It all started with the unofficial godot discord admin dealing with some chuds and people turning their ire towards the Godot Foundation staff instead.
Since Godot has stubbornly remained on the Xitter nazi bar as a valid space for PR and social media interaction and dared to promote the Wokot hashtag and reiterate their progessiveness, the reactionaries infesting that space are now piling on their socials and harassing everyone they can get their eyes on.
Examples
- https://x.com/LifeArtStudios/status/1840230152254509067
- https://x.com/Grummz/status/1840162056928145740
- https://x.com/madewithgodot/status/1841118786964840618
Anyway, solidarity with the targets of harassment. I hope they finally realize that Xitter is a lost cause.
Update: Godot is being review-bombed
Fortunately the reactionary backlash seems to be having the opposite effect
Finally a place I can share my cold takes. (I’m not on Twitter, I won’t discuss this on Reddit either.)
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The community manager had a meltdown and blocking everyone was a power trip and was wrong.
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Godot’s tweet was wrong, because it used the word “woke” which immediately drives any conversation into the gutter. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the right or left, as soon as you say the word “woke” you have ruined the conversation.
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It is good that Godot explicitly supports LGBT+ people. They should be welcome. The community CoC should make this explicit, and it does. A tweet to reaffirm this is fine, a cringe joke born from the dredges of Twitter is less fine.
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Godot’s “revenge forks” are amusing and will not go anywhere. Someone might collect some donations before grifting into the night though.
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None of this has any effect on Godot’s technical suitability for creating a game.
as soon as you say the word “woke” you have ruined the conversation.
And as soon as you have “banned” a word from conversation regardless of context, you have ruined your credibility (in my eyes, obviously).
I mean, there are plenty of words that are used almost exclusively to cause offensive. Swears and slurs. Often it can be debatable whether or not a word counts as a swear or slur, but it’s usually pretty clear. I prefer to avoid using words that are intended to cause offence.
The word “woke” doesn’t seem to fall into these categories, but it’s still a term that seems to have been polarised by both groups. I don’t think that word would ruin a discussion that was already political, but it would definitely cause a discussion to become political.
As far as one group is concerned, being “woke” is inherently good and means being aware of modern issues and accepting of marginalised groups.
As far as the other is concerned, being “woke” is requiring all media to have this representation and lashing out when it isn’t inserted in a certain way; thus, you can be supportive of lgbt+ rights and the rights of marginalised groups while still being vehemently “anti woke”.
Because of this conflict in definitions it’s understandable that the Twitter manager might want to use this term, and it’s understandable that people would be against it.
I feel the polarisation of this term may be being done for the drama people on both sides to farm engagement.
“Woke” is a problem because people have different definitions, and no matter what Webster or any other authority says the definition is, people will continue to have differing definitions.
How can we reach understanding when we don’t even agree on the definition of words?
This is way to nuanced to deal with on fucking Twitter. If you use the word “woke” on Twitter, expect a lot of misunderstanding, talking past each other, and bad faith arguments to follow.
I did not suggest banning any words.
To understand why I’m opposed to the word “woke”, you must first acknowledge this fact:
Sometimes people have different definitions of the same word.
If you’re willing to accept that, then it logically follows that using a word that people have different definitions of will cause more confusion than understanding. If our goal in speaking is to convey understanding, then that is best accomplished by avoiding words where people have conflicting definitions.
We’ve all learned that there are facts and opinions, but there is a third category: definitions.
If you watch for it, you will see that many disagreements boil down to nothing more than disagreeing about the definition of a single word. If we temporarily avoid using that word, suddenly we find ourselves in agreement, or at least having a better understanding of each other.
This is a pretty common challenge in philosophy with a very obvious solution:
Define the controversial word (or words) at the top. It’s done all the time in science articles or legal documents.
You can even compound it to point out it’s your version (like calling it Lefty-woke).
By avoiding it, imo, you let them win and “claim” the word, since in their worldview, everyone is now using it like them.
Having said that, this is just my approach, I think the issue with politics is that people assume everyone is using the same language. You got to affirm or confirm that first.
Also, ironically, I think we are talking about the same thing, just using different words lol.
I’ll share mine too.
The community manager had a meltdown and blocking everyone was a power trip and was wrong.
Apparently they did receive a large number of tweets that genuinely warranted a ban, but some innocent people got caught in the crossfire. If this is true then Godot did the right thing by responding as neutrally as they can and giving people a way to get unbanned. If it’s not, then yeah very wrong.
Additionally, the Twitter manager apparently said some unprofessional stuff on her personal. I think there was something about her requesting a shower pic from a very large controversial streamer. I feel like that sort of action would bring attention from trolls.
