I didn't have any plans to input myself but fuck it why not. I have mixed feelings on this because on one hand being "overly aggressive" isn't a bad reason to demote someone. It's why I try to turn down staff-like positions where possible, because its just not something I think I'm good at regulating. HOWEVER, none of the examples given by SS here have been good, and I feel bad because this feels exactly like it was agenda driven by a couple people. I also feel bad for Tuthur because there are frankly, far FAR more abrasive staff members that deserve this scolding even further and I'm sure me saying abrasive alone is enough to tell some of you who I mean. I ain't gonna say names since these people are usually also the people who do everything being accused of in this thread: extreme magnifying glass punishing / borderline petty harassment in my case. If your gonna enforce a standard, you NEED to enforce it equally and that just isn't being done. Either reinstate Tuthur, give some more solid examples of Tuthur's misconduct, or try enforcing this more equally. Being on a tight leash after prior punishment is fine until it feels like your hanging prior failings over their head at all times and unfortunately this feels like the latter.
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Announcement ZU Elections
- Thread starter Tuthur
- Start date
- Status
As someone who has been quite active in staff positions in other Pokémon communities since 2014 but only lurking on Smogon with zero intention to involve myself further, let me just say: this is why. I obviously have no stakes in this, so feel free to ignore my opinion entirely, but I feel like I speak for a lot of passive users as to why they choose to stay away from any kind of decision making on this site. Hope Tuthur gets reinstated, big kudos to the ZU community for this incredible and unanimous outpouring of support, and frankly some of the very senior staff should reconsider whether they really are in the right positions. 10 years ago chaos would have stepped in. Not sure if we are in too deep now.
We haven’t had sunshine and rainbows interactions in the past, but Tuthur definitely doesn’t deserve this. The backing they have from the zu community and so on shows how much of a valued individual he is to this site. I hope SS in the future can change the way they do things for the better. May you thrive from this Tuthur
This kind of reminds me when Youtube made the decision to remove the dislike count back in 2021 in their like to dislike ratio button and quite literally everyone (without a single exception I am aware of) is very critical of such decision. However Youtube decided to completely disregard the community feedback and proceeded with the removal anyway showing that Youtube clearly does not value their content creators and general user feedback. Once the decision was made and patched thru overnight we already saw third party software and browser add ons to return the dislike count via third party software and estimations only for the late youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki to double down on their decision to do so only turning the platform worse and leaving a sour taste in everyone's mouth. To this day I still see creators talking about this is the worst of the worst decision they could have made. We are already seeing competing platforms on the rise including Elon Musk's X (formerly twitter) and rumble etc.
While I understand the decision making in SS is obviously not the same as Youtube HQ, if you want to create a thriving online community, when a clear majority of the community base is critical of a decision made by the higher ups which absolutely seems to be the case from just viewing comments on this forum, the very least you can do is to drop your ego and at least give a viable path for Tuthur to be reinstated and have his/her name cleared up unless there is something going on that REALLY justifies the demotion behind the scenes that most of us regs are not aware of. You definitely do not want to make the same poor decision youtube did back then.
The SS are still human and there's no shame to admit you made a hasty decision. We all make mistakes and there will be times that you will make a very questionable decision looking back. However a quick reminder for the SS is that both trust and respect between you and the underlying community takes years to develop, only seconds to throw it all away and a lifetime to rebuild - a conventional wisdom old as time itself. Hence you know what is the right thing to do moving forward. It's very self-explanatory at this point. (Again unless there is more to it that is not available to the public which I would retract all of the above once it comes to light).
May you make the next move wisely.
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I'm not sure if there will be an official response to this thread or if this is considered a closed case already, but while we are waiting to see, I want to add two points of feedback that I think would help handling cases like this in the future.
