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May 5th, 2007 by Sean PsiPog Postmortem

It’s been 9 months since I announced I would be archiving PsiPog.net, and about 4 months since the last PK Party. I figured a postmortem would be appropriate.

The story of PsiPog.net is such a long one, that I could probably write a small book on the subject. So I’m going to break down this postmortem into logical chapters of PsiPog’s life, and go over each.

1. The Beginning

The beginning was a lot of fun. I wish I could go back and just observe it all over again. I was young (15-17), and had no clue what I was doing (don’t worry, I still don’t have a clue :-P). We had a great community at Dimensional-Doorways.com. I think the reason their forum was so popular was because it was one of the first links to come up if you did a search for “psychic forum” or something like that. I rarely spent time surfing the website - 95% of my time was spent on the forum, and that’s how I found the site.

This is where I met Rainsong (RainTurtle) and Nazarak (KMiller). This is also where I eventually met Not_Important (NI). Plus a bunch of other really cool people. Every once in a while I’ll still get e-mails saying, “Hey Peebrain, remember me? It’s X - we met at DD.”

During this time period, I tried everything in psionics. I remember printing out and reading Active Psy (which used to be called Playful Psychic), and trying all the exercises, for months on end. I remember when I first started my training with OBEs. And I remember my first OBE - and afterwards, walking downstairs in complete shock, telling my parents what I experienced - and them probably thinking I was completely nuts :-). I also remember playing GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64, which I had gotten for Christmas :-).

PsiPog grew, mostly I think due to good fun information, an active forum, and our impatience with fluff bunnies.

2. Poor Decisions

It seems like almost overnight PsiPog grew to a much larger community. I was around 18 and 19 years old, and had to deal with some really perplexing situations. With zero experience, I made some really bad decisions.

The worst decision was buying into the mentality of: “This is my website, if you don’t like what we do, then leave.” It’s a legitimate idea - I certainly shouldn’t bend over backwards to try and please everyone. But I took the idea to the extreme. It was basically a free for all. If I didn’t like something, or one of the authors had a complaint… we were right. No matter what. The reason we were right was because it was my website. The logic was simple, but it was insanely unrealistic :-).

This idea - while it pissed a lot of people off - I think a lot of people also liked it. Strangely, it might have added to PsiPog’s popularity, because we were such assholes that people HAD to pay attention to us. We were the cool kids. You could be cool with us, or you could be a loser. Your pick.

It probably played on an emotional level with everyone, including ourselves. Let’s face it - we were talking about creating energy balls, telekinesis, and reading minds. Chances are we, and the people who visited PsiPog, weren’t the most popular kids in high-school. Since the vast majority of everyone was around 14-20 years old, maturity wasn’t in our favor - hey, PsiPog is cool, and you want to be cool, right? As outcasts, we promised other outcasts the opportunity to be cool. Perhaps this is another reason why we grew.

Lots of regrets in this time period. Lots of really bad decisions. Oh well. Live and learn, I suppose. For example, we had formed a couple of secret groups that did psychic combat. Now obviously, psychic combat wasn’t allowed to be discussed on PsiPog.net, but that didn’t stop us from trying it out by ourselves. It was fun until we realized it was real :-P. Then it wasn’t fun for the overwhelming majority of us. A lot of the authors left PsiPog.net, and removed their articles. That sucked.

3. Regroup

With the authors splitting, I decided to try and refocus my attention back towards the good things PsiPog.net had to offer. New articles, created the Q&A section, better chat, seminars, PK Parties, new Media, etc. The good thing about making so many bad decisions, and having them blow up in your face, is that there’s so much to learn from it. It also gives you an opportunity to sit down and rethink what it’s all about.

I tried to make the logical and best decisions at this point. I tried to be fair, and repair the damage that was done by the bad decisions of the past. I think I succeeded for the most part :-). Looking back, I think I did a pretty good job here. Granted, this good job is overshadowed by the extremely piss poor job before it :-P. Nonetheless, I’m happy with it.

There was a lot of development at this time. Probably the most work got done during this time period. At first I wasn’t sure if things would get better, but I just kept working hard, and refused to shut the website down. I figured that the reason we succeeded in the past was because the website simply didn’t shut down - so I decided that no matter what happens, I’ll just keep the website up. If it doesn’t go away, and I continue to work hard on it, then it’ll improve. Simple as that.

