Some Thoughts on Gatekeeping

Over the course of the last half year or so, I've continually returned to thoughts about creative gatekeeping online: where it works, where it doesn't, and at what point it just becomes annoying and counterproductive.

This is probably true in every creative community. You always have the established, entrenched names who have territories to defend against the upstarts and new voices.

Systems get put into place. Allies get recruited. Walled communities go up. Artificial metrics are invented, and then used to quantify popularity, which in turn is then used to bolster and support the artificial metrics. Some people seem to spend more time manning the gates then they ever did making the very thing they're desperately defending.

And yeah, I know it's the nature of the beast. But still it gets ridiculous.

The gatekeeping world I see every day is in the Fallout game modding community. Much of that universe revolves around a website called Nexus Mods, which basically serves as the central clearinghouse of community mod projects.  

Whatever kind of creativity community you engage in, I'm sure there's a similar set of dynamics at play.


Endorsements, Upvotes, and Creative Discouragement

First, you have the popularity accountants.

The Nexus walled community is built around a single artificial bookkeeping metric: "endorsements". These are basically upvotes. Projects with more endorsements on their ledger get more visibility; they tend to be taken more seriously by the other bookkeepers, and mods with few endorsements are generally expected to conform to the technical needs of higher endorsement projects.  

Of course, as an author you don't have to do this - you're free to write (mostly) anything you want, in (mostly) any way you want, for whomever you want.

Sooner or later, however, users are going to tell you that the accounting needs of mod ABC demand that you do things in a certain way, and in a Popularity Accountant system, they will use the Metric as the justification and leverage to demand it. This invariably creates high pressure to conform to other projects, and in many cases, to not even publish.

After over a decade in the Nexus world, at this point I think that endorsements are probably more trouble than they are worth. They certainly kill a lot of promising projects and discourage a lot of bright new authors. But that's my own opinion. You do you.

On Nexus, endorsements are a gatekeeping mechanism. The metric mainly serves to enforce a social hierarchy, like all good gates do, and if you happen to be outside of that gate, well.. get gud, I guess. Toil on little things until you get lucky with the fandom, or until you get bored, or you decide you suck and just quit.

The Other Extreme: Cool Kid Elitism

Then you have the other extreme, the cool kids.  

These are the guys who got lucky with the fandom, dug deep into it, and built audiences and user bases. They got the endorsements, and despite what they may argue about the merits of whatever gatekeeping system they toil under, by God they want to stay on the winning side of that system. And they want you to remember how awesome they are.

As someone who has experienced both sides of this world, man, I can tell you, elitism is an easy trap to fall into. People praise your work, and of course you like that. And pretty soon you start thinking that, hey, yanno, I really DO deserve to be the one who decides what passes for good in this community. How dare you question me? Do you not SEE my popularity, and QUAKE IN FEAR OF MY VOICE?

I'm exaggerating, of course. Just not by a whole hell of a lot.

The systems cool kids invent often tend to be worse than the ones they rebel against. Tiers upon tiers of hoops that new authors are expected to jump through. A long path of pilgrimage, up the long cobblestone road, to offer penance at the marble temple on the mountain. They will claim to value new voices and fresh ideas, but only so long as you work really, really hard to earn the right for your voice to be heard.

And, strangely enough, within a system whose stringent rules don't really apply to those they recognize as the other popular cool kids.

They get an air tram up the mountain. The rest of you get to climb, until they (and their friends) find you worthy of respect and acceptance.


Balancing Quality, Credibility, and Creative Freedom

There's a real issue there, when you start talking about trying to improve product quality, establish credibility for information sources, and defend your own hard work from a crowd that could perhaps be described as carpetbaggers. For every one artist who puts in the long hours and works to get the job done, there's a myriad of folks who want the attention (and in some cases, the money) overnight while doing little to no work for it. And no, it's absolutely not fair, not to anyone really.

But that's just how life works. That's how the world works. And so there's always going to be a gatekeeper of some kind, an arbiter of faith and fairness, ready to build an artificial security system answerable only to itself. And there will always be those people who are overinvested in the success of that system. It's that way everywhere.

I just think that, once in a while, we all would do better to step back, look at the systems we're defending, and start asking questions about whether they actually work and what they do. 

Maybe, just maybe, there's a better way to get there.

My feeling is, if you have a creative vision and are willing to put it into the world, you deserve a place at the table. You're an honest laborer, like the rest of us, and I'll put out a chair for you and welcome you to the club. You earned your spot just by showing up. You don't need to climb a mountain on your knees in order to prove your faith to me.

So my message here is, don't undersell your value. Whatever it is that you do, that you make, don't decide that it just isn't that important simply because it didn't make it through the artificial HOA rulebook being enforced by some self-important, self-appointed gatekeeper.

Make your thing anyway.  Get it out there, and let them choke on it.

Your stuff has value. It changed the world, simply by existing. No one can gatekeep that, though many are still going to try.  The cool kids and the popularity accountants.

Some people just need stuff to do with their time, while they sit and wait: wait for the systems to erode, wait for the world to change.  Wait for the inevitable next generation to come along, and not have the slightest earthly idea who they are, or why they should care.