I can't speak for any other staff, past or present, about whether or not they feel they should be paid for their work here. But I guess I can talk about how I felt about it and what I wanted during my tenure here. When I was active staff I was a major contributor and proud of the work I did for the website. It had a big impact on me. I am a different person now on the other side of it than I was when I started. I did not know what I was getting in to at the time, but I knew the position would be volunteer and accepted it on those terms.
The time I put in here was out of an earnest, personal desire to see the website flourish. It was to give the people here a place to post, especially the people who felt like they had nowhere else to go. It was to prove that a website like ours could exist, and should exist, and it could only exist if members of the community helped shape the website in to what they wanted it to be. My earliest posts on this forum, before I was ever staff, was beseeching that people be kind to one another and care about each other. A community that does not love each other cannot flourish. When I was asked to become staff a few months later, I accepted that responsibility because I believed strongly that this was the best way I could help this community prosper.
The volunteer nature of the position meant that it was flexible. There was no requirement for how much or how little I did. There were no required hours I needed to work. It was not a job. It was work, yes, but it was work to build something I felt like I was part of. The website was my vision too. The community was my own. I never felt like I was being taken advantage of. I can just say bluntly: I did not care literally at all about being compensated for my work here.
But there were times that I was. There were times where being a member of the staff made a big difference to me. There were times where my peers came through for me. There were times where other members of the staff were generous to me out of kindness. When family members were ill, they helped support me. When I got married, they helped support me. I do not believe the people who helped me would be comfortable if I named them, so I will not. I can also only speak for myself. I know that I felt taken care of by my team. Some of the best friends I have now, people I cannot imagine my life without, are friends I made when I was member of the staff. That is why it was so important to me.
I have no idea what current members of the staff want. I do not speak for any of them. But I can absolutely guarantee you that if they are unhappy with the arrangement they will just politely retire from the position. Nobody is going to be forced to stay if they don't want to. It's a volunteer position. Moderators are the people who suffer the most for this website, so if they do feel negatively about this change or feel like they are not being fairly compensated for their contributions, they are not going to stick around. They can leave whenever they want with no hard feelings.
What does create hard feelings, and is definitively the hardest and most unrewarding part of the work, is the absolute subzero trust and good faith you receive from the community you serve. The constant spinning of narratives to portray you as sinister and manipulative, as dishonest and vindictive, is brain-damaging. To be constantly subjected to thousands of people assuming the absolute worst of you no matter the situation, and no answer and no action ever being good enough for people, makes everything you do feel helpless, hopeless, and depressing. But you keep doing it because even if the work is thankless it is necessary for the community to exist. You do it because even if people think you're a useless moron who can't do anything right, or an evil actor with no regard for humanity, and even if people will hold every breath you take against you, the website needs people who care about it enough to take care of it even when it reduces them to ashes.
Over and over again I have seen sub-communities offer up their favorite members to the moderation team only to turn on them, call them traitors and failures, and grind them to dust. The division between staff and members should not be as wide as it is. All of the staff members were community members first - people who posted here and connected here and formed relationships here. They are members too. But this website, for all its claims to the contrary, absolutely despises the moderation team in every form it has ever taken. They want mods to hurt. They want mods to fail. They want them to quit or be forced out. People relish in the opportunity to drag or slander the mod team, to paint them as negatively as possible. It is a sport. The opportunity to do so is irresistible.
I do not know why the website is like this. Maybe it is a fundamental distrust of authority a community with values like ours has baked into it. Or maybe a website with our values is ungovernable. Members have always had conflicting visions for what this website should be, should feel like, and how it should be moderated. People are very comfortable in their insular community Discords where everybody likes the same things or shares the same interests or experiences and then think the atmosphere outside their discord is inhospitable. So they blame the staff for not making the website like their Discord and when that can't be accommodated they splinter off into some other website or server.
So with how brutally members on this website treat the moderation team, all of this "what about the mods?" energy rings extremely insincere to me. I know some people have their hearts in the right place, because I know some of you more personally, but the good-natured looking out becomes indistinguishable from the people who are just using this event as another opportunity to do what they've always done - to single out an enemy and make them suffer for it. To demand someone pay for the transgression. So on comes the accusations, on comes the spectacle, on comes the narratives about who is at fault this time and whose turn it is to pay for it.
If you care about the staff, even just in principle, pay attention to what they've always asked for: to be treated better by the community. Right now, the mod team isn't having to deal with the site being sold, they are having to deal with the reactions in this thread. They are having to read all the posts calling them complicit in a grand failure, they are having to read all the posts about how the website is over, all the "delete my accounts", all the "what about TRANSPARENCY", all the insistence that everything they have worked for is pointless, all the perception that nothing they do has ever mattered to anyone, all the grandstanding about how shady and dishonest and manipulative the forum is and that it must not actually stand for anything because the forum has a new owner. I don't know if people understand how incredibly damaging this torrent of rhetoric is for your mental health.
So if you genuinely care about staff, and you're not just in it for the fun of drama, do what is actually in your power to do: treat them like your fellow members invested in the welfare of the forum, not like enemies or failures. Maybe saying you think they should have been paid is your way of expressing that, but I mean it when I say that is never what I wanted. I was always very clear with what I hoped to get from this role. I never got it. I retired in exhaustion and humiliation because I could not overcome the mental and physical toll this community took on me. I've been to the emergency room. I've been medicated. I've been counseled. I've had to completely reinvent my relationship with the internet. I am fucked up and damaged goods from how members here, past and present, conduct themselves at the first sign of gossip or scandal. No amount of money would have made a difference with that. Not even a little bit.
If this transaction does change the priorities of the forum with respect to its values or ideals, you will never catch me defending it. I will leave too. I know the ideas this community is supposed to be built upon. I helped write them. You can bet I'm not sticking around if that changes. But right now - nothing has changed. I still have faith in the staff. I still believe the people there are doing this work out of belief it is important work to do. And I believe they would not be here anymore if this was not the case. They can decide if it's worth it to keep doing the work here - and I know money will have nothing to do with it.
This topic is upsetting to me in a way I would prefer not to engage with further, so I will not reply again. You can accuse me of cowardice if you prefer but I just don't have the guts for this kind of discourse anymore. I wish the best for everyone. For Cerium, for Dubs, for the staff, for all this forum's members. I have always wished for the best. That will never change. From the beginning I have always believed that if we can find a way to love each other, we will succeed. The terms have always been the same: we must either learn to love each other or we will die trying.
