Thank you for sharing this. I'm sorry for your loss.
I only had the faintest idea of who Etika was until about a week ago, but there is a pattern around here of an unhealthy and unempathetic relationship to celebrity, and it's high time for the people complicit in this culture to take some responsibility. I only wish it didn't have to take an event like this.
Unless you have that order of magnitude of followers on your channels or social media, you truly have no idea how much pressure and scrutiny you are under day to day, even as a minor public figure. And yet we enable people who blow up every perceived transgression into an industry headline, as though they were doing some kind of noble service to the world as the only ones who will ever hold social media personalities to account. Everything is unforgivable and everything is permanently attached to your name. Can't have a conversation about them without someone butting in edgewise and dropping the opposition dossier, hiding under the excuse of keeping everyone informed, when all it amounts to is gossip and salacious gawking.
It's not enough to "talk" about mental illness and suicidality when for a high-visibility figure, talk just invites more goading and hands out more ammunition to be used against you.
All my sympathies to those who held him dear.
Good posts. I'm glad to see some open blowback here against site policies that can only be described with one word—cowardice—and which can be said to be actively causing harm. (The comparison to "thoughts and prayers" is especially inspired.)
Apparently we can't talk about moderation without inviting the trolls, so we can't talk about moderation. Does the staff not realize that this policy only serves to feed the trolls? They have no shortage of oppositional communities and back-channel gossip boards to run off to and complain, while the people least able to have their voices heard are the ones who mostly want to be here, who contribute to this place, who want to see it be better, and would strongly prefer to steer clear of those other places. Everybody gets a word in about Era except for those of us who want to use it.
Those who want to trash this place in bad faith have no limit of places to go. Those who want to improve this place in good faith have nowhere to go. It's the same familiar absurdity as providing written ban reasons to put on a charade of transparency, but burying them instead of making them available in a readily accessible in-house log. The policies here have created a situation where it is more convenient for those with minor grievances to run off to self-declared enemies who wear their bans proudly on their sleeves. Does the staff not see how this undermines the community's integrity? How that has only deepened the climate of paranoia where enemy trolls are around every dark corner, ready to strike? Do they not see the utter lack of trust and confidence in hashing anything out over PMs when the public face of the moderation team, ex-mods included, is one of condescension, snide dismissiveness, and shameless apologism for their own?
Quite right.
Those who have normalized this, by participation or by policy, are neither innocent bystanders nor paragons of accountability. They are enablers; they are gossips.
