Unity Community introspection

We as Unity's community speak overtly when decisions from mid-upper level in the company disappoint us, or when some dev teams make decisions that impact our work, or if a relevant feature in the engine is missing.

So we should speak about ourselves overtly too, i'm no community manager, but please, stop being so toxic in posts all over the forum.
I can live with it but after some time it's tiring, especially to others and newbies.

Some examples of what i've seen:
- People speaking hyper harshly to some internal teams devs, some even say to them after to "not take it personally" (while some teams seem to be laking, other are doing their best, please respect and be patient).

- People being impartial and constantly putting down the whole Unity engine or whole new features just, because they see no use in them as they have other personal priorities.

- People who have such a big ego, it induces them to demean and disrepect fellow users, unsolicited.


It won't hurt anyone to be honest and constructively critical, while also being encouraging to internal teams, and other members.
We should maintain a balance between good criticism and encouragment.

I'm not defending Unity like a "white knight" or something, i just want to be a memeber of this community without having to go through disrespect, splurting and polluting heavy negativity around me and others, from a few members.

This also adds up to the internal teams mental state, and in some cases is counter-productive, as mid-level could start limiting contact with us to protect their teams motivation and productivity.

Please be respectful and not eager to put down others, we can do better, with a bit of empathy.

 

Being honest and constructively critical means people will get angry at you, because their feelings will be inevitably hurt.

Trying to sugarcoat problems things means writing half a page of quasi-legalise and dancing around the issue. That is an unproductive waste of time.

Regarding internal teams mental state, I believe they can speak for themselves, and it is actually inappropriate to speak on their behalf.

Empathy does not work well in text form, and is not a good thing either. Politeness and common courtesy is a much better alternative.

 

I mean being critical, without being disrespectful, or seeking to put pressure and shame someone

Obviously constructive criticism is feedback, which is positive, being toxic is different, some of us have a total lack of "empathy"

 

In general, if you just give your opinion straight, without "seeking" anything and meaning well, people may end up insulted or upset. No matter what you meant. It is incredibly common.

Being empathetic creates toxicity. Because people form groups, pick themselves an "enemy" to destroy, and then harass them. The scenario happens when A says something to B, the person C gets upset at A, and starts the "how dare you" cycle, then person D, E, F, G, H join the circus. White knighting falls under this category.

That's why I recommend to focus on common courtesy and politeness. Empathy leads to hostility and toxicity. Because empathetic reaction works with different strength in different people.

That is based on experience.

One more thing. In general, proposition like yours should come from the owners of the resource.

 

Well we might have a different definition of empathy, what you described is maybe frequent in the country you're from

But returning to the subject, there's not only disrespect at matter..

I have personally seen posts (unofficial) by people working at Unity annoyed by the antagonistic and untruthful rethorics they're confronted to.
Sometimes you can see it even in the forum posts it's just cut down in tone.

And what about this:

 

Based on my experience, It is frequent thing on the entirety of the english-speaking internet. Younger audience are more prone to this behavior.

They are in their right to speak for themselves, of course.

Use "report" button. Hostile elements will be eventually banned.

 

@ANFADEV Thank you for this post of yours!
Am feeling the same since quite a while and have reduced my activity here due to that. Oddly enough think that rather increased my productivity using Unity.

 

This is the reason I stopped to spend time on the forums. It degraded over time into three things:

1. Unreal and Epic are the super-hyper-greatest mofos on the block
2. Unity is garbage and it's slow and too big (apparently those Epic-simps have never seen the ~100 gigabyte software called Unreal with the enormous recompile time it has but I digress...)
3. UT rather should make another Unreal out of Unity, because see all the above and because of open world bullshit.

So now I sometimes help people on the forum, rarely post news others missed and once in a blue moon read up on threads and even more rarely answer on "public debate"-threads like this.
I crawl back to my hole under the rock now.

 

The mood of the community has gotten worse around the time Gigaya was cancelled, now there are few bitter people running around and spewing their, ahem, "disappointment" at every opportunity they get, in every thread.

While I do not agree about "empathy", this sort of thing is certainly not helpful.

 

I think the forums largely reflect the state of the world. A global pandemic, war in Europe, inflation, recession, price gouging and profiteering are rampant and then Unity seemingly are making the worst decisions possible for the established forum audience which are mainly game developers. People can't do anything about a lot of these problems, but they can get angry at Unity and post on the forums, perhaps sometimes too harshly worded but a lot of it is deserved in my opinion. If the world ever returns to normal and Unity stop making unpopular decisions, the forums will also get better.

Albeit what's profitable for Unity and what is popular with forum audience might not align in the future as well. Unity has been in a very long transition period both from a technology perspective and also from a business perspective. In many ways Unity have outgrown indies and small independent studios who can't sustain Unity as a company.

 

you need to take into consideration the mental stability of those "toxic" (is stupid to use this word) users. To be honest, in my case, i just ignore 99% of those users xD in fact i believe that some of those users have an alter ego here, you can not help it, is just the way it is, that is what happens if you create a very popular product.

Totally agree with this

 

Off topic. (among other things) Closed.

 

I don't know why I can still post here even though you locked the thread, but I'm going to take the opportunity to ask: Do you hate discussions?

Why is this off topic? It's the general discussions forum, you should be able to discuss anything. Discussing the community being rude and impatient towards Unity devs sounds very legit.
Even if discussions start to go off topic (which the one in this thread has not), that's just the nature of discussions. What's the point of the forums if it's so hard to discuss anything without your thread getting locked?

