Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
Hello users of hexbear, I have gone back and tried to unban everyone from the past couple days related to this struggle session.
I was offline most of yesterday so I missed what happened.
From the bottom of my heart I am deeply apologetic to everyone who was hurt by the statements and actions of the past few days. I know it will be a long and tough road to regaining back the trust of the userbase.
We are going to let this post sit for a couple of days and then move towards rebuilding. I'm back today and am happy to answer questions.
Please bear with me if I fail keep up with questions and comments. It's quite late here, but I'll do my best to address things and will link and pin Q&A's here
"Why were we banned in the first place?" -NewAcctWhoDis
"Just to clarify, most of this is just around @Alaskaball@hexbear.net being banned and that was something they did to themselves?" - radio_free_asgarthr
Several questions and comments on site culture, not forgetting about chauvinism issues, and more - cowbee
Why did you quote @radio_free_asgarthr@hexbear.net asking a question about the Alaskaball thing? The answer to his question is actually "No, most of this is about completely different things, Alaskaball just did a poorly timed bit with some confusion on gendered terms, but that was resolved and is just a tiny blip in this whole debacle which has many facets involving admins and mods complete disregard for the users of this site, which in turn has many of those users very upset."
I am trying to understand, I guess the issues with the admins and mods goes deeper than Alaskaball, but I guess I don't know what is happening other than mods maybe being a little ban happy?
Literally no one is upset about the Alaskaball thing and it was only for like 20 total minutes that anyone was before the matter was cleared up. Pretending it has anything to do with the core of the struggle session is just yet another in the seemingly endless series of shameless admin lies.
Is it the large amount of bans flying around and some of the mods stepping down? I am still trying to understand what is happening.
At this point it's like 4 struggle sessions stacked on top of each other. In short, the mods/admins still hate the dunk tank and are mad that they failed to kill the dunk tank using rule 8 ages ago. So they tried a new strategy which was wildly unpopular, insulted and condescended to and banned loads of people for expressing the unpopularity of this strategy, and then repeated. Like 3 times.
Wait, so this all boils down to the dunk tank/dredge tank struggle session, and everything else is downstream of that? seriously?
This is my understanding of it.
The dunk tank stuff is an incredibly minor thing, that should have been easily fixed. Everything else has just been logs thrown on a paper fire over and over again.
It's all incredibly silly and it seems like nobody in this team understands that less is more when dealing with minor drama. Responses to drama should be kept proportional to their size, if something is major and deserves a major response fair enough, but if something is minor and you give it a major response then what you do is immediately blow it up into a major issue instead of keeping it the incredibly minor thing it should have been all along.
In this case the entire admin and mod team should STOP FUCKING POSTING.
Seriously. Stop. Just stop. It's that fucking easy.
I think the issue is that the argument around misogyny and "white cishet bro culture" hasn't actually been made, with users being told to go look at the modlogs as a poor replacement for a good lesson on what characteristics are objectionable.
I don't really get it but I'm not a big tank poster, I haven't seen anything that I wouldn't see on somewhere like fauxmoi
It also doesn't help that it's clearly not the only issue some people have with the tanks, with others finding them toxic
As a total tangent, I find the use of the term chauvinism very strange, like I did feminism at uni and it's definitely a word I would associate with writing 50+ years ago (I assume being used here as a shorthand for male chauvinism)
Yeah I'm still confused by it all, too. We're clearly not being told the whole story. It sounds like some mods got their feelings hurt by tank posters, I guess. But if that's the case, specific examples of that should have been included in their stickies. You can hide them in a spoiler so people who don't want to read them don't have to. Essentially a tiny modlog with just the examples in question included. But to say that I have to go scour all of the modlog looking for some arbitrary comment and I don't even know specifically what I'm looking for is more than a bit asinine.
I think you underestimate the number of mods that were absolutely shitting on the admins in the private chat. Seriously, last night made me lose two weeks of sobriety, stop including "mods" when this was clear as day just TC69 being a petty shithead
I understand some stuff may have happened behind the scenes.
Anything that isn't user-facing is being seen even less by the community though and will therefore create even more confusion when the response is huge walls of text about it.
As far as the 99% of the community that didn't see private modchat stuff are concerned, the situation is as I laid out and they're all confused and completely feel waylaid by what they perceive as a massive overreaction to it and an incredibly confusing pace of events.
And I'm in control of that? I invited people from outside the official mod chat into a different mod chat to talk about things safely, I really did my best. If I had the energy to respond to people insulting me as a mod, I'd be sharing tons of information from the mod chat. And as someone in the mod chat, I can firmly say 90 percent of the real fallout for this belongs to TC69 and AlaskaBall. Even from the posts it's clear as day that it's just TC69 and AlaskaBall doing this shit.
