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.

  • 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]
      ·
      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]
                ·
                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]
                  ·
                  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]
                      ·
                      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
                            ·
                            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