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)

  • tls123 [she/her]
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    11 days ago

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    i present an offering to thee to temporarily satiate thine cravings for blood whilst we internally consider the feedback we've gotten

  • CARCOSA [they/them]
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    11 days ago

    Hello everyone, I want to personally apologize for how I handled this change.

    During my time as an admin I made the decision to shift decision-making from a group of admins admin to all the moderators. My reasoning is that the barrier to entry for a hexbear account to become a moderator was pretty low, and we have a 90% acceptance rate for applicants. Therefore, a mod collective is going to be the users most interested in shaping the site.

    The reason that I made this post and I edited down the discussion to the comment below is to protect any mods from harassment. Not everyone is open to defending their thoughts against the userbase and I didn't think they should have to as long as one of us was willing to engage with this post. I personally agreed with the mod sentiment that this change could be a chance to improve the site but did not mind the dunk/dredge tanks however it was a majority of mod team members that voted in favor of this change during the week+ that this change was discussed & voted on.

    I recognize I could have done multiple aspects of this better and I think it is clear from the discussion of this change that it was not the right approach.

    Another admin will be putting up a second discussion post for what we will do after some time with the current change. Closing the tanks will be permanent but the decision on if we will be opening a spiritual successor to exist alongside gossip and counterprop has not been made.

    The screenshot circulating in this thread of my statement in the lemmy instance admin chat was an attempt by me to get the drama communities on other instances closed, ultimately a failure on multiple counts.

    With all that being said, I would like to thank everyone for their input and state that I will be stepping down as admin as a result of my mistakes in facilitating the discussion, executing the change, and communicating with the userbase.

  • Sickos [they/them, it/its]
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    13 days ago

    No everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world.

    The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991.

    I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence.

    Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper.

    I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten.

    In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate.

    Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership.

    There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it.

    My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin.

    I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism).

    My [main] source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money.

    I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol.

    I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own.

    My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it.

    I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist.

    During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil.

    William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles.

    George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together.

    The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor.

    Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall.

    I am running out of walls.

    When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution.

    I am very smart and people like being around me.

  • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]
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    13 days ago

    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.

  • Hex [he/him]
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    13 days ago

    Big ups on name changes, I had no idea and it's always good to root that kind of stuff out. however downbear the removal of the concept of the dunk tank. The loweffort liberal slopbucket is a pillar of this community. It may not be the most productive, but it is an infinite wellspring of leftist-aligned content, which is always needed and lets people continue to participate in a leftist community when they don't feel like theoryposting/theoryreading. unless the vision for this website is solely theoryposting and anyone who wants to have fun has to schlep back to reddit-logo

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
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    13 days ago

    Okay, in defense of a low effort/no effort space for mockery and derision of weird liberal posts

    I find that it serves as a form of santiy check and a kind of ritual for reinforcing community and in-group solidarity. The sanity check part is important for me; we're bombarded with so much capital realism and horror every day, and I don't have other commies in my day to day life. So having a space where other people can look at random silly unimportant things and mock them helps me stay grounded and, paradoxically, engaged.

    It reminds me that the liberals all around me are not normal, neutral, or natural, that their views are weird and can be challenged and discounted.

    The low/no effort part is important bc effort requires effort. Analyzing everything is very taxing and having a goofy place that doesn't ask much of you can be helpful when you're just worn out.

    That's my two cents. I'm cool with whatever the community decides, just wanted to throw out an effort post.

  • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]
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    13 days ago

    We're decommissioning two of our top five communities, and redirecting their users to !agitprop@hexbear.net and !effort@hexbear.net Mk.3?

    Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but I don't think people frequent the piss shit owl beanis website exclusively to build a revolutionary vanguard. Part of it is an outlet to vent frustration at an absurd world.

  • booty [he/him]
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    13 days ago

    Issue: People are having fun with the dunk tank comm and that makes forum moderators mad for some reason

    solution: a series of increasingly incoherent changes and partial walk-backs to try to convince people to stop having fun with the dunk tank comm

    no-fun-allowed

    (obviously a name change is fine but seriously why do we need to keep having big dumb arguments about this shit that does not matter? we want a comm to make fun of random reactionary stuff. that isn't going to change. so stop removing and remaking such comms. either commit to that not being welcome on hexbear at all for some reason, or just let the comm be)

  • ElGosso [he/him]
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    11 days ago

    "We're banning the_dunk_tank because it's too white and cis" is just the perfect bait post wow Bravo to the mod team, you've still got it

  • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]
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    13 days ago
    1. c/gossip is a bad and counterintuitive name for the comm. Also it's exclusively for famous people? No other notable content? Who was asking for this?

    2. but also many posts there were not useful with regard to developing rhetoric and furthering dialectical analysis of that which we dunk upon.

    This is not even close to the reason why I post in dunk_tank. When did we agree that the reason for posts shitting on reactionaries was to "develop rhetoric"??

    1. These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.

    How do these changes serve that purpose (aside from the dunk tank name, which, fair enough)?

    1. I'm glad something is being done about the weird overlap between dunk and dredge tank, but this feels very much like the mod team is saying "Stop having fun, Hexbear is serious business" angery

    Edit: Thanks to @CARCOSA@hexbear.net for clarifying the announcement post. Still think gossip is a terrible name for the concept of the sub

  • Parzivus [any]
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    13 days ago

    Seems like there's a pretty big disconnect between what the admins want Hexbear to be and how the average user treats it (Reddit but leftist). Maybe something that should be resolved sooner than later.

    Honestly I have zero faith in the revolutionary potential of a Reddit clone but if people want to take it in that direction we can see how it goes shrug-outta-hecks

  • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]
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    11 days ago

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    Starting to think that the real issue is that large portions of the admin team do not view themselves as users of the site who have stepped into a community role, but rather as managers and who have contempt for the unruly, unwashed masses they are forced to oversee.

  • plinky [he/him]
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    13 days ago

    Not well thought out change, not well thought out names, 1/10. How are posts about disphits opinions gossip? We don't post counterpropaganda for a simple reason we defedded with anyone who might find it counter.

    Did you become unburdened by what has been together with dnc or some shit?

    Guess i could post anticommie propaganda into counterpropaganda comm

  • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
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    12 days ago

    Closing the dunk/dredge tanks is a futile change. I understand that often times it didn't exactly produce valuable discourse and I'm sure there were instances of reactionary posts, but "get a load of this lib/chud" is like 50% of hexbear. The dunk tank exists to contain those posts, closing that community will not make those posts go away, it will just make them clutter the other communities or the megathreads. So what if the posts on there are low effort? Who cares? If I want to read actual theory, I'll pick up a book.

    To put it another way: Many of us go on hexbear because getting mad at the same thing together feels cathartic, especially when nobody in our physical surroundings shares our political opinions. We see a dumb tweet by some liberal and we wanna have like-minded folks agree with us that it's dumb, so we go on hexbear to post it here. That's what the dunk tank is for and while it's not very productive and it's not gonna bring about the revolution, trying to stop these kinds of posts is a losing battle.

    I mean, just look at how the dredge tank came to be: Mods didn't want screenshots of tweets by random nobodies and so they implemented a rule about it, but people wouldn't stop posting them so the dredge tank was eventually created as a compromise. Because although it might be low-effort and unproductive, dunking on dumb tweets is what the userbase wants and it's what they'll keep doing. !gossip@hexbear.net is just gonna become the new dunk tank.