ResetEra Ownership Update
- Thread starter Cerium
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Do you play Mario Kart Tour? They added Vampire Waluigi as part of the Halloween event. 🧛♂️
We're gonna have discourse, tags,
Do you tho? Because you spare kind words for me, and I'm literally trash.
Signatures are lower than trash tho. They're, like, the YouTube comment section of forum capabilities.
I love you Roy, but I keep telling you this is a horrible idea. Trying to save you from yourself.
finally, a place for us game.com fans
can your little game boy connect to the internet? does your precious wonderswan have a touch screen? yeah, didn't fuckin' think so
IIRC there's a mod to play Tetris online on real GB hardware.
EDIT:
The GB can mine crypto also. 😂
I'll try to be nice to you.
GAFers who migrated early to Era in October 2017 did not plan Era on GAF. The lucky members who managed to get invited to the "super cool Discord" were only there because they got there in time before GAF was shut down for a week or so. It wasn't intended to be some special club, it was just kind of getting lucky with who you knew and being online at the right time.
That said, it was members of that discord who planned and created Era. So even though you heard about Era on GAF, you were effectively being invited to an exclusive beta. There's no way that Era would've been allowed to have been planned out in the open on GAF, and there's similarly no way that any Era successor would be allowed to be planned out in the open on Era. If someone were to successfully create a new forum for Era users to migrate to, it would be done in secret and then effectively guerilla marketed here - cause anyone posting links to the Ereplacement would likely get their post deleted. Posters would eventually hear of the new forum despite the bans and post deletions due to sheer numbers of people advertising it - I imagine that's exactly how you found out about this place. All of this, of course, is exactly what happened on GAF.
Notice when K.Jack did a point-by-point rebuttal to Zips about bans he cited, there was one they mentioned that was omitted.
I'm somehow not permitted to voice my lack of confidence in the way this stable of first party studios is being managed by Microsoft even when there is tons of precedent for it because it appears to offend the people who wear their team jerseys, so to speak. Someone literally responded to my outlook with a list largely composed of multiplatform games and the other participants in the thread didn't even bat an eyelash at it. But it's easier to ban me as the console warrior than ban the actual console warriors that outnumber me and have higher post counts, because I had the dissenting opinion. No personal attacks or anything.
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Oh, I thought we were talking about the junioring and subsequent account deletion request that happened earlier in this thread.
I will burn this forum down and spearhead a new one if either happen!!!
Y'all need to add an option for everyone's posts to be made in glitter text.
That'll prevent this forum from imploding or something.
That'll prevent this forum from imploding or something.
Why did you tag me just to relitigate your ban? I only responded to ONE example the dude posted because I'm not doing this.
User threadbanned: Trolling over a series of posts
Should've stopped when I was blinking my eyes three times, understood.
On the one hand, that would be very terrible.
And the other............................ freedom..........................................
we members are both burns and maggie
on the other hand.... :3c
I won't lie, I would laugh so much if people moved on to a new forum after Moba spent 4 millions or whatever on this one.
Anyway, as far as I remember, everything was planned on one Discord server, but many other communities that had their own Discord server were given a heads up, so if you were lucky to be part of the more prominent ones, you got in early. Dragon Ball GAF was respectable enough that my number is 287, lol.
Anyway, as far as I remember, everything was planned on one Discord server, but many other communities that had their own Discord server were given a heads up, so if you were lucky to be part of the more prominent ones, you got in early. Dragon Ball GAF was respectable enough that my number is 287, lol.
Yeah, I feel like that's the one bit that wasn't mentioned so far. It wasn't just one "super cool Discord"; that's where the planning happened, but ton of OTs/communities individually jumped ship to their own Discords when things were falling apart on GAF. We chilled there for a while and then there was an effort made to organize us back together and join the site when it went up. That's why people have those resettler tags.
oh
I did not realize that was a pun till now……….
Cerium just shot himself in the foot.