First, I think demotes should be treated less lightly when the person being demoted is in good standing with their community. It shouldn't be based on some controversial examples as this demotivates people from contributing to the site and negatively affect subcommunities which is way more detrimental than having to keep someone that is sometimes abrassive and difficult to work with. Even those who demoted tuthur would probably agree it was not really that strong of a case as he was allowed to keep his room owner position at first, but then I don’t think the negative of the demotion was really weighted in.
Second, I think holding opinions people had as staff against them is very detrimental to the decision process as a whole. The "Ox ban in smogtours" is a good example of this as it was part of tuthur demote reasoning. If arguing against some punishments can be held against you people will just stop commenting on these cases and you'll be left with a few opinions that may not even represent what people or the comminity think at large. I think it's important to make sure everyone in staff feels safe sharing their point of vue on any topic without fearing for their position or being called stuff they aren't and this example doesn't help feeling that way.
First, I think demotes should be treated less lightly when the person being demoted is in good standing with their community. It shouldn't be based on some controversial examples as this demotivates people from contributing to the site and negatively affect subcommunities which is way more detrimental than having to keep someone that is sometimes abrassive and difficult to work with. Even those who demoted tuthur would probably agree it was not really that strong of a case as he was allowed to keep his room owner position at first, but then I don’t think the negative of the demotion was really weighted in.
Second, I think holding opinions people had as staff against them is very detrimental to the decision process as a whole. The "Ox ban in smogtours" is a good example of this as it was part of tuthur demote reasoning. If arguing against some punishments can be held against you people will just stop commenting on these cases and you'll be left with a few opinions that may not even represent what people or the comminity think at large. I think it's important to make sure everyone in staff feels safe sharing their point of vue on any topic without fearing for their position or being called stuff they aren't and this example doesn't help feeling that way.
i know that i'm probably not the most qualified to speak, especially in regards to the zu tiering council, but wanted to give my two cents regardless
the silence from senior staff on this topic is deafening, especially given how they handled the situation with lily (who was ultimately more dangerous to the site's integrity than tuthur due to, among other things, sharing her account with others, which could've lead to some dire leaks). upon examining tuthur's logs, it seemed like some lapses in judgement at worst and a full-blown demotion was absolutely disproportionate. given the site's previous (and current) treatment of those in marginalized groups (particularly trans people), this comes off as pinkwashing; taking an unnecessary (and ultimately harmful) action to posture ss as progressive good guys while their friends and cronies are able to get away with far worse against lgbtq+ members. the logs showing ss members making remarks that are arguably even worse than anything tuthur said/did do not help their case either.
ultimately this makes the website (particularly its staff) come off as a tight-knit circlejerk that prioritizes the power of its inner circle over fostering a productive and welcoming community. as long as the status quo is maintained, those at the top can get away with anything they please so long as people don't make a stink about it. at some point however, enough people will catch on and will voice their displeasure.
the silence from senior staff on this topic is deafening, especially given how they handled the situation with lily (who was ultimately more dangerous to the site's integrity than tuthur due to, among other things, sharing her account with others, which could've lead to some dire leaks). upon examining tuthur's logs, it seemed like some lapses in judgement at worst and a full-blown demotion was absolutely disproportionate. given the site's previous (and current) treatment of those in marginalized groups (particularly trans people), this comes off as pinkwashing; taking an unnecessary (and ultimately harmful) action to posture ss as progressive good guys while their friends and cronies are able to get away with far worse against lgbtq+ members. the logs showing ss members making remarks that are arguably even worse than anything tuthur said/did do not help their case either.
ultimately this makes the website (particularly its staff) come off as a tight-knit circlejerk that prioritizes the power of its inner circle over fostering a productive and welcoming community. as long as the status quo is maintained, those at the top can get away with anything they please so long as people don't make a stink about it. at some point however, enough people will catch on and will voice their displeasure.
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"lächerlich -[umgangssprachlich, abwertend] nicht ernst zu nehmend, abwegig, unsinnig"
Absolutely ridiculous. I don't want to burn my mouth, so I will just leave it at that.
