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.
CARCOSA, I appreciate the candor and self criticism. But we know it was not only you who created this debacle
Transparency is needed about how this decision was made, who was responsible, and how large portions of the mod team (apparently) came to view the userbase and content posted here with such disgust. The rest of the mod team are cowards for hiding behind you. Let them come and tell us that we are toxic cishet white debate bros to our faces. I'm not going to forget about what they think about me now that they have done me the courtesy of telling me
The mods who misgender and concertroll large parts of the userbase need to be outed. There's also obvious leniency for certain people. Debatebro losers like @replaceable shouldn't be in any position on this site.
I saw this post with no admin badge. I upvoted it, and then it updated to show the admin badge.
but I am stepping away from all decision-making at an admin level
No the council has decided you must stay ❤️
I'll cast my vote in favor of @CARCOSA@hexbear.net not stepping down and returning to the admin team. The point of criticism and self-criticism is to learn from mistakes and struggles so we don't repeat the same mistakes and struggles. If the actions requiring self-crit are done from a place of good intentions and the consequences are learned from, this makes us stronger. I understand that others may have stronger opinions on some of the statements made, and that's valid too. I'm not erasing that. It seems you already know that users want more important decisions to be made with more transparency and wider input, as long as we move in that direction this was a positive event.
What needs to happen, more than anything, is an open discussion on how sitewide changes should be proposed and voted on that includes more transparency, that's what it seems like everyone wants. Additionally, toxic moderators and users should be called out and made to publicly self-crit, or be removed.
Really, I don't think it was that serious to begin with. I love that we have a space that we can all be ourselves in, and many mods and admins who want to do their best to improve it. Even if we agree or disagree on what that direction is, I do think the fact that we all use this site is a testament to the myriad different vectors of value it provides. From shitposting to memes to high-effort news analysis to
, this site provides so much for so many people with different wants and needs.Those are my 2 cents as a half-year user of Hexbear. I'm not a long time user, so others should give their thoughts too. I mostly kept out of the drama because I had very serious personal issues going on the last couple days, so I don't have the same perspective as those in the trenches the whole time, I'm not invalidating those who disagree with my more hopeful stance. Really, I just want to have a fun site to relax and shitpost on, keep up with the news, and talk about whatever games I'm playing, and I love that this site lets me do that. I'm sure many of y'all feel the same.
Anyways, I'm gonna
and 
for a while. The people more invested in this drama can keep hashing it out, I'll return in a few days when this has hopefully blown over and a consensus between users has been reached.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.
I'll repeat what I already said in this thread to make sure you see it here:
You have been an exemplary admin in all of my interactions with you. Always responsive to problems and issues, always willing to hear feedback, and continually supportive of events on Hextube; your stickying of movie threads on the home page has been instrumental in establishing a consistent userbase there. The very fact that you do not seek to be admin is precisely why you must be one.
CARCOSA, come back!
can't speak for the other admins as i never interacted with them, but you've always seemed pretty level headed and come across as someone that actually cares about the community and culture of this site
you should come back (if you want)
edit: oh shit i refreshed this page and you're back o shit waddup
If you step down from the team or step away from decision making, then there's no point in any of the self-crit and learning you do! (There is, but I'm thinking like a businessghoul about the org in large.) You are now a more effective admin because you have made these mistakes and learned from them. Don't let that learn go to waste!
The decisions you made about structuring the mod/admin teams were all well-reasoned and worked for a good period of time. They were not some wild unserious foolish thing to do, they made sense.Chapo.chat/Hexbear was never my project nor did I ever intend to take it over.
This attitude of yours is one of the big reasons I do not want you to go. These few days show how easily a little bit of mod power can go to peoples heads. A little bit of admin power can have the same effect on an otherwise good type. The fact you've always been chill and levelheaded should really not be undercut as nothing less than a very important quality.
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.
proves the problem of the toxic dunking culture.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who's been around since the beginning I appreciate all the work you and the other admins have done keeping the site running and free of reactionary bullshit. This struggle session too shall pass like the stacking rocks, outdoor cats, and name change. The struggle sessions are the waves that crash against the rocks of the eternal Hexbear shore
I'm a LG user who was introduced to HB after Oct 7th and so I'm not quite aware of the full history of the community. I didn't want to comment on the initial announcement beyond making a meme about the humorous "coincidence" of it being posted on Eighteenth Brumaire because it felt like a fait accompli. Since there has been more introspection, I want to properly throw in my voice on the chance it is possible to strike while the iron is hot.
@CARCOSA@hexbear.net, I deliberately went through your past posts before writing this to reinforce my view of how much you've done for this site. Your efforts to support the messy federation process, your defederation explanation posts (which I fully supported in that case). You care about this community, and this is why you actually stepping down would be, without exaggeration, disastrous for the site. Your absence would cede ground to the more "reddit brained" members that seem to be present on the team who see their role as more akin to a reddit power mod talking down to the filthy proles rather than as comrades taking refuge from an alienating world.