I will say, mods (or most fairly well read people) are against the "dunk" culture (me included). We literally have known doxxers in this community that haven't been banned due to dissapointing admin inaction. There is a very firm split between the mods doing unpaid labor on this site, and the most of the admins. We all told AlaskaBall to go fuck themselves last night very directly. Seriously, so many of us have had to deal with serious backlash from this shit with no warning, we are a bunch of volunteers getting absolutely shat on by people we try to help. That is so fucking hard to work through, and my therapist would probably tell me to delete my fucking account.
I get the confusion, I never check the mod chat, I'm awful about it, I was confused too. But even when you look at the fucking modlog, there is no mod action, IT'S ALL ADMIN! And just like capitalists, TC69 and Alaskaball are simply farming out all the mods to take the actual backlash of this shit.
I did not say you were in control of some things happening in closed spaces.
What the team is in control of is communication outside of those spaces. If something happens among a tiny proportion of people, it's not actually a "this needs community-wide acknowledgements and ritual beatings" type of thing. It's among those relevant to the matter.
We all told AlaskaBall to go fuck themselves last night very directly
Is this about banning themself as a bit or something else?
Can you dm me a picture or something? That's... Psychopathic behaviour or I dunno. I can't wrap my head around being able to be chill and buddy-buddy and then doing that unhinged shit to the very same people
There were a lot of chat messages last night, I just scrolled back for 9 minutes and didn't find the message because of how much we were pissed at this. Nakoichi and other admins we recognize weren't even in chat until about half way through and ended up catching some strays from me. They started defending TC69 and AlaskaBall without context and I directly told them to go fuck themselves. Y'all know me, I try to keep my mouth shut without good reason, I can firmly say that all the serious admin abuse that's happened in the past few days has been TC69 and AlaskaBall.
Yes, we mostly all agree that the dunk tank is toxic af. I'm not going to try to deny any truths whatsoever. But TC69 and AlaskaBall essentially nuked all good faith between staff and users and I genuinely hate them for that
Edit: was talking about the admin alts, something I found most troubling. Melina can eat shit
Thanks for the effort. I don't know what to believe since that behaviour was so... I can't imagine thinking oneself a leftist and writing that. I feel betrayed if that's true, especially since alaskaball was posting about looking for them and so on. If it's really them, then they should have nothing to do with the site. The things they wrote are so messed up.edit: big misunderstanding, never mind
modlog claims it was melina, who definitely makes a lot more sense as a culprit ngl
No wonder they went nuclear when I mentioned the fake news comm then....
lmao wait really? i missed that, but damn that's super funny.
like wearing a ski mask and a sandwich board with a picture of your face and home address to a bank robbery
Yeah, after I made this response I got told to die basically.
I really think my comment wasn't that bad. I was just trying to point out that trying to make hexbear into a super serious website by banning the dunking comms, but still having a community called fake news, and one deliberately made for bad posts, didn't make sense.
talk about disproportionate, goddamn. i'm sorry you had to deal with that. you bring significantly more of value to the site than they ever have.
and i completely agree with you, for what it's worth. i also think it's incredible for them of all people to be calling for or celebrating the gutting of "unproductive" or unserious comms.
I had no idea that Melina was on the modding team. Kinda weird that someone problematic enough to need two dedicated containment channels would have an elevated voice in the larger community.
I think the admins genuinely don't know who did it and perhaps will never know.
yeaaaaah I won't bother to sugarcoat it, i honestly did consider that it could be a wrecker taking advantage but it felt like such an unhinged thought that would require a ridiculous level of hatred for the community as well as access to somewhat insider info, so i discarded the suspicion for the more reasonable one.
learning it was melina instantly made it make perfect sense lol
>fae went through the trouble of creating 12 accounts
is this to do with the
debatebro[x]@thelemmy.clubaccounts? (i am getting more lost the longer this struggle session goes on despite having been lurking the threads since they started, i've literally had to document everything in chronological order on a mediawiki page to wrap my head around it.
