How to kill a con

[james_davis_nicoll]

It’s my opinion that what really killed RF2016 was RF2011 to RF2015. During those years we failed to deal with problem behavior as it started happening. We failed at every level of our organization: we didn’t adequately staff the event to cope with our growing numbers, we didn’t work with our venue to discourage bad behavior, and we didn’t create an environment where people who wanted to solve these problems were able to. As a result, damage to both the venue and to RainFurrest’s reputation escalated yearly, and by 2016 it had reached a point that I now believe was irreversibly broken. The rest of this letter explains this opinion in detail, but that’s the summary: RainFurrest was irretrievably damaged before 2016 began, but we could not — or chose not to — see the damage.

Comments

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

It's almost as though fandom is full of people with the mentality of middle schoolers.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

Not full, but full enough for negative purposes. Elementary- and middle-school "everyone exclude [X], s/he's got cooties, ya know, [X] germs". And some of the problem people are at high-school-level for cliquishness and such.

But these discussions tend to wander into the zone of Harlan Ellison's essay "Xenogenesis". As many people dispute his assertions, most fans really are good people. Far from perfect, but basically pretty good.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Sadly, every fandom has more than enough of the immature idiots.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

:$s/fandom/any group of people aligned by personal interest/g