Excuse my off topic criticism, but I can't help but feel that the mod team is sometimes too trigger-happy with locking threads.

 

Those are hardly discussions but what on Discord we would put in a "vent channel" :/

 

By the way, just to clarify,

I used some terms such as empathy and toxic as a way to carry a meaning, my discourse is not influenced by some sociopolitical ideology to which these terms happen to be associated within your countries, i'm just using the language objectively.

Empathy is a scale where while we're at the median, those who lack it completly can't control their ego to the point of apathy and disrespect.
Toxic is just polluting the surroundings of this forum, to the point that some people are avoiding it.

 

In my country we have an old saying I think it may be appropriate here, in english it renders "live and let live", maybe they have the same origin.
What does it have to do here?
I believe it's not exactly related to life (it could even be "talk and let talk"), it's related to tolerating other people "errors" and it's used in this kind of situation, so you may well imagine why it was related to life in past times

There are some definitions you used that I find a bit unique, definitions of words are important because if we don't agree on them, we aren't talking of the same things, so we may think we are disagreeing but we aren't inasmuch as we are really talking of different things.
Empathy is one of them, to me it is briefly the capacity to share emotions. In a discussion you can share emotions of one person or another, first person can think you are empathic because you share their, second person can think you are not, that does not mean you are not empathic. Instead your definition of toxicity seems good to me but in the whole scheme of things this can be influenced by how you perceived emotions and empathy, we generally perceive them in a subjective instead of objective way.
I know it's not easy.

I'm not sure I understood your definition of impartial you used in you first comment, did you mean partial?

 

Exactly what i'm encouraging, there's no need to demean and disrespect others for the fact of not liking their opinion.
It's strange to me that community managers at Unity haven't stepped in to solve this, it's plaguing the forum, and i don't see the same on other competitors' community platforms.

Yes my bad, meant partial, biased

 

I fundamentally agree to your call for good criticism and respecting others, the problem I see in forums is following it and moderating users to make them follow it is time-consuming (so much so I'm not sure I would be able to do it every time), moreover it would need to define a stringent set of rules users should abide, maybe words that are allowed and not, things you can and can't talk about and you may even think, in the worst case scenario, this thread could be closed at first post.
I don't know if zombiegorilla left open on purpose to see if we would make something good out of it. Have we?

 

It doesn't have to be a dictatorship, just recall the demeaning and disrespectful when they start misbehaving here, give 2-3 chances, and maybe a temporary ban of a like 2-3 weeks.

One can say whatever he wants, within the limits of good manners, or be sanctioned, The community as a whole comes first.

Mods clearly spend time here so it's a non-issue

 

I don't think the forum moderators are paid, it's all volunteer work from times when Unity was a small and up-and-coming game engine company. Perhaps if you Unity, now a multibillion corporation, actually paid someone to keep this place in order, it might improve.

 

Forum rules.

In unity forums, in general discussion, you cannot discuss ANYTHING. You can only discuss anything related to gamedev.

See, that part contradicts the very principles you listed.
You're being disrespectful, putting people down based on their country of origin and insult their place of birth.
This is not a polite thing to do, and does not contribute to constructive discussion.

The problem with empathy is that in many people empathetic response is too strong, and when empathy overreacts, people act in toxic fashion. Typically they form cliques, defend people within cliques and drive outsiders away. A typical example of that is white knighting. You know when a video game has a "suggestion" forum, and you post a suggestion, there will always be a person that will argue you to death about it (eventually switching to insults and mockery) while not being a part of the dev team. That. They are trying to defend the developers because they care, and in doing so they work against improving the very game they respond. Typical example of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

That's why I recommended to use politeness and common courtesy. Those are far more neutral terms than empathy. Empathy is emotion, emotions are irrational, they cloud judgement, when judgement is clouded people will start attacking each other. Meanwhile you can talk to a robot who does not have any capacity of empathy, and it will be always polite to you.

So, in my opinion "be polite, be civil" is a MUCH better principle than "be empathetic".

 

Offtopic:
We have a median empathetic capacity, deviating from that median is what causes conflict, both the emotional side, and the robotic one trigger this.

A balanced approach towards others ensures good comunication and collaboration,
Lack of empathy is as bad as full-on empathy, don't mistake the call towards a direction for its own opposite end.

I'm not sure about that either, if it is then it's pretty unconventional

 

Lack of empathy does not matter with high cognition level.

Being placed exactly at the median also means that half the world is above the median while the other half of the world is below it, while simultaneously making median a minority, meaning median empathetic behavior would be uncommon and not a norm.

Which is one more reason to stick with "polite and civil" instead of "empathetic".

 

As far as I know, moderators are volunteers. Community Advisors(? I forgot exact title) are unity employees.

 

My bad for not hitting the lock button.
It is off topic because this forum is for discussing game development and unity in general. Additionally it was closed for irony. Complaining about perciviced "toxicity" by attacking others for their posting style is just not on. Ranting (especially about subjective opinions) is not allowed. Arguing/ranting about subjective perceptions about other community members is a big no.

This is not a social media platform, or a chat site (there is a discord for that). This is Community support forum. I don't see a huge difference in attitude here, beyond a bit more grumbling in General. But the General discussion threads aren't really the value or point of these forums. There is great info in the feature/domain specific sub forums. Moreover, I would say that it has improved over the years, and there is many more staff members interacting in those areas.

Mods are volunteers who are here primarily to keep the forum clean and on track. (It is not paid, but there are perks) We don't speak for Unity. Community Managers are Unity Staff who are responsible for (among other things) the forum. Anyone with a "Unity Technologies" badge is a Unity employee.