/tg/Station 13

Watch out, I'm using general chat!!! You'll never catch me alive!

Headmins pretty consistently burn out either midway through their terms or immediately after their term ends. I think this sucks.
We're essentially pushing (in theory) popular/experienced people into a meat-grinder every 6 months.

Can you think of anything that might alleviate this issue?

Thanks for general I don't have the hours needed for punk club

The biggest tensor of the headadmin design is their need to respond to apocalyptic shitstorms once every 2 months with some number of paragraphs explaining why some socially stunted yet internally assured otherwise contingent of the /tg/station userbase(includes dev and admin staff) is in the right to an identical socially stunted yet entirely oblivious to their own maladjustment contingent. Basically if your reading this and you think you know how to act on the internet there's an 85% chance you are delusional.

But for actionable commentary the immediate intuitive answer is 3 month terms but headmin elections are too bulky to hold 3 months apart.
Luckily headmin elections have always been parasocial bs which didn't really matter so we should instead internal discussions it to the max, toss the whole election crap and idk have headmins get veto'd by 2 day player votes or something im so tired

If someone bails just have the runner up take their place.
Alternatively allow for the formation of admin political parties because clearly nothing can go wrong with that idea.

Shorten it to three months so they burn in 1.5 months rather than 3.

MSO being gone and (as I understand it?) no longer being the sole person able to make certain changes to the servers is already a huge change in avoiding headmin frustration. Would be cool to have some former headmin perspectives in this thread.

subject217 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 26, 2025 5:12 pm MSO being gone and (as I understand it?) no longer being the sole person able to make certain changes to the servers is already a huge change in avoiding headmin frustration. Would be cool to have some former headmin perspectives in this thread.

this overfocuses on like a single point of frustration out of the many.

4 months terms (i think 3 is a better idea, but it can be 4 just as a start)

MSO induced more burnout in coders than headmins.

Headmin-wise he stayed out of the way unless you were touching his freeze peach or threatening to shut down polcon or whatever.

During my second headmin term he pissed me off at some point near the start, so I lectured him in the headmin channels and his only response was to block me for like 3 weeks.

The biggest issue with the headmin team is that you can't strategically pick for optimum synergy.

I am an abstract analytical person, I benefit from grounded social-savvy people

I'm respond to calls to action but fumble scheduling, I benefit from people who handle that stuff better.

I was very much blessed to have a first headmin term with two people who I feel have a lot of characteristics that balanced our team fantastically.

But there's no way to strategize. You can say that the player vote is going to be a bit more fiery or unorthodox, the host vote is going to be stability/sanity, and the admin vote is going to be a similar security vote, but idk I don't think that narrows it all down enough. Especially for people who get in on the player vote and then are de facto seen as secure and known which greatly increases the chance of getting the admin vote in future elections.

Similarly unavoidable are the bad things you have to hear about because the buck stops at you. It just wears on a person and if its difficult to process and the support you need isn't there burnout is inevitable.

we should replace head admins with 3 different LLMs that will decide all future policy on our server

SpaceInaba wrote: ↑Wed Feb 26, 2025 9:46 pm we should replace head admins with 3 different LLMs that will decide all future policy on our server

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TheLoLSwat wrote: ↑Wed Feb 26, 2025 8:45 pm 4 months terms (i think 3 is a better idea, but it can be 4 just as a start)

Better for the headmins but probably worse for the community, I think it'll lead to election burnout

Make it a number that's not divisible by the number of months in a year like 5 or 7

Timberpoes wrote: ↑Wed Feb 26, 2025 9:30 pm MSO induced more burnout in coders than headmins.

Headmin-wise he stayed out of the way unless you were touching his freeze peach or threatening to shut down polcon or whatever.

During my second headmin term he pissed me off at some point near the start, so I lectured him in the headmin channels and his only response was to block me for like 3 weeks.

Was this when he banned multiple people from discord for his own bad faith interpretation of what was said about men's rights?

Probably. All the MSOments blend together after some point into an amorphous blob of nondescript matter.

we tried shorter terms way back in the day and the headadmins said we should increase it so we went back to 6 months.

Yeah but that was before tiktok brainrot, nobody can keep focus for 6 months

12 month terms. we shock our headmins every day with prods to keep them focused. we feed them grits and powdered milk

How well the headmins synergise doesn't really matter, Me, Timber and Jane are fundamentally 3 different personalities and it worked out. What burnt me out is specifically these 3 things:
1) Players randomly getting uppity over decisions you made and talking smack dashed in with fake news over a lot of shit until you correct the narrative and also people getting assmad over decisions that you can't publish due to good reasons
2) Admins can randomly get antagonistic as fuck over the smallest stupidest shit (yes I can do this), or they can just be a real pain in the ass
3) Drama.

Actually there's probably one more thing which is the amount of bureaucracy or things to tick off every now and then and it really all piles up, it's hard to get 3 adults together at the same time when they're busy with IRL stuff a lot like work and other personal stuff. Most of the shit headmins have to do could be pawned off