First and foremost, I want to discuss this topic of “censorship”.
I invite each and every one of those that claim censorship to go out and visit other communities (such as Twitter, as @Budewr gave as an example), to see how they deal with members that cause trouble.
If you don’t want to, let me tell you what you’ll find - you’ll find real censorship, where the owners barely show up on their own forums and the moderators ban without care.
That’s not the route we want to take.
Let me tell you a secret - both @SaintSovereign and I seriously dislike having to ban, silence or edit people’s posts. We take no joy, no pleasure, no sense of superiority over it. We feel sad that we have to do it.
Our ideal forum is the one where we can all sit together at a campfire and share openly deep secrets, knowledge, advice and life experience with each other.
That is the vision we strive towards, and that is why every single time there is an incident on the forums we hold a meeting to discuss the incident at length.
To put it into perspective - at what forum do the owners themselves take time away from direct business endeavors to focus on a forum incident?
That is what happened here. @SaintSovereign and myself spent 5 hours, with @RVconsultant weighing in with his thoughts, discussing at length every aspect of what happened - instead of managing the company and developing the technology.
That is how much we care about being fair in our decisions regarding this community, and that is how much we care about our vision for it.
Furthermore, some expressed the idea that we should simply let things be unsafe if members make it so, such as:
I posit forth this thought:
Think about a community where the owners do not care about members safety. Why test things? Let’s just let them run all the experimentals without care! They are adults after all, so it’s up to them what happens, right?
I think this is an extremely slippery slope.
The moment we start thinking “it’s completely up to them” is the moment people will get hurt, and that is not only unethical but also damaging to the company.
Can we completely stop people from harming themselves, like @AlexanderGraves said?
No, we cannot. But we will damn make sure we try our hardest. Anything else would be lazy and wrong, and we are well aware of what can happen when people skirt our recommendations.
It’s not a game people. It’s not about lawyering and policing others.
It’s about protecting our customers.
To illustrate my point, and to tackle the following claim:
We personally messaged/responded to Hermit at least 5 times:
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I privately messaged Hermit in July 2020, asking him to stop with excessive spirituality as it is putting off other members.
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@SaintSovereign discussed at length in March 2020 the topic of censorship and why he must be careful in the way he words things.
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So, we asked him to relax his zealous stance twice. Some time later, we end up with the following:
Qv2 experiences, comments, insights and questions - #834 by Fire
Qv2 experiences, comments, insights and questions - #832 by SaintSovereign
Qv2 experiences, comments, insights and questions - #824 by SaintSovereign
Where apparently subliminals are a way to provoke spirits and that is completely unnatural. We of course, describe at length why this is not so and to please stop. Keep in mind, both @SaintSovereign and myself have to do this - multiple times. -
Then, @RVconsultant asked him, again, to stop, with multiple responses:
Putting ultima cores in custom Q? - #22 by RVconsultant -
Finally, we have the following:
Qv2 experiences, comments, insights and questions - #832 by SaintSovereign
Qv2 experiences, comments, insights and questions - #824 by SaintSovereign
Now, I seem to recall another discussion where both @SaintSovereign and I distinctly told @Hermit to stop.
But here’s my thought process:
Why do we have to continuously warn @Hermit and ask him to stop? If there is such great love for this company, why must we take so much time out of our day and out of developing this company, just in order to protect our customers from someone who does not want to listen to what we directly ask of him?
For me, this does not make logical sense.
So after discussing it at length with @SaintSovereign and @RVconsultant, we decided that simply warning him again is not going to last. We tried it multiple times, and it did not work.
And here’s the thing:
You should know that the person you are saying is defensive and emotional, the person who needs to work on his “shadow”, is the person who felt the most sad about having to see you go.
@SaintSovereign didn’t ban you - I did, because I do not want my closest friend and business partner to have to go through sadness.
I, the one who is so kind and logical, while I did feel sad to see you go, had no problem doing so once a decision was made as it is for the good of this community and the company as a whole.
Y’all need to understand that @SaintSovereign is a man who uses all his fiery emotions to bring incredible change to peoples lives - and he does so out of the kindness of his heart and deep understanding that at times, tough love is necessary for real growth to happen.
Where you might see shadow, there is light.
To reiterate, @Hermit was not suspended due to censoring or sharing his thoughts publicly. He was suspended because of potentially dangerous information that could directly cause harm to our customers, even after being talked to multiple times.
There are no “laws of power”, “power tactics” or “evil” at play here.
We do not get any sort of enjoyment out of moderating. All we do, is for the betterment of our mission - advancing human potential, as well as the safety of our customers. Once you start down that road, we will start telling you to stop, and if you do not listen, we will take action.
It’s as simple as that.