I know it was originally a spin off of the chapotraphouse subreddit but I don't know much else. Is it it still affiliated with the podcast? How has it grown etc? Why was the subreddit closed etc.
Give me the lore, baby
Alright I'll have a go.
The CTH subreddit got quarantined. Partly for being a leftist subreddit that was revolutionary and blasting off in popularity, and partly because it was run like a crack house and its userbase behaved like that's exactly what it was. This was hilarious and partially responsible for its popularity, but also not so good when it comes to placating admins. This of course gave them pretty easy excuses to come down on it.
The quarantine didn't work however, quarantines on reddit are supposed to kill subreddits. They're supposed to stop growing and they're supposed to go into a decline spiral that leads to them eventually just fizzling out. For CTH this was not occurring, it continued to grow albeit at a slower pace. Only a ban could stop it.
Many reasons are given for the ban, "slave owners should be killed" is the main one. I don't think it matters too much what the exact reason was because they wanted to do it and would have found anything to excuse it.
The ban came unexpectedly and the subreddit was not prepared. A very hasty lifeboat was set up on discord which turned into a shit show for various reasons because discord always turns into a shitshow.
Then Chapo.Chat was born. Eventually people decided to rename it Hexbear because association with the podcast was hurting initiatives to reach out to people, many of which didn't want to be associated with the podcast. Thus the name Hexbear was born, which worked out really because Chapo.Chat already used Hexbear as its logo, very little change was necessary.
The site started out pretty much just like r/CTH, utter chaos and a lot of emotions that probably could have led to it being closed down if various people weren't convinced to just continue the long march and pushing on. It mellowed out considerably over time.
The name Hexbear itself literally just comes from the "Look at this dope ass bear" meme that was extremely popular on the subreddit.
Show
It just happened to be the active meme when the ban happened. If we had been banned a week later we would have ended up with a different name.
Yep
tbh I still hate the name of this website and I've never found the idea that we were increasing our credibility by changing it to be convincing.
I think it was a aspirations grandeur thing; for a while there was this notion among some of the admins that this could be the place for internet leftisms, and so they didn't want to be hitched to the chapo wagon if they wanted to eclipse the pod.
In fairness, we are one of the larger explicitly revolutionary sites. Not that that's saying much.
There was also outreach happening and people kept being like "Chapo trap house?? no"
Yeah there's a lot of animosity towards the pod that isnt just the shitlib and radlib stuff that we usually write it off as. Like honestly as someone who actually listened to it regularly for awhile (I dont anymore) I find most of the accusations against it absurd. But when you try to defend it you can get some pretty strong emotional reactions from people. Do I think its based mostly on misinformation? Other than the fact that the boys are basically just on the more radical side of socdem, and the messy stuff with Vergil, yeah I do. They did engage in edgy ableism at times though. But things like the Cosby photo or the idea that the boys are transphobic are obviously dumb.
Ive also encountered people with an animosity towards the old chapo sub on the accusation that they engaged in various forms of bigotry, especially transphobia. I've tried telling those people that that was NEVER my experience with the old sub, talked about the trans cuities threads and stuff, and how Hexbear is even better because it is RADICALLY anti-trasnphobia. But that attitude exists out there regardless and its hard to counteract because once someone feels that way about something you're seen as defending reactionaries when you try to change their perspective.
People typically don't read anything and never bother to actually learn, especially on the internet. That's why the Chapo Posting Method came about. Because anybody can come in and claim anything they want, but you are the loser if you correct them like a nerd. Just shit on them instead, while they become the nerd. It doesn't matter, they haven't actually read anything and are obviously wrong, so who gives a fuck.
We'll see how this translates in federation. We are not really a crack house anymore.
tbh I still hate the name of this website and I've never found the idea that we were increasing our credibility by changing it to be convincing.
