![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
whoisacHi. I'm AC. Or RatedAC. I'm some 6'4 handsome idiot that somehow cultivated a small but passionate following on a website called Backloggd. It's allegedly a place for discourse and reviews about video games, somewhere that people can discuss the games they love and discuss every aspect of them with the wider gaming community. Whether that is through critical analysis, creative storytelling that links into the themes of the game, or just trying to be funny until one day you actually are.
I say allegedly, because a number of recent events have made it incredibly awkward to even continue to exist on the website in any meaningful way. You see, I do like my place on the site. I do long, verbose reviews. People seem to like them. My comments section is always populated with really passionate people. But recently the drive hasn't been there, there's a growing discontent in the community from all different angles and it's overall just not a very positive place to be right now.
As for me, I'm kind of in a position where I'm not really enjoying my time there. I still enjoy reading reviews, still enjoy participating in the community and seeing what people have to say. I want to read, I want to be entertained. But I don't really participate much in the Backloggd community outside of... well, Backloggd. I don't use Bluesky, I couldn't think of anything worse than joining the Backloggd discord. Most of the people I talk to from the site are people I've reached out to personally. I've networked, in a sense.
But that also means that my "presence" on Backloggd is weird. My voice doesn't get heard as much as others, yet I'm still judged just as harshly. Believe me, the amount of people with an audience on Backloggd that had blocked me suspiciously around the Black Souls saga would suggest that is the truth. Speaking of Black Souls...
BLACK SOULS
Lets start with the elephant in the room, Black Souls 1 & 2. Me and another Backloggd user named grubmaiden both wrote similarly scathing reviews about the games and the content housed within them. The intent of these reviews was to spread awareness of the actual content within them. I was already planning on writing a review for Black Souls 2 before grubmaiden posted hers, as I had multiple conversations (one with a literal minor) with people that were intending to play them, not realizing what kind of content it housed. A lot of the reviews on the site either obfuscated this content deliberately or deemed it not important to talk about. When Grub posted hers, it inspired me to prioritize writing mine. Our reviews blatantly called it out, mine might have been a little pretentious and "slam poet-esque" but they both achieved what they set out to do.
What they DIDN'T set out to do, was censor the site. You see, at the same time as these reviews, there were a number of Backloggd accounts that were pretty blatantly engaging in weird, creepy behavior. They were very happy to do this in public as their activity feeds were littered with comments about finding children hot, linking eroge mangas to minors among many, MANY other things. Backloggd moderation... did nothing. They sat on their hands as they would delete specific comments but not actually pass any judgement on the accounts that were being reported. No temporary ban, no permanent ban. Nada. Instead, I was watching them continue to censor one specific comedy account instead and take down lists that linked to other peoples reviews as, and I quote, "ragebait."
Yelling "children are hot" from the rooftops? A-okay. Linking to somebody elses review on a list? Woah buddy, get the firing squads, we gotta kill this guy!
Long story short, a group of users marched into the Discord to demand for better moderation. What happened was instead of communicating with anyone involved, The site owner, MrProg sat in silence, contemplated, then removed Black Souls 1 and 2 from the site. Something nobody even asked for. This is all EXTREMELY easy to verify if you go to the discord yourself and don't just read two out of context images that you found on Twitter of all things. The entire chat logs are publicly accessible on the Backloggd discord channel. Go there, educate yourself.
We never wanted for the games to be taken off of Backloggd. It would be incredibly hypocritical of us to want that, considering our reviews depended on the games existence on the site. This is a site about discourse. We should be able to discuss any game openly and honestly, and that ability has been taken away. Quite literally standing against the point of our initial reviews. MrProg made a decision, refused to publicly elaborate on it sufficiently and allowed me and grubmaiden to take the brunt of the abuse because people pointed towards the reviews and saw them as the catalyst for the problem.
We had nothing to do with the decision to take Black Souls I and II down. That was entirely MrProg.
I have never had a direct conversation with MrProg. I would like to, quite frankly. Lets talk about the backlash, shall we?
DOXXING
So I haven't spoken publicly about this, but here's something fun for you to stew over. During the Black Souls saga, I received a pretty substantial amount of harassment. Me and grubmaiden both did. It would be incredibly reckless to speak on her experience, so I will speak only for my own. But I do want to make it clear that she received a substantial amount of it, and that fact both disappoints me and angers me in equal measure.
I've got a pretty thick skin so luckily a lot of this didn't bother me too much. I think I was called a slam poet multiple times, which honestly is kind of a vibe. But I also received a few death threats via my Discord.
