The Shep/J.ai Files

So, Shep and his team came out with their statement considering the ex-mod drama.

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They released a document telling their side of the story, and if you want to read it, here it is.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-rNP6aGCizg1O5vgi77cxnW8o7d-83matVgN0BBAgWM/edit?tab=t.0

BUT, if you don't want to read it, I'll summarize it.

So, Hugo's first point was the tools the mods have. They admit that the mods' tools are bad, and that they plan on "rebuilding" them. As they have spent hours working away to improve these tools and planned on telling us later, but with the whole drama going on, might as well tell us now.

Now, onto communication.

They admit that communication is bad, and they acknowledge this. And that they plan on making a formal communication pipeline for mods. But here's the thing: why wasn't this added before this whole thing? People have BEEN complaning about communcation on j.ai, but now that this whole thing is happening, now they want to say this. If this whole thing never happened, would they still have added this pipeline for clear communication with their mods, or continue letting the problem settle?

Anyways.

They admit that communication with the community as a whole is bad. They know communication is bad and never fixed it, even with all the backlash. But, now they're using all the feedback to better communication and make sure to take the right steps.

Now, onto the guidelines.

Guidelines are vague, and they say they're trying to figure out the whole legal stuff and what is pushing the line. They're working on making it clearer and still stay flexable.

Now, they do talk about the favoritism. They understand the concern of it (or at least that's what they say, we don't know if they're just bullshitting). As they said, "Our intention was to add friction before actioning high-visibility accounts to prevent mistakes that would be hard to reverse—not to create a two-tier system where some users are above the rules. But the effect was the same. We’ll be changing these policies over the next couple of weeks." And that they plan on fixing the earning of the verification badge due to how messy and confusing it is.

They do also talk about how hard it is to run a website of j.ai level with the small team they have. They're working on making it better, but since the person making this, Hugo, doesn't have a clear timeline, they can't talk about it publicly.

And for the last part, they do confirm that actions are reversed, as they get new information, they make mistakes, and communication isn't clear.

Now, my opinion on the whole drama is that this shows just how fucked j.ai communication is. While they do promise to fix it, we've gotten these promises before. So, if this drama does cause a shift, it does fix the problem, but it shows another problem. That shit won't be fixed until it becomes huge and they actually come out with stuff to calm everyone down.

Now, I ain't saying the devs or Shep himself are horrible people, but this whole system is just dumb. If they do fix it, then great, but after this, it will just cause the community to trust the devs even less. If things actually do change, then good. But if not, and they're just trying to calm everyone down, then that's some bullshit.