I don't know how much the rest of you know about forum culture (I'm an expert), but honor and shame are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in Discord where you can become successful by being an asshole. If you screw someone over in forums, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.
What this means is the forum public members, after hearing about this, is not going to want to stay at Resetera, nor will they purchase any of Resetera Gold memberships. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Cerium has alienated an entire market with this move.
Cerium, publicly apologize and cancel your yacht or you can kiss your business goodbye.
I don't know how much the rest of you know about forum culture (I'm an expert), but honor and shame are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in Discord where you can become successful by being an asshole. If you screw someone over in forums, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.
What this means is the forum public members, after hearing about this, is not going to want to stay at Resetera, nor will they purchase any of Resetera Gold memberships. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Cerium has alienated an entire market with this move.
Cerium, publicly apologize and cancel your yacht or you can kiss your business goodbye.
With EU law you can demand to have your content deleted by someone else. You have the right to your own data.
Trust me, as someone in IT support I've had to handle enough content deletion requests to know that it's possible.
For me it would be so that the profit made from this forum could go to a decent cause rather than a shitty corporation.
Yeah same. I've handled those requests as well and the law is straight forward.
No idea why we have to debate whether or not an exception - which is explicitly only appliable within an academic context under certain circumstances in the Netherlands - is also appliable for ResetEra. Seems like googling 2 words and reading one quick-reply interpretation makes you an expert on a difficult subject.
I mean, do you have this in a binding contract?
Because, as Palmer Luckey found out, that literally means *nothing* otherwise.
I think what a lot of us are concerned about is that there seems to be either a desire to deflect questions (say because you know the plan is "we're going to quadrouple the ad load and that's going to suck so we don't want to tell you") or a genuine lack of intellectual curiosity about the future that suggests a lack of forward planning.
Ultimately the only thing that is firm is that MOBA put out a statement for their shareholders stating that they require this place to grow. And we know from third party metrics the site isn't growing, somewhat the opposite. So, ultimately, there has to be some idea of how that happens. And if there is it would be helpful if MOBA could educate us on what it is, but people's concerns aren't unreasonable until they do - forum acquisitions over the last decade do not have a good track record of working out.
Excuse me? They did what now? Where are the pics? I need pictures of vampire Waluigi.
EDIT: Oh my god, he's dashing!
I've worked within consulting for GDPR and implementation for industry clients within an agency environment, for what it's worth. We might disagree but there's no need to continue to make snide assumptions around it. If you have a concern around data protection it might, as said before, be worth reaching out to MOBAFire's DPO to understand their view. Since they're who own the forum now and who you've showed concern around using our data, it would be a route to resolving those worries. The general manager of the forum has been explicit in saying that in their own consulting over GDPR that the forum, as it stands, complies with a users right to erasure. As is true for the developer of the platform we use. So if these outstanding concerns are a sore point, making your own enquiries might yield a result.
That's the year the Illuminati was formed.I ended up with 1776 as my member number.
👀
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I'll always have a soft spot for these things lol. Pretty much responsible for my initial interest in designing things on the college computers back in like '06 and that ultimately led to the career path I chose. Teenage me just trying to making cool signatures for people on Sleepywood.net would never have imagined.You just can't beat this.
There are a lot of distractions in this thread, for better or worse. I think the heart of the matter is that the community needs to, collectively, decide whether or not it is worth it to organize and move to a different domain rather than accept corporate ownership. It seems to me that this should be considered reasonably and neutrally. In the interest of that and hearing what others have to say about that, I will write down what I feel the advantages and disadvantages of each approach are, in good faith.
Option 1. Stay on resetera.com, take MOBA Network at their word on not changing this place too much, come back to the matter if they make changes that cross the line.
Pros:
Option 2. Organize the community, and form a new site, and do it right this time. No individual is in charge.