)Yes. The wrecker decided to capitalize on the rogue admin desaster by essentially framing the rogue admins as even worse
I think that's being more generous in ascribing to the deviousness of the banned poster in question than the occurrence warrants.After poking around the mod report box, I'm being led to believe this had been more of a month long+ grudge against certain posters by the banned poster as there's been multiple occurances of targeted DM harassments.My current conclusion is that this was primarily one of the many intersecting coincidences that occured in the chaos of the climax of the story stemming from a user with a long history of engaging in this hostile behavior. That is to say this was not premeditated but simply an act of passion of the moment.I'm revising my hypothesis based on new information that there is possibly an additional third party arsonist that simply saw the wildfire going and decided to do everything they could to stoke it until the constant and consistent bans outweighed the effort making new accounts. While it doesn't exonerate fae for their improper behavior beforehand, I do apologize should the truth be that you were scapegoated in coincidence to the incident.
Yeah, as soon as I realized who that "beluga" worm was, it was clear that this wrecker tried to use the rogue admin desaster as a launching point for an attempted wrecking
I wonder if that was the same person as the wrecker we had on lemmygrad a while ago (a reactionary sleeper account that created several extra accounts after being banned, and which, coincidentally, was also on my blocklist, just like this one)
ooohh perhaps. i don't claim to know much about where they came from but i certainly wouldn't be shocked if it were a habit. fae seemed to deeply dislike most of the people here outside their little friend group (the other fakenews folk)
When someone I don’t like on vibes finally gives me an actual concrete reason
Edit: did not realize that was dsplayer too Jesus Christ. Good riddance again lmao
just giving a +1 that the displayer thing was mentioned in mod chat and alaskaball never said the alts were them, just the poorly timed self-ban
"No superiors can relieve me of my duty, you bulldozed them all to a mass grave for trying to free humanity."- Comissar Iosef Lilianovich Dros on why we'll never stop posting
Bit idea: report all mod and admin posts
spoiler
Don't do this folks
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I am still trying to understand the ins and outs.
Yup. Admins can't stand that the users of this shit posting site want a comm where they can post low effort dunks. That's the core of it. At every opportunity the mods and admins could have just stopped antagonizing the users of the site for no reason, and at every opportunity they have instead doubled down with some of the worst and most offensive arguments I've ever seen from supposed "socialists."
I mean, there was some discourse about gossip having some gendered/misogynist overtones, but other than that, it seems like just a simple reshuffling/renaming. How did this go so far off the rails?
It's not a renaming. Essentially, they had one comm where you're allowed to post low effort dunks of celebrities, and another comm where you're allowed to post high effort refutations
of random losers. The old dunk tank / new dredge tank would, once again, be removed.IDK, I see some use in moving/categorizing things along that axis. But things seem to have gotten much further along than just the exact splitting of the two comms for mocking reactionaries.
Ok but whatever you 'see some use in' the point is that that is wildly unpopular. Absolutely does not fit the culture or desires of the user base of the site. We just want to post the shit we like posting. If you don't want to see that content you're perfectly capable of blocking it. I think the fakenews comm is bad, mean-spirited, unhelpful, useless, awful in every way. I blocked it (and the person who made it) the day it was made. I've never been affected by its existence since. Why exactly do we need people to remove comms for content that they personally don't like, when those comms are among the most popular on the website?
Bingo, it's like banning cth because you don't like the word cracker or whatever. Like, that's a core part of the site. I feel that if an admin doesn't like a core part of what comprises Hexbear ideology and aesthetic, the problem isn't with Hexbear but with them. They should go join a different instance.
That's where it originated but it is well beyond being about that alone now. As just one other little event to mention here, it was revealed that our main admin was telling other lemmy admins about this as a plan a week before any hexbear users were told about it. That admin (who has since stepped down amid calls for them not to, so they may return) told us that they were lying to the other lemmy admins to try to get them to remove their dunk comms, and that they weren't lying to us. But that is as weird as it sounds.
One of the things that was revealed by showing mod chats and mod reasoning for the change was that they were saying the people who like to dunk here are toxic cis-hets exclusively when that is clearly not true and got a lot of our trans and queer users who enjoy dunks rather upset at being told their behavior is toxic cis-het. Plenty of misgendering ensued as well.
There's also a person who has been making alts and harassing people who express dissatisfaction with this unilateral mod/admin decision and it is almost certain that this chronic harasser is herself a mod of some comms here.
And there are plenty of other things going on with this too, so hopefully that gives you an idea as to why this is beyond just being about some comm changes. I'm also exhausted and probably didn't explain things well, but again, I hope that gives you a better idea what's happening.
Okay, so this is mostly just being stuck watching my [internet community parental figures] fight.