This is probably the most pathetic sentence I could say out loud, but I actually received death threats from a Backloggd user before this. During my review of 'Mouthwashing' I got a message from someone who was pretending to reach out because of their history with alcohol. Turns out, this was a lie to lull me into a false sense of security so he could drop the following zinger. He said, and I quote: "Drink yourself to death." and when I hit him with a classic crying laugh emoji. He then went onto a near two paragraph rant about the fact that people like me should be killed. Most sane Backloggd user.
So receiving death threats from angry Black Souls fans was not really a surprise. But it happened. It was allowed to happen because MrProg and whoever work with him didn't deem it necessary to clear this up whatsoever. I have spoken to one person even remotely affiliated with MrProg. A discord moderator, who in the grand scheme of things does not hold an awful lot of sway anyway and I mean this in the least dismissive way possible.
I mention all of this because I was pretty dangerously close to getting doxxed. Someone found an old YouTube channel and did some diving through a digital footprint to find a specific social media account. I am very, very lucky that I had wiped a lot of that social media account quite literally weeks before this had happened or my personal information would have been out there. Pretty scary to think about, but it's something that I've had to stew on and just deal with because, quite frankly, I haven't had a platform to talk about this with my audience on Backloggd.
I was just expected to get over it. Nobody cares, keep writing.
I hold a lot of resentment over this situation. I'd like to pretend I don't, but that just isn't truthful. I was going to leave the site, not because the harassment got to me but because MrProg and the staffs complete lack of empathy and interest in controlling the false narrative that was being directed towards me and grubmaiden made me feel bitter towards the idea of writing reviews on a platform hosted by them.
Why was I the one having to walk into community servers to clear my own and Grubs name for something we never did? Why were Backloggd so hesitant to actually make a statement about why they did anything? Why were we left alone during this entire situation, why was it up to two users of your site to fix a problem you, yourself made?
Me and Grub are close friends off of the site, we talk quite literally every day about anything and everything. Our friendship started through Backloggd but it has gone far beyond that now.
So when I tell you that it was mainly her that convinced me to come back, just know that I want you to remember this, because it ties into my general feelings on the site going forward.
GRUBMAIDEN AND MODERATION
So we are now weeks removed from the Black Souls saga. What changed? Well, not a lot actually. Rules have been reworded but are still inconsistently handled, and nobody is remotely happy with how it looks. It's all a bit of a mess really, and nowhere is this more evident than with my friend grubmaiden.
Grub is someone that I have seen be on the receiving end of questionable moderation actions that come from a blatant double standard for a long time. If there are list trends that everybody else has made? Grub is punished for engaging in them. Speaking her mind on a political issue? Punished for it. Yet Johnny Dipshit over here can make the same argument 50x worse and get away for free.
This has been a continuous problem, and it has kept going. Over, and over, and over. Until we're reaching a point now where I'm having to watch grubmaiden, a writer that I have been a massive fan of since some of the first weeks on joining the site, lose interest in the site as a whole. Her writeups are getting shorter there, her interactions more limited. All the while moderation continue to sit there with their thumb up their ass and focus their attention on specific users (myself included.)
Even today, there are multiple reviews for "Maya Feys Borger Eating Simulator" that are quite literally clones of one another. Don't get me wrong, this entire thing was VERY intentional and meant to be memetic. It proves a point. Isn't it funny that instead of focusing on MULTIPLE reviews, Backloggd chose to suspend the review I made? It's pretty clear there's a double standard here. Because the rest of them are sitting pretty on the site, even now.
So we swing back to the point I made earlier. Grub convinced me to come back, and I'm going to say something that I haven't really told her. I have sort of regretted doing it. The first couple of weeks were pretty great. People seemed really happy to see me back, the community was going strong and then we started spiraling into the moderation problems again and now it just feels like we're moving backwards.
Grub is an amazing writer. I will follow her writing wherever she posts it, but now I'm sitting here in the inverse position. Grub is the one with her eye on the door. Difference is, I've also got my eye on the door. I just don't really know what I want to do afterwards, if anything, writing-wise to be honest. I'm just getting burnt out. This isn't fun anymore.
Take away the website, take away Backloggd culture, take away all this internet bullshit and what do you have.
Grub is my friend, and I want people to do right by my friends. She is being treated unfairly, so yes, I am going to point the middle finger to the people doing it. I don't sit on my hands and wait for things to happen.
