One of the easiest ways to strengthen a community against attacks is to shine a spotlight on the behaviors shown by people attempting to sabotage it. This is done by labor organizers in real life to strengthen a group of workers against union busting, for instance.
The term often used for this is “inoculation”. Similar to being vaccinated once you are aware of an attacker, the effectiveness of their behavior decreases.
So Hexbear comrades, what patterns have you noticed in wreckers, trolls, and feds? Comment in the thread and I’ll update this post to include your feedback.
Terminology
Troll
:troll:
Standard internet bog person. Not particularly clever or inventive. 4chan-tier. Nothing in their brain but slurs.
Wrecker
:silver-legion:
Typically fixated on the site, repeat and/or sustained activity. (Eg Pumpkin Spice Flintstone guy). Might be a reference to an old USSR term for saboteurs in the party?
Fed
:fedposting:
Rare (?). Tries to encourage illegal behavior. Bad at it. Often doing it just to see who corrects them and in what ways.
Patterns I’ve noticed
General
:cissues:
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new account with slightly “off takes” that gradually becomes increasingly aggressive
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“just asking questions”
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“innocently” brings up incredibly specific past struggle sessions
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tries to position obvious shitposts as sincerely held opinions that somehow reflect poorly on the site (eg “everyone loves hunter biden”)
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attempts to take other user’s sentences out of context and spin it into an argument
Wrecker Types
Fresh Accounts without History (FAWH)
:amogus:
These are accounts created in the last few weeks with little to no activity FAWHs indicate ban avoidance, shell propaganda accounts, and/or a desire to hide a pointed agenda. Identify and counter this by checking post histories.
Defrosted FAWHs
:corporate-art:
These accounts behave similarly to FAWHs but show a much older registration date combined with long periods of low activity, reflecting history editing or dormancy. They will occasionally only have comments at or around the time of struggle sessions. Identify and counter this behavior by checking post histories.
Drive-by Accounts
:stupidpol:
These accounts post bigoted or inflammatory comments in active threads then delete/edit their comments a day or two after the submission dies to obscure the pattern of their activity.
This is hard to spot unless you check back in with your suspected trolls or seek them out by reviewing. If you catch them in the act it's hugely indicative of subversive intent.
Identify and negate this by monitoring suspected trolls for post deletion and reporting before they are deleted. Also quoting especially aggressive replies so they can’t edit it away.
I’ll update this based on other’s comments. Viva la Hexbear!
We just established that account age is worthless, didn't we? And there's an implicit ideology in the OP that is really toxic along "everyone I disagree with is a Russian bot" lines.
I agree that that one respondent should control their language, but that still wouldn't be enough for anything but this specific case. A lot of what the disagreements are are on political and moral issues. It's normal and expected (and indeed happens regularly) that people think negatively of someone disagreeing with them, but then that just means there's like a two comment exchange and then the person is banned when a Mod gets around to it.
If I oppose your opinion on, let's pick an example, the attitude we should take towards sex work, are you not going to call me an asshole for it? And I'm not even saying you shouldn't call me an asshole for it, but let's counterfactually assume I'm correct and you are not on that specific issue. You will still be morally outraged at me, and probably I you, and then I will be banned for being an "asshole" (which, again, is a reasonable impression to have of someone who is supporting views you think are immoral) and then nothing changes and you remain wrong.
There is no way of being "civil" enough to circumvent the conflict of moral beliefs, you will think I'm an asshole either way, that's what moral argument usually is. That can't be a basis for a ban by itself if you want to even pretend to yourself that you're practicing half-decent epistemology.
Moderators do not operate on the level of epistemology. Bad faith actors make a point of being walking thought experiments to waste your time. Moderation’s purpose is social and trying to disentangle it from the murkiness of social nuance is a bad idea. Standards can be put in place, as can checks on power, but it can’t be divorced entirely without rendering it pointless
Read the rest of the comment
Done. Now what?
My point was that moral disagreement makes someone "an asshole" no matter how carefully they choose their words. That's not a jab at the site culture, that's just how basically any society I've ever heard of functions. Because of that, if "being an asshole" is sufficient to ban someone, you are banning moral disagreement, which is a little hazardous.
The site ideology has crystalized over time because of this, and some elements of that are actually really good, e.g. :some-controversy: , but some I think are holdovers from when the community was more of a "standard radlib but ruder" space.
There may be some contradictions in the fact that we purge core usership along ideological lines. Typically, that sort of purge is more effective in leadership, but the goal of the site is not to be a vanguard party in and of itself.
But it sounds less like your concern is with holding ideological standards and more with the standards set for specific topics.
Well, I guess I mean that the ideological standards should perhaps be "higher order" and so stances on specific issues in the world should have some leeway so long as they are argued from a reasonable position (e.g. there are legitimate communist criticisms of the CPC, and then there are radlib, neolib, and hard-right criticisms).
If I could just have my way, I'd say "ban liberal reasoning", but I got a :who-must-go: for that one, so I'll take what I can get.