If you really want a good idea of what's been going down, you should skim the major threads where it has been going down:
https://hexbear.net/post/3856299
https://hexbear.net/comment/5613033
https://hexbear.net/post/3867510
https://hexbear.net/post/3871189
bonus lemmygrad thread: https://hexbear.net/post/3872357
Also important: https://hexbear.net/post/3866246
So in watching a lot of this go down, yes a lot of people were pissed about the handling of canceling the tanks, but what REALLY pushed it all overboard was someone,
presumably a modwho was confirmed NOT to be a mod but was thought to be, making a bunch of alts (if you search the mod log it's the "debatebro" accts harassing the upset users. Misgendering them, infantilizing them, telling them to kys, etc etc. Many users felt that that issue wasn't addressed at all. Hence people feeling like the admin team was letting that shit slide, which really pissed everyone off. That's where shit REALLY started to pop off. That, combined with there seeming to be multiple different reasons coming from admin about why the tanks were closed, then a controversial mod figure coming back after years and just banning everyone and admin turning this whole thing into a bit and posting instead of either ignoring things or answering questions, which just made people feel even MORE disrespected.The person who was making the alts was not a mod and does not have any unbanned hexbear accounts, the instance they were using to make the wrecker alts has been temporarily removed from our allow-list.
Gotcha, okay if that was posted somewhere in the comments I totally missed it obviously and I'll edit my comment to reflect that to avoid the rumor mill from circulating.
Also, I do wanna say that having to handle all of this must be tremendously stressful and I appreciate you really trying to hold it all together. I really don't think a lot of the grievances aired were aimed at you personally and I hope you were able to separate that for your own mental health. I do agree with a lot of points made by users as this thing devolved but I also believe that some people were doing way too much in the beginning and took it way overboard. I wish that the conversation could've been more productive. I truly believe that yall are taking this feedback into consideration, and to me Lyudmila's post really speaks to that more than anything. Seems to me that having a broader conversation, or town hall as you will, about conduct of both users and mods can really strengthen this place and hopefully the site can become more welcoming to the people who feel turned off by it because that's IMPORTANT! Undoing all if the -isms is an every day practice, it's short sighted to think it has been or ever will be "fixed" but maybe moving into the future there can be regular, ongoing feedback sessions about the health of the site with the broader community??
Anyway sorry for the ramble from someone who lurks, just wanna say thank you for maintaining a place that has felt so comfy and has been a refuge from the libs during dark times
thank you for the reply, I did take some time to do exactly that emotionally.
At this point it's like 4 struggle sessions stacked on top of each other.
This wording kinda reminds me of those trail markers where people stack rocks on each other.
I'm starting to think dengism won because the Chinese people really were burnt out after red guard struggle sessions.
One of the justifications for the removal was that the dunk culture on the site is inherently 'white cishet bro'-ish. I'm paraphrasing, but this comment goes a little deeper.
https://hexbear.net/comment/5620140
Which is also a knee-jeek reaction at best. Pronouns do not indicate sex assigned at birth, sexual attraction, or skin color. It's kind of cishetnormative-brainwormy for a mod to make the statement 'white cishet bro'. The one who wrote that needs to do some hardcore self-crit.
I'm sorry, but if people are garnering resentment for "the [he/him] demographic" at the mod/admin level, that's a failure of having pronouns on this site, no one should be reading posts and judging them based off of the poster's pronouns unless they are engaging in misogyny or something else where pronouns would actually be a relevant factor, also you don't know whether these [he/him]s are cis or not, that is extremely reactionary for a leftist website
With that group being largely cishet white guys
How do you know this? There is not a cis box next to the pronouns, there is not a race box next to the pronouns, there is not a sexuality box next to the pronouns, people are just assuming this about other people who have not made this clear? That's kind of a fucked up thing to do, I'm not personally assuming whether any user is cisgender or not, or is white or not, or is hetero or not, based on how they post unless they explicitly mention it.
If this was going on on a widespread level some serious self crit needs to be had.
We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist
Yeah I'm definitely more on the side of there being some bioessentialism brainworms at play, instead of it just being a "miscommunication"
iirc, on the site polls, the site was overwhelmingly white, and almost all of the he/hims who responded to polls were amab.
I really don't think that excuses anything personally, unless you know the specific user's sexuality, gender, race it is fundamentally reactionary to assume what they are
At that point you are quite literally profiling people based on their pronouns
Pronouns aren't gender, nor should they tell you anything about somebody's sexuality.
I feel like the mod team probably has similar demographics to the rest of the site tbh
Thank you for unbanning me. I appreciate the apology in the post, and I am glad that the bioessentialism and transphobia were addressed.
