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)
Most definitely. I've made plenty of high effort posts, the trouble is that no one (outside of the news thread sometimes, that's where high effort posts get the most traction imo) reads them or engages with them. I think my last post on the Marxism community, which was a detailed analysis by a South African Marxist on BRICS, de-dollarisation and sub-imperialism, got like 9 upvotes and no responses lmao. People on here want their low effort quick to consume content, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
7 months ago the sites active sort was changed to be more like "chapo.chat" active sort, but I can not find a code repository with a commit that shows what was changed (I welcome it of anyone knows where that is). So I can't review what the difference between Lemmy active sort is and Hexbear active sort.
What I can tell you is how Lemmy sorts:
Now I think what was changed is that the decay for Active was made more aggressive.
This means that the algorithm already favors posts that attract a lot of comments. The more a thread gets comments the longer of stays on the front page. Since score is also a major factor, it means that content you can digest quickly and upvote is also highly viable content.
The Dunk Tank and The Dredge Tank were baked in a lab for that kind of math. You get fast food for up votes and fire and forget comment sections. These comms are the peak of the mountain for keeping the front page fresh and lively.
You know what doesn't do that? Marxism, Anarchism, and Theory comms. I managed to game the system with out knowing it a few days ago by including a photo and a title to an effort post that yielded over 100 up votes which is a high water mark for a post here.
What I'm saying is, this shit posting site has a default algorithm that thrives off shit posts. You can't just nuke the shit post communities and expect it to stop. The algorithm doesn't favor thoughtful discussion, long form posting,
Several comms effectively became dunk and dredge after their closure and it you didn't pay attention you might have thought they were still open. This is because from what I can tell, outside of dunk and dredge, comms seem meaningless. Dredge content in the chat comm, dunk content in the chapo comm, both in main. The mega threads seem to occupy most of the posts in the site. That's a whole other topic for another day.
Womenby reopened and no one posts there. Menby I think is open? No one posts there. No one posts in parenting, they post in the weakly thread. No one is posting in theory, Marxism, anarchism, or really any other comm outside of news, chat, chapo, main (but not always), gaming, tech.
This is a small site, it might not have the foot traffic to drive these other communities, and the active sort isn't helping. This is just my rambling but I think if I pull on this thread some more I could draw better conclusions.
We should have been a phpBB forum instead.
Reddit was always multiple steps backwards from phpBB forums, and "shitty Reddit clone but with federation" doesn't seem to be that much better. Like, we still can't even create polls, fucking shit that old-school forums figured out more than two decades ago.
I think the original idea was to create non-corporate controlled alternatives to existing social media and siphon users as enshittification happened, to create a proof-of-concept of a post-capital internet, but if the end-use-case isn't to laugh at Elon Musk's deranged takes or to keep updated on the latest Star Citizen grift idk what we're doing here.
"The purpose of the system is what it does" applies to Hexbear as well- at some point we'll have to reckon with the mismatch between capitalist social media methodology as a means to "drive engagement" against our egalitarian/utopian aims, but that's probably not happening today since this particular struggle session seems more about mod/admin/user miscommunication and infighting (being charitable) so
tag filtering rather than siloed comms or subfora would make sense to me but i guess that's not lemmy
I mean, fundamentally tags and subfora fulfill the same purpose, the issue is the sorting algorithm weighing different types of content differently
The problem with the old active sort was that the decay was so slow, you'd get weeks old posts staying on the front page and clogging it up, preventing new posts from gaining traction. So I don't know what the solution is. Going back to the old sort algorithm means that we'll never see any posts younger than a few days on the front page, because of how prolific we are at commenting on high up posts.
Get rid of all sorts except New
new comments is good too
My last effort post got 25 upbears and like two replies. I still don't mind doing them every once in a while, but that's clearly not what people are here for in the main
Yeah that's the general trend with regards to that kind of thing. I find there's more traction for effort posts on the news megathread, but that's limited to current events, which limits the posting topics. Not everyone wants to discuss war and geopolitics, and it's perfectly understandable why that is.
My experiences have been similar. Effort-posting in a reply to a news mega comment tends to do a lot better than making a unique post. Although I've often done both to try and increase the visibility of other comms.
The unfortunate thing is that I feel like this whole saga has made me less likely to contribute longer, more detailed posts. There's a difference between spending time writing a longer post or reply because you feel like you have something to add that isn't highlighted often or might be useful, and some version of it being a kind of mandated fee to post because a handful of mods seem to want it the whole thing gone but aren't willing to just make that decision and stand by it.
Some of the mods here are great and continue being, but getting one word answers followed by dickish, oddly angry, and doomer-ish rants in response to genuine questions really sucks. It's obviously not a 1:1, but it makes me feel a little like 'if they can't be arsed, why should I put the effort in?'. I've got better / more entertaining things I could be doing.
my only idea is to literally just start pinning effort posts people make. i know that probably would come with the problem of picking which ones to pin and users getting mad if they didn't pin your post but it would be the only way to force engagement to them
Certainly within the smaller Comms this would be useful.
Yeah last time I made an effort post everyone yelled at me. Getting a lot of mixed signals rn.
curious what your effortpost was?
On shooting a tsarviech
Frankly, most people crying about not enough high effort posts haven't done shit. People who have actually typed out high effort posts quickly realize why high effort posts aren't a thing on hexbear dot net, and while I don't think the vast majority of high effort posters have their head so far up their ass that they think they should get paid for their labor, there's very little point in spending more than an hour on a high effort post with almost nothing to show for it.
there is no reason to effort post here. I had a talk with an admin at one point, like a year or so ago, about potentially opening back up c/islam and I was gonna try to effort post there. but all effort posting comms are just fucking dead, there's no desire for the content even when it's there. people come to hexbear for slop, me included. you can't ban that drive out of people, you can't make them dislike one type of content and switch to another, all you can do is meet them where they're at and try to facilitate wider styles also. problem is, this is a small community, we do not have the large userbase where niche comms would have more than a dozen regular users. it is what it is, but you gotta accept it for that
Yeah, I know. I think some of the moderators have a "build it and they will come" mindset, in that they believe that if they change rules and site structure, high effort posts will be appreciated more and we'll be able to branch out and reach more people. While that is a noble goal, I don't see how that is possible for us as an esoteric web forum defederated from pretty much every major Lemmy instance. Where are all the new users who will appreciate high effort posts going to come from? Who are we going to "advertise" hexbear to?
Yeah, if effort posts are what they wanna encourage, I'm thinking why not try to highlight them and make them more accessible instead of stripping everything else away? I've only read a little bit of theory, and I think that is hexbear took a turn for the superserious I would feel uncomfortable even posting here at all. I already feel like I'm not knowledgeable enough to post sometimes, BUT everyone here is friendly and SO FUNNY and smart that I feel relatively comfortable here. The humor and shitposting is a big part of that.
I also kinda feel like if the goal is to radicalize more people, then getting rid of the "fun" parts of the site will just alienate anyone who would come for the dunks but stay to learn some theory