Now that the XeNTaX forums are gone, and ResHax has sprung up with both forums and a Discord server, we've been considering the existential fate of the XeNTaX Discord server. A lot of us are still quite fond of each other, but we have no interest in moving over into the very same culture that we've been operating under for the last decade or two. That culture is completely broken. So we've decided to keep this Discord server alive, and take the opportunity to shape the culture into something that's actually healthy for developers.

It's been my personal observation that this community is filled with a broad category of people who manipulate other people (usually by playing ego games, occasionally getting on a soapbox, trying to rationalize how their selfish desires are for "community" in some context that distracts from what they're personally after, and so on), and sometimes people can be manipulated into doing a lot of work for those petty ego rewards. Some people are also put under the illusion that their work is serving a communal good, when it's just fulfilling a selfish need for an individual or small group, while collectively serving to devalue the essential labor involved. It's been unpleasant to watch developers fall into these traps, but it's just a way of life in these types of communities. We're also routinely greeted by people who just want their hand held because they're intent on investing close to no personal effort, and they don't respect or value anyone else's time. People try to help them anyway, and it's usually a complete waste. I've gathered that aluigi got sick of dealing with people in the Zenhax community for related reasons, not to put any words in his mouth.

Taking a step back and looking at what really matters in this community, it's the contributors. It's not people asking for models or textures from some game, and it's not people asking someone else to update a script for them. It's the people who want to put in the time and effort to learn, and the people who come to help others learn. However, the culture that's formed around this community and other similar communities is extremely unhealthy for these contributors.

In offering even the simplest of status/reward systems, we fuel unhealthy ego competition. Endless requests also begin to act as checkboxes for obsessive-compulsives, or challenges for people who want to prove their abilities. Unfortunately, fulfilling those requests often only serves to devalue all of the labor a developer puts into the associated software/script/etc. Many developers stopped sharing their findings and specifications (myself included) because they started to see their work exploited. By companies, which is morally reprehensible (and sometimes in direct violation of a given license/copyright) and serves to devalue the entire skillset associated with the labor. By other developers, who are socially positioned to exploit the labor in some other way. By people who just want to rip content to turn around and sell it, or claim false credit for it. In conjunction with unhealthy ego competition, this exploitation has made it impossible to create a culture of trust and sharing between developers.

We don't actually care about things like user count or social influence, and at our core, we want to create a healthier environment for everyone who's spent months/years/decades actually contributing to the foundation of this community. ResHax has presented us with an opportunity to do exactly that. ResHax will continue on in the spirit of reverse engineering communities immemorial, freeing us to experiment with our community structure and culture. To put it bluntly, we can use ResHax to funnel out all those users who have only fed off of our community. We don't have to concern ourselves with those users who would find some way to negatively reframe the steps we're about to take to reshape our community. (a lot of people have vested interest in perpetuating a dysfunctional culture for their own benefit) Now, those users can find their way over to ResHax. If they feel compelled to complain about us, or to stroke insatiable egos in order to feed upon the resulting ego-juice, they can do so far away from XeNTaX.

In the near future, we'll be laying out some new rules to help us make our way to a healthier culture. We'll be disallowing any requests which aren't made with any kind of labor/learning investment. We'll be encouraging requests which invoke healthy collaborations, such as fan translations in which one part of the labor is in progress or completed. We'll be disallowing insults or ego-based assertions of superior skill/ability between developers, in an effort to clean up some of the damage this culture (and general Open Source culture) has already inflicted.

Additionally, we'll be hand-picking contributors for Discord roles, and creating more role-specific channels to foster a community that's isolated from those who might seek to exploit the fruits of labor therein. Be assured that there's no "elitism" at play here, because no matter your level of skill, the genuine desire to learn and participate is all that's required for you to be a valued member of this community. I'm also considering the logistics of offering roles which are gated by various forms of verification, as I think this can further assist in creating a sense of communal trust, but this would be a bit down the road depending on how things shake out.

We want to create an environment where developers are safe to work together without being exploited, and where developers feel valued by fellow developers enough to not feel the need to engage in pathetic ego-based assertions of skill. We want people to be fueled by their creative ambitions and technical fascinations, not their social standing. We want to create a culture beyond what Open Source can achieve under the constraints of our current socioeconomic systems. No matter how many people are left standing in the end, this is where we're going.