Also I think there was something about a discord mod saying some dehumanising things about the “anti woke” people. Even if these people were causing trouble and deserved a ban, you shouldn’t dehumanise them. That will just make them more aggressive and convince them that “woke” people are indeed some kind of adversary.
Godot’s tweet was wrong, because it used the word “woke” which immediately drives any conversation into the gutter. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the right or left, as soon as you say the word “woke” you have ruined the conversation.
I think that word is loosely defined. To the drama people “woke/wokism” seems to relate to the idea of people aggressively wanting all media to contain pro lgbt messaging. I think the official meaning relates to awareness of modern issues. “Woke” seems to be a political term, but I suppose some people feel like calling “woke” political is harmful to lgbt rights?
I think inviting people to present their “wokot” is fine, but it probably shouldn’t be done from an official account.
It is good that Godot explicitly supports LGBT+ people. They should be welcome. The community CoC should make this explicit, and it does. A tweet to reaffirm this is fine, a cringe joke born from the dredges of Twitter is less fine.
Hard agree! Strongly agree!
Godot’s “revenge forks” are amusing and will not go anywhere. Someone might collect some donations before grifting into the night though. None of this has any effect on Godot’s technical suitability for creating a game.
Agreed. Give it a year or two. Possibly sooner. It’ll be somewhat interesting if they do go somewhere and contribute something, although I doubt that will happen.
Regardless of what happened and how it will turn out. If Godot increased their budget, even if it was in an unprofessional way, I guess this is an entirely positive thing for people who aren’t on those proprietary social platforms.
Revenge fork is a weird name for these forks. A fork is a fork, even a tiny change like changing the logo is a legitimate fork.
If anything if the Godot community could stop harassing the fork owners, that would be great. Them receiving harassment is the most ironic part about this, because there is more proof of that than the harassment the Godot community manager claims they faced.
Fortunately the reactionary backlash seems to be having the opposite effect
That’s good I suppose.
I don’t care what happens on Twitter. Just so long as the codebase isn’t negatively affected.
I have been seeing some drama YouTubers, who are clearly blowing this out of proportion, talk a lot about this. One thing they’ve been saying that concerns me however, is that apparently there have been people getting banned from help forums and even the GitHub for criticism.
My understanding is that “woke” is a loosely defined political term, so I think requesting Godot be kept free from politics in response to this stuff isn’t something that should require a ban.
Perhaps there were people going too far and getting rightfully banned and some innocent people got caught in the crossfire?
There shouldn’t be any way the MIT license can discriminate between “woke” and “anti-woke”. Godot can be used by everyone. This is just making the drama people lose their credibility. Regardless of what the devs views on this situation are, I could never expect them to come to a decision on this issue so quickly. Let alone act on it. Their main priority should be the code, not the community. Unofficial communities can pop up on their own and self govern.
One thing they’ve been saying that concerns me however, is that apparently there have been people getting banned from help forums and even the GitHub for criticism.
Perhaps there were people going too far and getting rightfully banned and some innocent people got caught in the crossfire?
They’ve addressed that:
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
And there have been 5 people banned from GitHub due to racist and homophobic slurs, which violates Godot CoC and GH ToS.
I don’t think these users were providing valid criticism. Never mind the fact that GH issues are not really the place to complain about some twitter drama.
I am begging you to stop giving credit to drama youtubers, they do not care about the facts and are only in it to farm views.
My understanding is that “woke” is a loosely defined political term, so I think requesting Godot be kept free from politics in response to this stuff isn’t something that should require a ban.
I’m a bit 50/50 on that. If they got kinda harassed to the point where they take a simple stance as they did, then saying “please stop being political” is often used as a thin veiled attempt to say “I don’t like your politics” by the people who get so hard triggered by that term, and women, and LGBT stuff, and people of color, etc.
We can see this all the time in other areas too, especially gaming. As soon as a game has a female main character, or even a female main character that isn’t white, or even one that is lesbian or bi, then uppercase Gamers collectively lose their shit. Say something about Nazis? Or Russia? “HoW DaRe YoU BrInG PoLiTiCs InTo MY GaMes!” …
Not saying that was the guy’s intend when he replied that to Godot, but I can see how it could be interpreted as such when they get brigaded by a bunch of toxic replies.
Open source software is the wokest shit possible… It’s pretty much digital communism run by the gayest furries you’ll ever meet.
It kinda depends on the license. Copyleft licenses are definitely digital communism–but licenses like CC or other extremely permissive licenses are digital libertarianism. I’m good with it in any case.
I can’t tell if you intent this as a positive or a negative, but it very much an accurate assessment.
more attention for a cool floss game engine, I don’t see this as too bad
Why do we need a game engine just for one dance or dental hygiene activity. Seems oddly specific to two very different tasks.