4. The Golden Age

I think the Golden Age of PsiPog started after I got out of Basic Training for the Air Force, in May of 2005. This was when we adopted the idea of: fair rules! My goodness what a great idea :-P. We also removed the restriction of using the PsiPog Client for the chat room, which was a huge step.

The reason getting rid of the PsiPog Client was a good decision was because of something most of you didn’t see. The new banning system. In the past, the banning system was extremely crappy. It was effective, and it worked pretty good, but the way it was used encouraged abuse of power. There was no accountability. Anyone could add a ban, for any reason, and it wasn’t really questioned.

With the new banning system, I wanted to “do it right”. I took the lessons from the old banning system, and created a new system where each mod used their PsiPog.net account to access it. When they added a ban, it recorded WHO added the ban, what time, and left a comment area for mods to post WHY they left the ban - preferably with logs. All this was available to the other mods to check. In effect - we policed each other.

It also had temporary bans programmed into it. This meant, as a mod, you could set whether the ban was permanent or temporary. If it was temporary, then the script would remove the ban automatically. In the past, we had to manually search all the bans, and see which ones we wrote should be temporary, and remove them by hand. Which never happened. So even the temporary bans were permanent in the old system.

Also, an important switch was to make the default ban be temporary. Meaning that if someone pissed a mod off, we shouldn’t ban them permanently right then and there, no matter how stupid they acted. The system was a lot more forgiving.

The only bad thing about the system was that when a ban was removed, it was removed. Meaning that I should have made it so that when a ban was removed, it would still remain in the system - just disabled. That would have allowed us to see whether someone was a repeat offender a lot easier, instead of relying on memory. Oh well. That was my only issue with it.

When the forums came online at PsiPogBB.net, I followed the same idea. Simple fair rules, with accountability. The default action - instead of banning or thread deletion - would be to lock the thread. This made mods accountable to the community. The community could police the mods, and the mods could police each other. I instructed the mods to add a reason at the end of the post, as to why they locked the thread.

Lessons to be Learned

Overall, the best lessons to be learned were mostly explained in the previous paragraphs. If power is unchecked, then bad decisions follow. So: make people with power more accountable for their actions than the average user.

It’s important for everyone to realize that it’s human to abuse power. When you’re sitting on the side lines, it’s easy to look at someone with power, and tell them how they’re abusing it. But when YOU are the one with that power, it’s a completely different story. It takes a lot of self control to use power wisely. And you will make mistakes. Which is why it’s insanely important to set up a system where people police each other.

I’m not perfect. Even in the Golden Age, I made some mistakes on the forums. But since I made a system where I encouraged my mods to police me - it was caught by them.

It’s important to separate the rules from the rulers. Make the rules public. And make the rules above the rulers. Even the leader :-P. This is tough, especially when you work for years and years on something, only to have some pissant tell you you broke your own rules :-P. And then having to admit that they are right, and that you’re sorry. It’s tough. But it’s correct.

It’s also tough to tell your friend that their ban is too harsh, and that they need to step back and rethink it. I’m sure it was very hard for my mods to come to me and say, “Hey Peebrain, what you did was wrong. These are the reasons why:”. It’s hard to take criticism from a friend, and not take it personally. To keep in mind that they are looking out for your best interests, even if that means making you temporarily angry.

Another important lesson was actually seeing how good people could be convinced to do bad things. How a good person can be manipulated by someone else, and also how they manipulate themselves, in order to convince themselves it’s ok to do something immoral. We really mind-fucked ourselves to say it was ok to do psychic combat. I’m glad we overcame our self-delusion, and it stopped before it became too serious. Good lessons.

Sure I have regrets about how I ran PsiPog, but overall - I’d do it again. If I hadn’t have made those mistakes, I couldn’t have grasped these important lessons otherwise. I feel lucky to have learned these lessons early in my life. They will serve me for the remaining time :-).

I recommend everyone put a lot of heart into a project, for a long period of time. Whether it be a website, or band, or politics, or health, or whatever else. Do what interests you, and work hard. You’ll make mistakes, but it’s worth it.

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