But I think that there is far more to this that needs to be addressed by the mod team and admins. Because there is more to this situation than a simple miscommunication. Regardless of whether this was a prepared statement, preparation went into the post itself - comments were collated, opinions measured, policies outlined. The post itself dripped with condescension from the opening line. It made blanket statements about the cisheteronormativity of tank posters - invalidating and marginalizing unsuspecting trans users, such as myself. The fact that no one saw how this could be construed as bioessentiallism or transphobia is, frankly, a further indicator that serious self crit needs to happen with the mod team with respect to how they communicate their opinions to a userbase that has no access to the internal discussions happening within the mod team. It made blanket statements about dunking being the domain of white internet communists - invalidating and marginalizing certain POC users of the comm, who made comments to that effect. It made ableist, infantilizing comments regarding participation in dunking as being a form of self harm - invalidating and paternalizing the neurodivergent again such as myself. The name of the gossip comm was, as pointed out, deeply misogynist, and the justification for choosing that name was again invalidating and marginalizing for many users, not to mention condescending. I do not fault any of the mods for being unapologetic and staunch in their opinions. They do not owe apologies to irony poisoned, bigoted cishet white men, who have always been a problem for the chapoverse since the days of the sub, the discord, and the sites inception. Concessions should not be made for bigotry. But this shotgun blast of a post caught people who had absolutely no business being in the firing line of these changes. Not a single one of those statements should have made it into that post in the way they did. And when users such as myself and others expressed our issues with the post, we were met with silence, further condescension, and dismissal. We were told to stay quiet and that it was being looked into and to log off. We were told that we were drifting into the conspiratorial because god forbid a post seemingly dripping in disdain for and condescending to the userbase (beyond just cishet white men!) Is indicative of a culture of cliquish superiority among the mod base. That doesnt even touch on the harassment certain users have faced by alleged members of the mod team. Even the most staunch defender of trans rights this site has had, someone who I thought would do everything in her power to make sure that transphobic shit would absolutely not fly said nothing to assuage the genuine fears and concerns of nonbinary and trans users beyond an edit mentioning out of pocket shit being said. The focus was all on people getting their slop back. Then she started banning users, the first of which was someone who faced severe harassment by an anti-dunker who told them to off themselves among other vile comments. The ban messages, again, were condescending and infantilizing towards, and when i expressed my shock and utter disspointment I was hit with my own ban.
Every step along the way, every mod and admin action (except for carcosa stepping down, that should never have happened) every stupid bit in that thread, every flippant, callous, and dismissive comment, every shitty ban message, did nothing but the make the situation worse, make the mods seem as out of touch, patronizing, and uncaring as they were accused of being, and made marginalized users in the firing line feel incredibly unwelcome. I myself in the 4 years i have been here have never, ever felt more silenced, unwelcome, unheard, and frankly, betrayed on this site . because this didnt come from people i hated and didnt care for, shitass reddit admins, wreckers - it came from the comrades around me, from people i respected and trusted.
I have no idea what's going on, but every time I check in, it seems to be worse
It really is astounding how the mods and admins keep making it worse. It could have been solved so easily at several different points, but they seem to insist instead on doing the condescending lib PR thing and pissing everyone off, then banning them for expressing discontent.
Keep your chin up and Keep Posting. The only way out is through
When you find yourself in a hole the first step is to put down the shovel.
I still can't get past the fact that the admins lied to all of us about why they were doing the thing (which IMO was a BAD reason), then when they got caught there was zero contrition. Y'all are quick to apologize for the ban rampage and the chauvinistic brainworms, but this seems to be just slipping to the back of the conversation.
The admins/mods demonstrated that they think this is their site, not the users. That was only reinforced by the gleeful cruelty and ambivalence of the ban waves. I for one spent yesterday afternoon reliving the intensity of anxiety I felt when I was in an abusive living situation, because I felt compelled to speak out despite people catching bans literally just for being upset left and right.
None of the apologies coming from the people who did this are speaking to this, that I've seen. To me that means the status quo still stands. Decisions about the site are for making behind closed doors, a week before any of the users know about it, and can be lied about when the rollout happens. And by my measuring of the timeline, that's the point where the userbase went from sad to angry, so letting this fade into the background is just setting us up for another huge drama like this in the future.
Why wouldn't I be afraid that the admin team hasn't had some form of transphobia kicking around in it when I got banned shortly after I attempted to defend my trans comrades with the following text.
The admin team needs combed through for transphobia immediately. Between the anonymous comment and this where an admin misgenders AlaskaBall, there's clearly an issue that needs addressed. If you folks want to continue being known as the transfriendly instance, it's time to act like it.
