A BEGINNER’S GUIDE

Hey there comrade! If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve just been criticized for something on Hexbear Dot Net, the world’s premiere leftist shitposting platform! Being criticized is an integral part of this site’s culture and will often occur in our famed “Struggle Sessions”™️, but can really occur just about anywhere! This can be disorienting to newcomers, so we’ve created this guide to make your transition into this space as fluid and painless as possible.

New users make several key mistakes in dealing with criticisms that hurt their potential to have a positive experience or may even result in a ban! Nobody wants that! This list of mistakes isn’t exhaustive, but it should serve as a good primer and reference for your interactions throughout the site.

Rule 1: Never Stop Posting

It’s easy to be taken aback when you are criticized. Don’t worry, this is normal. We expect this space to be a proper leftist echo chamber, so any sort of infighting or hostility can be counterintuitive. What’s important if you are thrown off your stance is to push through and continue posting. If being criticized for something has resulted in any sort of self-criticism or hesitation about your own actions, you are off the righteous path and must contact a moderator immediately to determine whether or not you are worth salvaging. Always remember: when you stop posting, you are hurting our engagement metrics and therefore our feelings.

Rule 2: The Points Are Made Up And Being Correct Does Not Matter

We basically consider ourselves an improv comedy forum. After all, this site was born from a very funny podcast. We are comedy fans here first and foremost. If you are ever unsure of what this means, just think “what would Jon Stewart do?”. He was a comedian, not a politician, and his commitment to being funny before he was correct has inspired an entire generation of fake news anchors to be neither.

So when are you are beginning to take your Accuser’s criticism seriously, remember this: I just called them an Accuser and that makes them moral purists who are destroying the left. Taking a hard stance on something is only good when someone is correct, and they have not taken the time to consider whether you are actually correct, so you should not think about your own correctness either.

Rule 3: It’s Not About You

Surely as a lowly poster you are anonymous and your actions will be lost in a wave of other posters, so they are not actually complaining about you. This is actually an issue about site culture. Don’t fall into the trap of guilting yourself or allowing fake leftists to shame you when they’re actually just taking out their aggression about site culture on you. As everyone who has read theory knows, individual action does not matter and therefore you should always fall into the middle of the pack whenever convenient. This is what I got out of reading Lenin.

If you catch yourself actually discussing the specifics of your own actions, especially while maintaining a liberal tone of civility, you have strayed from the righteous path and must report to a moderator immediately.

Rule 4: This Site Is A Direct Democracy

We have always operated on the principle of One User = One Vote. Even when the Kerries made thousands of accounts to test our principles, we stood by and maintained the process on moral grounds. Even when marginalized groups came to us complaining that we had blind spots that were causing us to overlook bigotry, we were tempted as a team of exclusively PMC cishet white men to give in and let them purge us of our guilt, but instead chose to maintain that because those users were minorities on the site, that those users were not allowed to override the rest of the site’s ability to say gamer words. The Admin Parliamentarian ruled that we couldn’t change this process even if we wanted to.

So if your Accuser is a marginalized person and is trying to express some sort of alienation you’re causing them, be sure to congratulate them on expressing their atypical viewpoint in the free marketplace of ideas and continue on knowing that your opinion is Normal and Good.

Rule 5: If People Are Dogpiling You, It’s Because They’ve Never Organized

This situation is rare but it does happen. You’ve pushed straight through without giving into your Accuser’s demands of silence and servitude. You’ve pointed out that you were joking. You’ve tried to remind everyone about the culture war on the site that everyone is actually upset about. You’ve taken solace in the fact that everyone agrees with you because your opinion is the societal default, but for some reason everyone is still replying to you and telling you you’re being an asshole. In fact, the more you continue posting, the more Accusers seem to join in.

This happens from time to time. The people attacking you are Internet Leftists. Internet Leftists have never organized and therefore don’t understand how the real world works. If they would go to a protest, they might understand that people there don’t use the word “intersectionality” because protests make you forget how to read (this has nothing to do with protests being different from book clubs, where leftists actually also forget to read). If they would talk to working class people, they would understand that working class people actually agree with the thing that you are now being criticized for. If they had belonged to an org, they would know that internal criticism is always counterproductive and that, just like on this site, it must be shut down aggressively at all costs. If they had read theory, they would know that the point of activism is to find out what your target demographic believes and then cater to that indefinitely, maintaining their worldview at all costs. This is what I learned from reading Mao.

Rule 6: Never Stop Posting

This rule is so important that it bears repeating. Sometimes, the previous guidelines will fail you. This site isn’t for everyone and that’s okay. What matters is that even if you stop enjoying your experience here, you never stop posting. It really hurts our feelings when a long time user (or worse, a brand new user) leaves without saying goodbye. This is not because we bond with our users (ew). It is because it hurts our user metrics, which just feels real bad. We set strict quotas and not being able to meet them is a killer for morale.

Just keep posting until you are banned and then create a new account and keep going indefinitely. It’s always we ask and honestly it’s not a lot.

Happy posting, comrades!