>>86443I can tell you what I saw while I was still involved with WGing, which hasn't been the case for awhile now. So take everything here with a grain of salt.
The thing to understand about Grot is that he's very business oriented. He treats WGing like a business because it is, under the hood. I've talked about it a few times, but there is an underlying LLM that he has it organized under. His goal is for WGing to be profitable and for the LLM (and thus him and any other owners) to have little to no legal liability.
This has a handful of implications for how the community itself is organized. Grot prefers to have a lot of distance between him and the community, and this was also true in regards to myself. He didn't want me interacting as directly with the community for the stated reason of the less the admins interacted with the community, the less likely we were to get in trouble should something come up (as we could deny that we knew anything about x,y, or z). I also don't think he cared for how blunt I was with users, as I certainly rubbed people the wrong way if I felt strongly about something, so anything to get me away from interacting with the community was probably going to be utilized (though I'm just assuming that).
Likewise, this makes being a proactive administration harder. He wanted everything to come through user reports, and we would only handle issues proactively if it was clear it was going to start a "fire" as he would put it. He felt very strongly that this should remain in the hands of the moderators, again, to maintain that distance.
This also drives the underlying rules of the forums. There is a focus on fairness (in that the rules should try to be objective), but a lot of it has to do again with the business focus. Don't want anything that might be illegal (e.g. underage content) because that introduces liability. And it doesn't need to be explicitly illegal, it just has to have the threat of being illegal. Grot doesn't like to just assume things on way or another on this, and takes the safer approach. When the problem of underage content came up, he was exploring legal consultation on it (to see if we could legally allow it), but unsurprisingly most lawyers didn't want to touch it, and those that would cost more than could be afforded. So he defaulted to the position that it shouldn't be allowed.
Ironically, Grot NOT wanting to police these types of project is usually what causes problems. When we would look at cases that had underage content, all attempts were made (at least from my viewpoint) to try and work with the creator to keep the project while being in compliance. Which usually involved looking for technicalities that would allow the content to stay on the site, which could look like the rules being inconsistently applied from someone outside of those conversations. Again, not a part of WGing anymore, so this may have changed since I left.
It should also be noted that Grot is not really able to give WGing much time in a given day, which means things are missed. He relies on moderators and users to bring items to his attention, and they're addressed as he can do so. This isn't a criticism of him, someone's got to pay the bills and he does it with his full time job. I ran into the same issues when I owned the site fully, which is part of the reason I gave it up. I just couldn't give it the time it needed.
So with that in mind, a couple of thoughts:
Underage Users. Its one of many reasons I ultimately divested myself from the project as I started to get nervous about potential legal action against myself as a part owner. As you say, it seems clear there's a growing group of them. If I had to guess, Grot would say that it isn't worth the moderation effort to clean it up as he would want to check/verify every one of them rather than ban them outright, again waiting on user reports instead. And the more we got directly involved, the more liable we would be for not handling the problem entirely, so its best to just let the users hash it out. And to be fair, there's a lot of truth to that, but that problem is only going to get worse. Honestly, I don't know what they could do at this point, other than remove people based on suspicions.
Patreon. I know their position is that the end user is responsible for how they want to spend their money. And in general I agree with that, but none of the users can freely point out that a given project is a scam without their post getting deleted or locked, so its hard to even know (as a new user) that something is a scam. Public callout posts aren't really allowed, and to be sure I think that was largely my fault for starting that trend. Early on, I tended to delete these to avoid WGing turning into tumblr where every other post is some dumb identity politics callout post, but it stifled communication and was one of the steps that allowed the culture of toxic positivity that is strangling the forums now.
At work currently, so I can add an addendum as to my thoughts on the decline of the forums later. My perspective on what is considered "decline" probably is very different from everyone else, because in fairness to Grot, his business-oriented approach works. Numbers are very high, most users seem happy with the site, but I've specifically grown to resent the culture there for reasons hinted at above.
