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”)
-
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!
This was your original contention as well, yeah? Not the ban, but the lack of notification. I think the reason for this is a mix of technological and a holdover from when launch-time wreckers were manipulating screenshots of conversations with mods. But I agree that the lack of notification isn’t ideal and would be a good idea for the mod team to review if they haven’t already
Yeah, I made this account to make a thread on that subject. idk, back when I was part of the mod team it was a normal practice to do things like "temp bans" and banning an established user without any sort of intermediary steps was frowned upon.
Hexbear has temp bans?
Not yet. Carcosa just recently posted about it
Thank you
At the time, the practice was to ban someone and indicate that the ban was to be lifted in however-many days. Typically both in the ban message and the mod chat, so another mod could handle it if you happened to not be on that day or something.
Obviously there are some issues there with elegance, but I just wanted to mention it as an example of something that's possible that isn't the current paradigm.