Where Do I Go From Here: Post-RYM Ban Plans
- Montie Montgomery
- Apr 30, 2018
- 3 min read
It finally happened. Today I was banned permanently from RYM (Rate Your Music) over the creation of a Facebook page made to poke fun of the 'Lift Yourself' controversy that occurred when the moderators of the site deemed Kanye West's novelty song to not be a single and proceeded to delete all ratings and attempts to revive the song as a single on the site. It was the URL of the Facebook page that truly did me in (RYMmodsAreFansOfGermanyCirca1939) and since I was serving a prior suspension due to apparently being disparaging of others tastes in a comment box via the use of the word 'plebs' to describe why the rating of an album was going down, the mods decided that they had enough of my "toxic behavior" and booted me from the site. I've been using RYM since late 2015 to categorize virtually every album I have heard. I have tagged with specific scores and genres each album on the site as well. Herein lies my main gripe with the ban; that I must now find a way to get all 2000 some ratings into my own personal database complete with scores, genres, and all. This is a massive time sink and annoyance for me. I am also upset over the fact that I was banned for off-site activity and never intended for the Facebook page to be of any importance to the RYM staff or community since it was made as a joke in order to justify the release of a ironic side project about the situation that I had worked on. So what do I do now? Where should I be uploading all my reviews, content, and scores? Should I even bother taking the time and effort to push these old reviews and scores onto this site or another like Allmusic? After thinking about this since the ban late last night I have decided to meet myself somewhere in the middle. I plan on slowly uploading all my reviews onto a series of post here: categorized by year, genre, and score. I'll be utilizing neverendingchart in conjunction with this in order to provide a visual aspect to my older scores. I'll also be keeping a running weekly list of the albums I listen to, their scores, and their genres along with reviews for those which I feel are worthy. Keeping up with new material should be just as easy as before minus the fact that I will have a single database to pull from when I do this. Year end lists from the past that I have made will also be uploaded onto this site as I can pull those from my now permabanned RYM account. Am I upset about this turn of events? Yes. What upsets me the most is that I was deemed a toxic member of a community that never sought out to be toxic in. Compared to many of the other users on the site what I did was hardly worthy of my initial punishments, two of which had to deal with conduct off of RYM. It feels like by becoming part of the RYM community means that the rules of that community follow you to other sites and you have to abide by the rules of RYM elsewhere. It also feels like I can't make website critique from a removed position without getting in trouble for it on the website. RYM is a fantastic database and I encourage people to use it however the moderation on the site is less than stellar. The staff take their jobs in such a serious manner yet show bias in their bans, subjectivity in their own rules, and respond in a rude manner to any feedback you give as if they have a manifested destiny to be right 100% of the time. Not only this but by being heavy handed and less than approachable their own community becomes a draconian space without a distinct allowable culture. I'll be here for a while I guess.
That happens when you got terminal online people disguising their agenda as dictatorship moderation. Nobody likes to be tolerant.