I don't care how much of a funny bit you think any of this shit is, but you need to gauge when shit is starting to careen out of control. It is not fucking okay that you folks banned me for that. As a transwoman, getting banned for that comment is a huge red flag for me. I've been here for a long fucking time and have been a mod of the traa community in the past. I'm still on there. I'm the only one without pronouns cause I deleted my account for opsec reasons. What was done and continues to be done is not acceptable and is purely childish behavior on the part of the people that run this site. You folks seriously need to all do self crit or get the fuck out.
I think the worst part about all of this is that the ban reason given made it seem like I asked for it, obfuscating and giving absolutely no real reason as to why I was banned. This is clearly because there was no reason and you folks just wanted me to shut up for whatever reason. Fucking figure out your shit admins.
Show
Show
I'm in absolute agreement with you. You absolutely shouldn't have received a ban, especially given the topic of the comment. You were banned independently by TransComrade69 for that comment, her reasoning given was because she was afraid further comments about the topic could lead others into further wild speculation based on mistakenly thinking an admin banned and misgendered Alaskaball. In actuality, they did it to themself.
Fucking figure out your shit admins.
I'm sorry you were banned. I hope that I and the rest of the mods and admins can work to earn your trust again.
her reasoning given was because she was afraid further comments about the topic could lead others into further wild speculation based on mistakenly thinking an admin banned and misgendered Alaskaball. In actuality, they did it to themself.
Then perhaps this information should be divulged to the userbase rather than banning people without a proper, given reason.
For someone who told us to read the modlog, she seems very upset every time we read the modlog.
her reasoning given was because she was afraid further comments about the topic could lead others into further wild speculation based on mistakenly thinking an admin banned and misgendered Alaskaball. In actuality, they did it to themself.
The ban do not stop this no? Other user will still discuss. It does not make sense to me. I am not trying to be mean. Do I not understand it?
I do not understand it either. Really all I can do is undo it.
This struggle session could've been an email.
"Hey users, the mod team has been talking about the dunk_tank having racist origins so we've changed the name to the_slop_trough. We also wanted to gauge user reaction to changing the format of the comm for xyz reasons. You have 3 days to vote and voice concerns etc."
But at every step it seems that some section of the mod team was lying, vagueposting, bitposting, powertripping, or generally just ignoring valid criticisms and concerns.
I'd love to see this resolved and I think this post is a good start. No need to talk about specific grievances, I think the other users are doing a great job of covering the bases...when they're not being banned for it ;)
I go for a run and TC69 deletes her account
Anyway I'm back from the gulag. I've got thoughts, but I'm gonna chill out and not post for a little while - Trying to embrace @Awoo@hexbear.net thought - so it's only going to be a short novel of a post.
Thanks for the support y'all, it's warmed my heart to see all the people who wrote about me getting banned. TBH I was being hostile, though I felt like my hostility was an appropriate response, and it was not like I came out swinging. It ramped up slowly as this situation became more... Situationy.
I'm really happy to see the direction things are going right now. @Lyudmila@hexbear.net Is handling this how it should've been handled from the start. Truly doing a great job. 10/10
I wanna say I don't think there's a shadowy mod cabal, that's not what I meant by "clique", but I guess it could be read in the commnist way.
I didn't expect immediate action, I still don't.
Renaming the comms for a joke was not okay. Renaming them because of racism was very okay.
Just how we gotta be watchful for transphobia, we gotta be watchful for ableism. The infantilizing "you can't take care of yourself, I know best for you" attitude of a lot of people is ableist. Even when the sentiment is rational, speaking like that to other users is ableist and it creates an environment that is not welcoming for ND people. Extra sucky to tell someone who was a back- and knee injury that flares up and makes them literally unable to walk at times - that they should walk outside. This wasn't completely relevant this time (hence the run), but still, it has hurt to be told to do so before.
Embrace Awoo thought.
Main.
little bit of drama if you're a messy piggy
I'd forgotten how bad TC60 was a community admin though lol. Thought she'd mellowed out This was just the VCJ all over again, really exemplary.
> Comes back
> Immediate strugglesession
> Carcosa steps down
> Vagueposts about misogyny in the modlog
> Bans all dissenters
> Condescends and infantilizes the userbase
> This will surely stop the conflict
> 72T steps down
> Deletes her account
> Refuses to elaborate
I know the strugglesesh isn't her fault, but it is very funny.Go kiss your dad on the mouth y'all <3
edit: forgot to say that banning me was fair. Not for the post I got banned for, but for how I treated @blight@hexbear.net. I apologised later, but I was way too much. I do not think I was too much elsewhere, since I believe I gave back what was passed around. I do not respect Ben Shapiro and I do not respect people that behave like him. Also death to redditors.
