Lately I’ve been seeing posters here express some form of the sentiment that Hexbear has fallen from its previous heights of glory and now we post amongst the ruins of greatness. This is not a response to anyone in particular, and I don’t want to call anyone out. In fact, it seems to be a normal human tendency to romanticize the past. But I’ve been here since the beginning and want to provide an alternate view.
1. Hexbear just isn’t like it used to be. 
This is one I am particularly suspicious of, since people started posting this after the site had been around for a couple of months. Before that they posted about how chapo.chat wasn’t like the old chapotraphouse subreddit. If the good ol’ days ever existed, they always seem to have been just prior to the current moment. If anything the site culture and vibe have been remarkably consistent since its inception, for better or worse. Faces have changed, people have come and gone and sometimes come back again, but Hexbear remains.
2. People used to be nice here and treat each other as comrades. Now there is just a culture of shallow dunks. 
Seriously? Be for real. I’m not going to deny that we love a good dunk around here, but let’s not pretend that this is a new phenomenon. It’s a big part of the culture around here that predates the site and even arguably even the subreddit. You can be free to like it or not, criticize it or not, say its productive or not, but its definitely not a new development. There’s always been a lot of love and mutual support, but also a lot of vicious arguments intracommunity arguments here. If anything I think there’s less of this now. The early posters would laugh at what passes for a struggle session around here these days. The VCJ struggle session seemed at the time like it might legitimately end the entire site.
3. This site had the potential to be a place for organizing and building something rather than just posting. 
This one is an interesting counterfactual. From the beginning there was no clear agreement on what the ultimate purpose of the site would be, and there were definitely people who saw the site as having revolutionary potential. There were also people who saw it as a place to hang out and shitpost among comrades and were skeptical of its potential for organizing. Over time, I think it’s become clear that we’re closer to the latter than the former. I’m okay with that, personally, but more than that I think it’s worth considering why despite having a lot of smart, determined people on the site, organizing never really materialized, or if it ever had that potential in the first place.
4. People used to post effort posts and stuff and now its just a bunch of shitposting. 
It’s always been mostly shitposting. This is one of my first comments on this site. It’s hard to say if there really used to be more effort posts or not, but what’s stopping you from writing an effort post if you feel like Hexbear needs more of them? I’m doing it right now, and so can you.
One thing that really has changed is that we used to have more comrades actively working on developing the site. Hopefully more people will step up to do that (not me though because I can’t code).
In conclusion, Hexbear is mostly, for better or worse, as it always has been. Enjoy your time here without worrying about whether it measures up to some imagined glorious past. If there’s something you feel is lacking, step up and contribute it. This site is nothing more or less than the sum of our contributions.
As somebody who was on the subreddit then here, the subreddit was quite different.
For starters, the subreddit was about a million times more active. You could read a whole front page of new threads (sorting by hot; not new), come back an hour later, and the whole front page would turned over. That amount of content is night and day different.
With that much increased activity, there was also a significantly greater amount of people who posted there, including a lot of chuds who walked in. This presence of chud posting allowed for easy dunk for people to rally around, and I think served as a lightning rod to deflect sectarianism. It’s that combination of obviously wrong posts deflecting dunks as well a moderation policy which allowed for dissent and questioning of some mod’s orthodoxy (which is something this hexbear’s moderation policy does not allow - hence why in spicy threads you will sometimes see heavily upbeared posts deleted) that I think fostered more interesting comments.
So yeah, idk about the rest of your post, but insofar as you’re questioning the differences between the subreddit and here, I’m a bit confused. They were definitely very different places with different vibes. Maybe you prefer the vibes and smaller posting culture here - fair enough. But it was quite different, so if somebody preferred those differences then pining for the good ol’ days makes sense.
This post is really just about Hexbear. I also was on the subreddit, and yes it was a lot different than here for both better and worse