Is Grub perfect? Fuck no. Am I perfect? Fuck no. But we are two people who are quite frankly being treated unfairly as a result of a situation we had nothing to do with. So yes, I'm pretty fucked off. For my sake, and for hers.
...SO WHAT ABOUT THAT RATEDAC GUY?
I'm just tired of this shit now.
I've been in spaces before Backloggd and I'll be in spaces after it. I've reached out to lots of people and made friends through that site, if I leave tomorrow, I'll still have those friends. I'd like to stay on Backloggd but the last few days of me receiving a suspension with no time limit on the login screen (very odd, thankfully over) and constant censorship of reviews that honestly should not have even been removed in the first place.
I don't know what I want to do in terms of writing, at least publicly. I still am working on something for myself, a little book called Sunset Cyanide, but I don't know if I'll continue using this Dreamwidth or find a new space of my own somewhere. I have community where I need it, and Backloggd needs writers like me more than I need Backloggd. I'll be completely frank.
The site is a fucking cesspit that is stifling its own community. They don't communicate, they don't listen, and they do not learn lessons. Its becoming increasingly clear to me that Backloggd is very much a vanity project. The sense of "community" comes only from the community, I do not think it is shared by the people running Backloggd. If it was, I think they would have approached a lot of things very differently over the last month or so.
The last thing I'll say is this, I want an apology directly from MrProg. I am owed one. I'm not better than any other person on the site, nor do I want to be held in a higher regard to my peers on that site, but a harassment campaign was allowed to be formed because of MrProgs inaction, and there has been absolutely zero sign of any empathy from him about that. Even if I don't get one, and I very much doubt I will because even during the Black Souls saga I was receiving the least information out of anybody, I want grubmaiden to get one.
She is owed it more than I. And I am fucking owed it.
If I'm forced off the site, and with that strange suspension they put on me the other day that seems like it might be likely, I'm proud of the fact that I managed to build a community of my own, with one of the best and most populated comment sections on the site. You can keep your follower counts, keep your numerical metrics of success. I built a really fucking good community, one that always engages with the work I put out.
If nothing else, I'm very proud of that.
Keep safe, make your voice heard, and never play Mirrors Edge: Catalyst. That game fucking sucks.
Maybe I'll see you on a review. Or maybe it'll get taken down within 5 seconds. Maybe I'll get wiped off of Backloggd within the next few weeks, that'd be fun, wouldn't it?
Peace.
-AC
I say allegedly, because a number of recent events have made it incredibly awkward to even continue to exist on the website in any meaningful way. You see, I do like my place on the site. I do long, verbose reviews. People seem to like them. My comments section is always populated with really passionate people. But recently the drive hasn't been there, there's a growing discontent in the community from all different angles and it's overall just not a very positive place to be right now.
As for me, I'm kind of in a position where I'm not really enjoying my time there. I still enjoy reading reviews, still enjoy participating in the community and seeing what people have to say. I want to read, I want to be entertained. But I don't really participate much in the Backloggd community outside of... well, Backloggd. I don't use Bluesky, I couldn't think of anything worse than joining the Backloggd discord. Most of the people I talk to from the site are people I've reached out to personally. I've networked, in a sense.
But that also means that my "presence" on Backloggd is weird. My voice doesn't get heard as much as others, yet I'm still judged just as harshly. Believe me, the amount of people with an audience on Backloggd that had blocked me suspiciously around the Black Souls saga would suggest that is the truth. Speaking of Black Souls...
BLACK SOULS
Lets start with the elephant in the room, Black Souls 1 & 2. Me and another Backloggd user named grubmaiden both wrote similarly scathing reviews about the games and the content housed within them. The intent of these reviews was to spread awareness of the actual content within them. I was already planning on writing a review for Black Souls 2 before grubmaiden posted hers, as I had multiple conversations (one with a literal minor) with people that were intending to play them, not realizing what kind of content it housed. A lot of the reviews on the site either obfuscated this content deliberately or deemed it not important to talk about. When Grub posted hers, it inspired me to prioritize writing mine. Our reviews blatantly called it out, mine might have been a little pretentious and "slam poet-esque" but they both achieved what they set out to do.
