I think that this would be the perfect post to get this community going.
Under my direction as admin of Hexbear I restructured the internal admin/moderator order. A large part of this restructure was to shift the majority of the site decisions to a larger collective of people dedicated to the site.
At the time I also reorganized the new moderator protocol to make it easier for new mods to be added and for those mods to have the power to appoint mods at will based on a vouching system. Only moderators who submitted an application were invited to an off-site moderation discussion room.
This room is where the proposals for the site were made, discussed, and voted upon. After a proposal was finished I would often write up a statement and post it for feedback and approval so that the entire process from proposal to post had as many opportunities as possible for the moderators to give input or present changes.
In light of the most recent decision I am taking responsibility as I established this decision-making process, I drafted the announcement post, I collected and edited the followup statement.
It is clear to me that I was mistaken in the effectiveness of this approach and that a more transparent approach is needed. As well as, creating more opportunities for user input need to be added.
I am more than happy to return to the admin team if the users want me to do so, but I am stepping away from all decision-making at an admin level. I will continue to be involved with Hexbear in any capacity I can and will not be leaving as a user.
Chapo.chat/Hexbear was never my project nor did I ever intend to take it over. My hope was to keep it going another day so the people that spent hours developing, coordinating, organizing, and educating on this platform could continue to do so. Everyone that has donated to mutual aid, organized fundraisers, wrote effort posts, and bad posts have done just as much if not more than I have.
I have faith in all the other admins both new and old to keep this place going and while I am happy to give my thoughts on any aspect of the site I think the best way to self-crit is to accept my mistakes and to let the other admins take the lead.
Thank you to everyone who has sent me kind comments and to those that continuously strive to make this place better.
Yeah I totally agree. I mean, I know most of the time I post nonsense, but every now and again I effort post and it's nice that this is place I can do both. I truely believe we can both be serious, and completely stupid in one place and it can work just fine.
I enjoy people's mutual aid, organisation and news posts. I also enjoy people posting the weirdest shit about beans. The place wouldn't be the same if we lost either.
Yep, 100%! And again, if we fire admins every time they make a mistake with full intention of improving the site, where are we supposed to find trained admins who have learned from mistakes? Hoping everyone can just learn automatically? That's unsustainable.
The mods have obviously been a mixed bag, clearly there are good ones and some toxic elements. I don't have a good solution to that and others are working on that, but I don't have the time nor energy to read all of the receipts and go through that, so I'll let the rest of Hexbear decide on that aspect. I think they should be allowed to publicly self-crit, and the toxic ones should be removed.