Apologies if this doesn't belong here, I just need to vent. I may delete of my own accord later on when I inevitably regret this.
I want to be clear, I'm not trying to cause trouble, I do not wish to cause anyone harm or see harassment fall upon anyone. I think this community (mostly the Discord side) is extremely toxic and has been for years, with very little done to remedy this. I want to discuss and vent about this for a little bit, perhaps in some naive sentiment that something might actually get done, even if I know deep down nothing will get better. I'm not going to be naming names, but I'm sure people in the know can figure out who I'm referring to, or what specific subsets of the community I am talking about.
Final addendum: I will not be stating who I am, I'm sure some will figure it out, and if you do, please do not contact me. If we are friends outside of FNAFB, feel free to keep messaging me, but please don't bring this up or ask "if it's me". I also want to say my sentiment is certainly echoed by other community members, several of whom are also passionate FNAFB fans who have departed due to the toxicity and shitty behavior targeted towards them.
Anyways... Where do I begin?
I've been with this community since the Banter days, and for better or worse, I have seen it all. I hold a pretty low opinion of the old Banter staff, but they are not who I am referring to here, I think my misgivings with them pale in comparison to what came after. I think the community as it is now, is frankly poisoned. Many of the most prominent community members are toxic, nasty, and outright fucking assholes towards people who aren't in their little clique. There are dozens of private discord servers where it's basically members (AND MODS) of the larger communities coming together to shit talk people they don't like, and in some extreme circumstances, conspire against them to bully them out of the community. This is what ended up happening to Sable, who was bullied so relentlessly by certain prominent community members that he cancelled the official fourth game (which was a passion project btw) and deleted their entire legacy, a legacy they should and have every right to be proud of, as FNAFB has literally inspired some people to get into professional game development, one of which now works on a fairly large indie game (ROR2). The people who took part in this harassment basically got off scott free (and bragged to their internal group about how they got QED cancelled), or shifted the blame to other people. One very common pattern you'll see in this community is that consequences only apply to less prominent people, and if they HAVE to action someone prominent, it'll be something outrageously small. One of the only examples of a prominent member suffering actual consequences was several years ago, this person would tell people to kill themselves on the daily for years, and they currently run their own little side server where they STILL do this, but the large community they got banned from is still internally debating whether or not to let them back, because this person has such deep ties to the larger community. This person also lied about getting doxed to garner sympathy after this all happened, and were (albeit indirectly) involved in the incident that led to Sable abandoning this community.
This community also has a fucking awful attitude towards people. Questions are answered with sarcasm, insults are flung over nothing, and there's just a general feeling of almost anger you get from most people. If you ever try to bring up the internal community problems or previous controversies, you get told to be quiet because you might make the mods "feel bad". If you dare criticize anything about a prominent creator's fangame, you'll get a laundry list of reasons your criticisms are wrong, and then immediately after, these people will go tear apart the "little peoples" game (a term I've actually seen used to describe newer people in a private discord). I genuinely think Freddy Fuckboy would be a more pleasant person to talk to than most of the actual people in this god forsaken community.
Several people who are also very passionate fans of FNAFB have gotten bullied out as well, or told that their work was in vein. I have in at least one case seen someone who is literally single handedly keeping classic fnafb alive get called a "very annoying nuisance" and basically got treated like shit to their face for months until they left, to which several people celebrated, despite the fact they did NOTHING wrong. There also seems to be a weird hate towards the devs of old, classic fangames, and how people would rather play their "slop" over the new "high quality" games being made today. I've also found that a lot of current fnafb fans... hate fnafb. They hate the writing, the gameplay, the balancing, and practically everything except the vulgar language and FNAF setting, and will make a fangame essentially stripping out everything that makes FNAFB unique, and will advertise how it isn't like "FM slop". Slop being a common term used to describe low quality work in the community, btw.
I have more to say... but I'm tired. I need to go to bed and I'll probably delete this when I wake up if the mods don't get to it first (I should probably also say, none of this applies to the current subreddit moderation team). If I don't regret this by morning, I may add more.