I don't particularly have an opinion on the closure of the comms nor on the attempt to foster a new site culture. The real principal issue as I see it is that a "class struggle," unironically, is being promoted within the site culture via the mod/admin-community dynamic showcased in the original announcement thread. I only really post on the newsmega and when I talk there and see Mods and Admins, I only see them as fellow comrades who simply have an extra responsibility of taking out the chuds and terfs. They've treated me in the same manner as well. As this was a leftist community, in the year I've been here, I had the feeling that everyone was an equal in the shared struggle of alienation from our deeply hostile societies that have no place for leftists (and especially LGBT leftists).
The noticeable thing is the team closing ranks and making one person the messenger. There is no reason for this. The update post made with the positions of each mod clearly shows that everyone on the team has a stance on the topic and they simply are not comfortable vocalizing it to the community themselves. The point of closing the r/SLS comms was to foster a more "ideal" community culture appropos of leftists but this ideal is a contradiction of how the team seemingly is itself uncomfortable with walking the walk. Apparently there is a private mod chat and I have no doubt the team is currently discussing the community response amongst themselves there, likely commiserating about how the community "just doesn't get it." This is inevitably going to foster resentment between the mod/admin and general community "classes." You can already see it in how some (not all) mods responding in the thread already take a "we the mod team" tone and thereby solidify the "class" divide.
Aren't we all (attempting, at least) to be fellow comrades here? I'm not sure what kind of mental catastrophism the team believed was going to happen if they descended down into the "masses" from the start and properly engaged with the community to push for the idea from the outset as fellow leftists rather than donning the robes of Vatican Cardinals, confining themselves indoors and the outside masses only being left to stare at the smoke color on the chimney.
HB can operate under Democratic Centralism if the mod/admin team understands properly what that system is, rather than the "Death of Stalin" anti-communist parody of it. Democratic centralism isn't "shut up, we decided this and if you disagree, you're a new Trotsky." That's the CPUSA style of "democratic centralism" where their wrecker-hijacked "Central Committee" only comes out to force the party masses to vote Democrat. Actual Democratic Centralism is where the idea is presented, the full party gets to have their say, then the decision is make and if you refuse to allow that decision some time in trial before making critiques, then yes, at that point you can be called a "new Trotsky."
In any case, the problem is now this: by highlighting the mod/admin decision-making process, given that applying for mod positions here is hardly as rigorous as climbing the ranks of the Communist Party of Cuba, what this has done is that it is going to promote people with less than noble intentions into becoming a mod, so they can join the "inner circle." Rather than becoming mods to primarily help maintain the community, fostering new comms and smacking down the chuds and terfs, these applicants will be doing so with the hope of joining into the "politburo."
Even if the applicants were all hypothetically still comrades and not wreckers, this will inevitably lead into a downward spiral. Given that those applicants will join specifically so they can be at last among the "decision makers" and so they'll resist passing down decision-making into the community and the more this happens, the more applicants with similar intentions will join. Eventually, the mod/admin team will likely become a more insular group, reinforced by the echo chamber of the internal mod chat, which could eventually turn into a sort of "dunk tank" against the community itself. More conciliatory members willing to break to help the team's message to the community might be pushed out by the pressure of being the community's target of ire, leaving only the anonymous hardliners. Over time, this could lead to a growing disdain for the opinions of the broader community. This dynamic could foster even more resentment, eventually resembling the relationship between Reddit mod teams and their communities—or, at worst, mirroring the real-world phenomenon where "cops start to see their own neighborhood as the enemy."
This kind of exaggerated hypothetical feels justified, in my view, because this isn't just any subreddit or random forum about potted plants—HB is one of the few (literally just this site and LG at this point) genuinely leftist public online platforms in the entire Western world. The stakes here are truly higher, and the consequences of these dynamics playing out could have a far more unfortunate impact on the community and its values.
Edit: Yikes, it looks like my concerns are already coming to pass less than half a day after making this comment. https://hexbear.net/post/3871189
Well written and lots of great points. We will take this to heart when looking to move forward and enact changes that will not only prevent this situation from occurring again but improve the decision-making process for the site while bringing transparency. Thank you
Improper vetting and oversight of mods/admins is bad news when there has been doxxers, fakes, and sociopaths from the beginning. Because of the way the internet works however, this will never be able to be done perfectly. The culture of the site has to protect against stuff like this, it can't be one or two people. Having a culture that encourages posts that piss off half the userbase will always end in disaster. This isn't one person's fault, and part of it is the design of the site its self. I agree with the others who have said that badposting and fake news were always more harmful than the dunk tank. Those comms specifically are used to push lines and piss people off and have been since their inception. Just my 2c I'm staying out of this one from here on.
edit: I see some people trying to pretend like there isn't a culture of pushing lines with racism / misogyny etc, and that is really not helpful. The week of federation was a shitshow.
