Proposals made are mirrored here to facilitate discussion

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I don't think any of these proposals should be implemented at this time. The last thing we need is even more sweeping changes. And I think we should consider the time of year right now:

    1. Winter has come/is approaching, which means many people are going to be affected by SAD, which leads to more volatile emotions including anxiety and depression.

    2. Around this time is also when Covid cases start to rise before peaking in January, which means there will be many people here who will be scared and angry at their plague rat relatives and friends and might take out their fear and anger at other people. This isn't right, but it is what it is.

    3. For people who don't have many friends and who are estranged from their families, the holiday season is actually very depressing. It's depressing to see other people spending time with their families while they are out stuck in the (figurative and literal) cold all by themselves. This loneliness sometimes translates to bitterness, and that bitterness is sometimes taken out on other people.

    4. To many people, the realities of a Trump presidency will finally hit like a pile of bricks on January 20, and while it's the cool (and correct) leftist analysis to say that a Trump presidency doesn't mean a whole lot will change, people's emotions are very different. You could intellectually understand that Trump isn't a whole lot different from Biden while still being emotionally scared.

    All this combined together is going to lead to volatile emotions and people being more on edge. And there is evidence of this from past years:

    • I remember a struggle session around late December where some dude completely melted down because he was willing to die on the "bidets are bourgeois d-word" hill. Why did he had a complete meltdown harassing users who didn't share his opinion on bidets? Because he was super drunk. And why he was drinking so much? I can't answer this but I don't think it's a coincidence that someone would be more likely to self-medicate with alcohol during winter.

    • I remember another struggle session around New Years Day where there was a massive struggle session between people who think New Year Eve party goers are plague rats and people who think New Years non-party goers are shut-ins who need to touch grass. This was obviously exaggerated by Covid cases peaking in January, meaning Covid was at the forefront of many people's minds. It's why people were more willing to have a struggle session during early January instead of a struggle session on concert goers.

    Frankly, I think implementing these changes now is foolish. Hexbear needs to be an island of stability as winter approaches. The last thing many people who feel more lonely, more anxious, and more emotionally irritable need is for Hexbear to be hit with another struggle session because half of the people didn't like some new change. Discussion for improvements is fine, but it's much wiser to hold off pushing out those changes until early February at the very least, which is around 9 weeks from now. By early February, the holiday season is over and Covid cases usually start to drop.

    • CARCOSA [mirror/your pronouns]
      hexagon
      MA
      ·
      1 month ago

      Thank you for the comment, you are absolutely correct.

      We won't be making any changes in the near future, I agree with the timetable you have laid out. The comments in this post are all the proposals being currently discussed. This post is making the discussion process more transparent: mods and now users make proposals, we discuss them for varying periods of time before agreeing on a way to execute the proposal, and then we begin drafting a statement to communicate.