Kind of a moot point now that she's deleted her account, but I would explicitly not like to see TC69 return as an admin to the site. I have no doubt that she is a good person who has done good things for the site, but her behavior yesterday was extremely inflammatory and escalated tensions for no reason. I was sitting on the bench for this struggle session until I started seeing childish bans from her leveled against users voicing legitimate concerns.
Here a couple of thoughts.
If you’re an admin posting, don’t do bits. Have an alt and preferably recognisable as such.
Mod actions shouldn’t be anonymous. Own your shit.
For the love of god stop posting please.
I mean this with love, for this team and this site.
Context for my take:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5620189
https://hexbear.net/comment/5620267
Just stop fuelling this whole thing. It's that easy.
Oh hey, I'm unbanned. Neat. I don't know where it would be best to post this but my recent thoughts are as follows:
After all this I feel conflicted on returning to any sort of activity or interaction with the site. I don't really feel that seen or welcome as a non-white, trans, nd person and it has nothing to do with the tanks. Despite being here since the beginning, I've never been a poster of any renown(?), and as of late I feel like celebrating posting clout and reputation has often taken a higher priority in hexbear's culture than being a safe place for discussion for people like me.
The arrogant dismissal I and many others were recently confronted with is disgusting but, for me, unsurprising. I am disappointed but I expected something like this would reoccurr, as the phenomenon has been demonstrated many times since this site was chapo.chat.
The recent "struggle session" concentrated a lot of the feelings I experienced as an auDHD person throughout my life. Facing broad assumptions about how I felt and having to argue against a person built in the shape of me. It was uncomfortably similar to the arguments I've had with family, authority, educators, that have stemmed from them assuming the worst possible intention and refusing to hear otherwise. It was and is emotionally exhausting and simply not worth it for what this site has provided.
The worst was assumed of people because nobody in power bothered to ask or communicate, and when action was taken, founded on this blind assumption, not only were poc, trans, nd, people ignored but mocked, shamed, and banned.
The aspersions cast on me and others like me, in contradiction to years of our demonstrated cameraderie, have been disheartening. Ultimately I don't think it matters much personally as I've never been a celebrity or poster of renown, just someone who enjoyed the occasional dunk, art post, commiseration on the state of the world.
I don't have illusions of being some valued presence or improving the site culture or anything, and I don't mean all this to convey some high melodrama; for me it's just a dull grey disappointment.
This is the first sensible post to come out of the admin team since the start of this insanity.
Still a lot of room for improvement - not sure that “associating behavioural trends with pronoun tags” is a route we should ever go down, to be honest.
But after the past few days of being entirely baffled by whatever the hell was going on with the rest of the admins, this is a step in the right direction.
this is not in response to you specifically @Lyudmila. I appreciate the work you and @CARCOSA are doing in this thread to sort things out. thank you.
effortpost preface:
I started writing this at 5am this morning after checking to see if I was banned (confused? keep reading!), seeing @Aradina had been unbanned, stumbling onto the horrifically sad comment that apparently @morte made from an alt after being banned, and crying my eyes out. I've been working on it (and crying! 😂😭) off and on all day, in between reading the comments here to catch up on What Happened.
I have to get this out, and presumably we're supposed to keep all of this contained to these threads.
admins, mods, fellow users – this is not an attempt to restart The Shit.
I'm posting this to get it off my chest and hopefully get some clarification from some people on it, so I'm gonna leave it and close Hexbear and maybe see you tomorrow.
ATTENTION, FELLOW HEXBEARS:
telling me anytime after Friday to logout and let things blow over was ableist, actually.
also, saying this is just a website is callous and fucked up.
please allow me to elaborate. get your clicking fingers ready, because baby, I got links.
I am autistic as fuck. I only just realized this last year, and got diagnosed last week.
justice sensitivity is a well-known neurodivergent trait, and it has been a defining part of my character for my whole life. one of my earliest memories is getting whipped with a spatula for "talking back" because I questioned the justice of adult decisions, for responding to "life isn't fair" with "why aren't you trying to be? why don't you make it fair?"
I have been repeatedly socially ostracized for sticking up for others or finding repugnant behavior intolerable. I lost my hometown friend group when I wouldn't attend functions to which they had invited the asshole who abused another person in the group.
