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
This isn't opt-out, it's opt-in.
Which, since I don't even remember if we had to opt-in to seeing posts from any communities previously through /all, means almost no one is going to see these posts.
And where's the boundary around talking about covid? What's doomerism, really?
This is a poor solution.
I agree. At least make the new comms opt-out rather than opt-in. The opt-in comms on this site tend to get ignored, because we took a community that was a single subreddit and split it into many. I’m fine with having all the covid news in one place so those who want to can hide it, but shoving it all somewhere no one will see it isn’t a good answer.
And c/doomer is even worse. Like 80-90% of posts on this site could be considered doomer. Is c/doomer just the new main/chapotraphouse now?
I think changing them to appear in /all would be a good compromise
I mean most struggle sessions are either petty or decided in advance based on if the mods are in a good mood, so I’m glad that topic has been suppressed.
If people are having problems with communities they can also unsub. Why should the onus be on the vast majority of users who have no problems with these posts?
Creating this opt-in model will just create endless communities that could be covered by reading the title of the post or the CW. If someone is harmed by discussions of rape will there be a seperate rape/molestation community for news? A CW or title should be enough for people not to click on those posts. Why move the posts to an opt in community and kill discussion?
There is absolutely no reason to create new communities for this small of a site. I'd rethink this.
Does Psaki being snarky about how they're going to continue to do nothing about Covid go in c/covid or not?
I agree with CCA that they should appear in /all. It's inconvenient for people who want to filter out those posts to have to manually subscribe to everything else and sort by subscribed, but that's more realistic than every user that doesn't want them filtered to manually subscribe. Critically, because it won't be obvious that you need to do that if you don't read this thread.
Now does my example not go in c/news or c/videos? That's what I think will be tricky, since users will still absolutely be posting the particularly choice examples of incompetence wherever it fits.
I don't think people usually read the copypasta block in megathreads. I know I haven't in months. I'd like to hear from people who don't want to see the posts in question and what their thoughts on defaults are.
Word up. Hope nothing comes across as bellicose, just trying to be straightforward.
Could you please rephrase the title of this post then to clarify it's a community discussion? Appreciate all of you being open to feedback.
As one of the inspirations for this post, I think it's fine if they appear in /all.
I agree with the idea of making new "quarantine" (no pun intended) communities opt-out instead of opt-in, by auto subscribing users to them. I don't have a strong opinion or anything but I think it's better.
For this reason:
I think if all the Covid posts are suddenly coming from /c/COVID, people who want to avoid that will be like "oh, the fuck is c/Covid? I am unsubscribing from that cursed shit" at a pretty reliable rate. And on the other hand, it'll be hard to get people to see this post, and they'll suddenly have Covid posts sorta disappear without realizing it.
I for one will be using this excellent new functionality by unsubscribing from Doomer but not Covid.
Oh, and nearly all of the concerns raised in your threads are asking for a way to filter or hide posts, not a comm. These are features that have been requested for more than a year now. I know development basically stopped for quite a while, but not having the features that users actually ask for and that solve problems like this without affecting the broader shape of discussion is not a reason to use solutions that just make things more inconvenient and confusing for nearly everyone.
Why not just make a /c/safenews and /c/safe_the_dunk_tank for users who have anxiety?
You can already unsub from the dunk tank, the problem is doomerism in c/chapotraphouse (main)
I'm kind of confused about how this is supposed to work? This basically kills off half the dunk tank posts and a lot of posts in news/politics. Also affects science and sino.
TDT especially helps to show when someone thinks a take is bad at a glance. Posting covid denialists without that context is not great.
Where do things like memes or videos around these subjects go? What about posting or venting about getting covid or even having a bad day in megathreads?
What qualifies as doomer content? We literally live in a hell world.
I empathize with people who have anxiety around doomerism and covid, this shit is rough. I process my own stress around this through humor, shitposting, and talking politics. Making these communities opt-in defeats the purpose of the site for a lot of people and also effectively silences the topics on the site.
One of Hexbear's strengths as a community is that we have a dark sense of humor. Being avoidant about material conditions and people's suffering on a socialist website feels pretty counter productive.
Edit: I read the posts that asked for this and totally get trying to do something to address it. Maybe removing more sensationalist post titles and putting total doomer collapse / climate apocalypse shit in !doomer@hexbear.net?
