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Godot just posted their damage control response on X:

https://x.com/godotfoundation/status/1840721449364988300/pho...

https://x.com/godotfoundation/status/1840721449364988300/pho...

1) On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse.

The volume of negative engagement overwhelmed our moderation efforts. While attempting to protect the Godot community we mistakenly blocked individuals who were not participating in the harassment. The Godot Foundation Board takes full responsibility for these moderation actions.

If you believe you were blocked in error and have not violated our Code of Conduct, please contact us with the form linked below. We are committed to swiftly rectifying any mistakes.

We firmly stand by our mission to keep our community spaces free from hate, discrimination, and other toxic behaviors.

– The Godot Foundation Board

2) On community moderator Xananax

We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server.

We want to clarify that Xananax is not hired by nor a spokesperson for the Godot Foundation.

As an organization, we have our own official Discord server, moderated together with new volunteers vetted by our team.

– The Godot Foundation

I found their responses to be... insufficient and potentially blind to the amount the debacle affected public perception?




>we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community.

What terrible gaslighting here, shifting the blame from their community manager in charge doing the harassments, to the community itself as being the harassers.


The "community" in this case being someone who complained that game engines were woke.


Stop it with these lies. Someone got banned for quoting the creator of Godot

https://x.com/Cosmic_Scr/status/1840184610862313560


Wrong. That was only one person who made the woke comment which only got 8 likes. Meanwhile, there where hundreds of other people who got blocked and made no such comments and were blocked only because criticizing the product and the poor actions of the CM. That's the real community.

If the CM only blocked that one person with the woke comment and kept quiet, everything would have been fine, but instead she kept antagonizing the community using the woke comment as fuel to start a fire based on her own world and political views as if that one comment represented the whole community, so the community told her to drop it and focus on the product instead not on politics, then she started banning all those people.

If one comment of one person is enough for someone to loose their shit and go on a tirade about identity politics on the org's social media account and ban hundreds of people untreated to the offending comment, they must have some rice paper thin skin, low emotional maturity, or untreated mental issues either of which make them unfit for such positions.


I'd argue it's a lot worse than that.

I don't know who are on Godot Foundation's board, but as I've mentioned elsewhere: these people might want to lawyer up. This situation may very well have legal ramification, including for them.

Particularly if this was indeed their (only) response, to the events so far. Their attempt to distance themselves for the actions of Xananax, characterized as unofficial and an individual not sanctioned by them, means little if that person was effectively able to exclude access to Gotdot sources (as I’ve read from several sources) and/or at least a substantial part of its community. If the Godot Foundation made this possible by somehow by giving away the keys to their castle, then that's on them; they can (and will) carry the consequences. Even more so if they had any power to at least “freeze” the situation and somehow failed to do so.

Either way ... the tone, character and message of these two tweets sound pretty clear to me. Sad to see Godot go down this road. I always did see plenty of potential in Godot, albeit in need of a lot of work (of which I even considered actively participating at some point).

After this, I think no serious business could/should risk doing business based on Godot. Not after such a lackluster and “it wasn’t us”-style of response. Personally, that was about as dumb a move they could make; also precisely what I hoped they would not do. Two major rules of any successful sustainable business: all ultimately comes down to relationships of trust, where trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback. Godot could just as well have pointed this proverbial gun to their face instead of the foot.

Addendum:

On another level, not just related to Godot and more to all politically/ideologically driven dramas that have done harm to Open Source in general over the last decade or so: It looks like most of these incidents center around geographical regions/cultures (maybe covert commercial interests too), that apparently deem such incidents acceptable (or even weaponized them). Apparently even believing (or at least acting like) people should just move on, without the damage-causing entities facing substantial/material punishment nor be held accountable for the damage done.

This is not about censorship, political/ideological oppression, or what-not in that “department”. This is about people doing damage, yet typically walking away with near-impunity. Many of which having “freedom of speech” as their only excuse, while their actions clearly go way beyond speech. Also, since when did the right not to never be persecuted for speech became a license for saying anything without any consequences?

Most of the push-back against that kind immunity has time and again been framed as just politically/ideologically-driven responses themselves, even if they were obviously not. Unsurprisingly, mostly by those who use politics/ideology as their weapons of choice. Still, why is such framing even accepted in the first place? Since when is doing harm considered acceptable, no matter what kind of political/ideological excuse it’s packaged in? If that fundamental flaw isn’t fixes, on a cultural level, then many people may eventually see increasingly more Open Source (development) moving towards regions/cultures where playing such games isn't (politically/culturally/legally) tolerated. Not because of politics; simply because of business and even societal needs.

Probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, until a whole geographical region gets cut off. Maybe only because too many abuses kept coming from there: arbitrage mitigation and unfortunate guilty-by-association. No doubt sounds like a wild idea now. Would not count on it staying that way.




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