A Senior's Rant

projecteducate is making an honest attempt this week at dispelling some myths about senior members of deviantART. However, I want to weigh in - as someone unaffiliated with the project - about some things. I'm not purporting here to be the word of God or anything, these are just my personal views, and my personal effort to dispel some of the misconceptions that senior members have about the misconceptions the community has. And foremost is the misconception that we are somehow obligated to be your hugboxes.

I hate to be the voice of dissent for the senior community, but I kind of get tired - very tired - of these generalization-type articles about the senior membership base here on deviantART. I've been seeing these types of articles for a decade now. There were, at my last count about a year ago, twelve hundred or so senior members on this site. Only a fraction of that number are people who give back to the community, or give any sort of a damn about the community; it states right in the FAQ that you can get the senior status by being an artistic icon, a former staff member (even a coffee-slinger at HQ who only logged into the site by CEO mandate), or one of the community loudmouths. And about half of the senior member base are vacant accounts, of people long gone.

When seniors are pushed by fellow seniors as being some sort of superhuman community participation league, it can (in my opinion) even further confuse the community, stigmatize senior membership as a position, and go a long way to create a feeling in the community that seniors should be held to an equal or even higher standard than the site's volunteers/staff.

Some of us have been gone for a decade. Some of us who are still here are absolute pricks. Some of us have a lot going on, in our personal and professional lives or on the website; some of those people want to be able to do it in peace and not be bothered, and will not coddle you just because we have a little medal beside our username. We're also no less cliquey than non-senior members. And yes, some of us do in fact meet in shady backrooms and hatch schemes about how we can impact your experience of the site, or how we can push our agendas on you. We're not always successful when we hatch the schemes, to be fair, and those types of schemes are something well within the capabilities of normal users too.

Some of us have, due exclusively to the nature of our being senior members, been offered opportunities that regular site users have not. Some of us in days gone by even had moderating privs - not sitewide, but in specific regions, most notably the forums. There are projects on deviantART that you explicitly cannot be involved in unless you're a senior member. Some of those projects had, and still have, increased opportunity to liaise with volunteers and especially with staff. I'm not saying senior membership will get you a direct line to the CEO, but it will give you opportunities to have your voice heard in some areas where you'd not have thought that the userbase even had or needed a voice before. If you come up with those areas of concern on your own, before you become a senior member, and want to try to effect change: All the power to you - I think that's incentive enough for you to get the senior membership. At least it's enough to get me to go to bat for you and try to get you senior membership, if I see your efforts.

Suggesting yourself for senior membership will make you look like a horse's ass. One thing I've got to give most of the senior member base is that we are humble about what we have done onsite. If you suggest yourself, you're just going to look like you think you're entitled to it. If you've legitimately done enough for this community to merit senior membership on the basis of community involvement, don't feel that you have to suggest yourself. People who are also involved will suggest you, eventually. Be patient. If you're impatient about it, you'll shoot yourself in the foot.

We're people. We are diverse. Our experience, and our involvement with the community, is also diverse. Don't expect anything more or less from contacting a senior member of this site than you'd expect contacting any other stranger. Don't get caustic. Don't hold us to an unreasonable standard. But don't look down on us, either, because at the end of the day we're humans and we care about something; it just might not be what you care about, or what you think a senior member "should" care about.

All that said? Don't stop suggesting seniors, and don't hate us irrationally for being a diverse group. Many of the seniors you see around regularly are the very community-oriented ones, who will probably be nice-ish if you approach them - just don't think that niceness is a right you have from us inherently.

The medal does give us a prominence in the community. The seniors who deny that are willfully blinded to the facts, which are evident just in the number of misconceptions there are about seniors. Would people think what they think if they didn't notice us as being noteworthy? The medal is not a position, it is an accolade, and it is one that gives people who become seniors some extra weight, some notoriety, some pull - just not to the staff of the site, but rather to the community. It gives us an exclusive and distinguishing feature that is presented every time we interact with deviantART.

And if you see someone abusing that notoriety and pull over the community in a way that you think reflects poorly on seniors as a whole, make a stink. I've made stinks about those people before I was a senior, since I've been a senior, when I was a volunteer, hell, even once when I was banned from the site. As a community you embrace us, you empower us, and we need you to be our checks and balances as much as we need you to be our peers.

Hope I haven't offended anyone. Once again, these are my opinions. If I did offend you, well, let's discuss it rationally like normal people? But don't just expect me to take your rebuttals as fact prima facie; once again, I'm not obliged to be a hugbox. We can debate but I'm as entitled to my opinions as you are to yours. Here, have some art.


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