AiAe is no longer a Community Manager for Ripple

Me and Nyo have decided to demote AiAe from the position of Community Manager. This document serves the purpose of making our public statement on the matter.

We don't have time for discussion

The decision of demoting AiAe was taken by me and Nyo, following our own experience with AiAe's behaviour, as well as feedback from staff members and users. The purpose of this document is to outline what brought us to this decision, so that it is known to everyone who is interested. We know drama will arise from this, but we don't have time to make lengthy and in-depth responses to each inquiry, which is why we are providing upfront this document.

Nyo is currently busy with his last year of school, as he has to undertake the final exam (matura, or maturità), and he's very busy studying. As for me, I'm currently doing a full-time job during the week and the weekend is often crammed with other activities, such as another freelancing job, or going out with irl friends, or working on other projects. We really have very little time to spend on handling the Ripple community. The reason we are taking action is because we think AiAe really went overboard and that his behaviour is unacceptable for the role he has, due to CMs essentially being the "public face" of Ripple.

The decision to demote him was taken deliberately abruptly and without forewarning to the community or him, a) because we want the job done quickly and get on with our lives and b) we know that if we let him know of our intentions he may take vindictive actions such as abusing his powers even more.

Yes, we know this may sound like:

• we don't give a shit
• we are just trying to cut the noise from our lives
• we take so little care of the community that we haven't personally seen him do anything

However, I can assure you that what this wasn't the irrational decision that we just made one day that we woke up in a bad mood. We have seen issues with his behaviour over time and let slide, in hope of eventually dealing with the problem in a graceful manner and without taking actions such as this. We don't have the energy or the time to deal with the matter gracefully, and we fear that letting everything slide even more will only cause more issues stacking up over time. We realised that we have to do something now.

I'll leave my direct messages open as always, and whenever possible I'll try to answer questions if they don't take long to consider and make a meaningful response. Don't be angry if I haven't answered your message.

Let's get to it

His behaviour is unacceptable. AiAe often takes things personally and abuses his powers by sometimes taking extreme actions. While he definitely did a great job in handling all the matters that Community Managers have to deal with daily, this does not justify having a toxic behaviour towards our users.

While it is true that AiAe is not Ripple but himself, and as such what he does outside of Ripple should in theory not be taken into account, it's also true that he does represent Ripple, due to being one of the people with the most power in the entire staff. For this reason, his behaviour outside influences the image that Ripple has in the "public opinion".

To make a comparison, imagine the head of a big company was caught saying making racist and homophobic remarks. Even unconsciously, the behaviour that he has affects the image of his company. A real world example is that of Uber. Now, Ripple definitely isn't a company: this is only an example meant to illustrate how the behaviour of the single person representing an organisation can affect the image of the organisation itself.

So is this a move exclusively to make Ripple's image better? Is this move simply "political"? Is this just a PR stunt? No. Time ago, specifically the 2nd of February, 2017, I wrote on the Trello board "Guides and Instructions", meant for our new staff members (but sadly often out of date), a card with the title "Why did we make Ripple?".

[...] Ripple was born because we believed we could have done better, and we think we managed to achieve this. [...] By joining the Ripple staff, you're helping us in our mission of making a better osu! server and community. We'd like to thank you very much for spending your time helping out in the continued development of our growing project. [...] We do not want to be like osu!, we strive to be better than osu!.

Now, while over time we have come to learn that some measures we disliked in osu! are actually necessary to run the community, and have come to be much similar to osu! than we would have originally liked to, this was the spirit with which Ripple was born. The focus has always been on the community: what we saw in 2015 in the osu! community was injustice, nepotism and a toxic environment, we wanted to make a place where this wasn't the case.

Admittedly, we have partly acquired some of these vices, at least in part. Staff members and old members function as a role model for the rest of the community, and set out the de-facto rules of how to behave. Demoting AiAe is our message to say: this is not how it should be.