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Date:    2017 Nov 11 06:31
From:    dentin
Subject: Toxic players, negativity, and garden curation
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The recent situation with Teros has had me thinking long and hard about
social curation, jerks, and toxic players.  Some of the things I've read
and which may provide interesting background are:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5f7/elitist_jerks_a_wellkept_garden/

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

(The last one will eventually make sense.)  That said, these are nowhere
near all of the resources I've looked at.

More specifically, I've been trying to come to terms with how the game
should handle people who don't play and serve only to bring drama and
discontent into the game.  I have decided that the correct action is for me
to take responsibility for it and aggressively kick them off the game. 
This is a pretty dramatic change from my historical position.

In the beginning, 20+ years ago, I had two primary reasons for wanting
relatively free and unrestricted speech.  The first was the ostensibly
noble goal that people should be allowed to talk about whatever they want,
because "free speech".  I no longer believe that.  There are  many topics
which simply should be discussed Somewhere Else, whether because they are
morally reprehensible, illegal, or just plain because it hurts the game to
allow it.

The second reason I had for wanting relatively free speech was far more
mundane:  I didn't want to have to manually deal with it.  Manually
curating the playerbase to keep track of jerks, filter for stupidity, and
do  social management is irritating and time consuming.  Writing up posts
like this is a pain in the ass.  And a human has to do it, because social
management Doesn't Scale (see the Paul Graham essay linked above.)

But one of the critial points of the Paul Graham essay is that when you're
small, doing things that Don't Scale is often the correct answer.  Even at
our largest, if we were to grow a factor of ten, we're still small enough
for one person to handle this.  Not having automation isn't really an
excuse.  I scale well enough here.

With all this in mind, I have updated the rules to include a general
'negative contributor' clause under 'social interaction'.  In short, this
is a blanket rule can be used to ban players that log in, but actively make
the game worse for their presence in the eyes of the admin.

Expect it to be used.


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