Forums / Discussion / General

Why did he get banned?

He was one of the most prolific poster of images too.

I'm also curious about what happened.

Damn… This one hurts tbh

The only things I can think of is maybe he posted a Hololive lewd that went a little too far, but even then, I've seen other lewdposters go on for longer posting much more egregious lewds without getting banned. Maybe he got too heated in an argument on a political entry, but then again, he doesn't strike me as the type to get overly angry with his comments to the point of committing banable offenses.

The only thing left would for him to have been an alt of a banned user this whole time, but he doesn't exactly remind me of anyone else, at least right off the bat. I think the last couple of users that got banned and people started asking where they went, the Mods came out and said that they were alts of banned users, so I guess we'll have to wait and see.

On a sidenote, I think the Mods should start a thread listing every new ban that's not a bot/advertising account/the porn spammer with the reasons as to why, it'd be work, but it would be really helpful for people when they log on and see that one of the regulars got banned for no apparent reason.

Good question, i’m curious too

On the image posting leader-boards, his account is listed as being 'deactivated'.

Could it have been entirely voluntary? It's weird since were pretty active, maybe new responsibilities just popped up?

So the weird part is Griff's final nail in the coffin was being part of several users who were suspended for posting in the Joe Rogan entry and, as though it was their golden ticket, decided it was okay to post the n-word several times in one post without realizing there's literally no need to post the n-word even though the discussion was about Joe Rogan using the n-word. So if this post was one of those users, they would have typed it out three times, which happened.

But it didn't have to be that way. Griff could have just been suspended like the others. Except Griff, not even a 1 year old account, was suspended six times. That's amazing because very few accounts get that many chances. I can't comment on why he had so many suspensions cause I don't think I was around for those votes, but in deciding what to do, the other choice was "suspend him a seventh time", which didn't sit well with us. So Griff's final straw was posting the n-word several times.

I know that, at least, a few of Griff's suspensions were about him derailing topics while arguing with Individual.

I hate to see Griff go because he was a good vtuber meme uploader but I'm not at all surprised it happened. I'm beginning to think the site's promotion of controversial content to keep up engagement has a negative effect on people. Most of the big-name bans recently seem to be people who are very active on these memes, and I've seen others who aren't active there comment that it just brings their mood down overall on the site. I get we have to document these trends but I wish we had more initiatives or incentives to promote a healthier userbase that doesn't spend weeks arguing in the same comment chain.

Has the rule changed on it now?
I didn’t know just saying it in a discussion related wasn’t allowed

Sad to seem him go, I liked Griff.

Why'd you have to go, Griff :(

(A sad Gura for the vtuber poster. Rest in peace.)

It might be a side-effect of the internet being as it is, where too many people who are into harmless fandoms still end up going off the deep end. I mostly post on the politics end of things now, but I was actually way happier with the site when lurking and focusing on silly stuff. Somewhere along the line the vibe on a lot of websites changed.

'Course, the final suspension was apparently on the topic of Joe Rogan, and despite knowing nothing about him or his content, that name manages to come up a lot with some drama.

A real shame to see him gone. I never cared much for vtubers, but I liked Griff's enthusiasm and diligence in uploading. Always sucks to lose such an active user.

But I didn't see him doing any of those things though

I wouldn't really call that racist he was just using the n word because that is what the article was about and he called Joe Rogan an idiot for using it as well, he just think the controversy was way out of proportion which….yeah

I'd like to mention 'OurDeerLeader", who was extremely vile, and that such an asshole still had a defender, (and that were was some controversy to criticize him) was worrying. He needed to be banned a long-time ago.

https://knowyourmeme.com/forums/general/topics/64277-so-what-happened-to-ourdeerleader

Just my two cents, I don't know what was so different years ago that made the general atmosphere here feel less hostile, but something has definitely gone wrong at some point.

Maybe this thread has also run it's course, since we now have our answer why?

Dude, you've just literally proved the point he was making in that comment.

I'm not saying this next bit to be mean or overdramatic, but this is a really dangerous mindset to have.

Being so easily emotionally manipulated by a word regardless of it's context is going give anyone great power over you and make you really easily controlled.

Whether by accident or design, you have an honest-to-god memetic berserk command built into your very psyche and if that doesn't terrify you, I don't know what will.

> If you dont think the n-word constitutes as racism, too bad

The word itself has no inherent value nor power. Context matters.
Merely typing ██████ doesn't make you racist. Otherwise dictionaries, rap songs, and GTA SA would be racist for containing the word ██████.

Griff didn't call anyone ██████, neither a single person nor a group of people, so to whom did he cause offence? Against whom was he racist?

He argued from a neutral position that we shouldn't let a word have such power over us. The fact that he was banned for this argument proves his point.

We've reached a point of unironic overreaction that merely uttering ██████ became memeworthy..

Unrelated but this was a funny find.

---

Carrie Enright wrote:

How could anyone predict a person walking a thin tightrope would eventually fall?

This accurately describes the situation, both in terms of the number of infractions that should have been a clear sign not to keep trying the rules, and in using racial slurs in general.

---

No!! wrote:

he was just using the n word because that is what the article was about

The article is about Joe Rogan’s use of the word and retroactive response to it being used, not the word itself.