What they DIDN'T set out to do, was censor the site. You see, at the same time as these reviews, there were a number of Backloggd accounts that were pretty blatantly engaging in weird, creepy behavior. They were very happy to do this in public as their activity feeds were littered with comments about finding children hot, linking eroge mangas to minors among many, MANY other things. Backloggd moderation... did nothing. They sat on their hands as they would delete specific comments but not actually pass any judgement on the accounts that were being reported. No temporary ban, no permanent ban. Nada. Instead, I was watching them continue to censor one specific comedy account instead and take down lists that linked to other peoples reviews as, and I quote, "ragebait."
Yelling "children are hot" from the rooftops? A-okay. Linking to somebody elses review on a list? Woah buddy, get the firing squads, we gotta kill this guy!
Long story short, a group of users marched into the Discord to demand for better moderation. What happened was instead of communicating with anyone involved, The site owner, MrProg sat in silence, contemplated, then removed Black Souls 1 and 2 from the site. Something nobody even asked for. This is all EXTREMELY easy to verify if you go to the discord yourself and don't just read two out of context images that you found on Twitter of all things. The entire chat logs are publicly accessible on the Backloggd discord channel. Go there, educate yourself.
We never wanted for the games to be taken off of Backloggd. It would be incredibly hypocritical of us to want that, considering our reviews depended on the games existence on the site. This is a site about discourse. We should be able to discuss any game openly and honestly, and that ability has been taken away. Quite literally standing against the point of our initial reviews. MrProg made a decision, refused to publicly elaborate on it sufficiently and allowed me and grubmaiden to take the brunt of the abuse because people pointed towards the reviews and saw them as the catalyst for the problem.
We had nothing to do with the decision to take Black Souls I and II down. That was entirely MrProg.
I have never had a direct conversation with MrProg. I would like to, quite frankly. Lets talk about the backlash, shall we?
DOXXING
So I haven't spoken publicly about this, but here's something fun for you to stew over. During the Black Souls saga, I received a pretty substantial amount of harassment. Me and grubmaiden both did. It would be incredibly reckless to speak on her experience, so I will speak only for my own. But I do want to make it clear that she received a substantial amount of it, and that fact both disappoints me and angers me in equal measure.
I've got a pretty thick skin so luckily a lot of this didn't bother me too much. I think I was called a slam poet multiple times, which honestly is kind of a vibe. But I also received a few death threats via my Discord.
This is probably the most pathetic sentence I could say out loud, but I actually received death threats from a Backloggd user before this. During my review of 'Mouthwashing' I got a message from someone who was pretending to reach out because of their history with alcohol. Turns out, this was a lie to lull me into a false sense of security so he could drop the following zinger. He said, and I quote: "Drink yourself to death." and when I hit him with a classic crying laugh emoji. He then went onto a near two paragraph rant about the fact that people like me should be killed. Most sane Backloggd user.
So receiving death threats from angry Black Souls fans was not really a surprise. But it happened. It was allowed to happen because MrProg and whoever work with him didn't deem it necessary to clear this up whatsoever. I have spoken to one person even remotely affiliated with MrProg. A discord moderator, who in the grand scheme of things does not hold an awful lot of sway anyway and I mean this in the least dismissive way possible.
I mention all of this because I was pretty dangerously close to getting doxxed. Someone found an old YouTube channel and did some diving through a digital footprint to find a specific social media account. I am very, very lucky that I had wiped a lot of that social media account quite literally weeks before this had happened or my personal information would have been out there. Pretty scary to think about, but it's something that I've had to stew on and just deal with because, quite frankly, I haven't had a platform to talk about this with my audience on Backloggd.
I was just expected to get over it. Nobody cares, keep writing.
I hold a lot of resentment over this situation. I'd like to pretend I don't, but that just isn't truthful. I was going to leave the site, not because the harassment got to me but because MrProg and the staffs complete lack of empathy and interest in controlling the false narrative that was being directed towards me and grubmaiden made me feel bitter towards the idea of writing reviews on a platform hosted by them.
Why was I the one having to walk into community servers to clear my own and Grubs name for something we never did? Why were Backloggd so hesitant to actually make a statement about why they did anything? Why were we left alone during this entire situation, why was it up to two users of your site to fix a problem you, yourself made?
Me and Grub are close friends off of the site, we talk quite literally every day about anything and everything. Our friendship started through Backloggd but it has gone far beyond that now.
So when I tell you that it was mainly her that convinced me to come back, just know that I want you to remember this, because it ties into my general feelings on the site going forward.
GRUBMAIDEN AND MODERATION
So we are now weeks removed from the Black Souls saga. What changed? Well, not a lot actually. Rules have been reworded but are still inconsistently handled, and nobody is remotely happy with how it looks. It's all a bit of a mess really, and nowhere is this more evident than with my friend grubmaiden.
