pouët.net

Absolutely nobody said that or in any way implied that. At all.

@Gargaj I'd like to hug you. In the upmost long, silent, understanding and appreciating way.

Gargaj: The amount of energy you have invested into the demoscene over the years is insane. We two did have our clashes from time to time, but I always had and always will have the highest respect for your contribution.

Please underestimate how much work it is to build, extend and maintain a platform for the demoscene.

I also understand your position "extracting joy out of the demoscene".

We had privately talked about "what will happen to important demoscene platforms if the maintainer dies or leaves the scene", not just about pouet.net, but also for the other platforms there are. You mentioned there is a transition plan. Does that still exist? Will it be implemented? "leaving Analogue as the only administrator" sounds really dangerous to me. There really should be an active demoscener running this place.

Also, I wonder if you no longer be willing to invest the time and work into pouet.net also applies to scene.org. Your work there is less "visible" than on pouet, but I am aware that you are running a huge part of the show over there, too. SceneID for example is extremely important for a lot of demoscene infrastructure. Will you keep running that?

All of this being said: I have the highest respect for your decision, and announcing it well ahead instead of doing a rage quit. I am still worried. And I would love to see you reconsider and keep running it. You really, really did an awesome job not only as an administrator, but also as a developer and moderator.

I understand how frustrating "working for" the demoscene can be in these times. I feel that it is much harder to extract joy out of the demoscene. I only partly blame the demosceners for it, though. The world is becoming more and more frustrating, and a lot of sceners are seing their depressions and other neuro diversity stuff becoming worse, with people not really knowing how to deal with their pain. That appears to be causing a lot of aggression and venting. I wish more sceners would go see a doctor, instead of spewing their frustration onto demoscene platforms. I fully understand that it must feel frustrating if the platform you are running more and more feels like a hate distribution service.

Whatever: If there are things that would you make reconsider your decision, please talk about it. Maybe you would be willing to for example invest a couple more months training potential future administrators and moderators, should people come forward offering to do this, and really being willing and able to to invest their time and energy long-term.

I know very well that it is quite hard to find people in the demoscene who are willing to act as server administrators. I have the same problem with SceneCity - I wanted to build the platform, but not staying in control of it. But those who offered to take over administration after a couple of weeks or months had different priorities.

All of this being said: You may not haven given birth to pouet.net, but it is your baby. Please consider to make sure that baby will get a new family. If you don't, in a couple of years you might be unhappy that all the hard work you had invested has gone down the drain, as your baby was abandoned.

Again: You are one of the demosceners I highly respect for constantly have given your energy, soul and passion to the scene on a level hardly anyone else has.

Love & Respect!

"Please underestimate" = "People underestimate". I really should proof-read my posts before submitting them.

Thank you Gargaj, and further more for the 3month notice.

Pouet has seen some weird weird shit over the years. I'm mostly on the demoscene sideline and can only imagine some of toxic content I missed, that gloperators, moderators and the admin(s) had to deal with and clean up 😟

Thank you for everything you did here,
we'll miss you.

I guess the door will be open forever for you in case you change your mind ! (joking !)

Ok, sure, it is not about money. However, to remove posted dicks or other obviously inappropriate content, it is not required a demoscene adept. It's basic management of contents in a public space. So, maybe a mixed solution could still be there.

Then, as far as I can see (also from the example Gargaj provided of a misbehaviour in the BBS) most of the stress comes from idiotical posts, trolls, and idiots that are free to shitpost and leave inappropriate comments. And the consequent effort of cleaning up this and that. (And, by the way, the cynical comment in that thread fully qualifies the person that wrote it and it should stay there forever, now I know how to consider that person, from now on).

However, this happens when the door is always open and vandals can freely enter and to whatever they want. It's a Sisiphus job fighting alone vs. an army of idiots. Then, what about just shut the door close and allow editing (in all forms) only to referenced sceners?

You choose the mechanism: what about minimum glops earned, referencing, votebans? Certain policies can help to solve the problems at the root, making troublemakers inoffensive, while maintaining a fairly open stance toward genuinely passionate people...

I don't know, really, just thinking aloud.

To be clear, I did not say that. You raised the issue of private keys being only stored by one person - a valid concern - and I counterargued that as far as my involvements go, on a systems level there are many people who have access to both Pouet / Scene.org / Scene.hu / etc., so all the code / data / server maintenance can be continued by any one of those people. It is a different discussion than who steps up to get flak for performing moderation.


On the fence about it, honestly.


You explicitly, publicly said that I shouldn't be trusted with moderation. Now you get your wish.

Gargaj:

IIRC that had been ages ago. And I changed my mind on that. Back in time my feeling was due to you having strong opinions, that your content moderation might be biased.

Also, to be fair, I also mentioned that I also should be not a moderator on any platform, because I'm simply not moderate.

Also, typically power of time corrupts people. As an administrator, you have full power, and you could have abused it. But you haven't.

Yes, back in the days of Breakpoint I saw you as a problematic person. Maybe you today are an improved version of yourself.

I see you constantly trying to make pouet a better place for the scene, and trying to help tone down things if the shit is hitting the fan. You are very very reluctant to ban people, which sure allows trolls to get on our nerves, but also provides diversity. Other moderators on other platforms constantly have an itchy trigger finger.

I'll take myself as an example: In the last decades I have caused a lot of controversy, and had been part of some really ugly BBS threads here, with stuff often going up in flames due to the way I communicated. But you never banned me. Yes, you provided very direct feedback about my behavior, but I assume you somehow agreed that even for a problematic person like myself there should be space provided in the scene.

I would highly appreciate it if solutions for stuff that frustrate you could be found instead of you dropping the ball completely.