---

No!! wrote:

he just think the controversy was way out of proportion

Sure, that’s all well and fine. This is not carte blanche for using the term.
This is the same sort of logic that lead to Poochyena getting banned. He felt the taboo about exposed breasts was odd. They are a natural part of the human body, not an inherent part of the act of sex, and the functional role that they serve, caring for babies, is something that society claims to value. And sure, when phrased like that lost of people might agree. Granted, the way pooch felt IIRC, wasn’t just for breast feeding purposes, and that if women wanted to go topless or if there is a wardrobe malfunction, there should not be a big stigma. Probably fewer people would fully agree, but there would be some that still would do so in theory who aren’t perverts, and that there are actual problems in the world that are way more important than enforcing this. Obviously, not everyone would completely agree to that (and the long downvote history of his comments in general, people literally wanting Poochyena banned for sharing his opinions, and that he still lives on in site legend can attest to that). Still, this is just an opinion that some things should be destigmatized.
However, this destigmatization requires and change in society [Le joker face]. Trying to change society by going on KYM to share your opinion by posting rule 63 fanart of Hellboy wearing the same outfit as the original with chest exposed on a meme documentation website isn’t how you go about doing it.

---

Soup King wrote:

He argued from a neutral position that we shouldn't let a word have such power over us. The fact that he was banned for this argument proves his point.

Cool, should we invite poochyena back? He posted exposed female tiddies because he thought something so basic had too much power over society, and him posting them was part of what lead to him being banned. Wow he was right! What clever social commentary! Doing something against rules often has repercussions!

---

Soup King wrote:

Being so easily emotionally manipulated by a word regardless of it's context is going give anyone great power over you and make you really easily controlled

Again, this is a problem with society in general. Sure, nominally, I agree that a word should not have this sort of power. But that’s literally how most societies have functioned since the advent of speech. Words have meanings associated with them. If you want to change the meanings of those associations, that’s fine. Do it by learning about the history of the terms, why people are bothered by them, and actually talking to those people. Going onto a meme website and using racial slurs “because you can” and actively ignoring why those words have power under the pretense of improving society (even if said pretense is genuine) is only going to further the association of online culture being extremely toxic. It is not removing the power of a word. Trying to justify the intention of an action as an excuse for breaking rules is a dangerous game of chicken when everyone else is playing checkers, chess, and tic-tac-toe in place intended to be a library. You shouldn’t be surprised if you are thrown out for being disruptive.

---

The goal on KYM is to document memes, not make them. Sure the second usage falls more into the Dawkins definition of “meme” and I’m well aware that KYM doesn’t have a perfect track record of “no self made memes allowed”. But is the hill you want to die on wanting the site to be able to freely use racial slurs when some of the most upvoted posts in this thread want to return to the good old days?
wisehowl_the_2nd wrote:

I'm beginning to think the site's promotion of controversial content to keep up engagement has a negative effect on people.

Gilan wrote:

I was actually way happier with the site when lurking and focusing on silly stuff. Somewhere along the line the vibe on a lot of websites changed.

Freely using slurs and having civil discussions are generally exclusive objectives. “Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.” The site already has a long history of users that were some of the most active members leaving because the community they used to love turned into something else that was toxic to them. You’ll notice that nowadays, the only active moderators that are left are the ones that are smug about stuff, and don’t care what other users think so have the highest tolerance to the current community, the mods that generally do not interact with the community and just work on images, entries, and cleaning spam, and the ones like me that still enjoy parts of the site, but I cannot in good faith recommend anyone to I know to actually visit.
Also, before anyone brings it up, yes, the quotes being referenced are not just about wanting less site controversy, and indeed they are more heavily weighted towards wanting the direction of the site to be different. Some of the problem, as Gilan notes, is due to the fact that a lot of the internet in general has seemed to become more hostile. However, the direction of what the staff decides to cover is by all means what is intended by this.
With that said, there’s literally no one forcing people to comment on those things. Indeed, relatively benign content like documenting more traditional style memes made because a videogame happens to be popular with transgender individuals gets way more blowback for even being on the site than real world controversies that only get entries because they, like almost everything, happens to have some internet presence.

---

Gilan wrote:

Maybe this thread has also run it's course, since we now have our answer why?

Yes.

---

Final note: Despite the content of the rest of my post, I actually wasn’t someone who actively called for banning Griff for this [yes, even with, as Frank’s post noted, a long list of infractions in such a short amount of time]. Don’t get me wrong, all things considered, Griff was still a user that I was certain was going to end up being banned at some point and this post was further evidence of that. Still, I have generally been a mod that had been fairly hands off in terms of these things unless I could clearly point out why I took the actions I did. This has meant that, at least on my end, a lot of users that should have been banned a long time ago were not. They either didn’t clearly break the rules enough that if they made a thread about “Mod Abuse” or appealed to the admins that my decision would have no chance of being overturned, or their history of bad behavior and bad attitudes that drove other users off the site wasn’t something that was explicitly against rules, even if that mean that the most active and friendly users left the site in disgust.

I strongly suggest the users who simultaneously wish that there were more active users and are upset that users like Griff were banned seriously consider what kind of site they want. We used to have a lot of users and moderators that were active in the community, actually made entries for traditional internet memes regularly, and they are just gone now. A lot of them actively hate the site, and on much of the internet, the site is seen as a joke. KYM was intended to be the closest thing to an academic resource for documenting internet culture. That isn’t really how it is seen now, and I definatly know that isn’t how the site is being used by most of the current userbase. I at least do struggle with knowing where to draw the line between “that’s bad behavior but it doesn’t break rules/ the userbase is not going to support disciplinary action being taken” and wanting contributing users to feel comfortable and willing to work on the site, versus having a site where people are able to say what they want. Often the people who appear to be the loudest about the the later being more important contribute the least to actual reserach and important documentation, and vice versa. This is not to suggest that Griff's uploads are useless, far from it. But for the function of the site, writing specific entries and uploading specific memes, and organizing the images are more important. It is a thankless job, but often the people who do it actually do legitimately enjoy it. But if they do not feel comfortable even being on the site in the first place because racial slurs are used "just because" and identities that they or their friends identify with are mocked and see said mocking get a lot of support, unless you are willing to become numb or become extremely argumentative, why would anyone like that even want visit the site?