I never minded it too much, but ReBr0 mercilessly mocked us for it, in between bouts of canvassing for Beto
he turned up here soon after the site got up and running
i think he got banned within a few hours lmao
found a post lol https://hexbear.net/post/95082
Who was he accusing of being a pedophile/would be pederast in his final comments? Richardnixon's part of the convo is deleted as is the original post so idk wtf is going on lol./
That may have been when some guys from the cumtown forums (I think, or maybe a chan board) made some posts pretending to be a girl who had supposedly been groomed by an old admin (or mod, I can't remember) called Beatnik. They were one of the oldest users, and were active on the old sub too. The accusations were never backed up with any evidence, but Beatnik deleted all his posts both here and on Reddit anyway, and was never seen again.
A yeah, I remember the Beatnik situation. I assumed it was about him or Quill, both of which were unsubstantiated situations.
Wait, it was fuckin cumtown posters? Lol I’d thought it was like a 4chan thing or the
I'm not sure now, but for some reason I thought it was. I'm sure they've fucked with us before. I've been going through the archives (one of the good things about being on the modern Lemmy architecture) and I've seen a few posts mentioning the Silver Legion in relation to the Beatnik situation. It seems strange that we'd make a big joke out of them if their "reckoning" or whatever actually involved doxxing one of our members and accusing him of being a paedophile, making him leave permanently.
The real answer is that people refused to go with the superior lib.rehab choice because some random poster thought that was demeaning. Then the skerry posting started
It just happened to be the active meme when the ban happened
Wasn't it chapo.chat for the first several months?
For around its first year of existence (when it was still called chapo.chat) this site was a bit of a dumpster fire, despite having mostly great admins and users. Constant struggle sessions, user drama, some actual wreckers, and heavy-handed moding (some of it justified, some not as much) made for an often toxic environment that bled users. Capped off by one of the founders getting doxed and falsely accused by a rightist op.
Thankfully things have calmed down alot since then, and we've gone from regular exoduses of users to stable (if small) growth, with a considerably kinder and chiller community.
Even still I try to avoid dramaposts or struggle sessions just cause I remember how bad things can be when they dominate discussions.
Hold on let's be real here, the subreddit was also a dumster fire. Chapo.Chat continued what was basically exactly the same thing that had been occurring on the subreddit.
The modding was actually significantly worse on the subreddit you had several mods that would just do shit because it was funny, which was great in its own way but in no way could you call it professionally run. The subreddit was "dirtbag" in every single way.
The modding on the subreddit was good actuallyTM at least until the admin coup.
The subreddit never had the struggle sessions. It was mostly shitposting at the subreddit. The people who came to discord and Chapo chat were the too online types who took things too seriously. The atmosphere has been a lot better the last year and since TC69 left tbh
The subreddit most definitely had the struggle sessions they just didn't get voted up to the Hot section. They lived and died in /new/. Every 12 hours there was a new dprk one. TC69's work was a huge part of the atmosphere improving.
Ah my friend cth2 spawned from the depths of the guns struggle session.
How can a website be too online you want 100% uptime baby you can't get any higher
Lol no kidding. Who was the one who invited all the r/vegancirclejerkmods
More like a struggle between shitposters and mods who demanded that we read actual theory which most people refused to do. This became a problem when we were told to read LGBTQ+ theory, not reading on principle was enough for some to go on a ban spree. That and veganism struggle sessions.
I still have the trans liberation: beyond pink and blue pdf on my computer that I read the first chapter of and then forgot to read the rest 😞
I feel like I failed TC69
one of these days I will read it! and other theory
in the meantime I keep my uninformed opinions to myself as well as having nothing but love and respect for trans comrades
When the subreddit was quarantined, a couple diaspora communities were started in anticipation of a ban. One being the discord server, the other was this lemmy instance crafted up.
There's basically no affiliation aside from the origin story of coming from a sub named for the podcast.
The sub was closed over "violent threats", basically the members would not stop saying that john brown was right to kill slave owners and that slave owners should be killed. Many think that the sub was banned mostly to keep things equal when the_donald was banned. I think it was a combination of fash reddit admins taking offense to violence against slave owners, and using the_donald banning as an opportunity to say "look we hate all extremism".
