They tell you not to read the comments. That advice goes double for content creators. I don’t really adhere to that sentiment because I think it’s important for writers here to engage our audience which is you, the Magic community. But sometimes I can understand and appreciate why people tell you to avoid reading what other people write about you on the internet.
Exhibit A.
Having someone make a Twitter account to tell me how bad of a writer I am is a new one for me. I hope that @Greenseeing makes the most of Twitter. They’re currently following Kibler, Chapin, Marshal, Reid Duke, Aaron Forsythe, LSV, MaRo, CFB, SCG, and two of the official Wizards MTG accounts. Maybe one day they’ll follow @HotCBlog and we can all have a good laugh. But what did I do draw such ire?
Aside: Having someone create a Twitter account to tell me I’m a hack isn’t the worst thing I’ve seen written about me. That title still belongs to someone that told me that reading my column gave them cancer. I really hope it’s in remission.
Last week I wrote about gender and minority representation by Wizards of the Coast. I wasn’t happy and the article took a very unpleasant tone that a lot of my readers didn’t appreciate. But I also got a lot of feedback from people who didn’t seem to read the entire article. Or they skimmed most of the article but still filled in the blanks with their own assumptions and generalizations.
Exhibit B.
Someone who isn’t associated with Hipsters of the Coast thought it would be fun to see the reactions on Reddit. I reached out to them to ask why. They knew it would be a cesspool and they were correct. Reddit isn’t the entire Magic community. It isn’t even close to being representative of even a small portion of the Magic community. By Wizards’ estimates there are 20 million Magic players worldwide and fewer than 1% of them subscribe to the Magic Reddit. However, the Magic Reddit is often good at pointing out problems and they did so with my article.
Exhibit C
In full disclosure I am Alamoth on Reddit and perhaps I was leading on the unsuspecting user “burf12345” but I was genuinely curious why so many people had jumped to the conclusion that I was advocating for Wizards to fire members of the R&D team and immediately replace them with women, a thing I specifically said I didn’t want. The answer was simple. People didn’t actually read the article.
So we come to lesson number one about producing Social Justice content for the Magic Community:
If your headline allows the community to fill in their own response, they won’t read your article.
The title of my column last week was “Introducing the Ten White Men Who Designed and Developed Conspiracy: Take the Crown.” My intent was not to create clickbait but to highlight columns written by Mark Rosewater and Ben Hayes which introduced the members of the set’s core team with single-paragraph bios and lovely head-shots. Instead, my title gave many in the community all of the information they needed to make their own assumptions.
As burf12345 so eloquently said, “You have to admit that it’s a reasonable thing to assume the writer said.” I disagree with this sentiment but it highlights a massive problem with the Reddit community: the assumption that people advocating for equal treatment of women wish to accomplish their goal by taking something away from men. This is inaccurate but that’s a story for another time.
It would be easy to say to myself that people just didn’t read my article because of a poorly chosen headline or because they prefer to fill in the gaps for themselves but our story doesn’t end here. It turns out I also committed another sin of journalism last week.
Exhibit D.
Exhibit E.
I didn’t provide enough research. Titus and Mel are both people you should recognize if you are a) part of the Magic Community and b) on Twitter. Titus is the author of So Do You Wear a Cape (The Unofficial Story of Magic: The Gathering). Mel Li is a member of Magic’s creative team who you may recall from this interview about gender in Magic from a few months ago.
This brings me to lesson number two about producing Social Justice content for the Magic Community:
Don’t assume people have all the information you have. Make sure you paint a complete picture.
I’ve written a lot about Social Justice in the Magic community. Other writers here have also done so. It is a topic we hold very dear to us at Hipsters of the Coast. Assuming anyone reading last week’s article was familiar with that history, or putting any reference to that history towards the bottom of the article (see lesson one) was not the best idea.
What could I have done better? The title could have been clearer. I could have provided links up-front to my positions on Wizards’ progress. These would have helped, perhaps, and in the end that’s what I’m trying to do: help the Magic community. So in the future I have the tools to help myself help all of you and hopefully you’ll all continue to help me and the rest of the staff here at Hipsters of the Coast do better.
That said, the response to my article highlighted a lot of the ingrained problems within the community. One Pro Tour Hall of Famer suggested that because the majority of Hipsters of the Coast’s writing staff is male (but not 100% of it) that we have no place talking about this topic. That’s incorrect. Many community members assumed that what “we” want is to fire men and replace them with women. That’s incorrect. A lot of people accused me of clickbait. Poor choice of words perhaps, but I assure you that the writing staff and I could do a much better job of click-bait and you’ll know it when you see it.
At the end of the day there are still problems and we are still going to do what we can to change things because it’s what this community needs and deserves. I’ll leave you with one last response from a user on Twitter. I look forward every day to interacting with our readers and fans and friends and the entire community across all of social media and I hope to see you there, like @ScreamingDying.
Exhibit F.
What We Learned is a weekly feature here at Hipsters of the Coast written by former amateur Magic Player Rich Stein, who came really close to making day two of a Grand Prix on several occasions. Each week we will take a look at the past seven days of major events, big news items, and community happenings so that you can keep up-to-date on all the latest and greatest Magic: the Gathering community news.