The Sakinorva
Databank “Ruleset”
updated 2018-10-24
Hello! If you’ve been using the
databank for a while now, you may have realized by now that I haven’t actually
established a clear ruleset for my site. The truth is that I’ve been actively
avoiding doing so, because it requires confronting a question that I have
trouble answering: how could I bear the burden and responsibility of
restricting others’ freedom using arbitrary criteria when I couldn’t possibly
handle being restricted myself? But there’s much more to it than just that—
For context’s sake: most of my
active users – myself included, of course – have been part of the typology
databank scene since segovois created obscure French
MBTI site Personality-Databank, and segovois promptly
abandoned his website about a year? (I wasn’t there that early on so correct me on this if you were) later along with
his French moderators, leaving the website in its eccentric users’ hands. I would be lying if I said that I used that
website because I wanted to type people and characters, because I really just enjoyed that wicked game of
balancing truth, lies, and the relationships caught between them in an anarchic
“society” where pointing fingers and playing detective prevailed over the
typology-related discussions we would have on the site. My voting percentage
(vote count / total # of entries) never surpassed an infinitesimal 0.5% because
I was just extremely caught up in either commenting on the drama, indulging in
the drama, or posting mini-essays about type theory; with an absence of
moderation, I found excitement in interaction, presentation, and everything in
between on a fantastical website like Personality-Databank. It was definitely
the most consistent source of fun I’d ever had on the Internet, and I loved
telling stories about the wild happenings there.
But with the website’s demise
(which is honestly an amazing other story in itself, even though we’ll just
have to keep that one a secret!) our userbase
migrated to MBTIbase, a website erected by P-D user PROgrammer, who I suspect had been behind the alphabetized
crawling of the site’s entries to import them into his own site. His insistence
on changing sites didn’t work while P-D was still active (I think my reasoning
on the entry advertising his site was that I would stick around where the
community stuck around and that until then I would have no reason to switch)
but when segovois’ site finally disappeared, we chose
to go with MBTIbase instead of “The MBTI database,”
which actually had a great system for averaging out votes but fell short with an
absence of Enneagram voting. Our very own MBTI averaging system is inspired by that
website!
MBTIbase was casually abandoned by its already inactive
administrator soon after problems like “the voting bug” surfaced, so we once
again found ourselves using an absolutely unmoderated website except that this
time, the entertainment factor was gone. I don’t really definitively know why MBTIbase was so unusable, chaotic, and boring at the same
time. It even had an anonymous chatbox on its front
page. But to most of us active Personality-Databank migrants, MBTIbase did a wonderful job of being extremely drab while
also harboring the nastiness that surrounded the detective culture on P-D.
And it’s this very nastiness
that I want to talk about. Though things were certainly exciting and unpredictable
on these former unmoderated sites, our free environment was nurtured by a
precedent defined by a willingness our community collectively shared in
engaging with its anomic side. Many accounts, alts, and entries roaming about
on the site were created solely to kindle the growing hostility between users,
however, others leaned more into a parodical
direction—my own alt Vermeil was an exaggerated caricature of indulgees in magical typology i.e. visual typing,
functions, and the like—and various other expressions that established the
chaotic atmosphere. I would like to think it all contributed to a sense of entertainment, a positive in my
eyes, that forced our community to stay despite how awful things would get, and
I am fairly confident that MBTIbase (with all its
drabness) was put up with because its community was a
tight-knit product of its predecessor.
Now with our context aside: my
website would the first moderated databank since Personality-Databank was
hacked near its demise. With nothing to necessarily “uphold,” the
responsibility that befalls on me extends to creating a standard that others should follow. But note the
wording: a standard, not a ruleset.
I am going to avoid making rules because, being someone who finds
herself often circumventing them to achieve outcomes that aren’t intended to be allowed, I concern myself
instead with following up intentions
with results that mirror my intentions rather than allowing intentions to be filtered through wording and interpretation and
achieving results that may or may not align with my intentions. Problems are
not always solved by creating rules, and rules themselves may create problems; problem-solving
has always been an administrator’s responsibility and rules have only existed
to standardize and simplify that process. Judicature should be a subjective
process which adheres to whatever “justice” should mean, and using rules that
exist outside myself and my intentions would only disempower my ability to sort
out problems like I believe they should be sorted out.