Pros:
Cons
I realize this is all a little out of nowhere, so before I go on to synthesize what I think the correct course of action is, I want to give a bit of my background. I have been posting on traditional community web forums for over twenty years at this point, the majority of my life. I am deeply invested in their success as a medium and want them to thrive. They are so much better than social media services are and I don't want to see the ecosystem get smaller.
Twice in my life, I've had a forum I posted on become "uninhabitable". This was an earlier poster's wording and I thought it was well-put. The first time began much like this. The owner of what was a community site had sold it to a corporation, in this case, an online gaming news site. They made promises to not change anything, and the admins, not wanting to disrupt the owner's deal, encouraged us to wait and see how it turns out. The changes came slowly over time. We were limited in what topics we could discuss, limited in what games we could criticize, etc. It got pretty bad, but there was never any breaking point. Our time to organize was when the sale was announced, not the fifth time they banned a long-time community member for criticizing their corporate decrees. How did this one end? AOL acquired the gaming news site, and promptly deleted the forum without a second thought. They bought it for the articles. Years and years of posts, gone forever, with no backup. Some parts of the community managed to re-organize on another site, but it would have been a lot more successful if we had done so right away instead of waiting for everyone to scatter into the internet wind.
The second time was much like neogaf. In 2020, the owner of a Something Awful proved to be of....dubious moral character. (long story) The site was uninhabitable while he was in charge. Instead of folding and let this happen, I struck back. The community made it very clear that he was unwelcome, and used our leverage to force him to sell at a low price, preserving twenty years of internet history and our community. I am the user who stepped up and made sure that ended without a corporate acquisition or opportunistic cash-grab. I put every dollar the site makes back into it, and I see. So I hope you all can imagine why, as the owner of Something Awful, I am interested in seeing web forums as a medium succeed. I honestly came here to observe one of the few old-style forums that is as large as ours, and I found myself upset reading this thread. It truly is a missed opportunity that this place wasn't started by someone who would truly put the community first, in ownership structure as well as monetization. 700k/year is an insane amount of money for a web forum and could have been doing so much good. Surely your community has members who, like me, are able and willing to set up a business that puts the community first and always will. If you believe in your heart of hearts that you are one of those people, who is selfless in that way, now is the time to come forward and show some leadership. Your people need you.
In my most humble opinion, I think the pros of self-ownership outweigh the negatives. Right now, and only right now, the users of this site can organize and make sure this community stays intact and in control of its destiny. If MOBA Network believes they have something to offer, let them come to the community, on a site run by the community, and pitch it to the users. Let the people decide and not just the designated person at the top. This is a position of strength from which the community has grounds to make demands and potentially work out a mutually beneficial arrangement, unlike meagerly asking for concessions on a site they already own. I made this post in hopes that others can look at my list of pros and cons, and decide for themselves. I realize that not everyone is going to draw the same conclusions but my hope is that we can have this conversation, rather than getting sidetracked. It's the most important thing by far and, in my opinion, what ought to be done needs to be done right away.
Option 1. Stay on resetera.com, take MOBA Network at their word on not changing this place too much, come back to the matter if they make changes that cross the line.
Pros:
- We're here already. Can kick back, resume posting about video games, snack foods, billiards, etc. This is pretty neat.
- They have resources a community-owned forum won't. We don't know what they will spend on this place, but there certainly is some chance that more money will be put into the site that the community could ever produce by itself as it is now. This is, however, mitigated by the fact that resetera is massively profitable on its own. You can make a lot of Website for 700k/year if you put that money back into development and that *doesn't* require MOBA network.
- They have access to traffic we don't currently, and some of those users will sincerely be cool, and it'd be cool if those users signed up. While we've all seen the linked examples showing the worst that their forum network has to offer, it'd be overly pessimistic not to acknowledge that some of the people on those "sister sites" would genuinely be welcome contributors to this site. If anyone from one of those sites is here already, welcome!
