About Discord...

Alright, I'm kinda tired and it's been a long day, so my apologies if I ramble a bit or a lot, but this stuff that happened on discord has been swirling around in my head all night and I'm just now finally free to get it out, so here we go.

First of all, we'll start with a bit of a recap for people not in the know of the whole situation. To be totally tbh, I'm not privy to absolutely everything myself, but I'll be sure to mention what I have only heard and not witnessed personally. It all starts a couple days ago with a thread on the SRC SMB1 forum. Somebody (I won't be mentioning any names at all throughout this) mentions that they looked around and didn't see if an SMB1 Discord server existed, so they made one. The next post is a link to the already established Discord server. If you don't know, this server originally started as a hub for the SMB3 tourney back in 2016 and has since grown into a fairly decent sized community for most of the 2D Marios. Basically, this new server was never needed in the first place. The person comes into the established server, and starts mentioning how their server is better, without really posting any concrete evidence other than "mine has more roles". Now if you don't know, most of the active people on the SMB Discord are, for lack of a better word, shitters. I mean this in the NICEST POSSIBLE WAY, and I certainly consider myself the exact same, but any opportunity for memeing, idiocy, or other degeneracy is met with open arms amongst us. We started cracking jokes, making silly roles, etc. etc. Eventually on the SRC thread they post "I hate you all." Now I took this as a joke, as I think most people did, but I don't think it was really intended as such. A lot of people, myself included, "liked" the post, I'm hoping again, as a joke.

Flash forward a little bit to the actual new server itself. I never actually joined the server, so anything in this section will be going off of stuff I've seen/heard elsewhere. People start joining the server, mostly just to troll, but eventually they start giving admin to people that have WR in games not even related to Mario. This prompts people to start changing their nickname on the server to impersonate other people and get admin rights. Eventually people start making channels for no reason, and posting NSFW stuff, basically the entire server descends into chaos. AFAIK, the server isn't up anymore, or at least it's been handed off to someone else, but for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist.

I think, in a lot of ways, we as a speedrunning community acted incredibly poorly. Now, in some ways, I think this person didn't act with the best interest of the community in mind. We questioned this when they first came into the established server, and honestly they didn't do anything to answer the questions and concerns we had. However, this is where the community did the wrong thing. I'm not exempt from this. I made jokes, I liked the post on the thread. While I wouldn't say anything that happened in the established server was overly mean, we didn't do a good enough job of explaining why this was a bad idea in the first place. At some point, a line was crossed, and while I don't think anyone in the established server crossed it there, we certainly flirted with it. I don't know who did all the other stuff in the new server, but I think it'd be a bit naive to think that nobody from the established server was involved with it.

All of the stuff that happened in the new server was really disheartening to see. I don't know think anybody really knows exactly who did what or anything like that, but impersonating other people just to gain power, and then using that power to send the server into chaos is frankly, completely unacceptable. I hope the people who did this reach out to apologize for their actions.

One of the things I've always said about speedrunning is how amazing the community is. I've been a part of a number of online communities over the years, but the speedrunning community has always had something special, something that those other communities never did. We raise millions of dollars every year for charities and people in need. We encourage each other and celebrate wherever successes are found. We didn't do that here. We did things that reminds me of some of the other communities I was a part of and some of the bad things that almost seemed commonplace. I hope people don't look at this example and think the speedrunning is just like some of the other toxic communities out there on the internet. We're different. We're better than this, or at least I hope we are.

I don't really see myself as anyone important in the speedrunning community. I'm just a guy who plays games fast. But I know a couple people have told me they've gotten interested in speedrunning in part because of something I did, or something I was involved in. That's a good feeling to have. I don't feel happy about being involved with this. I don't feel proud to be a speedrunner right now. I hope this is just a blemish, something we look back at and realize that it was a moment where we just briefly lost sight of who we are. I have faith that we can learn from this, and next time something like this happens, we as a community handle this with the same friendliness and   supportive attitude that we show every day.

Glib