Removed by mod
WTF is happening on Hexbear?
Removed by modHexbear's new head of operations just dropped, and their way of dealing with the fallout of their last struggle session is to hand bans out like candy to their concerned and disillusioned users while throwing out "epic" quips like insecure teenagers along the way coupled with their communication (and seemingly contempt) towards their own userbase which isn't helping their allegations at all and the revelations that were learned about Hexbear's moderators and admins from their most recent struggle session.
The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.
The issue wasn't the name change, everyone was fine with that and it should be done cuz the term has a racist history
The proposal that started all this was removing "/c/the_dunk_tank" (where you can post bad takes and mock them however you like but they can't be the bad takes of nobodies, so basically like shit_reactionaries_say) and "/c/the_dredge_tank" (for posting the bad takes of anyone, this was made after people got tired of seeing the lowest effort, repetitive, bad takes from random people so they could block the comm if they want) entirely and replacing them with "/c/counterpropaganda" (for posting instances of any reactionary rhetoric under the conditions that your post also had to include an essay countering the rhetoric) and "/c/gossip" (for posting only public figures' bad takes, without the essay), the arguments for and against are in the 1200 reply struggle sesh post lol
Sry if you already know all this, I'm not sure how visible this has been to other instances lol
Idk, I get the intention behind it but it became clear this was poorly thought out and was not what most of the userbase (or the most active?) wanted. In the past certain issues like this have been resolved by purges (like our mandatory pronouns and anti-transphobia and anti-misogyny stances) of anyone who disagreed or couldn't self-crit but this one does seem much more aimless and less concrete to me, to the extent it is even serious, tbh, idk :/
I don't know any of it beyond what I've been able to gather in this thread and the linked threads, I appreciate the context. Tbh, I'm probably overreaching on having a take at all, only going off of what I can gather about it. But I am also kind of biased, I think, against anything that seems obsessive over the minutiae of forum structure in a way that can fail to see the forest for the trees. I've been on a number of forums over more than a decade, including from before I had communist views, and I think sometimes the ease of exercising sweeping power gets used as a justification to be more rushed in decision-making and execution than the circumstances warrant. Most things in the tangible world have to go through more of a process, even after a decision has been made, to make them a reality; and that makes the cost of a decision seem higher. The internet has costs of a kind too, but some of them are harder to see. Like understanding how people engage with a website in the first place, why they come, where they come from, what makes them stick around or leave and for what reasons, whether what they're doing contributes to the goals of the forum, if it even has clear goals in the first place. All things that could get lost in overthinking if taken too far, but also seem to get neglected chronically across different types of leadership and subject matter of forums.