Fan Page - Part 2

If you do anything long enough, someone is going to resent you for it. You’ll also make mistakes, which aren’t always easily corrected.

As an admin for the RH, I can honestly say I worked with the best team of humans anyone could ask for. We truly worked together and had conversations about removing posts, giving warnings, and banning those who willfully or egregiously broke group rules. We looked at situations from different perspectives, and sometimes we had to make really hard decisions, especially about banning.

When you work in a community where members resonate with Ren’s music and philosophy because they too have chronic health and mental health conditions, it’s important to meet conflict with compassion. Many times, members would break group rules, go on rants, or even attack the admin team, and we had to decide how to handle such complex situations. Often, continued conversation resulted in conflict resolution, and no further action was necessary. However, there were times when we had to ban members—despite knowing they had mental or physical conditions that could impair their judgment—because their actions negatively impacted others within the group. Some of those members went on to start their own groups or share a narrative that painted our team in a bad light. But we’ve always held firm in our decision not to address the criticism and to do our best to ignore it, even when it affected us on a deep, personal level.

Remaining silent and not defending myself or my team has always been a challenge for me. More so when we’ve banned well-known members of the community who went on to launch smear campaigns against us. But as the RH grew, and as the group gained recognition from Ren and his team, it became clear that our little team had to focus on lifting others up, rather than reacting to criticism—even when it was blatantly false. It also became clear that there was a certain amount of power inherent in our positions, and addressing complaints publicly could bring undue hate onto individuals, which is something we all found unacceptable. The rare cases where we addressed a conflict by name came only after we felt the cat was out of the bag and we had no other choice but to respond.

Each member of the RH team has a few horror stories of times when conversations went sideways, or when we let emotion get the better of us and made snap judgments. For me, there are a few people whose actions have honestly been traumatizing, but I’ll get into that a little later. Overall, my time on the RH Modmin team was incredibly rewarding, and the bonds I forged with my fellow admins and moderators are still strong to this day. But as the group continued to grow, I found myself unable to keep up with the demands, so I resigned my position late last year. I still help run a small sister group, but it’s much less demanding and doesn’t stress me out in the same way the RH did towards the end.

My stress peaked around this time last year, due to ongoing problems in Patreon and the establishment of a Facebook group whose sole purpose was to intimidate, harass, and threaten me and other members of the Ren community. That group made me feel genuinely unsafe, because in addition to threatening to “expose wrongdoing” the people behind the group made some cryptic stalker-y comments. When I was in the UK with friends I posted a photo of us in front of a sign that said "Hello Gorgeous." Within an hour, the words "hello gorgeous" were posted to that group, which nearly sent me into a panic attack. They also made light of the death of a friend of mine and my dog’s passing.

In Patreon, the toxicity got so bad that I quit being a mod before the decision was made to remove all mods and leave the task of moderating the platform to Ren’s team. Fortunately, the most difficult personalities eventually turned their attention elsewhere or left the platform altogether, which has made Patreon more welcoming for everyone. It’s now one of my favorite places to engage with others in the community—though I still wish they would fix blocking so I could properly block some people. Leaving the RH has really allowed me to enter my blocking era.  

I suppose I should circle back to my own personal horror stories. I actually wrote a whole other page diving into some of my experiences but even leaving out details and keeping things as vague as possible, I don’t feel comfortable sharing things publicly. I still see some of these people in the community daily, and the risk of breaking this quiet truce is too great. So I’m going to leave it there, and hope that’s enough to help me move forward. It still hurts every time I see them, but unfortunately blocking works better on some platforms than on others.

Big love to you all, thanks for reading. The photo is of my friend Brooke, who passed unexpectedly in 2024, ten days after taking me out for my birthday. I wrote a bit more about her in an earlier post.