And yes, thinking like this can
be a mark of authoritarianism, but there isn’t anything definitively authoritarian about autocracy; after all, the objective
middleman (rules) is often abused in actual government through things like
wording to achieve authoritarian results.
Now, the important bits:
An intention is an intention. It’s just my intention to do something.
A ruling intention is a ruling standard I’ve set, so I totally lied
about not having rules, but it’s stuff you would expect to be a rule. Sorta.
Intention #1: I intend to
uphold the general idea of free speech. This means a lot of things, and this
doesn’t mean a lot of things. Think of it as a hangout with your friends—what would
get you kicked out? So, as someone graciously pointed out, it's not really free speech, but I'm very lenient. I care about sharing ideas, but I'm not keen on behavioral issues. That's all!
Intention 1b: I intend to
allow criticism in moderation. You can criticize anything you want, but when it
comes to people, keep the following
in mind: is it constructive? is it relevant? is it careful? is it not excessively hostile? I wouldn’t ban you if “no” is the answer to any of those, but
if “no” seems to consistently be your answer for those comments as you post
more, consider that you may just not be allowed to post anymore.
Intention #1c: I intend to
nurture a comfortable environment. With confrontation, hostility, and excessive
openness often comes discomfort, and I want to avoid letting anything by that
discourages people from interacting with others on the site.
Intention #1d: I intend to
keep unrelated, personal drama off the site. If you want to fight to the death
with somebody about why Stanislav Sakinorva is really
an ILI, by all means, go ahead. But if you start bringing your personal drama
with them to the website, I’ll have to call it there. Nobody wants to hear it.
But if you really do want to hear it, talk to them privately about it.
Intention #2: I intend for
the website to be usable. Anything that directly hinders others’ ability to
actually use the website the way it’s intended (and I mean intention #5
specifically) isn’t okay.
Intention #2b: I intend for
each user to have one vote—and one vote only—for each voting column in any
given entry to ensure fair consensuses for entries. Voting in one column twice isn’t
okay.
Intention #2c: I intend for
our entries to be categorizable in accordance with my
designated categories. If there’s a “hole” of entries that should be
categorized into something but aren’t, I’ll consider adding a category to sort
it out. And that also means that you shouldn’t make dumb
entries like we were flooded with on MBTIbase.
I thought Personality-Databank was bad, but a very different kind of bad popped
up on that website.
Intention #3: I intend to
protect my users’ privacy. This usually means protecting everything about a
person, but for your sake, I will clarify that the ruling intention here is protecting your very personal information,
and not necessarily anything you give to Sakinorva. I
probably won’t compromise anything you give to the website, but my Extremely
Strict Standard extends to your personal information and that only. Your Sakinorva stuff (except for your actual non-encoded
password) isn’t under that protection.
Ruling intention #4: I intend to nurture,
or at the very least, protect entertainment. You wish I were kidding, but my
lenience so far has been all about the entertainment. You might or might not
like this part, but I’ll totally let things go that I’m entertained by. It’s
when I get bored of it that you might want to worry. And you’ll only need to worry
if you’re conflicting with any of my other intentions. Boredom is unfortunately
implicitly protected, but I think I’d have to protect it if I wanted a website
to begin with.
Ruling intention #5: I intend for
index.sakinorva.net (or db.sakinorva.net, databank.sakinorva.net, or whatever
else that’s active that I’ve forgotten about and directs to index.sakinorva.net)
to be used as a website for cataloguing, typing, and discussing entries.
I reserve the right to moderate
this website like I please, intentions followed or not followed.
And with that, I think my
vision should be clear. But if you need clarification, please contact me –
there should be plenty of ways to do that, but [email protected] exists, and you
should use it when you’re out of options.
lily ives gossamer
administrator
of sakinorva.net