Hello,
Today the !covid@hexbear.net and !doomer@hexbear.net communities were created.
As of now they are not set to appear in the /all feed so in order to see posts here you have to subscribe.
They do appear in the /all feed and will require users not wanting to see these posts to ensure they subscribe to all communities they do want to see and then change their feed to subscribed only in their settings
Please post !covid@hexbear.net or !doomer@hexbear.net appropriate posts in their respective communities.
Going forward covid/doomer posts that are not in those communities may be crossposted there & removed.
Posts that are without a content warning and/or are titled in a sensational/excessive/clickbait way will be crossposted to one of these communities & removed from the community it was originally posted in, consider using the sourced article headline with a content warning to avoid having this occur.
I know this is an inconvenience and posts restricted to those communities may not get as much engagement but for now this change is intended to help.
If you see a post in another community that may be more appropriate for !covid@hexbear.net or !doomer@hexbear.net please report them.
This post intends to discuss this change so please comment any questions, comments, or concerns regarding this. Thank you
This change is a result of user concerns raised in:
https://hexbear.net/post/166749
https://hexbear.net/post/166985
I completely disagree with the idea of people cutting themselves off from this content at all as liberalism we shouldn't indulge. yes it is damaging for your mental health to see about drowning Syrian children in boats making crossings, or people losing their houses in wild fires and so on, but those facing these things aren't allowed to politely ask it all get hidden away that is their lives and their realities. there is no way for the unprivileged to push their struggles and pain out of sight, and so called 'doomerism', an absolutely dismissive term off the bat, IS discussion of those conditions and those suffering from them. we should be upset, we should be informed, and we should not hide the bad because it's inconvenient to see it
If doomerism affects our users so much that they are too demoralized or depressed to organize, or too depressed to continue living, we have a problem. That is something that this change is trying to prevent. As a socialist site, Hexbear should strive to enlighten the proletariat rather than create a depression cult of its own.
sticking your head in the sand doesn't drive people to radical action, those who want to lock themselves away from the conditions out there of struggle are sure as shit going to come across far more of it organising than in memes and headlines on here.
moreover, what gets called 'doomerism' and 'a cult of depression' is 9/10 people literally just reporting the factual news and our current political crises. that's not 'doomer', that's just what reality is now, and we can't ignore it if we want to be socialists, and if we want to enact change.
I think if politics is making people genuinely suicidal, maybe a political site is not the place for them to be. and I wish them all the luck getting through their struggles, but maybe an explicitly political space that thinks our current political system can only end in collapse is not the best place for that
deleted by creator
what's being offered here is not 'limit your consumption of them' it's very much a 'should this be hidden away'. sure, people should consider those things, but unfortunately that's something people have to do on an individual basis, and not something that can be done by locking content away. much the same with the idea of forming coalitions, sure that's good and people should focus on that but that's not what's up for debate here