Hello users of Hexbear, we wanted to inform you that we are going to be locking the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank communities. We have created two new communities /c/gossip and /c/counterpropaganda to serve a similar but clearly distinct purpose than the dunk/dredge tanks.
Not only is the dunk tank a term that has racist origins, but also many posts there were almost no effort and often times requiring later edits to show how they weren't reactionary, not useful with regard to developing rhetoric and furthering dialectical analysis of that which we dunk upon.
To that end, we wish posts of reactionaries to be placed in !counterpropaganda@hexbear.net along with an accompanying explanation (as simple or complex as desired) with the intent of countering the reactionary propaganda in the post body, as of now comments are not subject to the same rhetorical rigor rule.
For the posts that are not "low-hanging fruit' of notable people we ask that you use !gossip@hexbear.net .
These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.
Any moderators of the dunk tank or dredge tank that want to be a mod in the new communities let me know.
Any users with questions or comments please use this post, this change was made at the behest of the entire Hexbear mod and admin team. We will be looking for more moderators in an organized volunteer drive shortly, if you wish to submit an application you may send it to me via hexbear or matrix direct messages.
Use this post as a place for discussion to these changes. We will keep things as they are for 2 weeks and then reflect on the feedback, including this post: https://hexbear.net/post/3858346
As a personal addendum I am sorry if the closing of the tanks these changes removes a beloved space on the site and if you want to suggest a community to replace them you may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
Sitewide or community changes come from proposals put forth from the mod team, discussed, and voted on by the mod team.
Any users wanting to suggest a community to replace the tanks, may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net current discussion is here https://hexbear.net/post/3858346 or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
You may also consider using !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml as a substitute for dunk/dredge tank posts as well
The mod statement can be found here: https://hexbear.net/comment/5613033
Application
What is your Hexbear username? Do you have any preferred pronouns? What are your thoughts on capitalism? What are your thoughts on imperialism? What are your thoughts on trans rights? What are your thoughts on racial justice? What do think about current and previous protests around the world? What are your thoughts on Veganism and Animal Liberation? Do you have any experience with other leftist online communities? What did those experiences teach you? What is your approach to moderation, and how do you work with teams? How do you deal with online drama and people who try to start things for the sake of it? What current comms would you be interested in moderating? Do you have any ideas for community engagement? What is your general time availability? (Time zone, amounts, common browsing times, etc)
I don't find fault in changing the names because of the history, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little bummed out by the direction of this. It feels like having your sweets taken away and replaced with vegetables.
I mean this politely, but sometimes I think people here want this website to be more than it is.
Oftentimes. There was talk of getting rid of the news mega to "support community organising and growth" at one point.
Some people want this website to be something other than a website, and I don't really understand it. I also don't understand how they think a website can be something other than a website.
Hot take: this sentiment Is liberalism and reddit brain. Posting on a webbed site is not organizing
I love you nerds to death but there's no way in hell I'm letting hexbear leak into the real world
I dunno I wouldn't mind meeting people from here and doing some kind of table top thing
There's a ttrpg discord
I agree
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What the hell was even the argument for that?
The regular mega was seeing less activity, so if we got rid of the news mega then all the people would post in the regular mega instead.
Completely unrelated but democrats are silly for saying that third party voters cost them the election, because that assumes all third party voters would vote for them.
Amazing.
It didn't happen because people pointed out it would be silly. I think we're also whipping up a bit of a frenzy in here, and we should remember we're not being ruled over by despots. We are on a niche webforum and the worst case scenario is that we
unironic make-Main-the-only-comm posters but specifically for this site's various megathreads is very funny to me.
I've never really understood the megathread, especially not if we wanted to have more activity. It seemed like it was advocated for by people who wanted to turn hexbear into an oldschool bulletinboard forum. Lots of people wanted to get rid of votes entirely as well.
The only mega thread that makes sense to me is the news mega, and that's in large part because it still links to an overview of the big news that have happened. The regular mega makes no sense to me. I try to interact with it once in a while, but it feels pointless. If that's the format peope enjoy, why not go on mastodon or some other leftist twitter-clone? There's a large group of users who seem to enjoy it though, so I think it would be silly to shut it down.
I remember sometime after chapochat went up there was a discussion about how "serious" the site should be and I think the consensus at the time was not very - and I agree with that.
This place would have to be completely rebuilt from the ground up for it to become a "serious" space, and it would no longer be what I'm fairly confident most of us come here for.
I'll concede that I'm wrong if and when effortposts go through the roof as a result of closing these two comms. I won't be holding my breath.
It’s essentially impossible to create some international internet “organising” space. We’re all anonymous, the opsec implications are beyond idiotic, and first and foremost organising is done at a local level. Especially the kind of praxis people that are on this website are (or should be) engaging in.
Sure, if you want education, if you wanna be marxists.org but with a forum attached, by all means. But that really is not this website. It would have to be nuked from orbit and completely rebuilt.
Exactly. I really do not understand what the point of this is supposed to be. Don't get me wrong, I sincerely appreciate all the time and effort that has gone into building this site and keeping it running from the very bottom of my heart, but again, this sort of top-down "you don't get to do this anymore because [insert vague not actually explained reasons here]" is not what I believe most of us signed up for.
I'm fully onboard with closing the dunk tank due to the implications of its name, but you can't use that reasoning for just shutting down the entire concept of what it was meant to be for. There doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent ideological basis for this decision (or if there is one it is yet to be presented), it's looking like it's just "we don't enjoy this type of content, so neither can you". And no, going "it's liberalism" without any further elaboration, just isn't going to cut it.