Grub is someone that I have seen be on the receiving end of questionable moderation actions that come from a blatant double standard for a long time. If there are list trends that everybody else has made? Grub is punished for engaging in them. Speaking her mind on a political issue? Punished for it. Yet Johnny Dipshit over here can make the same argument 50x worse and get away for free.
This has been a continuous problem, and it has kept going. Over, and over, and over. Until we're reaching a point now where I'm having to watch grubmaiden, a writer that I have been a massive fan of since some of the first weeks on joining the site, lose interest in the site as a whole. Her writeups are getting shorter there, her interactions more limited. All the while moderation continue to sit there with their thumb up their ass and focus their attention on specific users (myself included.)
Even today, there are multiple reviews for "Maya Feys Borger Eating Simulator" that are quite literally clones of one another. Don't get me wrong, this entire thing was VERY intentional and meant to be memetic. It proves a point. Isn't it funny that instead of focusing on MULTIPLE reviews, Backloggd chose to suspend the review I made? It's pretty clear there's a double standard here. Because the rest of them are sitting pretty on the site, even now.
So we swing back to the point I made earlier. Grub convinced me to come back, and I'm going to say something that I haven't really told her. I have sort of regretted doing it. The first couple of weeks were pretty great. People seemed really happy to see me back, the community was going strong and then we started spiraling into the moderation problems again and now it just feels like we're moving backwards.
Grub is an amazing writer. I will follow her writing wherever she posts it, but now I'm sitting here in the inverse position. Grub is the one with her eye on the door. Difference is, I've also got my eye on the door. I just don't really know what I want to do afterwards, if anything, writing-wise to be honest. I'm just getting burnt out. This isn't fun anymore.
Take away the website, take away Backloggd culture, take away all this internet bullshit and what do you have.
Grub is my friend, and I want people to do right by my friends. She is being treated unfairly, so yes, I am going to point the middle finger to the people doing it. I don't sit on my hands and wait for things to happen.
Is Grub perfect? Fuck no. Am I perfect? Fuck no. But we are two people who are quite frankly being treated unfairly as a result of a situation we had nothing to do with. So yes, I'm pretty fucked off. For my sake, and for hers.
...SO WHAT ABOUT THAT RATEDAC GUY?
I'm just tired of this shit now.
I've been in spaces before Backloggd and I'll be in spaces after it. I've reached out to lots of people and made friends through that site, if I leave tomorrow, I'll still have those friends. I'd like to stay on Backloggd but the last few days of me receiving a suspension with no time limit on the login screen (very odd, thankfully over) and constant censorship of reviews that honestly should not have even been removed in the first place.
I don't know what I want to do in terms of writing, at least publicly. I still am working on something for myself, a little book called Sunset Cyanide, but I don't know if I'll continue using this Dreamwidth or find a new space of my own somewhere. I have community where I need it, and Backloggd needs writers like me more than I need Backloggd. I'll be completely frank.
The site is a fucking cesspit that is stifling its own community. They don't communicate, they don't listen, and they do not learn lessons. Its becoming increasingly clear to me that Backloggd is very much a vanity project. The sense of "community" comes only from the community, I do not think it is shared by the people running Backloggd. If it was, I think they would have approached a lot of things very differently over the last month or so.
The last thing I'll say is this, I want an apology directly from MrProg. I am owed one. I'm not better than any other person on the site, nor do I want to be held in a higher regard to my peers on that site, but a harassment campaign was allowed to be formed because of MrProgs inaction, and there has been absolutely zero sign of any empathy from him about that. Even if I don't get one, and I very much doubt I will because even during the Black Souls saga I was receiving the least information out of anybody, I want grubmaiden to get one.
She is owed it more than I. And I am fucking owed it.
If I'm forced off the site, and with that strange suspension they put on me the other day that seems like it might be likely, I'm proud of the fact that I managed to build a community of my own, with one of the best and most populated comment sections on the site. You can keep your follower counts, keep your numerical metrics of success. I built a really fucking good community, one that always engages with the work I put out.
If nothing else, I'm very proud of that.
Keep safe, make your voice heard, and never play Mirrors Edge: Catalyst. That game fucking sucks.
Maybe I'll see you on a review. Or maybe it'll get taken down within 5 seconds. Maybe I'll get wiped off of Backloggd within the next few weeks, that'd be fun, wouldn't it?
Peace.
-AC