I am very sorry to hear what happened to you Tuthur. You were one of the greatest influences I had in the ZU community, and on the website as a whole. It is incredibly sad to see how the literal face of this tier gets treated. Many already said how much positive influence you had on ZU, it really can't be understated, but as someone who worked with you on pretty much the highest levels, which can't be seen by the public eye, and even consulted you for help in my time as a fresh TL, I can not thank you enough for what you have done for the tier and for me personally. It was always a pleasure working with you. I don't remember even having any big disagreements with you, besides maybe something about Durza but LOL that was wild af. Thank you so much for your guidance, even if I'm not active right now, I am still very thankful for what you did.
As for ZU, I don't want to talk down for whos left now (I don't even know) but ZU has such a big void to fill now. I don't want to make it worse than it is, but these times will be challenging in terms of growth and pushing ZU forward.
Speaking for myself and not the entirety of SS here. Conversations are still ongoing, however, I feel compelled to reply to this thread as there has been a lack of response so far on our end and I'd like to give a reply to the community in the interim. SS will most likely come with formal post to close out the thread.
Our intention is to reinstate tuthor, although it's still under discussion between Tuthur, estarossa, and myself. The reason for my preemptive response is to properly address the community's justified outcry and cocnerns. I think users like LilyAC and Amaranth make solid points and there was a myriad of other reasonable responses that we sure do appreciate.
SS wants to earn the confidence of our community. We're making hundreds of tough calls a week and the demand for accountability is great because it helps us reflect when we make a mistake. And to Amaranths point, we don't want SS to be a jerk. What we do want is a group of levelheaded users that can make tough calls on behalf of the community, without bias. I do not think we necessarily acted with bias against Tuthur, who has often been known to toe-the-line. But our failure was due to our lack of approaching him before the situation blew out of hand.
Before I continue, I will not be addressing a lot of rage bait claims such as pinkwashing (I'm an ally to all, get outta here), Lily, and any other egregious statements that aren't backed by evidence.
The decision was originally made not due to Tuthur having a large blow up, but evaluating a consistent string of small behavior instances that built up overtime. Our initial determination was that this repeated behavior was not befitting for a tier leader. After talking with Tuthur yesterday along with Estarossa , we were both impressed with the calm rationale Tuthur displayed, the ability to take accountability, and do feel that he's earned the repromote.
I also want to be extremely clear that we aren't making these decisions to punish the community. We have stringent expectations of anyone in leadership, and the biggest failure here was acting reactively instead of proactively having that personal convo with Tuthur. Something that definitely needs to be normalized in these situations. And it's a lesson learned.
Look everyone, we are human and we do make mistakes. Everyone who wants to paint SS as the bad guy has no idea what it's like to be in a position where nothing that you do will be good enough. This is coming from someone that was a massive critic of SS for a long time and many of you can find evidence of that. I'm shooting from the hip here. The difference between our current SS team and previous iterations is that we are extremely committed to getting the decision right. Sometimes that decision is gonna be automatic. Sometimes it's gonna take us a little time and a few detours to get to the right destination. If you're expecting us to nail every single tough call, I'm here to tell you right now that's not gonna happen. There's no body of power in the world that's able to do that, including us. But, what I'm also saying is that we are reasonable and listening to every single member of the community. (Even you Fardin)
I've heard a lot of talk about trust and SS and how that trust seems broken among the community. Hopefully our actions moving forward will inspire more confidence from the community. Our entire team is committed to rebuilding the trust among all of you.
I do want to personally apologize to Tuthur. I really appreciated talking with you yesterday, and it was nice to have a discussion that will help on both sides and humanize the entire situation.
Much like the ZU community had the back of their leader, I will have the back of my SS team. We appreciate the challenge issued by the community to keep us personally accountable. Much like losing in a tournament game, we've got to evaluate ways to improve, and keep chugging along.
