Cerebrawl said:
Stamaris said:
I realize I'm courting the banhammer here, but does anyone else see the irony in running this article while the site is hemmoraging talent?
More like hemmoraging liabilities.
Wether it's because they were implicated in ethical violations, even if they later acted well, had their consumer advocacy mask fully removed, or channeled goebbels on twitter... they were all in some ways liabilities.
Well, yes and no. At the end of the day I think the problem was that The Escapist didn't hold many of their people to much of a standard. They pretty much gave people a platform and then said "hey, go to town with your stuff" and that was fine until things started to get really political, when people like me noticed and said "hey, you really might want tone this down" nothing was done, which pretty much gave the red flag for things to get even more extreme over a period of time. To use MovieBob as an example, when he first started he was all about the movies and occasionally added some purely contextual insight. As time went on he started to turn it increasingly into a personal political platform, and during some of his reviews for movies like "The Expendables" he flat out insulted the fans of that kind of movie, which of course means a LOT Of people given how popular it was. There is a point where his features started to be less like the work of a geek culture site, and more like something you'd expect from the games section of a political magazine.
I remember a day when Jim Sterling when called left wing (by me) went to lengths to make the point that he was NOT a liberal and was actually apolitical right there in his forums. As any pretension of neutrality or staying on the topic of geek culture and issues became less relevant he gradually began to start getting into social issues more and more, and his tenure more or less ended when he went on a rant about how upset he was that people with different political views on major issues could post on The Escapist.
At the end of the day you need to manage people and keep them on track no matter how talented they might be, and that seemed to be where The Escapist went wrong with some of this talent. There was a big difference between Jim and Bob when they left, compared to what they were when they first started here on The Escapist.
Jim in particular struck me as being someone who needed some kind of leash to operate on a professional level. Namely because he seems to have as tendency to want to push constantly to get a rise out of people, which is why I suspect he had a parting with Destructoid first despite his long term contributions there. When Jim is flat out insulting people who disagree with him on say homosexuality in Mass Effect, that's not professional behavior, that's turning his feature into an attack platform whether you agree with him or not. Considering that this is a guy who fairly early on was doing faux-erotic videos of himself screwing a blow up doll with "Colonial Marines" taped to it's face it should have been obvious that he was likely to keep pushing until he eventually hit the limit and things collapsed unless he had someone handy to reign him in, which is something a lot of celebrities apparently need.
On some levels it's the whole "Imus" complex, people getting big enough, and getting away with enough stuff, where eventually they just push one button too many and go from being a benefit, to a liability. In the case of The Escapist I'm guessing some of it (but not all) comes down to Gamers Gate which as uncoordinated as it was brought a lot to a head. You saw Jim wanting to take control of the platform entirely and have The Escapist taking a clear side that agreed with him, and any professionalism Bob had was compromised by his personal relationships before you even get into his politics.
Going by some of the statistics I've seen posted The Escapist started to seriously lose users as it became increasingly politically polarized, with like a 25% drop off towards the end of last year. At the end of the day as much as liberals like to think of themselves as some kind of super majority, they are not, and as you were sort of seeing they apparently can't support a site like this exclusively. Every ban of a right winger or someone having enough with extreme liberalism cost the site hits, as did all the lurkers chased off by the slant, and of course those who decided it wasn't worth investing in a site where they were likely to get banned, or endure constant attacks the way I do. To thrive something like The Escapist needs to be balanced, or apolitical, or at least close to it... and believe it or not there was a time when it was.
Patreon also figures into this as well I'd imagine, a lot of people had their eyes on Jim Sterling to see how well he would do after breaking free of sponsorship by a major site. He's done quite well, and I'd imagine especially if sites are beginning to impose higher standards (or talk about it) a lot of people here and otherwise probably figure "hell with it, I'll just go to Youtube". That said while I'm sure it will last for years yet, I expect that bubble to burst especially as these people compete and drive each other out. As much as I love Jim, politics included (yes I follow some of his stuff on Youtube) despite how it might sound, I expect he, and a few other people might also wind up getting themselves in trouble via Patreon-friendly sources like that as well. Totalbiscuit has gotten some pretty heavy attacks over the years and has managed to weather them, but he also doesn't push as far as Jim has been known to do.
Overall I think a new team of content people, new mods and mod policy, and also some tighter standards on content might be a good thing for the site. Of course to be honest I have my doubts unless The Escapist can actually convince a lot of users that were chased off to return. What's more the crowd The Escapist has attracted is likely to resist any such change, and even expressing my thoughts (based on long term observation, statements by the general manager, posted statistics, etc...) has lead to some rather mocking responses. Time will tell if I am correct or not though.
BONUS: For those who read long posts like this I figured I'd toss in a conspiracy theory of sorts here as well. I'm not a huge follower of such things but I find them interesting especially when there could be a grain of truth to them.
Right now there is a fairly quiet buzz that unless something changes The Democrats are pretty much doomed come the next presidential election, as right now with approval ratings, 26 states involved in a law suit against The President, Arizona passing laws saying it does not acknowledge Federal authority to regulate guns, etc... it's the Republican's race to lose, and some apparently think that if a Democrat DOES win and continues policies anything like we see now it could very well cause a civil war or something similar to it.
I'm not quite that extreme yet, but where it gets interesting, is when it gets into the attitudes of certain Senators and Congressmen who have been making comments about the media being out of control, and engaging in slander, libel, and character assassination disguised as satire and "criticism". The point being that while free speech is protected, as are satire and parody, things like Slander and Libel are not. Interesting questions have been raised about "quotes" used in attack pieces when divorced from the rest of a longer statement, basically using 2.5 seconds of a five minute block, which can be made to seem like one thing being said when another thing was quite clearly intended. Done that way "hanging someone with their own words" can be seen as an attack. If The Republicans win they are allegedly planning to make some major crusades in this direction to clarify laws. This is supposed to be why guys like John Stewart are retiring (he can always come out of retirement), Colbert is moving away from his "political" personal to take over for David Letterman, and other things. Comedy Central in particular is supposed to be somewhat concerned due to some of the shows they have done like "That's My Bush" and "'Lil Bush" (I think they were called that), etc... allegedly a lot of media and news agencies are supposed to be bracing themselves for this possibility, and a lot of people are being put on notice due to concerns that if certain rulings are made ways could be found to retroactively apply the laws to media that has already been produced. While I doubt it's true for a lot of reasons (especially since your not supposed to be retroactively applying the laws) allegedly the Bush family has been having lawyers going over the two "Bush" shows with a microscope in preparation for such cases, even if they can't sue with those shows, they can use them as examples of exactly what the law should be preventing.... and on some levels I understand that, the tricky part is of course going to be proving how it's more of an attack compared to say a show-sized SNL sketch.
The point of this is both to entertain and inform (it's amusing when you hear about things like this and then see something different but vaguely like what you heard happen), but also point out that it's interesting to note that at the same time other big time left wingers are abandoning ship, The Escapist, which is pretty well known in it's arena, also has a lot of it's most politically charged people going elsewhere (or being fired). Of course I'll be the first to point out that the weird coincidence makes little sense because at the end of the day I don't think The Escapist has run much that could fall even under what The Republicans are concerned about. You can't for example logically say that Jim or Bob had a platform sufficient to actually do financial or political damage to a dynasty, compared to say the Bush family (old political family) being able to claim that they lost money and political projects because of the ridicule directed at them, especially when it was exaggerated, or involved comments presented entirely outside of the context or dialogue in which they occurred, and reinterpreted by someone else on their own to mock or damage the speaker. It's still vaguely interesting.