I really don't agree with filtering out any news that happens to involve covid. Quarantining stupid "we are all going to die" posts though makes sense. Socialists inherently need to have a kind of revolutionary optimism.
Maybe !covid@hexbear.net could specifically be for a lot of the raw data and science discussions?
the covid hellworld channel on the discord is really good
Where should I be looking for an invite to that discord?
Yeah, it seems like a good way to support anyone combatting anxiety / depression around hellworld without also breaking the flow and community of the site.
I really applaud you and the other sitemods always being willing to try different things out and how much you do with the tools you have.
Having multiple comms like we do that are just subscribed to by default and then can be opted-out of goes a long way to basically side-loading a basic topics filtering feature.
I agree with you and there’s a possibility you’re going to be labeled a wrecker for saying this.
Sure but the weakness of the wrecker label is that you can label basic everything as wreckerism
Eh ya know it when you see it. Also they almost always tell on themselves.
:shrug-outta-hecks:
TFW the site becomes exclusively pictures of guns and the occasional cat video
The entire point of the site for me is to come here and commiserate
The whole world is a doompost
Yeah c/doomer would encompass like 90% of posts on this site
Just want to throw two cents in and say that I think the essential feature of doomposting isn't bad news, but fatalistic framing. It's not just "bad things are gonna happen"; it's "bad things are gonna happen, we're fucked, and there's nothing we can do about it" (which is actually counterrevolutionary so yeah cut that out). Even "society is collapsing" isn't strictly doomer if it's framed in a "here's how we need to prepare" kind of way or a "there is great disorder under Heaven" kind of way.
Prepare? What is this? Soviet China?
In great freedom countries we let individuals handle everything
Lol let's pretend covid doesn't exist I'm totally not a lib
I get people don't want to see scary sounding posts but a crack down on exaggerative or clickbait would be the answer here
BTW I have severe health anxiety. Like panic attack hypochondriac shit. Absolutely debilitates me when it gets out of control.
Doesn't mean I want to bury my head in the sand against what the fuck is happening
It's my source for leftist shit. I can listen to npr or whatever and cry about the landlord they have on but the reason I use this site is to get an additional perspective
Well now you can subscribe to /c/COVID but don't call me a fucking lib while pushing a "handle your own shit" narrative
Sorry, I took it a bit personally because I nearly had a panic attack yesterday and my post in Feedback was one of the key points for this decision.
Health anxiety sucks shit, and I swear I know where you're coming from. I've spent 4 years of the last decade dealing with repercussions of it. Hypochondria before we all were
I have issues with posts that look to gain traction from those fears, BUT covid also does exist and I find it upsetting for a community to want to hide conversations about an extant threat
The opt out while putting it in main is a fine compromise to me, and I'm not calling those that wish to opt out libs or whatever.
What I was attempting to communicate was a general policy of removing scary things as a problematic decision.
Edit: communicate autocorrected into communism lol
No you're fine and your critique you had in your original post is spot on. That post that sent you spiraling fucking sucked.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic but yes this is the correct take.
News under capitalism is a product. You pay for it with subscriptions or much more offen with your attention. It's trash made to keep you looking, it doesn't give a fuck if it's informative.
Not consuming it is a good idea
Yeah I've got a lot of problems this is a good and helpful post.
Adding it to the main feed would be good yes, that way you have to opt out instead of seeking it out specifically
I totally get the concerns. It's hard to function with health anxieties and wanting to let people opt out of seeing this stuff is good.
Honestly the site shouldn't even have a thing called "communities". It's too small to use a reddit model. They should be tags and you should be able to select multiple of them. Then you enable a filter to hide posts with certain tags. Then "Explicit", "Gore", "NSFW", "Spoiler", "SV", "flashing content", and "Doomer" could just be other tags.
Yeah I think the post titles are the worst bit, and people are doing those themselves. We can interpret and doom about the content in the comments ourselves without it being jumpstarted by whoever the OP might be. Kinda like how eating whole grains slows digestion to a healthier level.
My day was a comedy of errors. It’s amazing how many small things just went wrong or didn’t work. Like God zoomed in on me to fuck with.