Please rest assured, we hear all of you. We appreciate everyone for speaking up, and we will continue to keep striving to do better.
Our intention is to reinstate tuthor, although it's still under discussion between Tuthur, estarossa, and myself. The reason for my preemptive response is to properly address the community's justified outcry and cocnerns. I think users like LilyAC and Amaranth make solid points and there was a myriad of other reasonable responses that we sure do appreciate.
SS wants to earn the confidence of our community. We're making hundreds of tough calls a week and the demand for accountability is great because it helps us reflect when we make a mistake. And to Amaranths point, we don't want SS to be a jerk. What we do want is a group of levelheaded users that can make tough calls on behalf of the community, without bias. I do not think we necessarily acted with bias against Tuthur, who has often been known to toe-the-line. But our failure was due to our lack of approaching him before the situation blew out of hand.
Before I continue, I will not be addressing a lot of rage bait claims such as pinkwashing (I'm an ally to all, get outta here), Lily, and any other egregious statements that aren't backed by evidence.
The decision was originally made not due to Tuthur having a large blow up, but evaluating a consistent string of small behavior instances that built up overtime. Our initial determination was that this repeated behavior was not befitting for a tier leader. After talking with Tuthur yesterday along with Estarossa , we were both impressed with the calm rationale Tuthur displayed, the ability to take accountability, and do feel that he's earned the repromote.
I also want to be extremely clear that we aren't making these decisions to punish the community. We have stringent expectations of anyone in leadership, and the biggest failure here was acting reactively instead of proactively having that personal convo with Tuthur. Something that definitely needs to be normalized in these situations. And it's a lesson learned.
Look everyone, we are human and we do make mistakes. Everyone who wants to paint SS as the bad guy has no idea what it's like to be in a position where nothing that you do will be good enough. This is coming from someone that was a massive critic of SS for a long time and many of you can find evidence of that. I'm shooting from the hip here. The difference between our current SS team and previous iterations is that we are extremely committed to getting the decision right. Sometimes that decision is gonna be automatic. Sometimes it's gonna take us a little time and a few detours to get to the right destination. If you're expecting us to nail every single tough call, I'm here to tell you right now that's not gonna happen. There's no body of power in the world that's able to do that, including us. But, what I'm also saying is that we are reasonable and listening to every single member of the community. (Even you Fardin)
I've heard a lot of talk about trust and SS and how that trust seems broken among the community. Hopefully our actions moving forward will inspire more confidence from the community. Our entire team is committed to rebuilding the trust among all of you.
I do want to personally apologize to Tuthur. I really appreciated talking with you yesterday, and it was nice to have a discussion that will help on both sides and humanize the entire situation.
Much like the ZU community had the back of their leader, I will have the back of my SS team. We appreciate the challenge issued by the community to keep us personally accountable. Much like losing in a tournament game, we've got to evaluate ways to improve, and keep chugging along.
Please rest assured, we hear all of you. We appreciate everyone for speaking up, and we will continue to keep striving to do better.
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i appreciate you coming forward and being transparent, as well as acknowledging ss's errors. i would like to add that it wasn't my intention to ragebait and these were genuine concerns, but i worded them extremely strongly as a result of personal anger and grievances being aired out. i did kinda characterize ss as this monolithic entity, but i'm aware there are indeed good people among them.
While this is a great concession for the ZU community and rebuilding trust is good. Unfortunately this doesn't change the Underlying problem that this all voluntary to you guys. You could have completely ignored this and the situation would have fizzled out. The only checks and balances are at the very top. The ZU community had no way to fight back against this decision. The only thing they could do was make noise. Of course there are situation where the SS should put a iron fist on a user if they present a danger to the whole community but this was not it.
Again I am happy that this decision is being overturned, but this more to due with your integrity as a SS member. I can assume most of you are nice people. But you don't have to care if your specific community doesn't agree with you. That user can do whatever they want if it doesn't annoy other SS members. The whole position of SS member is too powerful in its current form. I don't really have a good solution for this but I guess a system of democratically elected of Mods/Leaders/TDs/Seniors would be a something I guess.