- There may never again be as big an "inciting incident" as the sale of the site. Right now, they are watching carefully. They know that the slightest misstep could have users scrambling for another website. Right now, and only right now, they have to be extremely careful. This is where their assurances that they aren't going to make big changes come from - they don't want a revolt. Instead, if individual small changes are made, then some people will be mad, and some people will leave, but it might well never feel big enough to rouse a large portion of the community to move somewhere else. In some sense this is our biggest chance to make any sort of move and not doing so is squandering it. The first change I expect is them cracking down severely on anyone trying to openly organize another site. This period where they watch and wait will end soon enough.
- Corporate control is control. They can do whatever they want with the site. They will act with motive towards profit rather than what the community wants. Whole books can be written on the evils that have been wrought through profit-seeking and I trust I don't need to say more than that. They have promised no big changes, but there is nothing at all holding them to that. They didn't buy the site not to make it grow in profit. They are smart enough not to come in hot making a bunch of changes right off the bat, because people will leave en masse in an organized fashion. Instead, slowly they'll make changes over time. Some will be good and some will be bad, but overall, it will not be up to the community what happens.
- Potential for data harvesting, even more aggressive advertising, people wandering over from "sister sites" and spouting hate speech. These have been well-discussed throughout the thread and are serious concerns.
Option 2. Organize the community, and form a new site, and do it right this time. No individual is in charge.
Pros:
- Community ownership structure. Decisions about the site can be made purely on the basis of what is right for the community, and without any sort of compromising profit motive. It can be run as a non-profit explicitly with a board and bylaws that prevent any one person from taking control. This is what resetera ought to have been from the start and it is a real shame that it was not set up that way. The community has the opportunity to learn this lesson for good if they start their own site. This is just.....how things ought to be. The forums earn money which is used to improve the forums. Rent-seeking external players won't be able to pull cash out of it - all the money can go back to the site.
- Control over monetization methods. Even a community-owned site needs money to run, but it doesn't need to be maximally profitable to run, and we don't have to abide by any sort of intrusive advertising if we don't want to.
- An organization devoted to acting on the community's behalf will mean that the community will never again be without a strong advocate in any business dealings this place has. There's no owner's interests vs community interests if the owner of the site is an organization that is bound contractually to act in the interests of the community.
- Honestly, it's very funny to imagine MOBA Network paying $4.5 million for some web hosting space and a domain name. The idea that a company can "own" a community is ludicrous and dark and I personally find it very satisfying when a community successfully demonstrates otherwise.
Cons
- It is work to set up a new site. Lots of decisions to make, organizing to do. I won't pretend this is trivial, it is not at all, but if any community can manage to spread this work out, it's this one. Resetera has the numbers and the resources to make all of this happen.
- Like any transition (neogaf -> resetera included), some people won't make the jump. They won't feel like moving. They have inertia in coming to this site but won't bother with a new one. This is a real loss and something to consider. If I were more convinced of MOBA Networks good intentions this would be the basis of an argument for staying, but I am afraid I am not, and so I'm forced to compare them with people who will leave in frustration over a MOBA Network decision.
- Lose out on four years of posts or at least, break up the archive. The posts will still be here to read but there is a loss of continuity in long-running threads.
I realize this is all a little out of nowhere, so before I go on to synthesize what I think the correct course of action is, I want to give a bit of my background. I have been posting on traditional community web forums for over twenty years at this point, the majority of my life. I am deeply invested in their success as a medium and want them to thrive. They are so much better than social media services are and I don't want to see the ecosystem get smaller.
Twice in my life, I've had a forum I posted on become "uninhabitable". This was an earlier poster's wording and I thought it was well-put. The first time began much like this. The owner of what was a community site had sold it to a corporation, in this case, an online gaming news site. They made promises to not change anything, and the admins, not wanting to disrupt the owner's deal, encouraged us to wait and see how it turns out. The changes came slowly over time. We were limited in what topics we could discuss, limited in what games we could criticize, etc. It got pretty bad, but there was never any breaking point. Our time to organize was when the sale was announced, not the fifth time they banned a long-time community member for criticizing their corporate decrees. How did this one end? AOL acquired the gaming news site, and promptly deleted the forum without a second thought. They bought it for the articles. Years and years of posts, gone forever, with no backup. Some parts of the community managed to re-organize on another site, but it would have been a lot more successful if we had done so right away instead of waiting for everyone to scatter into the internet wind.
