“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.
The modlog literally does not include the comms for any post, removed, locked or otherwise and cannot be searched by reason or otherwise, so telling someone "go look in the modlog" is - in my opinion - unhelpful as hell to any justification the mod/admin team is making about any comm or the site culture as a whole. Like I said in my original post, my intent is obviously not to downplay any actual misogyny, chauvinism, etc but to close two of the most popular comms for such things - I would expect you (i.e. the admin/mod team) to at least have some sort of screenshots or links to a handful of posts highlighting the issue.
Very few because of the mod team - but should we shut down Chapotraphouse, Main, and every other comm because someone might make a transphobic or misogynistic comment or post??
The justification just doesn't make sense to me.
What IS the source of the problem then, in your view? Should we just ban the words cocksucker, bitch, and twat since those were quite literally the reason the first two comments & post I found in the modlog, like 8 pages in, were removed for misogyny/homophobia?? It just seems like this is, like many have already said, the team intentionally being vague when really - from the 15 pages of the modlog I've looked through while writing this reply - it seems like this is a war on gendered words/insults, even if they aren't being used as such. Why would you (again, the admin/mod team) just not say that outright literally two posts ago instead of claiming it is 'cis het male behavior'??
I don't think any normal Hexbear would have a problem with any of the above words being banned. It shouldn't even really be a huge mod issue anyways, given we had - and still do have to my knowledge - a filter that will literally replace unallowed words in comments but what do I know
The modlog does kind of suck, and I think some things just aren't logged. While trying to find things to help myself understand the issue further, I came across an unrelated commbanning of someone for a surprising given reason. Then I found that there was no removal messages for the comments that incited the ban, though they were removed. Trying to parse the log itself is frustrating too, as it (and the frontend itself in some cases like viewing user profiles) tends to sort by putting every type of "content" on the list, so I'm seeing stuff from a year ago on the first page unless I limit it to a specific type of mod action, which isn't helpful when I'm trying to gauge the vibes.
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Cool, like I said - I don't think any normal Hexbear is going to have a problem with this.
I have always respected you & the rest of the team for volunteering your personal time & arguably mental health to administrate this site so I won't continue airing my personal grievances with this and will wait for the next update from y'all (which is funny because I don't think I've ever actually made a Dunk or Dredge post & was quite vocal about rule-breaking posts after the notability rule was introduced) but can I say that banning @REgon@hexbear.net & a few others like @Aradina@lemmy.ml and (@morte@hexbear.net - who were in this thread adding valid criticism (especially when it comes to the misgendering/transphobia by the mod team on the previous post) and telling them to take a break is pretty shitty?
I get you're in a tough position - you haven't even been back officially for a week (afaik) and you're having to deal with arguably the biggest struggle session we've had since you left - but I don't think either 3 of those users should've been temp banned and to tell them to 'take a break' honestly is kinda irritating. This will probably sound harsh, but I think the moderators & admin team need to come to a decision on whether they want to be the user-base's babysitters or they want to be the enforcers of the actual rules of the site/comm.
Temp banning someone who arguably is one of the most justified users to be up and down this thread angry at the moderators but never actually made any insults or flew off the handle & giving a reason like "go take a break", "come back when you're not mad", or "sorry to disappoint" may work when you're talking to a child about watching the next episode of Blue's Clues, but to say that to a long-standing user (Morte has been here since the inception of the site, Aradina has been posting from .ml for over a year) when they voice disappointment with seeing how you've banned another user? Come on - I think the entire team, who again I do genuinely respect for volunteering their time and effort, should be better than that. No one even tried to make a comment like "Hey can you chill out or you're gonna catch a temp ban" but I understand why that wasn't done, it would've been seen as ridiculous and likely set them off given again - none of them were being inflammatory or insulting..
Don't really expect a reply for this - just felt like it would be wrong if I didn't point this out before logging out for a bit.
Fwiw that's a good change. The second one is already a de facto banned word, just not part of the filter yet. Definitely get to that.
It's not all bad