Edit: lmao how did i get it so wrong, I've been here since the first days and I've totally forgotten the details of how it went down, and I was fuckin addicted to refreshing /r/cth.
it should not be forgotten that at the time CTH was banned, there existed a several-months-old moderator tiff where most The_Donald had decamped to their thedonald dot win website and as a result r/The_Donald was inactive and an almost entirely post-free ghost town
If I remember correctly, TD was actually closed for new posts for like three or four months (this was done by the subs own mods) before the admins decided to nuke it.
The admins were also acting like "slaveowners" was a euphemism for rich people in general, in order to make their whining sound more acceptable
Negative affiliation IIRC, one of the guys wasn't happy that the sub had almost nothing to do with the podcast and that they kept getting emails from chuds asking to be unbanned.
Actually the "ark discord," as it was called, was launched like the day before the ban (the ban was on June 29th 2020), someone who had word from a Reddit employee made a post about it (a lot of people thought it was fake and didn't believe it, but some people put together a discord server just in case). This Lemmy instance was then launched a little under a month later, and it was announced on the ark discord on like July 25th (I didn't see the message on the discord until a few days after it was posted).
I think there was an earlier discord that didnt take off as much that was around like, maybe even before the quarentine? I remember trying to join it, but being put off by their vetting process.
There was "Dirtbag HQ" which was around since well before the ban, I joined that but I don't recall any vetting process. There could well have been another discord though, I was a relatively casual user of the old sub for most of my time on it.
I would argue it was probably the other way around. Thedonald had already hemorrhaged most of its core posters to other splinter communities by the time the ban hit, while cth was still going strong.
Actually The Donald was completely dead and locked by the mods, and they used "banning" THAT as the excuse to ban us.
affiliated with the podcast
yes this place is affiliated to a podcastFor OP, this joke is as old as the subreddit itself, even back then the association with the CTH pod was threadbare and sometimes mutually hostile
yeah well which one hired a sexual predator? point one for the subreddit.
Which is just so
they built a brand on being snarky assholes but their relationship to the pod was frankenstein to the monster if frankenstein mentioned the monster like three times in total.
Any one have a copy of the "my dad works at reddit" post that predicted us getting bothsided by reddit a day later ?
That's our lore.
In the beggining there was a dope ass bear
The sub started as an unofficial sub for the pod. Over time it became a focal point for the " dirtbag left", unapologetically hostile and uncivil leftists who wnated to name names and apply blame where it belonged instead of playing the normal civility politics game. It was initially boosted by hope for the bernie campaign and then became a kind of maladaptive group therapy thing.
The sub culture was "all posting is good posting" and we posted a lot. We were the second or third most active sub by post velocity, in roughly the same bracket as the nba sub with millions of members. That made the sub extremely visible beyond it's membership numbers. We also gained a notorious reputation for being bernie bros when the dems were going hard on discrediting bernie's street level movement.
And when people would come on to the sub to complain at us we'd bully them ruthlessly.
All of this was embarassing to reddit. One of the far and away most active subs were a bunch of cruel leftist assholes who loudly supported bernie and were mean to everyone. Spez is a nazi, reddit is a psyop, and libs and fash alike are delicate in the face of critique, so we became the specter haunting reddit.
Seriously people were so fucking mad the subexisted. We were constantly accused of brigading although i don't think we did much. The usual tactic was to @ shitheads to lure them in to the cth sub and then crucify them.
Evetually the admins quarantined the sub on some bullshit excuse, along with most of the other left subs. But that wasn't enough to stop the red and black menace, so when /r/thedonald finally did enough terrorism to force reddit's hand they banned all the left subs at the same time on bs pretenses.
That's what eventually spurred the creation of this site.
so when /r/thedonald finally did enough terrorism to force reddit's hand they banned all the left subs at the same time on bs pretenses.
IIRC; The Donald was closed months before that by the TheDonald mods, since they moved to their own Reddit spinoff. You could only view posts, but not publish anything. So it was the opposite, they closed the lefty subs and then closed the inactive TheDonald to look evenhanded.
