done, with a whole presentation with GitHub screenshots on how normal software development projects behaved vs what they were doing.
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Hopefully at least now that it's out in the open there can be some progress on fixing it, because damn.
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