Saturday, April 14, 2012

Here's the Deal

Yeah, I deleted comments from Sean and now Phin. They were both acting like little wussies and I don't care if you agree or disagree. It got personal and that's not how we do things around here anymore. Whatever is going on between them is between them. I consider them both Deadspin friends, for whatever that's worth, but this shit is getting ridiculous.

Phin does what Phin does, and Sean is now an editor. That stupid feud or whatever you want to call it isn't welcome here.

Now back to your regularly scheduled comments about comments.

11 comments:

  1. Fair enough - I'm more than tired of the personal crap on this blog. But at least they put their names to it.

    More importantly, the Sean post (assuming that the "re-post" was accurate - I missed the original) contained legitimate information about how the ninjas operate and how they view patterns of behavior. I think it would be fair to leave an edited version for posterity.

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  2. No, seriously, I would have left that up. Our editorial discretion clearly differs a bit, which is fine, this is your house till I recover from the bout with scurvy.

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  3. Guy Who Sees Whether IMG Will Put His Money Where His Mouth IsApril 14, 2012 at 7:47 AM

    This was posted earlier by dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese mac, in reply to the above tittering about double-standards. How it in any way violates good conduct standards or does anything other than intelligently and clearly explain exactly the sort of thing people were speculating about is a mystery that I'm going to go ahead and guess will remain unanswered. Anyhow, here it is again for those who are interested in reading something of actual substance on this b(a)log.

    Somehow this was totally foreseeable. Phintastic, how you can sit there and say you are specifically targeted is insane. As most of you have had sussed out for a long time, I was one of the ninjas. Anonymous, you clever little scamp up there with your play on my old commenter name--just gold buddy. Solid, subtle gold.

    Anyway, let me be clear. 1. There are several "ninjas" and I am by no means the only one. 2. We have never once acted unilaterally. Ever. If we don't agree on something, we don't take action. 3. I am basically not involved anymore. I think it's weird having a dual involvement so I stay out of it for the most part now. 4. I have not written any of the new COTF-ishes.

    Back to why I'm writing this. Another ninja saw Phintastic's recent activity and we decided to move the thread and tell him to knock it off. For, like, the millionth time. Phintastic, you have crafted this sort of victim persona that is simply a figment of your imagination. Many, many others have been destarred or worse for doing the exact same thing. Cyrus the virus and Sheed's bald spot I can think of off the top of my head. Cyrus stopped almost immediately and Sheed, I guess doesn't comment much anymore, I don't know if that has anything to do with it, though I hope not.

    Do you know how many times the ninja account gets messages alerting to terrible comments? A fucking lot. By a fucking lot of different commenters, starred and unstarred. They don't want to make a spectacle of the comments section, so they tip off the ninja and it's taken care of, if warranted. It's just cleaner that way and lets the commentariat do what it does best. I say this from personal experience because I used to do the bullying of commenters who I thought sucked thing, too and it just looks shitty. It takes away from everything else.

    As for you being singled out, if you really were, why wouldn't you just be banned? I don't say that as some sort of flexing of internet muscle but as just a statement of how it is. If I, or any of the other ninjas played favorites (or non-favorites) why would you still be there?

    So, there you have it. For whatever reason, people latched on to me as the ninja and I've hated that because it takes away from the other guys and I think for all the problems you may have with what we do/did, we always try to do the best for the comments and the commenters. Say what you want about me, but continue to respect what the idea of the ninja means and know that I have very little to do with it anymore.

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  4. Also, the idea that there's any consistent opposition over here to things getting "personal" in the way that Sean and Phin got "personal" is fucking hilariously false, considering that at least half of all the comments around here are "this guy sucks" and contain about 1/10th the actual substance of what Phin and Sean (and everybody else) were talking about.

    Furthermore, I'll note that you didn't delete any of the other comments that accuse Deadspin's comment ninjas of having an agenda that colors how they do their job, which is pretty fucking "personal."

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  5. MKM Is The Ultimate Bastard editorial policy: it's unacceptably "personal" for two people to stand up behind their Deadspin identities and discuss Deadspin's comment moderation; it's unacceptably "personal" for one of the ninjas to out himself for the sake of defending himself from accusations of bullying; but it's not unacceptably "personal" for some anonymous bitch to call Triumph of the Will Clark "terrible" without any explanation or justification.