Oh, and if anyone reads this comment and finds themselves overwhelmed with the urge to reply with some variation of "you are way too online and you need to log off", I already agree with you. One hundred percent. I absolutely am and I absolutely do, but that's easier said than done. And I could actually provide you with a clear explanation of why that is, unlike what we're getting on the issue we're currently discussing. So just don't bother.
Especially not when a great many users have written thoughtful posts arguing for maintaining the dunk tank.
It's funny how many of the users who dislike the concept of "dunking" are the ones doing cheap low-effort dunks in this very thread. On top of that they are going after their own comrades, treating them with toxic hostility, instead of liberals or chuds.
For all the people who say they dislike dunk tank content, it strikes me as odd to see how easy dunking comes to you. If the logic that "dunk tank gives bad rhetoric" held up, wouldn't the roles be reversed?
But also if you start sounding too radical, you're a Fed.
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That just sounds like a mod who no longer wants to mod so they shut the place down instead of passing it on
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Agreed. The dunk tank was/is as much a sanity check as a place to dunk. It's not just making fun of weird lib shit, it's a space where you're with people who "get" it, so you can kind of re-affirm that you haven't gone completely mad when you're shipwrecked amid a sea of liberalism.
Yeah, by all means, change the name, and make a dedicated counter propaganda community! But there also has to be a time and place for having some fun. This is Hexbear, not The International Lenin School
Can someone help me understand the problematic history of these terms? As always it's a safe bet that any classic American trope is probably racist asf
The dunk tank at a carnival used to just be a black guy sticking his head through the hole
America God damn
In the words of Reverend Wright, god damn Amerika.
This really bums me out. Where does the dunk part come in? Do i even want to know
There was an intermediate stage where the guy in the tank was a black guy
So the head through hole thing was likely called something different but the dunk tank is explicitly derived from it? Not trying to argue for the use of the term, just curious about the history
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunk_tank#Origin
Cw: racism, slurs
Yeah I don't believe a leftist would make a comm named after that practice... It seems much more likely that it's an unfortunate connotation and somebody instead thought of making a comm for people getting dunked on and they thought it would be fun with naming it after a bit of a trashy method of containing things. Could easily have been called the_burn_tank or whatever.
Haven't seen the post people talk of though, so I could be wrong
Well, a "dunk tank" is a thing that is still done at carnivals, fairs, and the like even today. It does have exceptionally disgusting racist origins even though most people don't know about that (this is itself a ridiculously common phenomenon in the US: seemingly benign things with racist origins). I think you're right that the name for it here was derived mostly from the fact that we're dunking on bad things, and "dunking" on something that way, as a term, has its origins in basketball. But the play-on-words with the carnival thing was intentional. Innocent of course, but still intentionally a reference to the carnival dunk tanks as a kind of pun playing with the newer slang from basketball dunking. So as a name for a comm, it's about both, if that makes sense. At least that's my understanding.
We could remove the racism and have an even better play on words by changing it to the_dunk_court
Now it's both a basketball court and a court of law and we can make puns around that
I didn't even think about the pun lol. Yeah the carnival thing is fucked up
Commonplace terms with now obscure origins can end up being used innocently when in fact, their origin is highly racist, sexist, etc.
I doubt there was any malice to the name, but we should still get rid of it.
Oh I completely agree! I just thought the "dunk" wasn't derived from there, but basketball terminology
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I don't remember if the post mentioned it, sorry. Safe to assume it was bad.
That's my assumption about everything tbh
yes and yes. it was called African Dodger or Hit the N****r Baby
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2012/october.htm
Absolutely vile and disgusting
Damn, really? I thought it was that seat thing that dropped you in to a tank of water if someone threw a ball at a target.
That's the second version that came about because it's less lethal to the target
You can still do the same thing in !gossip@hexbear.net, its just restricted to public figures
What's lost is the links to 500 comment threads where people collectively mine out the craziest thing you've ever heard anyone say. Sure those messages all trickle down from those public figures, but they'll never be as weird or funny as the synthesis of a random assortment of those messages in the mind of a nato radlib from Connecticut.
Good riddance honestly, i dont value those posts at all
Which is why there was a comm for it so you could choose to interact with it or not. I don't value everything on hexbear either (fakenews for example), so I block those comms. Other comms I just ignore. Not everything has to be for me.
Yeah I don't get the sentiment I see from some users, not just in this thread, but in general. "I don't enjoy the content of that comm" - If the content isn't bigoted, then just block the comm. I don't understand why we decide to break up c/main to foster a decentralised comm situation, trying to foster the growth and integration of a bunch of disparate communities, and then complain when we see the development of different comm cultures and userbases. We have a furry comm, which I've blocked because I'm not into that. Should I want us to remove the furry comm for site-culture or whatever reason?
It depends. If people are enjoying the furry comm, it should probably be removed because it distracts people from revolutionary agitation
Yea the trend of creating a comm and then when it gets too popular and too many people are enjoying it killing it and trying to replace it with something nobody asked for is a pretty wild strategy.
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@replaceable@hexbear.net is one of the moderators of The_Dunk_Tank
Lmao why the fuck would he mod a com full of content he dislikes?
I honestly don't know. I'm wondering if all of this wouldn't have been better handled by handing off moderation to different volunteers, but afaik @replaceable@hexbear.net is the only mod who has commented on why this was done. His comment was more insulting than helpful and I don't know what any of the other mod's motivations were.
Unsubscribing or blocking a comm is reasonably simple. It's why i didn't see posts from videos because i will never turn my sound on
I enjoy being able to gawk at the weirdness with other people who get why it's so bizarre. I can't do that with lib friends, they don't really understand. It's like a cultural bonding thing.