“wow hexbear’s most annoying user returns and the site immediately starts to implode. really makes you think!” -a brave but fallen commenter
It’s an honor to be y’all’s most annoying user. I have been back for all of 3 days and I’m already catching strays, hell yeah.
To start out this classic “TC69 takes the reigns” post, I want everyone to take a moment to read this “I’m leaving” post I made during the Great Pronoun Wars and it’s slew of bloody battles before we move on as a refresher for where things were when I left. I want everyone in this chat to take a big step back and look at the overall reaction to this struggle session with my leaving post in mind. I want everyone to consider if there is still work to be done in the community.
Over the years while completely detached from the community for mental health reasons, I’ve heard whispers on the wind about the state of Hexbear – telling me that while things have massively improved for trans people, there is still work to be done in the chauvinism, misogyny, and overall toxicity departments. Wild that I managed to catch some strays, but I hope that “really makes you think”, I guess.
To cool everyone’s jets, you will be getting your slop back, but it’s definitely not going to come without some changes to the community as a whole. I’m talkin’ constitutional amendments. We will be updating the COC in the coming week-ish to explicitly disallow misogynistic and chauvinistic language/sentiments – what will be explicitly said, I don’t yet know but I do have some ideas having reviewed the COC for the first time in 3 years last night.
Having just come back outta the blue, I didn’t have much of a stake in this struggle session nor much context for the circumstances that led to this decision being made but from what I can make sense of, it sounds like we’re combing for the aforementioned issues with too fine of a comb. My view of the situation is this:
- I will provide an example to start. There are three overlapping communities that I remember receiving heavy pushback to have separated: Politics, Electoralism, and News. Each of these communities may have the same posts on average, but the way in which users discuss the content is distinctly different. I view this attempt at community changes in a similar light. Before the next point, I will say that from what I’ve gathered, I view the dunk_tank in more of a "here is some general stinky shit regarding politics, lib brain rot, electoral copium, etc., etc. Let’s all point, laugh, crack jokes, regurgitate the lukewarm takes we saw on Twitter yesterday” way.
- With point #1 in mind, I agree with the overall sentiment of a counterpropaganda community as well as see a healthy appetite amongst users for a more educational approach to “dunking”. However, I don’t think taking out the holy centrist middle ground and asking for more effortful posts was the best step. Perhaps all we want to do is point and laugh, perhaps a baby leftist sees something Not Good TM somewhere else on the internet, and while they do not have all the context or education on the matter to make an effort post of why said thing is Not Good TM, they do have the ability to identify it as Not Good TM and can post it to let other people tear it apart. There is value in that, but we need to work on the shadowboxing and cut down on the aforementioned chauvinistic, misogynistic and overall toxic tendencies, folks.
- There is equally value in seeing chud shit online and wanting to go in-depth for new leftists about why something is reactionary, but I don’t think everyone is meant to be a poster – not that I don’t believe in y’all’s posting power, but it’s true. 353K posts, 4.75M comments. Some people just live for the comment sections and that’s okay, I love you all the same. Commenters are still braver than any troop.
I feel like the overall sentiment is that we don’t have a problem with dunk-esque content, just the means by which it’s discussed – particularly involving, again, the aforementioned issues and conversations devolving into shadowboxing.
So here’s what we’re gonna do. COC Update, then run a slop channel naming competition for a new contained community. I’m going to make a megathread for the community to decide the name of our new slop trough. Most upvoted comment after a week decides the name (some restrictions may apply, I’m not going to let this turn into the Mountain Dew naming competition, obviously).
That’s it, that’s the post. I apologize for the rustiness in making community announcements, it has been a while. Love you all.
Original post here: https://hexbear.net/post/3856299?scrollToComments=false
EDIT: Look, I just got back from a 3 year hiatus 3 days ago. I'm definitely not privy to everything that has been said or done with regards to this issue while I've been slowly walking down the pool stairs and adjusting to the temperature of the water. From what I've read, some outta pocket shit was definitely said, and I apologize on behalf of the team for the defensiveness and botched communication on this rollout. For now, I'm working on addressing things that are immediately within my control and power as per usual with these types of "TC69 picks up the pieces" posts.
We aren't some turbo transphobic cabal, as I said 3 years ago in the exact same way, we're just volunteers trying to continually better the community and navigate taking action against certain types of behaviors/sentiments (something literally no other social media platform gives a fuck about doing, if they aren't actively encouraging negative behaviors to begin with). While what was said did not come from me, I can guarantee it was made under immense stress and pressure, per usual. That does not excuse it, but there is certainly a reason why the running joke is "wow TC69 is literally Stalin with her 5 attempted resignations" - see Carcosa's attempted resignation last night. I love y'all, but this is getting outta hand.
Please be patient as we work through these issues and navigate taking steps to improve. And for the love of G O D please let me catch up some more before our next struggle session.
EDIT 2: I said it 3 years ago, I'll say it again today. I'm not going to sit here and post every little example of things we're describing as an issue when the modlog is publicly available. It's accessible from any page on the site at the very bottom and in the sidebar of all comms. Please let your keyboard breath and spend like 15 minutes reviewing the modlog, lmao.
EDIT 3: Sangria was Alaskaball. Banning themself was a bit. Furthermore, they were unaware that fella was a gendered term, as was I. Yes, they did effectively misgender themselves if you consider fella to be a gendered term. They don't consider it to be. Therefore, non-issue on this point.
EDIT 4: I'm locking the thread. I tried my best to give some decent paths forward amidst the chaos. Someone else can deal with this.
Have you tried asking them
ok we're going to instate full direct democracy immediately, i am going to poll all of hexbear about whether or not we should ban some random guy over a weird comment, whether or not to approve a user every time someone signs up, every time there is some small technocratic rule change. we must become :vote: the website. deeply unserious. its hard enough to get even the most invested users to comment on shit and do shit until it blows up in some absurd way
people are also going at the transphobia angle a lot in this thread without realizing that almost a supermajority of the mod team is trans and wouldnt have included something blatantly transphobic (including the two people are irate with, carcosa and tc69), the context is just missing.
idk this is just all nonsense to me im going back to checking out
the_dunk_tank in the past month is ranked; 6th users/month, 3rd posts, 2nd comments.
Ah yes changes to that comm are exactly like a site wide discussion on banning "some random guy over a weird comment".
Say the line Bart
"deeply unserious"
It's fine for some decisions to be made by mods only, but keeping it quiet and rolling the changes out all at once when the decision is final seems to cause nothing but problems. It means the mods and admins are caught off guard when the users have strong objections, and have to scramble and backtrack to deal with the backlash. A heads-up about what changes were being discussed would have let the mods be aware of what complaints would be made while they were still in the decision making process. Then when the changes are made, they could already have measures ready to address the concerns, or at least consistent explanations of why the changes where necessary. Instead they had to quickly throw out multiple conflicting justifications, and added to the confusion.
If you're surprised the users saw this as more than a tiny change, an announcement that a discussion was happening could have given a warning of what to expect.