    Rrrright. And it's the ninjas who play favorites? It's the ninjas whose motives come in for questioning?

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    1. As IMG mentioned, there are some differences in editorial discretion here. Unfortunately, this one was glaring.

      As the guy who manned "CJ" for 99% of the week, I would not have removed any of the posts. And your point about TOTWC is lost on me. If you were paying attention, I chose to (civilly) reprimand that commenter, rather than delete his post. This, to me, is a more appropriate and effective method than all-out removal, which I personally think should be used for only the most extreme circumstances and have yet to exercise a single time.

      With that, please "own" your comments going forward. Harmless "Guy who..." stuff with funny links or whatever has become a bit of an amusing thing, which is fine, but serious takes like these should have your name on them. Despite the recent inconsistencies, the editorial policy is generally pretty level-headed if you do that.

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    2. Shit, now there are multiple CJs too? Is anyone here just one person? Am I just one person? Am I even a person? Who am I?

      Can we all just go back to simpler times and agree that Bullet Tooth Tony is the root of all our problems?

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  6. Well, it's your blog to do what you want, but, just to be clear, I thought that was a pretty un-personal post. Pretty detached. Maybe I shouldn't have called Phintastic insane, but whatever, I think the persecution complex warranted it. Me posting all that was just a way of saying, don't for a second think that the ninja acts personally because for the amount of people I think either weren't funny, or acted like total dicks to me and others, the ninjas try very, very hard to be objective about everything because we realize how easy it would be to just ban whoever we wanted and keep only voices we liked. And we realize how problematic that would be.

    It's a discredit to how good the comment section is to perpetuate this idea that the ninja is biased or applies different rules to different people. Whether I like or dislike whoever Phintastic is had nothing to do with what I said. For some reason, anything ever relating to Phintastic turns into a fucking sideshow and everyone always seems to miss the larger point. Whether it's what I just said up there, or a de-starring for playing rent-a-cop (seriously after being told a million times both publicly and privately) it's not really about him, or me. It's about the comments and how we decided to moderate them. Some may find it incredibly arbitrary that we are the ninjas and we get to do things you don't, but there's really nothing to be done for that. It happened, we moderate (moderated, in my case) and we try to uphold the standards of what we perceive Deadspin commenting to be. Whether you want to believe it or not, we saved the comments--because we wanted to. Time is spent discussing all this and I figured I'd fill you in and dispel some myths. Phintastic wondering aloud about his treatment seemed as good a jumping off point as any--not a way for me to personally attack him. Which again, I don't believe I did.

    Oh yeah, and the starring/destarring thing? A glitch in the initial redesign. Any promotion by an editor using a specific button would result in an automatic starring along with the promotion. Drew was a HUGE offender of using this one specific manner of promotion and drove us nuts. We tried to fix the glitch when we came across it. Again, we did it for tons of other people--not just Phintastic. But, as I said, anything involving the guy becomes a three ring circus, so a meme was born.

    If you're ever wondering how the fuck so-and-so got a star, chances are Drew promoted a comment somewhere and we never caught up to it.

    There's plenty of commenters we like, and don't like but I promise you we tried the absolute best we could to never let that color how we worked.

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    1. Oh man, I'm so glad you guys notice Drew's accidental starrings. Love the guy's stuff, but holy shit is he bad about that.

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  7. Not that Sean needs my support, but this is a fantastic comment and perfectly accurate. I was a dick to the ninjas more than once, both publicly and privately, both to their aggregate persona and to Sean's personal one -- and through it all I kept my star and was treated with more patience than I deserved. I still relapse occasionally (cocaine is a helluva drug, and let's be honest - Deadspin attracts the sort of people who like to stir shit up occasionally) and they remain neutral in the face of fairly aggressive provocation.

    Now, just to set the universe back in balance, I'm off to troll Jezebel. Don't worry, I'll use my alternate "Raysism" account.

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  8. I disagree, I don't feel like I play any kind of victim role. I guess mostly what I've learned is that I care about the comments section more than I thought. But it's not my job to ever, ever, ever mention that so many comments are terrible, and not in an unfunny way, just offensive or stupid that make the rest of the commenters look bad. They get moderated the best they can, and it's arbitrary, so I'll stay out of it.

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