Foundation’s Reply

On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse. The volume of negative engagement overwhelmed our moderation efforts. While attempting to protect the Godot community we mistakenly blocked individuals who were not participating in the harassment. The Godot Foundation Board takes full responsibility for these moderation actions. If you believe you were blocked in error and have not violated our Code of Conduct, please contact us with the form linked below. We are committed to swiftly rectifying any mistakes. We firmly stand by our mission to keep our community spaces free from hate, discrimination, and other toxic behaviors. - The Godot Foundation Board

On community moderator Xananax

We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server. We want to clarify that Xananax is not hired by nor a spokesperson for the Godot Foundation. As an organization, we have our own official Discord server, moderated together with new volunteers vetted by our team.

Context

  • andioop@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    An organization that can admit its mistakes, stand behind its employees, and offer a way to try to fix their mistakes? Now this is a great PR move.

    • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      I don’t fully agree. It’s still not good pr to lose your control and blocking innocent devs. Social media managers be doing anything to get clout.

      I want to be clear that I don’t support the outrage at all. I’m just saying godot needs a community manager who can stay calm and act responsibly. Also twitter is the hell of Internet. I can’t believe people still use it.

      • bbuez@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’m honestly convinced there’s a multiplier on likes to boost apparent engagement. That or I have finally lost all hope for humanity

        • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Could be bot activity. Whenever I check that hellsite (mostly to have enough activity, so my account won’t get deactivated and my user handle won’t fall into wrong hands), at least 20-30% of the posts have AI spam smell to them, especially from the right, also Elon Musk is boosting the right.

  • gurapo@lemmy.pt
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    3 months ago

    After seeing the thread, I don’t think even understand what caused the outrage. There was so much unfounded hate everywhere, what the hell? Is this normal in twitter? Or do people there simply have some sort of hate switch that gets turned on whenever someone says woke (word which, honestly, I don’t even fully understand what it means)

    Reading those comments made me feel like I was reading a contest to see who could be the most hateful though, holy damn…

    • Deway@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Twitter is a far-right oriented social network now and the far right is usually hateful by design.

      • gurapo@lemmy.pt
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        3 months ago

        Yeah that makes sense. I guess that the lack of positive replies could be attributed to the fact that the “real godot community” has long since left twitter. It’s quite sad that the only people who still use it are those who spend their time spreading hate for whatever reason… Though on the bright side, them having their own little far-right social media to play means that there’s a smaller chance they’ll pervade other social media, which is a good thing. I definitely don’t want to see those type of people here on lemmy!

    • Gamma@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      Yep, pretty normal for twitter. These reactionaries are the type to pay for blue checks so they inevitably end up dominating threads (blue checks show up at the top of replies)

      • gurapo@lemmy.pt
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        3 months ago

        Ahhh I see, that would explain it. I was kinda confused with how little positive comments there appeared to be compared to the sea of hateful ones when clicking the more replies button, but that would explain it - I hadn’t thought about it. I’ve gotta admit though, surprisingly, even after I scroll past the blue checkmarks, although the positive/negative comment ratio is much more in line with my expectations, most comments are nevertheless pretty hateful. Though I guess that can be explain with just twitter being twitter.

        Thank you!

        • Gamma@beehaw.org
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          3 months ago

          Definitely agree that it’s still much worse than expected, having those types at the top of every thread makes less hateful folk less likely to reply and ends up pushing them off the platform altogether. Kind of a vicious cycle

    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Honestly I wonder if the chuds are trying to coordinate a ‘godot-gate’ because they have nothing better to do with their lives.

      • gurapo@lemmy.pt
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        3 months ago

        To be completely honest, this whole thing seems to have nothing to do with godot at all. These bullies found a target, that’s all. I can only assume that once this whole “controversy” dies out, their reaction to godot will be “godot? Wazzat? Never heard of it.”

        So I don’t think anything like a godot-gate will come out of it (assuming a godot-gate would be something like boycotting godot, or campaigning against its use)

    • Chee_Koala@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I don’t understand the outrage either. All the folks screaming at this clearly think inclusivity is bad. It’s weird to be on Xitter rn, you feel like you want the reach it gives, but do you really want reach when all you can reach is these hatespewers?

  • Krrygon@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    Very funny, the people who were saying “good luck losing your customers!” Uh, it’s FOSS lmao. What customers?

    • wkk@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Godot definitely has sponsors which while not directly being “customers” are still very important when it comes to financing the development of the engine

      Having said that I want to believe current sponsors won’t have issues with the Godot Foundation here

  • clarkvtatum@mastodon.gamedev.place
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    3 months ago

    @kryllic It is crazy how this non-issue is becoming somekind of controversy. It was posted on that hate-filled site. I am not taking the reaction seriously at all. Godot is awesome and nothing has changed that.

  • Gamma@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    That Friday tweet was great 😂 though they were posting it to that cesspool, about the only thing you could expect there is the blue check babies

    • s12@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      I think the Twitter manager is lgbt or something and wanted to promote lgbt representation. They used the term “woke” in an official tweet where they intended to achieve this.

      My understanding is that “woke” is a poorly defined political term.

      People apparently asked for the engine to not get political and a lot of people got banned simply for criticising the tweet. I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the tweet, nor with a lot of the criticism that apparently happened. Banning people for criticism seems very unprofessional though.

      Perhaps the Twitter manager took it as people calling the existence of lgbt political? Perhaps there was a large number of troublemakers who had to get banned and some innocent people criticising the tweet got caught in the crossfire? Perhaps the Twitter manager really was acting maliciously? I don’t know what happened.
      Edit: It seems it was the second one.

      Apparently sponsors got banned and stopped their support, and developers got banned from the GitHub.
      I don’t care about twitter drama as I don’t use twitter, I just hope that this doesn’t affect the codebase.

      I’ve seen a lot of drama channels on YouTube talk about this, but I haven’t seen anything from the YouTubers who I trust to talk about FOSS yet. From what I gather, there doesn’t seem to have been any major problems yet. It just seems to be things getting blown out of proportion. People make money from clicks and engagement. Fear and rage generates clicks.

  • averyminya@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    I saw a video about all this last night and it was really disheartening how many people are insulting people.

    Edit: here’s a piped video link to the video. https://piped.video/watch?v=wdeto5kXd40&t=0

    And YouTube for the comments https://youtu.be/wdeto5kXd40&t=0

    The video itself wasn’t great, but it at least seems somewhat impartial. I was really tired and was having a hard time processing what his intentions were as he was going over everything. On top of that, reading the comments at the same time made it even more difficult, since so many are agreeing with the YouTuber but are being so hateful about it. The YouTuber doesn’t seem explicitly hateful, but like I said it isn’t great. Also, it seems inaccurate now given that the video came out so quickly and the way it was handled by Godot.

    That is to say, I’m pretty sure his premise of the video is that Xanax was an official community manager. So again, really not great and yet the comments in support are just… Evil and cruel.

    • Kissaki@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      It’s a statement of support of minorities. I think that’s a pretty good, fair reason, and not “just to cause drama”.

      Not making a statement is letting the original statement stand.

      • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        It was some random idiot on the web talking shit. Even worse, it was an idiot on Twitter, the shithole of the internet. There’s no need to address them. Most people didn’t even know what the context was. Addressing it just gave more “publicity” to them.

        It’s not even poking the hornet’s nest, it’s a calling out to a haggle of trolls. Fuck those people. Don’t give them attention.

        Anti Commercial-AI license