This is my understanding of it.

The dunk tank stuff is an incredibly minor thing, that should have been easily fixed. Everything else has just been logs thrown on a paper fire over and over again.

It's all incredibly silly and it seems like nobody in this team understands that less is more when dealing with minor drama. Responses to drama should be kept proportional to their size, if something is major and deserves a major response fair enough, but if something is minor and you give it a major response then what you do is immediately blow it up into a major issue instead of keeping it the incredibly minor thing it should have been all along.

In this case the entire admin and mod team should STOP FUCKING POSTING.

Seriously. Stop. Just stop. It's that fucking easy.

Yup. Admins can't stand that the users of this shit posting site want a comm where they can post low effort dunks. That's the core of it. At every opportunity the mods and admins could have just stopped antagonizing the users of the site for no reason, and at every opportunity they have instead doubled down with some of the worst and most offensive arguments I've ever seen from supposed "socialists."

That's where it originated but it is well beyond being about that alone now. As just one other little event to mention here, it was revealed that our main admin was telling other lemmy admins about this as a plan a week before any hexbear users were told about it. That admin (who has since stepped down amid calls for them not to, so they may return) told us that they were lying to the other lemmy admins to try to get them to remove their dunk comms, and that they weren't lying to us. But that is as weird as it sounds.

One of the things that was revealed by showing mod chats and mod reasoning for the change was that they were saying the people who like to dunk here are toxic cis-hets exclusively when that is clearly not true and got a lot of our trans and queer users who enjoy dunks rather upset at being told their behavior is toxic cis-het. Plenty of misgendering ensued as well.

There's also a person who has been making alts and harassing people who express dissatisfaction with this unilateral mod/admin decision and it is almost certain that this chronic harasser is herself a mod of some comms here.

And there are plenty of other things going on with this too, so hopefully that gives you an idea as to why this is beyond just being about some comm changes. I'm also exhausted and probably didn't explain things well, but again, I hope that gives you a better idea what's happening.

So in watching a lot of this go down, yes a lot of people were pissed about the handling of canceling the tanks, but what REALLY pushed it all overboard was someone, presumably a mod who was confirmed NOT to be a mod but was thought to be, making a bunch of alts (if you search the mod log it's the "debatebro" accts harassing the upset users. Misgendering them, infantilizing them, telling them to kys, etc etc. Many users felt that that issue wasn't addressed at all. Hence people feeling like the admin team was letting that shit slide, which really pissed everyone off. That's where shit REALLY started to pop off. That, combined with there seeming to be multiple different reasons coming from admin about why the tanks were closed, then a controversial mod figure coming back after years and just banning everyone and admin turning this whole thing into a bit and posting instead of either ignoring things or answering questions, which just made people feel even MORE disrespected.