Godot staff are facing a huge reactionary backlash on Xitter for being "woke"
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.
Finally a place I can share my cold takes. (I'm not on Twitter, I won't discuss this on Reddit either.)
The community manager had a meltdown and blocking everyone was a power trip and was wrong.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't know it was because of them supporting LGBTQ+, mostly because they've been doing that for a very long time now and very publicly. I thought most of the backlash stemmed from this;
From what I've read, that person is not officially affiliated with the Godot project. They just moderate an unofficial Discord server that is Godot-related.
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.
Nice to see some figures on the change in support levels. I was donating €5 a month and I've bumped it up to €50 for the next few months.
I get the impression that a lot of the people complaining on twitter are not even gamedevs and don't know what Godot is, it's just the reactionary pile-on du jour.
The flagbearer is ofc grummz, the terminally online ex-gamedev chud who turned to shit every game he touched and has had his right-wing grifting platform on Xitter massively boosted in recent years.
Tbh I'm not sure what your examples are supposed to demonstrate. Blocking someone for saying they should focus on the engine and not politics is astonishingly thin skinned
Kind of hard to follow the thread of most of this but they sure aren't disproving how woke they are by blocking people who even slightly disagree with them.
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.
You're fully entitled to use Godot if you're an asshole.
You're not inherently entitled to interact with their development process or get their help, etc. They aren't obligated to deal with bullshit to run an open source project.
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.
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.