On not adding insult to injury when making omelettes
Reposting here because guild chat is ephermal; I’m not sure if my guild chat post will be deleted for length, tangentialness to the guild’s subject, arguing with mods, or any other reason, and because it’s applicable to more than far more than just Habitica anyway:
Context: I made a snarky aside about the phrase “ran out of health,” as a euphemism for “died” (that was not always used) when reporting a bug involving duplicate death notifications. One of the mods replied:
@osberend : The "ran out of health" message was added to replace the death message when we received a lot of feedback that "death" was unmotivating and was causing some users to abandon Habitica. It's not intended as a euphemism but as a way of making more people more comfortable with using Habitica. For those of us who weren't bothered by the death message, it's not a significant disadvantage to read "ran out of health" instead. If you'd like to suggest changes, Help > Request a Feature would be the best place. For the trouble with the death behaviour, please report it to the app developers through the app's menu at About > Report a Bug.
This was my response (not blockquoting because it’s long, and runs through the end of the post):
I'm not going to try to argue whether the change was on balance a good one or not here. I know that it's useless, it's either banned or close to it, and, in any event, doing it properly would depend both on statistics that I don't have, and knowledge priorities that I have never seen explicitly laid out.
I've stopped posting messages just to complain about that sort of thing, although I do occasionally put a mildly snarky aside in a fundamentally informative message, like I did in my last post. If necessary, I can try to stop doing that too.
But even if it is the right decision, I still find the "there are no real costs to this"--type rhetoric very off-putting and, well, demoralizing. You say "For those of us who weren't bothered by the death message, it's not a significant disadvantage to read 'ran out of health' instead." And I'm sure that's true for you. It's very likely true for a sizeable majority of people who weren't bothered by the death message. But it's not true for me.
Every time I see that "ran out of health" message, it annoys and repels me. Every. Single. Time. (And my combination of playstyle and level of executive dysfunction means that "every single time I die" is *a lot*.) It actually makes me less likely to promptly open up Habitica in the morning if I know that I took lethal damage at cron, which is of course a very bad thing, in that it means that being badly unproductive on one day increases my chances of being badly unproductive on the next.
I have a very strong negative reaction toward the use of euphemism in an attempt to avoid upsetting me, or to avoid upsetting anyone who may be upset in an audience that includes me. (That last isn't quite optimally phrased, but I'm not sure if there's a terse way to express the intension of what I'm reacting to. If you actually want me to elaborate, I will.)
And it is a euphemism: The mechanism is a fairly typical RPG "character death" mechanism. It was called "death" initially, and how it works was not changed when its name was. You describe it as "death" yourself in some other posts on this page. Etc. I understand that it's meant to avoid demoralizing players (which is a commendable goal!), but that's kind of what a euphemism *is*: Not calling something what it really is, to avoid listeners having some sort of negative reaction, whether that's anger, offense, fear, or anything else, including demoralization.
I'm autistic, and I suspect that that's connected to, but not the sole element of, my reaction. I used to get angry back in pre-school when the teacher would say "I need you to sit down," in an attempt to soften what was effectively a command to sit down, when I didn't want to. Because she didn't (at least absolutely) *need* me to sit down, she just *wanted* me to sit down, and she was *lying to me* in an attempt to get me to do what she wanted. I'm told that the phrasing she used tends to *mollify* most children. That baffles me.
Again, my purpose in this post is not to argue that the change was bad on balance, really. The fact that it was bad for me doesn't necessarily mean that. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and in this case, you can't *not* make an omelette without breaking (a different set of) eggs, either.
But as one of the eggs getting broken (or at the very least a bit bashed-around; it's not like this is making it impossible for me to use Habitica at all, but it does genuinely make Habitica less useful for me), I find it offensive and upsetting when people react to complaints by saying "This helps some people, and it's not like it really hurts anyone." It hurts *me*. And just switching to a justification more along the lines of "There were a lot of people who found the old message deeply upsetting and/or demoralizing, and who are fine with the new message. While we recognize that there are some people who were fine with the old message but are deeply upset with and/or demoralized by the new message (either the message itself, or the decision to switch to it), it is our belief, based on number of comments received, that there are many fewer of them than there are of the other group" would at least avoid adding insult to injury. (Actually doing a poll to try to establish the truth of that would be even better, as would adding some sort of toggle to allow people to choose between a softer, fuzzier Habitica, and a harsher, blunter one. If and when I ever get around to setting up a local installation of Habitica (executive dysfunction, again), seeing about adding a "language" ("blunt English?") to at least approximate that is on my long list of changes and subsequent pull requests to make.)
This same sentiment also applies (at least for me) to a number of other changes meant to make Habitica friendlier to new users (and to plenty of things unrelated to Habitica at all; this is a broad social trend that is very upsetting to me): It may very well be the case that the the number of people you're seriously helping is substantially greater than the number of people you're seriously hurting. But don't dismiss the latter's existence out of hand, just because there are fewer of them, or because it's harder for you to imagine *how* you're hurting them than it is to imagine how you're helping the others. Don't add insult to injury.
And especially please don't, as I see happen a lot on other sites (I haven't seen it happen here, though a few responses I've seen from other mods to various complaints have gotten kinda close for comfort), declare that anyone who's hurt must be a gatekeeping elitist who wants to keep others out, and that their pain is just them getting butthurt about efforts to be more inclusive.
(For extra fun, stick one or more of "cisgender," "heterosexual," "white," and "male" (even if none of those four demographics are actually relevant to the changes being made in any way) in front of "gatekeeping elitist," and "of [the corresponding minority groups]" after "inclusive," so [generic] you can declare their pain to be evidence not just that they're *bad*, but also that they're *bigoted*. I haven't seen that at all on Habitica, but I've seen it a ton elsewhere.)