by Harmony B
You’ve probably heard a lot of jokes about the takeover of SCP Declassified's community by the clique calling itself a Yurt. A crazy conspiracy theory that a cartel of influential site users has taken over staff by working together to advance one another. It seems crazy, right? Who could believe that some of the most active and respected users actually routinely undermine the authority of those around them to enhance their own prestige and position, with the justification being some crazy thing called the “greater good.”
Well, you are right to be skeptical. What hard evidence is there? The answer: some, but not as much as I would like there to be. You see, Yurt was the place where all the screenshots went into, there was no more high-up side chat to be leaking because it was the top of the pyramid. Without those, it has been difficult to convince anyone of the Yurt.
So I will not do any convincing today. You do not have to believe in anything which I can’t back up with hard proof. I’m not the be-all end-all of knowledge on anything in SCP, the Yurt, or anywhere else containment fiction is talked about.
What I can do, is to lay out a specific timeline for every piece of evidence that I have to show you what the dress rehearsal for the Yurt takeover of the SCP Wiki looked like, the SCPD Coup. A seizure of power which broke both cardinal coup rules, to be fast and to be legal, but still provided a roadmap to power and a stepping stone to ultimate SCP Community control.
But, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Our story begins in early 2019, when the notion arose within Yurt circles that SCPD was lacking and needed rejuvenating. This was decided due to its bad reputation within the site elite who turn their noses up at the very notion of using Discord. Nobody in SCPD who wasn’t already in on what was then still mostly a friend group gave us any input.
There was chatter for weeks or months before Modulum, the owner of SCPD, was brought in. A kid with a bad home life and poor self-esteem, it was easy to manipulate him into doing our bidding by befriending him under bad intentions, so he would do what everyone wanted him to do. It worked.
I personally harassed Modulum for months repeatedly asking when he was going to pull the trigger. Modulum was reluctant to hurt his friends by knifing them in such an underhanded way but eventually he relented and went through the process of appointing the Yurt insiders to prominent roles within SCPD, purging the old guard and turning it into a power-base for this particular clique of power users.
The following is a verbatim text of the operational plan used by the Yurt insiders to take over SCPD. It is dated January 20th, 2020, and a screenshot of the edit history is included. This was seen by aismallard, djkaktus, Fishtruck, Rounderhouse, Woedenaz, as well as everyone else who was interested in SCPolitics residing within the Yurt discord server.
SCPDysfunctional
January 30, 2020
Overview
SCP Declassified occupies a unique space within the SCP community. While it is the largest and by far the most well-known Discord server among the elite of the Foundation, it is also a disorganized mess with sluggish moderation and anarchic atmosphere.
It is not unsalvageable but it is a hot mess. It’s facing an identity crisis and could soon find itself serving as little more than a daycare for the children #site19 forgot.
Problems:
Spamming and Venting: The general chatting community has been hijacked by a cadre of users who love nothing more than spamming and then spamming some more. The SCP-5k contest has revealed this problem in a particularly ugly way. There was a frankly ridiculous amount of pimping going on and it seems to have worn down whatever restraint was left on spammers spamming as much and whatever they please. That’s not even mentioning the users airing their dirty laundry or the knock-on effect this has downstream for users who log on to chat and find the room to be brimming with the lowest common denominator.
Weak Authority: Everything mentioned in the above point could be fixed if there were active, motivated moderators . Unfortunately the moderation team of SCPD seems to be universally disinterested or useless. If a person occupying a key role such as moderation is no longer serving a purpose they must be removed and replaced if necessary.
Loss of Community Focus The declassification of SCPD should be the primary focus of the community. Instead it’s one sub-channel buried underneath the general chat. The fact that the namesake of the community has as much real estate as the pimping channel is a serious problem. It seems that the last thing anyone chatting in SCPD is thinking about is actually doing some SCP Declassification.
Weak Constitution - The rulesets and systems with which SCPD is governed are weak and ad-hoc. The rules are a wall of text that could be communicated with a handful of bullet points. Authority seems to be paralyzed by indecision and not able to enact effective decision-making. The rules and regulations set up to govern conduct in the server are lacking at best and practically non-existent at worst.
What can we do?
The first solution would clearly be to clean house on the leadership front. If a mod is able to do low-level tasks like banning spammers and keeping an eye on chat that’s all they should be responsible for. Larger decision-making should fall to a small cadre of staff able to be hard-hearted enough to extract that which ills SCPD.
What is to be done?
Hard Moderation
This is a new regime, and it is a hard regime. The rules are to be cut down to a simple set of guidelines(These are only suggestions and are by no means final, there shouldn’t be more than five)Once the community has had some fear of god put back into it, then the rules can start to grow out a little more and be a little less harsh.:
Be respectful, and you will be respected.
Bigotry will not be tolerated.
Do not diminish the quality of life for other users in SCPD.
Do not PM other users if you do not know they want you to.
Make sure what you’re posting is appropriate for that chat room.
Channel Organization
Right now the way that SCPD categorizes its channels is a disaster. Several very different rooms are lumped together in general while the only real division, media content, is equally muddled. This is how I would re-configure the SCPD channel layout
The voice channels I have no opinion on.
Make SCPD declassify stuff again.
This one is pretty simple. If you want people to not be looking for something to do and finding shitposting then give the server its purpose again. Everything should be oriented towards declassifying SCP articles. That’s the reason this server exists. If it drifts from its purpose without finding a new one it will circle the drain forever. Grab the leash and take back control.
I’m Rogay thanks for coming to my TED talk
This last line is a reference to the original screen name used by this writer, Harmony, which was Roget. This demonstrates that the takeover of SCPD was done in a deliberate attempt to steer the direction of the SCP community. It's a cringe internet political manifesto taken seriously by a group of self-important misfits who thought that by seizing power, they would be different than those currently holding the levers of power. Whether they have succeeded in that aim, or become that which they sought to replace, is a matter best left to future internet historians. For although this was the first time the Yurt crew would infiltrate a community and take it over through intrigue, it is not the last.
We had a personal account of this regime change from the other side of the experience, in one of our early articles:
https://www.conficmagazine.com/post/scp-me
Honestly Harmony props to you for owning up to this and admitting your responsibility and actions.