The bullshit excuse was "calls to violence" against slave owners who have been dead for hundreds of years. It was "John Brown did nothing wrong" that got us quarantined, right?
will menaker shut down the chapotraphouse subreddit because it kept attracting too many people to his patreon. matt christman had made a vow of poverty with an eldritch being to manifest trump into the white house because it'd be hilarious and having too successful a podcast may have had devastating consequences, it managed to claim the life of lowtax....
Latest iceberg as far as I know (updated 2023-06-18), courtesy of @WIIHAPPYFEW@hexbear.net:
Show
Web version, in case you want to search for specific text. Originally posted at https://hexbear.net/post/273309.
Your missing something I just can't remember what exactly.
-7deadlyfetishes
7DeadlyFetishes is under layer 4, Niche Obscurities. @WIIHAPPYFEW@hexbear.net got like everything
I don't know how I missed that. I even checked the other site that was linked.
I ran in to them from time to time on twitter right up until i got banned (for saying kill all marketers)
Kwestley
I was there when he linked his 9/11 video in one of the early Ukraine megas. He said that someone told him it would be a good idea to post it here, but the site wasn't what he expected. Weird shit.
Edit: Oh also, remember that AMA on the subreddit with a journalist who predicted that Epstein would be murdered in jail just a few days before it happened? That was pretty funny
I mean predicting that someone with dirt on basically everyone with power would bite the dust isn’t exactly some genius big brain nostradamus shit, I remember a very large contingent of people saying he wouldn't make it to trial.
@WIIHAPPYFEW@hexbear.net the mystery emote was the original DPRK Soldier JPEG (which I have), which was actually 53kb but horrendously malformed (through text editing, IIRC). The site would get stuck trying to render it since you can technically render it through imagemagick (in the same way that certain types of mangled html can technically render in your browser) but it takes a lot of processing time to render it due to the aforementioned mangling. The creator sent out a MEGA link with the original file to people who asked and I yoinked it and popped it into the emote repository for the bit under :mystery-emote:
I still say we don’t deserve orb gang, we threw away a perfect opportunity to court Marianne Williamson when she started making Evangelion references.
The next update should add that guy who determined that Hexbear was responsible for almost all the "violent rhetoric" on the left.
the people's podcast
hey im still in that discord, great memories, hasnt seen a new discussion since 2020 lmao. i miss Quill
Hex was conceived in a Paris brothel, fathered by a liberal priest and a notorious whoremonger from Brussel. As far as we know, there was no mother involved. From the beginning life was disturbing for young Hex, certainly it was no Paddington "bell vita". At the age of 18 (months) Hex was placed into foster care by the French Aide sociale à l'enfance (ASE), which operates within a strong framework on a territorial basis, with priorities and protocols being decided in each of France's 101 départements. Unknown to most, the agency is source of a notorious human trafficking network, and so it was that young Hex found themselves living rough, on the mean streets of René-Goupal, a notorious quarter of Montreal, or as the Chicagoans pronounce it, Moan-real.... (TBC, should sufficient interest manifest itself...)
It started as a good subreddit. I was the only actual leftist on the subreddit though.
Historical bit: Shoutout to
and the Kerryposters as well! I forget if the kerryposters were just mega-shitposters or actual wreckers, but the Silver legion guys (guy? I don't know how many there actually were) were so fucking melodramatic about their wrecking attempts. Some of their self-aggrandizing quotes are still used as site taglines today!The Kerryposters were most definitely wreckers, and absurdly persistent ones at that.
My favorite one was when they gave a Hexbear apocalypse date prediction and then the site actually crashed on the date they gave
OMG the Silver Legion !! , that was great ! what a fun little period in Hexbear history...
Oh god yeah those guys were great, that time they pretended that that PSL member who publicly left was one of them in disguise was also pretty funny. though it's a shame she left because she seemed pretty cool
I think we still have parental rights on Matt Christman
lol, lmao
is wayy too far down the list lol.