Solidarity with ZU
I think that SS does a pretty good job of pulling representation from all sectors of the website. When I joined the team, I knew virtually noone. The impression people have that were this evil organization trying to upset you all is absurd. We care about the website and want it to run well.
We have to make difficult and uncomfortable decisions every day. That's what we signed up for. You're right, it's voluntary. But there's still a process to get to that level which involves being a community leader and showing trustworthiness.
We all like helping the site. We all love pokemon. We're not looking to constantly ruffle feathers. However, it's our job to make sure that the proper smogon communities are in line and functioning at a level of satisfaction.
Your impression is that Tuthur got unjustly witch hunted and that's not true. As I explained, Tuthur wasn't entirely innocent here. What we're choosing to do is simply listen to your community and your collective admiration for Tuthur and acknowledge that perhaps, we were a bit harsh in making the initial judgement call. However, if we didn't act with such judgement in these situations, you could see regression from how things used to be reflected. We need to continue to operate with dignity, and empathy which is where we failed here.
Lastly, the ZU community did fight back. Your opinion did matter. It mattered to us. Making noise is perfectly fine, and I even encourage it, as long as it's done respectfully. I've stated some examples of users who were especially effective in voicing their thoughts - and while their tone was harsh, it was justified and it wasn't a clear bashing of any individual, but rather a challenge for us to do better.
I don't want to keep harping on this as we hope to have a final post to close this out today. Just message me on discord if anyone has any questions, happy to talk it out.
We have to make difficult and uncomfortable decisions every day. That's what we signed up for. You're right, it's voluntary. But there's still a process to get to that level which involves being a community leader and showing trustworthiness.
We all like helping the site. We all love pokemon. We're not looking to constantly ruffle feathers. However, it's our job to make sure that the proper smogon communities are in line and functioning at a level of satisfaction.
Your impression is that Tuthur got unjustly witch hunted and that's not true. As I explained, Tuthur wasn't entirely innocent here. What we're choosing to do is simply listen to your community and your collective admiration for Tuthur and acknowledge that perhaps, we were a bit harsh in making the initial judgement call. However, if we didn't act with such judgement in these situations, you could see regression from how things used to be reflected. We need to continue to operate with dignity, and empathy which is where we failed here.
Lastly, the ZU community did fight back. Your opinion did matter. It mattered to us. Making noise is perfectly fine, and I even encourage it, as long as it's done respectfully. I've stated some examples of users who were especially effective in voicing their thoughts - and while their tone was harsh, it was justified and it wasn't a clear bashing of any individual, but rather a challenge for us to do better.
I don't want to keep harping on this as we hope to have a final post to close this out today. Just message me on discord if anyone has any questions, happy to talk it out.
As dave mentioned earlier I'm here to make the official SS response to this situation now.
As community lead I've been reviewing this situation for the past few days in order to find the best course of action moving forward. Part of this involved looking into what went wrong with the processes here; I myself was on a leave of absence when this occurred so that I could focus on UU after the Lily situation, so I did not give this the attention it deserved at the time, which I can only apologise and take accountability for.
As Dave mentioned this decision was made due to a buildup of smaller instances of behavioural issues over a longer period of time, but a key factor that was ignored in the original decision was that Tuthur had never actually been warned for this, and while we would expect someone to hopefully realise that their behaviour wasn't right in certain situations, it is very reasonable and a general policy to expect that users should still be made aware of these issues first and warned for it to give them a chance to change. Part of this miscommunication comes down to the fact that Tuthur was demoted once before about 3 years ago, but this is a significant time gap that further justifies having a conversation before acting on anything.
While it appears to be common knowledge now, I want to reiterate that dhelmise and a fairy were NOT the ones making the decisions here. dhelmise should never have been made to deal with this as a new SS member either regardless, and he has been a notable voice in helping resolve this situation in a way that benefits ZU too.
