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.
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.