I know that the majority of volunteers and staff here not only have their hearts in the right place but do an amazing job at what they do. I also know that the site is not a monolith. The movie portal is not the programming forum and so on. In most forums, no mod would ever do anything as cringe as participating in controversy threads that they are also going to moderate or even lock. Most mods would never dream of deleting post that don't violate rules on ideological grounds, much less because of personal grudges. Yet, as they say, here they are. These things happen and they happen too regularly to ignore.
I'm going to share a story with you because I think is indicative of a moderation culture that's actively pushing users away from the site. Again, I'm not going to claim that this is how the majority of moderation on the site works or anything of the kind. But I am going to hold firm that this is indicative of casual abuse of moderation powers that occurs all too often. As a matter of fact, I'm only sharing this story because an almost identical story to mine played out with @KittyhawkMontrose today.
Some throat clearing before I get started: I am certainly not a figure known for shying away from confrontation or heated debate on this site. My fights with CrimsonKero and others are fairly legendary. One of them even won "Worst Thread of the Year" in 2023. The thing is, that I don't bear grudges. Even disrespectful debate is very very different than abusing opaque systems and powers that you have been granted in trust. The former is something I salute and love engaging in. The latter is among the lowest you can stoop and still try and call yourself a human being.
Also in the spirit of disclosure, this is not my first run in with bullying and harassment from moderators. I was recently unjustly banned from the BBS. I use the word "unjustly" so confidently because, once the details of my ban were made public, it was mysteriously and without comment reversed.
To summarise my ban: my wife and others were harassed by a user whose name both refers to the Knights Templar and Heiling H****r (ironically in a thread about dealing with harassment). When she told others to ignore this "sad, confused person", she was banned for "resorting to name calling". When I complained about the obvious farce, I was also banned.
I would tell you that if you don't believe me to check the thread, but that touches on one of the largest problems that Newgrounds needs to address: there are no permanent public records of comment or thread deletions or of post that lead to bans. Even the famously over zealously moderated Reddit displays this information. Unfortunately, this makes Newgrounds an unreliable source and makes it all too easy (intentionally or not) for moderators to lie to and gaslight users. This tweet and this one both have screenshots.
My actual story sadly begins with a thread about AI. Specifically, the thread was/is about which sites do and do not allow or encourage training and what you can do in general to protect your art. Since I work in a related field, I realised I had something relevant to contribute. I had just seen that several art style models (or LoRas) based on Newgrounds art had been making the rounds at various AI model sharing sites. Several of them were NSFW, showing they had been trained via a data requiring being logged into Newgrounds. One of these adult models, amusingly enough, was of the Tankmen.
I don't have my original comment. I had no reason to believe it might contain anything that would be taken as untoward and I didn't back it up. My biased summary: heads up, NG is getting scraped, the scrapes are using logged in accounts, here's a screenshot showing some of the LoRas and a joke about Tankmen dick and a link to Tom Fulp's original animation:
The post stayed up for a day or so. Then, out of the blue, the entire sub-thread (my post and several people who had responded to me or to those replies) went missing.
I didn't have any modmail or notification and I didn't want to bother anyone, so I wracked my brain for what might be rule breaking. The thread was rated E and my post did have the words "veiny dick" and an adult link (albeit censored if you have A disabled). So I reposted (from here on I will provide post archives):
Reposting some info sans jokes, since I think my old comment may have gotten deleted to preserve the thread rating. The warning/info is well worth sharing dryly though, which is that NG is scraped pretty regularly and that there are a number of LoRa's floating around:
I'm pretty sure some of these were trained off the movie and not just art portal, for reasons I won't get into because of spice.
Kitty responded then both posts disappeared.
Now I was even more at a loss. I thought: maybe talking about reposting could be considered "complaining about a ban" or "backseat modding"? Maybe directly uploading the screenshot might be the issue? I posted:
In no way do I think NG can put much more effort into preventing it than they already do, but people should be aware that even NG does get regularly scraped as training data. I'm not going to link to Civit et al for copywrite reasons, but here's a link to a screenshot I took which shows quite a few LoRas based on scrapes.
Kitty responds. Both posts are deleted.
I read the forum rules four times. Nothing seemed relevant.
I'm at a loss. My tone is defensive/supportive of NG. I'm carrying the heterodox anti-AI sentiment. Ahha! I say. It's an implicit/shadow rule: NG mods are probably rightfully nervous of any explicit link or specific mention of any of the AI model sharing sites at all. No problem. I post:
If you go to a popular AI site, that I won't name, and search for NG you'll find at least half a dozen LoRas. Some have obviously been trained on material only available with a login. I'm not really sure what more NG can do, and I'm pretty sure that we're at the point of diminishing returns, but it's something to be aware of. I personally file it under the "sucks but it is what it is" category.
There are replies. Everything is deleted and has stayed deleted as of this writing.
I look forward with great interest to see what intellectual backflips the usual toadies and glazers will go through to try to claim my last attempt at a post was the most rule-breaking string of words you could ever string together, but I think to everyone else the line between honest mistakes and harassment, bullying, and abuse of power was crossed long ago. This is untenable. As an ***hole, I am willing to defend myself but 90% of people would have long since left NG.
I sent this entire story to a mod I respected weeks ago. I received no reply and now that the same exact thing is happening again I can only assume they are complicit. I'm sure that at least in the short term I'm aggravating a conflict that I did not start, but I'd rather be kicked off NG than bullied off.
Update 01:
@TurkeyOnAStick has apparently taken responsibility and also commented on my wife's post saying:
The AI stuff was because I said earlier in the thread we don’t need to keep making anti-AI soapbox posts.
The topic was about protecting art from AI scraping, and all other posts were about signatures, anti-scraping filters, etc.
Your post was about AI-generated NG characters, which is a topic shift into the done-to-death AI conversation topics.
I challenge anyone to read through my story and come to the conclusion that my post was not a warning that scraping was already happening, even here on NG. Notice what a delightful counterfactual Turkey spins here. My post might cause others to derail the thread, so it needs to be deleted. This same kind of "your crime is that you might inspire others to commit crimes" kind of batshit reasoning is present in this comment where he says:
If anything, if your argument gets so heated to the point that a mod has to get involved, that’s a problem with the participants collectively.
Good to know Turkey thinks that everyone involved in a home invasion should go to jail for assault. The kid in a crib is--afterall--a collective participant just like the guy in a balaclava. Amazing ethicist we've got looking out for our interest.
