there's a whole bunch of issues with etg at fault, but i want to specifically talk about their worker exploitation.
etg's company aka kavalri is a company. they have funding, theyre getting paid and they pay workers under them. they pay their workers, until it got to their discord server.
etg had a discord server for the community (which is not a necessity). they "hired" ppl to be moderators at the discord server and ambassadors. "hired" bc they didnt actually hire them, they didnt pay them, they practically accepted volunteers. the mods and ambassadors spent a huge, significant amount of their time on the discord server. managing the discord server, answering questions in the devs' name and managing the devs' game streams. this is a job in every sense of the word. they spent hours upon hours, even pulled all nighters to work for kavalri and do all of those things. they worked at the expense of their health and got absolutely nothing in return. hell, they didnt even get the illusion of reward as in game currency like the sso ambassadors. they got nothing, besides a strain on their health. because on top of all of that, their employers ended up having barely any contact with them and throwing all responsibility of handling the community on the discord server on them.
the fact they wanted to do it is irrelevant. as an employer, as the one who holds the power as employer-employee relation is a relation of power imbalance, it is YOUR responsibility to not employ people without payment. it is YOUR responsibility to refuse people to work under you without payment, ESPECIALLY when it gets to the extents of harming the worker's health. it's the company's responsibility to tell the employee, "no, we refuse to have you manage the stream", "no, we refuse to have you work on the server more than x hours". it's the company's responsibility to decide they're not going to have a community discord at all if they can't pay people to manage it. even PAID employees aren't abused to this extent. well, because paid employees got a job contract and protection both from the contract and from the government that has work regulations. but when you (a company which ISN'T a non-profit organization) let people work under you without contract and without payment, it first of all means they're all exploited without exception, and second it means they don't have any protection as a worker. which as you can see was 100% abused in this case by kavalri.
can you imagine feeling comfortable having a secretary working at your office for hours without paying them? especially when this person making you coffee is someone who's doing it out of admiration to your creation and belief in it. (what i mean by this is an emphasis on the power imbalance: they agree to work under you without getting paid because of emotions, and you take advantage of those emotions).
there's more to say about what happened with etg, but this worker exploitation part is a part that simply infuriates me. the audacity of a company to abuse people without payment and then to get upset and simply "fire" them when they're angry at it is infuriating and beyond me. because unlike official workers with a contract, when those managers and ambassadors were dismissed by the devs as they got frustrated with the working conditions, they obviously didn't get compensations. as i said, those are workers that worked for them without any contract to protect them.
the whole unpaid ambassador thing is something that starstable does as well, that i encourage everyone to raise an eyebrow at. especially when in sso's case part of those ambassadors are minors as far as i know.
