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.
I'm struggling to see what you did wrong tbh, other than maybe not wording things absolutely perfectly (and the fact that you get butchered for this kind of proves the problem of the toxic dunking culture. Like you'd think the months of unpaid labor would earn you more goodwill).
The hexbear userbase isn't the party. They're the consumer of a product produced and maintained by the labor of the mod/admin team. There should be input from the users, but democratic power should be in the hands of the workers, not the consumers. The low barrier of entry for becoming a mod supports this. If you want a political voice, become politically active.
I'm not sure how everything works behind the scenes, but I remember there used to be a hexbear admin team account to prevent volunteers from getting harassed and doxxed. It also made it clearer when something was a result of internal discussion versus the opinion of a single mod/admin.
Except for the fact that the toxicity came from those who wanted to critique it. Look thru both threads. You've got the group arguing for the dunk tank largely writing out long posts where they present the arguments against the dunk tank and present counterarguments.
Then you've got the other group that just keeps yelling "IT IS CHAUVINISTIC AND TOXIC" ad nauseam. There's plenty of bad faith debatebro-behaviour, but it's very clearly not coming from the dunk tank. There's no dunk tank users who decided to tell people to kill themselves, or who run around like obtuse ben shapiro losers jaq'ing off.
Not exactly. The mods are more like old artisans. They own the means of production (the site) and participate in the labor of generating content. They own the ability to post and the platform consumers use to post. They can turn off the site, ban, and make decisions over which users have no influence. You're correct in where the democratic power lies but wrong about why it lies with the admin. It's not because they're laborers, it's because they have the passwords and the admin features. Thus, this is the real material power behind the position.
This is exactly why hexbear can never be a place for organizing or a political party. The users do not have power over the platform. We're not charged rent, but we also can't hold anyone accountable for anything outside of that for which they hold themselves accountable. Websites in general are not setup to be owned by a community. They're designed to have an owner who has the power over life and death.
If we're going to do power analysis on a website, we have to meet the nature of the platform on its own terms rather than try to work through analogy.
You're simultaneously using analogy to disagree with me, while also saying we shouldn't use analogy. In any case, "ownership" of this site and the tools of management aren't an exclusive material power, they're tools that anyone who requests and meets a basic standard can gain access to. Thus it's much closer to a party structure than some abstract notion of medieval European classes.
I also disagree both that users don't have any power over the platform, and that that's the reason hexbear doesn't work as an organizing platform. The former is laughably false-- in theory, because the culture is formed through participation, and in practice, because the mod/admin team listens to user feedback to a fault and nearly anyone can join the mod/admin team.
I have opinions on the latter (Hexbear's utility as an organizing platform) but it's much less straightforward. Regardless, it's not a problem of the "hexbear masses being deprived of their rightful power over the platform by the gatekeeping mods".
The fact that people keep referring to them as janitors is incredibly revealing. It betrays a petty bourgeois entitlement and expectation of entertainment, unperturbed by the voices and existence of the workers providing it. Not to mention the devaluation and marginalization of service work. It obfuscates the amount of curation and moderation required to maintain a site's culture.
Okay so the users are petite burgeoise. What labor and capital do they own?
"Betraying a petty bourgeois entitlement" doesn't mean the userbase is literally petty bourgeois within the closed system of this site. It means the ideology being expressed is petty bourgeois. Working class people can and do internalize bourgeois ideology, just as bourgeois people can radicalize and become class traitors.
Why might some of the userbase express petty bourgeois tendencies? Maybe it's vestigial from reddit. Maybe it's a problem of how social media is organized in general. Maybe it's from living within the imperial core / anglosphere (which, unlike the organization of whatever social media site or party, is an actual material class distinction).
Whatever power dynamics might be happening on this site are far downstream of real-world relations. You can't isolate hexbear from the real world to do a "class analysis" about the mods versus userbase.
I'm not asking what power and capital they have in the real world, I'm asking in the context of the website. It's a very simple question. At the end of the day, disregarding vibes and that one post you saw, what power do users have that the owners of the site do not? If the users have less than or equal power to the owners, then there can't be an exercise of power over them.