Nothing serious but goddamn. Like I was just under a bad sign from the second I got up
Thank you so much for doing this, I know you guys do this all for free so I'm insanely grateful :floppy-parrot:
as much as I empathise with those who feel existential dread and anxiety from our present material conditions, plainly wanting to ignore the suffering of those around us and the collapse of the world around us from systemic issues is liberalism. as materialists and politically active leftists, we cannot cut ourselves off from reality, regardless of how dark and crushing it is.
segregating content always makes things less previlant, especially so on a site with such a small userbase. look at any specific com vs discussion of that idea on larger common coms, and you will see the more specific coms are dead af. if you post about fighting games in c/fighting_games nobody sees it, if you post about it on c/chapotraphouse people do and discuss it, just for example off the top of my head
I have to completely disagree with this as a liberal non solution that focuses on the idea of ignoring the harsh failures of our system because acknowledging them makes us feel bad. the world around you is still dying even if you don't see a meme about it, you're still gonna be anxious about it, and these are still the present conditions that inform every news and political event around us, to seal off discussion about that is a terrible idea.
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
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
It's really a problem of definitions isn't it? Some people consider any bad news to be doomer. Doomerism is supposed to just be defeatism. Everything is bad, will always be bad, and there's nothing you can do about it. Pointing out how the government is killing people is not doomer. It's only doomer if you suggest that there is no use in organizing/fighting against it. Yet there is another subtle difference because pointing out the individual's powerlessness against the state is also not doomer, but treating it as eternal is.
Some people just want to stop seeing bad news and that's fine but labeling bad news as doomerism isn't useful. You're just lumping everything from "covid cases reach record high" to "we're all going to die before the revolution so let's just give up" under one category.
Yes, we can put all covid news in a comm that way people can unsubscribe from it and not see covid news. But trying to pin down something nebulous like doomerism to one com just seems impractical.
Posting bad news isn't doomerism but posting collapse porn definitely is
I think basically everything in existence here in hellworld could be construed as being doomer content. Pulling doomer posts out of c/news or c/thedunktank will result in all news about the west going into c/doomer, c/thedunktank being completely relegated to twitter posts from u/neera_tanden and u/eve_fartlow, and c/news just becoming your daily China update, and the once a month occurrence of someone posting something from their own personal lives as though it was a news article as a bit.
I think it's fine to consider putting Covid content in its own zone, but like, all content about the outside world in a sick society is doomer content.
Honestly, I think we already probably have too many comms for the number of users and posts we have. A lot of the comms are quite specific and only get used rarely or by one or two users. It's good to have things be specific, but by the very same argument, then shouldn't every single post related to Canada go into c/canada, for example? Every post about China in c/sino?
How prepared are other mods to spend all day just sorting and re-sorting posts into appropriate channels? Do posters not lose interest in posting as they clarify more and more specific subjects for their thread, Usenet style? What do we do when we lose the will to sort and everything ends back up being posted into vague umbrella communities and now we have dozens of unused detritus comms that haven't had a new post in 6+ months?
I have found that in maintaining other spaces like forums and discord servers that you sort of run into this problem where you think maybe we need a new more specific channel for things, only to have channels die off. It often seems to either end up with more channels than posts, or everyone just ignoring all the channels and posting in General.
I think that a c/collapse that also encompasses climate change makes more sense than a doomer one, but I think it might be just as likely to swallow c/news and c/politics where most posts are already pretty much focused around that sort of vibe.
I think the actual right move might be to try to get people to not post extremely depressive and vague threads of wild personal speculation based on like, four Covid cases somewhere or "I'm having a bad day right now personally and this means that you are going to die a miserable death" type posts.
Tl;dr: I already have enough of a tough time trying to figure out what comm to post anything in, especially since so many are kinda dead. Maybe we should just go back to all posts being on c/main and just not post such doombait titles lmao
How about just content warning or removing content with doomer titles? Save it for the comments? On the “we’re all gonna die” post just remove and say submit with headline or diffeeent title
Yeah, I think just removing excessive titles would do the trick tbh.
I think a doomer comm is fine, but I don’t think covid stuff should be…. quarantined :kelly:
Someone who doesn’t want to doom binge can just scroll past it, but I think a title like “new variant just dropped” is ok because even if you’re trying to avoid covid posting you’d probably want to know about that. Idk
I also agree with this, I'd rather people use content warnings and censor titles than not be allowed to post stuff where they want.
Seconding this. Climate apocalypse and collapse stuff makes sense for doomer I guess.
