Original post here: https://hexbear.net/post/3856299?scrollToComments=false
I think we have a general path forward based on community feedback. "We see you, we hear you!"
I went ahead and unpinned the old post. I'm pinning this one for now and will edit this post when I wake up from eepy time. I had a very mid week and have no particular alarm set so be on look out. Love y'all and I'm amped for my first announcement post since coming back. :)
naw listen, when someone whose entire online life is a tsunami of toxicity tells you that you're sucking shit i really do think it's wisest to at least consider the possibility that you may not have the clearest view of your own actions
let me rephrase. i don't want to say you are toxic. but you are definitely being toxic. if you don't want to claim that (i think you should) then you are at very least being...i guess deeply disrespectful? it's unpleasant, is what i am trying to get at. there should not be this level of hostility between the people running the show and the rest of us. i don't think it's natural. i also don't think it's something we the userbase are responsible for kicking off (at least in this instance).
you will have to be more specific, in what way was i disrespectful?
alright, i'll play along.
i think the way you've comported yourself in general during this event positively reeks of disdain: for the userbase, their interests and desires, and for the effort they have expended trying to communicate such with you.*
you should be able to understand that replying to long, considered posts with terse statements of dismissal and apparent disinterest is, if nothing else, deeply rude behavior. it's the equivalent of responding to someone's impassioned monologue with "okay". at best they will feel stupid for trying to talk to you at all. it's flatly not the sort of behavior you extend towards someone you respect on any level.
*i know this isn't equivalent to the effort of upkeeping and running the site. i am keeping that in mind during this critique.
Hmm, you may be right
lmao i genuinely cannot tell if this is an example of the behavior i discussed or if it's just an amusing coincidence but i will take it in good faith and offer some advice in kind: if you feel that your time here has embittered you towards the userbase, the site culture, or your duties as a moderator, i really do think you should give consideration to either taking a break from moderating or the site as a whole. i say this with no hostility. you folks put in a lot of labor to keep the site usable and we all appreciate that. and the key word there really is labor. i'm sure monitoring the community that is simultaneously the most active and the most likely to contain deeply emotionally damaging/draining rhetoric is not easy, to say nothing of the drama it stirs up with the other, lesser instances.
you should not be spending your limited free time in this life doing something that you hate.
It may be enlightening to know im autistic
I would also like to see more effort posts instead of reddit tier screenshots and gotchas. I'd like to know - have it spelled out for me, rather - how to discuss and process why liberal and reactionary talking points and axioms are false and ineffective. but I think understanding the criticisms against liberals and reactionaries doesn't come from internet posts or youtube essays, but from reading and learning.
And then coming to the site to share that common understanding of reality via the leftist lens, and then exercise levity over that reality as we face our spectrum of competency and power(lessness) in that reality.
I've learned that the catharsis is the point. It's a necessary intellectual cultivation of enduring in reality and acting upon reality.
It'd be fair to say that you, I, and perhaps all of us would like to see that catharsis go somewhere. Yet we just won't see it go from Hexbear -> ??? - > socialist activism, community organizing, volunteering, etc.
The unknown factor are the material conditions and motivations of people to put their time and energy in the material world; the levity gleaned here is the point of the site, and as a community this is what its members make of it. It isn't inherently a bad thing.
Let people have their fun. It isn't meaningless, fruitless, or useless just because it does not interest you or I.
Dolores Umbridge was more hated among the Harry Potter fanbase than Voldemort.
What makes the distinction between mockery of public officials and petty trolls on the internet (twitter, reddit, lemmy) is that often our fellow proleterians are also our tormentors. In the news, Israeli football vandals picked fights, defaced properties, and chanted genocidal and racist rants. This behavior is echoed on the bottom of Israeli society and validated by the top; this behavior (not just Israeli racism but bigotry/oppression in general) is also echoed in Western states by core constituencies of its dominant population, and validated through willful ignorance and patronizing liberalism.
I think our problem here is that we've seen a lot of this content. So much so that it also gets grating.
But not everything is for everyone.