The second time was much like neogaf. In 2020, the owner of a Something Awful proved to be of....dubious moral character. (long story) The site was uninhabitable while he was in charge. Instead of folding and let this happen, I struck back. The community made it very clear that he was unwelcome, and used our leverage to force him to sell at a low price, preserving twenty years of internet history and our community. I am the user who stepped up and made sure that ended without a corporate acquisition or opportunistic cash-grab. I put every dollar the site makes back into it, and I see. So I hope you all can imagine why, as the owner of Something Awful, I am interested in seeing web forums as a medium succeed. I honestly came here to observe one of the few old-style forums that is as large as ours, and I found myself upset reading this thread. It truly is a missed opportunity that this place wasn't started by someone who would truly put the community first, in ownership structure as well as monetization. 700k/year is an insane amount of money for a web forum and could have been doing so much good. Surely your community has members who, like me, are able and willing to set up a business that puts the community first and always will. If you believe in your heart of hearts that you are one of those people, who is selfless in that way, now is the time to come forward and show some leadership. Your people need you.
In my most humble opinion, I think the pros of self-ownership outweigh the negatives. Right now, and only right now, the users of this site can organize and make sure this community stays intact and in control of its destiny. If MOBA Network believes they have something to offer, let them come to the community, on a site run by the community, and pitch it to the users. Let the people decide and not just the designated person at the top. This is a position of strength from which the community has grounds to make demands and potentially work out a mutually beneficial arrangement, unlike meagerly asking for concessions on a site they already own. I made this post in hopes that others can look at my list of pros and cons, and decide for themselves. I realize that not everyone is going to draw the same conclusions but my hope is that we can have this conversation, rather than getting sidetracked. It's the most important thing by far and, in my opinion, what ought to be done needs to be done right away.
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Why rush to do anything when nothing has actually changed. Ownership is the only tangible thing that has changed but I'm just as familiar with the new owner as I was with the previous one, so I don't have any expectations one way or the other.
If something actually happens I think the community as a whole will react accordingly, but until then there's no need to rush into things.
Self-ownership would be ideal of course, but that's a pipe dream for a fairly popular discussion forum in a capitalistic world.
You just can't beat this.
Its magnificent. You know exactly how cultured the user is just looking at this. A PS2 Owner AND a MGS fan??? Hoo boy.
Well maybe not the marilyn Manson fan part.
The community will act accordingly if they mess up and do something egregious, but if they're smart they won't do that. They'll change things slowly. When my old site was bought out, none of the actions of the acquiring company seemed bad enough to revolt over on their own. It was only looking back on it that it was obvious we should have left. Right now the community knows that the site has changed hands and is waiting to see what everyone else does. It will be very difficult to conjure that sort of willingness to migrate without an inciting event, and the site changing hands is one of the biggest ones. If you wait for things to change, you lose out on the huge organizing opportunity that is "the site is now corporately owned, what should we do?". It's like the frog being boiled, you won't notice how the changes they are making are affecting the community until its too late. I think leaving pre-emptively is the way to go, and that's something I say having been a part of a community that made the wrong choice in that very situation before.
Also I expect that discussing leaving for an offsite will be one of the first things cracked down on. Right now they know they have to watch their behavior or trigger a mass exodus. This will not always be true, especially if it's for "understandable" but inconvenient things, like organizing another forum.
Self ownership is not remotely a pipe dream in this case. All it takes is the community coming together and organizing it. Something awful's hosting costs about $1600 a month at this point, and could easily be lower. If you get even a fraction of that 700k on your own, the money is there, capitalistic world or not. All you have to do is organize.
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