And finally: You know that I am drastically critical on the demoscene using commercial services run by questionable huge companies. I dislike seeing ads before I watch a demo on YouTube. I dislike that people use communication platforms where the ToS say that whatever you write or do now is owned by some Internet giant.

And due to this for me it's very important that our non-commercial demoscene platforms survive and strive. I want to see MORE demoscene-operated services, not less.

And you are one of the very very few sceners who could be trusted to run such a services for decades. It will be very, very hard to find someone who has the time, will and energy to take over maintaining your legacy.

Oh no, he just called you boring.

I don't know what's going on but this sounds like a depression. It may have a cognitive side: perhaps you have been reading too much things into bad intentions which could have been explained otherwise. I hope you get well.

Huge respect for your work!
I hope the site will survive your departure.
Kudos for your dedication.

I'd like to chime in with the other sceners to also express my Thanks to Gargaj for his tremendous work on Pouet over all these years. That cannot have been an easy task, yet you managed to sail the ship reliably and sometimes through harsh waters.

As time moves on, it seems only logical wanting to pass on the scepter to another capable soul, in order to refocus on other (hopefully enjoyable) aspects of life.

I cannot comment on the reasons for or against your decision or the things that make you feel how you feel, Gargaj, for I don't truly know what's going on. But rest assured that you'll always be welcome here, and that there is still a lot of positive energy within the active demoscene, besides any of the crap that might be happening simultaneously. Take last Evoke, for example, which as a visitor I felt was filled with good spirit all around (and I don't mean alcoholic beverages!).

Thank you for all your hard work over the years, Gargaj. And thanks to everyone else who also have been involved in the site.

bitl who allowed rudeness and insults, asks to be a moderator. If Gargaj accepts him, then he will show that he is fucked up, as is the moderation policy

hello there, Goblinish.

PS: As I warned, he doesn't care about the ban, and he'll come back to shit-posting.

I don't feel comfortable posting this as I feel like I'm pissing on people's hard work, but it needs to be said:

In terms of having a centralized social hub, then yeah, Pouet == scene. But do we need a centralized social hub, when we as a greater community are proving time and time again that we can't sustainably have such a social hub without people burning themselves out with our bullshit?

At this point, pretty much all of my demoscene related joy comes from distinct subcommunities - demogroup specific chats, local demoparties - and I know I'm not alone with this. Would be just fine as weakly connected subcommunites? Do we really need an Omelas?

but not everything is bullshit

In my opinion, quite a few sceners have already said that Pouet.net is very important to them.

Specifically for me local communities and demoparties are not very important. No one will remember my releases after the party is over. Most party organizers do not even bother to have a gallery of compo entries on the party site. With rare exceptions.

Therefore, personally, I rather make releases for Pouet.net, and for the people who attend it, than for some demoparties. Participation in the party is secondary for me.

To me Pouet is important due to its history. I can see the cringey stuff I posted 20 years ago and so many lost friends are still here, either posting or as ghosts in the prod comments. But if it was gone and replaced with something else, I don't think I would shed a tear. But if it was gone completely, being somewhat out of the loop in general I don't know where I would go for my demoscene news and info.

All in all, I think we do need a some sort of a community site. Discord is fine for what it is, but what's posted there is not permanent and obviously there's the prod comments and feedback that's really valuable. Then again, I fear that whatever culture issues Pouet has, anything replacing it would have as well.

Is it important enough to justify the human cost? Is there something we can do to reduce the human cost? Gargaj is right in calling all of us out for being quick to recognize the job is thankless but slow to shoulder the burden, bu honestly, can you blame anyone for not wanting any part of it?

I don't see a future that doesn't involve drastic measures, like removing the BBS and oneliner altogether, increasing the moderation team size to at least 10 (which should be overkill for a site with relatively little traffic but sadly we suck), and not ban less, but more, and more early.

someone with the right mix to care enough to admin the codebase, but doesn't care too much that whatever goes on affects too much. the latter can again be fixed with more delegation, imho. so yes, thread closing / tempban rights for (more?) moderators to operate as a 'we don't tolerate this'-unit rather than making it too personal. that way you don't get that demozoo forum crap of angry fucktards who call out names for their "mistreatment" which makes admining this site hopefully a bit mentally healthier :D

P rich coming from you tbh.

The goblinish alt account posting does raise a good point tho, as an admin/moderator/gloperator you also put yourself in a position of scrutiny, cause you can never do it right. Ban a bunch of incel losers and you'll get the snowflake brigade calling you the woke cancel mob, try to tolerate them and and the vibe keeps deteriorating until only the loudest shitposters are left.

And it;s always your fault.

I try to not get baited into rage posting anymore, but jesus christ it's hard. I wish I could also fully commit to making things a better place, but I find my interest in the scene waining as well with a lot of the rumblings going on.

I'm with preacher and Jobe, i'll shed a tear if this disappears, but I feel it's unjustified to have people deal with the shit this inevitably ends up being.

I love you gargaj, you are a good dude and i'm sad you are having such a rough time :/

Well, we're not talking about someone having to go through pain and suffering to administer the site. I still think that there are oldschool sceners here who will do it at the behest of their souls. Maybe I'm naive.

BBS... It would be possible to restrict users with less than 100 glops from creating topics, and those with less than 10 glops from making posts. Or something like that.

As an option - an invite system for registration on the site.

Or just switch the BBS to "read-only" mode, let it remain as an archive. If that's the cause of the headache.

plenty of young okkie material as well. but not my point, just look at the current list of bbs topics and there's only 1 residue thread and it's mostly informative content. so yeah, there's rotten apples, but there's a lot of apples.