CW: DV
(photos of large, vivid bruising were not enough. seeing the bruises on her in person wasn't enough to make the host uninvite him.)
my husband and I lost his hometown friend group when nobody gave a shit about covid. they stopped inviting us to things because we were masking and distancing. I'd rather have no friends than friends like that.
it's the biggest reason for having left most of the two-dozen jobs I mentioned – somebody outside the management clique is unjustly fired or otherwise punished, and I quit in solidarity with no backup plan. 🤦🤷
it made me unwelcome in the glass program at art school because I reported the head instructor's abusive treatment of a fellow student to the program director.
it's the reason I left Christianity as a teenager. the adults wouldn't stand up for anything. they didn't give a shit about "love your neighbor." they were too busy gossiping and backstabbing each other while jockeying for positions in the social and institutional hierarchy. there were people with country club memberships while some of the other members of the <100-member church didn't have enough to eat.
it has made me the outsider in my conservative evangelical family. they thought it was super fun to get me all fired up about this stuff when I was younger, and then they'd make fun of me for caring until I cried and fled. they also hated that my best friend was a gay boy I met in band class. why should it matter that he was gay? didn't Jesus love everyone equally? I didn't understand. I still don't.
it's what drove me from the Republican indoctrination of my childhood to the Democrats as a young adult. it's what made me ditch them over the way they treated Bernie. it's part of what drove me from DSA. it's what has driven me further and further left.
it's why I would never have employees. it's why I pay for any little indie apps I use. it's why I left reddit during the API fiasco. it's what made me investigate Hexbear when you federated instead of just accepting the warnings about you as facts. it's what made me abandon my other fediverse accounts and live here on local on my previous account and this subsequent one. it's what made me start contributing to the Patreon the day I found out it existed.
I'm not online all the time, so I know there are plenty of things I miss, but since I joined last summer, this place has been fair, it has been caring, and it has been wonderful to see so much good come of this place. people have been fed and sheltered because so many of us are willing to share what we have, even when it is very little. lots of very little bits of goodness added together can make something great.
I'm 42, which makes me older than most users here; many of you are much closer in age to my 17yo son than to me. I don't bring it up because I think it makes me inherently wiser than any of you – far from it, I know I'm a dumbass, I have a lifetime of failure and fuckups to prove it. just because I've been fucking up longer doesn't mean I have learned more from my fuckups than any of you have from yours.
I bring it up because I'm fucking tired, and life is hard, and I genuinely had very little hope for the future until I made a post begging for distraction from terrible thoughts, and so many of you came through for me. 😭 it still instantly makes me cry when I think of it.
the months since then have been physically harder – I had to stop hrt for perimenopause due to life-threatening side effects, and I have been expecting to slide back into the abyss, but I hadn't yet. I really think the community of care I have found here is what was keeping it at bay. @morte's comment let me know I'm not the only person who feels that way about this place, and I don't want her to put herself out there alone.
some of you have become very dear to my heart.
a long-time user I have barely interacted with DM'd me yesterday offering help with getting my son T if Trump bans trans care.
there are no words to adequately express my gratitude for that sliver of hope.
Hexbear, I love you, but I care about things being "fair" or "just" more than anything else. I will stop caring about the way other people are treated when I stop breathing. you might as well tell me to stop getting rashes when I'm stressed.
wanna see what it looked like after I saw that @REgon had been banned?? 😂🙃
pic
Showthis might actually be the worst I've ever seen it. it was definitely the worst my husband has.
🏆🥇
you might as well tell me to quit loving my son or quit being 42. it is physically impossible. my parents couldn't beat it out of me.
"don't take it too seriously, it's just online, it's just a website!" friend, right now I wish it were just a website, because I would say fuck this place and never look back. no mere website is worth the amount of anxiety and stress I've felt and tears I've cried in the last 24 hours.
it's not just a website, it is a lifeline for my family and so many of my comrades. it has been a sanctuary for me, until this past weekend. really, until yesterday. "don't take that tiny sliver of hope too seriously"??
if you think that, then buddy,
with all my heart,
with every fiber of my being,
FUCK YOU.
is that hostile? good. maybe if someone who is usually kind to everyone gets hostile, this stuff will fucking matter to you, too. I'm glad that some of you are socially privileged enough to have enough support to not care what happens to this place. I'm not.
those of you who were applauding the behavior of TC69 and her Cool Kids Club this weekend should be deeply ashamed of yourselves.
I know I'm ashamed of you. I finally understand why so many people warn about this place. You Eat Your Own.
and for what??? what was the actual point of any of this? rename the comms plus change the comms equals change the site culture?
was the culture genuinely that bad?? this is a real and sincere question, I'm autistic, I'm sure there are problems that I don't pick up on.
most of the time irl, I don't realize a skillful bully is fucking with me until it's too late, so certainly I'm not gonna catch all the shittiness on here, where I don't have body language to help.
(continues below)