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So how did the review go?
Internally SS reviewed the logs and processes to see whether this course of action was deserved despite the mess up in said process or whether there were restorative routes we needed to take. Part of this involved looking into formalising more of the processes that were already assumed procedures by ensuring that any decision on this scale is looped through community leads (Aberforth and myself) before they go through.
The review process culminated in Dave and I having a conversation with Tuthur to discuss the behaviour instances gathered. As part of this, there were two things that we were really looking for: accountability in those instances and discussing how Tuthur could have handled those situations differently in hindsight.
This conversation was very productive; from my POV, Tuthur showed a key understanding of where he went wrong, he provided insight on how to better handle things in the future, and we discussed some good ideas for how to handle difficult situations. It also painted instances like the Ox log in a much better light when he explained it, and SS felt much more comfortable with that afterwards.
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What are the next steps?
After our review process and internal discussions, we plan to repromote Tuthur to his positions with a key understanding that this process acts as a warning for the behaviour that should have been provided before and as knowledge that Dave and I always have our DMs open for more advice/insight in the future and that we are confident that these hopefully won't be issues anymore.
I would like to obviously apologise for how this situation played out, processes were not laid out like they should have been and have caused a dramatic situation that could have been avoided. SS understand how poorly this situation was handled, but we will formalise these review processes and make them more robust when implementing them into our decision-making.
As community lead I've been reviewing this situation for the past few days in order to find the best course of action moving forward. Part of this involved looking into what went wrong with the processes here; I myself was on a leave of absence when this occurred so that I could focus on UU after the Lily situation, so I did not give this the attention it deserved at the time, which I can only apologise and take accountability for.
As Dave mentioned this decision was made due to a buildup of smaller instances of behavioural issues over a longer period of time, but a key factor that was ignored in the original decision was that Tuthur had never actually been warned for this, and while we would expect someone to hopefully realise that their behaviour wasn't right in certain situations, it is very reasonable and a general policy to expect that users should still be made aware of these issues first and warned for it to give them a chance to change. Part of this miscommunication comes down to the fact that Tuthur was demoted once before about 3 years ago, but this is a significant time gap that further justifies having a conversation before acting on anything.
While it appears to be common knowledge now, I want to reiterate that dhelmise and a fairy were NOT the ones making the decisions here. dhelmise should never have been made to deal with this as a new SS member either regardless, and he has been a notable voice in helping resolve this situation in a way that benefits ZU too.
______
So how did the review go?
Internally SS reviewed the logs and processes to see whether this course of action was deserved despite the mess up in said process or whether there were restorative routes we needed to take. Part of this involved looking into formalising more of the processes that were already assumed procedures by ensuring that any decision on this scale is looped through community leads (Aberforth and myself) before they go through.
The review process culminated in Dave and I having a conversation with Tuthur to discuss the behaviour instances gathered. As part of this, there were two things that we were really looking for: accountability in those instances and discussing how Tuthur could have handled those situations differently in hindsight.
This conversation was very productive; from my POV, Tuthur showed a key understanding of where he went wrong, he provided insight on how to better handle things in the future, and we discussed some good ideas for how to handle difficult situations. It also painted instances like the Ox log in a much better light when he explained it, and SS felt much more comfortable with that afterwards.
_______
What are the next steps?
After our review process and internal discussions, we plan to repromote Tuthur to his positions with a key understanding that this process acts as a warning for the behaviour that should have been provided before and as knowledge that Dave and I always have our DMs open for more advice/insight in the future and that we are confident that these hopefully won't be issues anymore.
I would like to obviously apologise for how this situation played out, processes were not laid out like they should have been and have caused a dramatic situation that could have been avoided. SS understand how poorly this situation was handled, but we will formalise these review processes and make them more robust when implementing them into our decision-making.
- Status