Plus, I would like to remind everyone who read Settlers yesterday and are now channeling the power of true leftism, that we do have surveys on users. Either everyone is lying, which is quite misanthropic and portrays a view of inherent distrust, or everyone here isn't a cis white dudebro tech aristocrat from the suburbs. In case of the latter, we have to brush-off our critical thinking skills and take a bite of humble pie despite being used to whipping out the ol-reliable rhetoric. It's easy to come in and just go "My personal feelings on this subject means that everyone on the other side is not a good leftist"
And I'm saying that that's not how material analysis works, that you can't just isolate the site into a closed system and then project external class categories onto it. Regardless, that's tangential to the point at hand, which is that there's not a strict distinction between user and moderation in terms of power. The sole differentiating factor is in terms of buy-in and investment. At any point anyone can choose to volunteer and put labor into moderating the site. Thus the degree to which any distinction exists, when the opinions of the users and the workers diverge, the power should be in the hands of the workers (who also happen to be users themselves by the way).
In any case, the analysis of power you've presented (or my interpretation of it, to be fair) is sorely lacking if it's just a matter of who has the power to do what. Why do they have the power? What gives them that power and keeps others from having it? The reason there's no class distinction is that there is no meaningful barrier to entry other than willingness to volunteer and participate.
And saying certain behavior expresses cis white energy says nothing about whoever might be participating in that behavior. I won't say it's the best choice of words, but from a purely semantic perspective, anyone and everyone can participate in "white" or "cis" or "whatever" behavior, that's part of how systems perpetuate themselves. It's still very obvious that we have our roots in reddit, which is a largely cishet white site, and because of that there's still vestigial cishet white characteristics that persist in our culture.
And thanks to the top-down efforts of mods and admins over the years, we've been able to excise a large majority of them to get to the culture we have now. Trans acceptance on hexbear was not something that evolved naturally, it happened because TC69 and others utilized the power of their position to exert influence over the system that their labor was creating.
Okay I'm not going to back off of the main point to get into a semantic argument about analysis. You said that the mod being "butchered" for "not wording things perfectly" proves that the user base as a problem with being entitled consumers. You try to frame this stance in class analysis in a thread where the same exact people from yesterday come to encourage the mod. Whatever flows downstream from broader society, regardless of whatever tendencies you see, the mod is clearly not butchered.
You can see tendencies everywhere. In order to connect that with the behavioral problems of the Hexbear user base, you'll need a little more explanation than just saying the tendencies exist and they come from broader society.
The two tendencies I've mentioned are the superiority complex of reaction culture that we inherited from Reddit, and the petty bourgeois dismissal of workers, particularly service workers. The latter is the dominant ideology in the US so I'm not surprised it persists here. We've all internalized it to some degree.
In any case, both tendencies, in fact nearly all interactions here, are going to be dominated by external factors and interests. There's no "hexbear working class" and "hexbear owning class" in any meaningful sense of the words. The people putting labor into the site naturally get more sway in how the site functions, and as a communist I couple this natural flow with an ideological stance that they should get more sway since they are performing the labor.
What utter nonsense. The key difference is a group of people have access to the backend of the servers and another group doesn't. Last time I checked, I don't have admin rights to whatever servers Hexbear runs on. And I'm not talking about Hexbear's definition of admin which is closer to senior mod. I'm talking about real admins as in users with administrative rights in the backend. This is the true material difference between the admins and the rest. The class distinction, if you want to call the social stratification of a niche website that, is between the users/mods/fake admins who can't even remote into the servers and the real admins who can take down the website with a single terminal command.
This is true for every single social media website, from Facebook down to some random forum running since 2004. Mods are basically managerial workers if we want to continue using this analogy, but the real material power lies in the admins' access to the backend. After all, who pays for the upkeep of the servers? We live in a capitalist society, and in the context of a capitalist society, whoever has control over money and capital controls everything.
If the admins wanted to shut down Hexbear, they have the absolute power to do so and there's not a goddamn thing any of us could do about it. If the admins want to turn Hexbear into some shitty fascist website, they have the absolute power to do so and there's not a goddamn thing any of us could do about it. If the admins want to turn Hexbear into some sketchy website where CSAM gets regularly distributed, they have the absolute power to do so and there's not a goddamn thing any of us could do about it.
That's real power. After all, power is just the ability to define and influence phenomena. We absolutely do not have this power. Mods and fake admins do not have this power either. Mods (and fake admins) are just glorified users. But they do not have access to real material power.
Yes exactly, there is no meaningful class distinction between the users and mods/admins. The only material distinction is people with/without backend access (I'll call them developers).
For that to be relevant, though, there'd have to be an example of the developers exerting undue influence against the wishes of the broad user/mod/admin group. Not just admins/mods deciding the manner in which they organize and focus their own labor (like the purpose and structure of the comms they moderate).
In any case, the idea of doing a power analysis of a niche website seems ridiculous to me, since most of the material interests and incentives of this tiny microcosm are going to be dominated by whatever the participating individuals experience in the real world.