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.

    • SixSidedUrsine [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 days ago

      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."

      • radio_free_asgarthr [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        3 days ago

        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?

        • booty [he/him]
          ·
          3 days ago

          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.

            • Halloweenbean [none/use name]
              ·
              2 days ago

              I'm starting to think dengism won because the Chinese people really were burnt out after red guard struggle sessions.

            • booty [he/him]
              ·
              3 days ago

              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.

              • pooh [she/her, love/loves]
                ·
                2 days ago

                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. doggirl-smug

                • Awoo [she/her]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  3 days ago

                  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.

                  • hotcouchguy [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 days ago

                    Feeling very vindicated in not knowing what the hell is going on
                    grillman

                  • Hexboare [they/them]
                    ·
                    3 days ago

                    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)

                    • propter_hog [any, any]
                      ·
                      3 days ago

                      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.

                  • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
                    ·
                    3 days ago

                    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

                    • Awoo [she/her]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      3 days ago

                      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.

                      • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
                        ·
                        3 days ago

                        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.

                        • Awoo [she/her]
                          ·
                          3 days ago

                          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.

                        • NewAcctWhoDis [any]
                          ·
                          edit-2
                          3 days ago

                          We all told AlaskaBall to go fuck themselves last night very directly

                          Is this about banning themself as a bit or something else?

                                • REgon [they/them]
                                  ·
                                  3 days ago

                                  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

                                  • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
                                    ·
                                    edit-2
                                    3 days ago

                                    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

                                    • REgon [they/them]
                                      ·
                                      edit-2
                                      3 days ago

                                      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

                                      • Kuori [she/her]
                                        ·
                                        3 days ago

                                        modlog claims it was melina, who definitely makes a lot more sense as a culprit ngl

                                        • m532 [she/her]
                                          ·
                                          3 days ago

                                          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)

                                          • Kuori [she/her]
                                            ·
                                            3 days ago

                                            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)

                                        • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]
                                          ·
                                          edit-2
                                          3 days ago

                                          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

                                          • Kuori [she/her]
                                            ·
                                            3 days ago

                                            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

                                          • starlight32 [any]
                                            ·
                                            3 days ago

                                            >fae went through the trouble of creating 12 accounts

                                            is this to do with the debatebro[x]@thelemmy.club accounts? (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. blob-no-thoughts)

                                            • m532 [she/her]
                                              ·
                                              3 days ago

                                              Yes. The wrecker decided to capitalize on the rogue admin desaster by essentially framing the rogue admins as even worse

                                              • Alaskaball [comrade/them]MA
                                                ·
                                                edit-2
                                                3 days ago

                                                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.

                                        • Yor [she/her]
                                          ·
                                          3 days ago

                                          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

                    • Awoo [she/her]
                      ·
                      3 days ago

                      i feel so conflicted saying this on hexbear lol

                      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
                        ·
                        3 days ago

                        the-deserter "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
                • booty [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 days ago

                  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."

                  • radio_free_asgarthr [he/him, comrade/them]
                    ·
                    3 days ago

                    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?

                    • booty [he/him]
                      ·
                      3 days ago

                      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 debatebro-r of random losers. The old dunk tank / new dredge tank would, once again, be removed.

                      • radio_free_asgarthr [he/him, comrade/them]
                        ·
                        3 days ago

                        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.

                        • booty [he/him]
                          ·
                          3 days ago

                          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?

                          • propter_hog [any, any]
                            ·
                            3 days ago

                            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.

                • ratboy [they/them]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  3 days ago

                  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 mod who 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.

                  • CARCOSA [they/them]A
                    ·
                    3 days ago

                    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.

                    • ratboy [they/them]
                      ·
                      3 days ago

                      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

                      cuddle

                      • CARCOSA [they/them]A
                        ·
                        3 days ago

                        thank you for the reply, I did take some time to do exactly that emotionally. meow-hug

                • SixSidedUrsine [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  3 days ago

                  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.

                    • SixSidedUrsine [comrade/them]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      3 days ago

                      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

        • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]
          ·
          3 days ago

          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

          • propter_hog [any, any]
            ·
            3 days ago

            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.