A few years back, I wrote a post on this site about bad experiences I had on Something Awful back when I was active on the site, mostly concerning ableism. I also shared this on other places, and people were generally supportive, but some of them defended SA.

"It's a lot better nowadays!" People told me. "C-SPAM is good!" They said.

It is not.

While searching C-SPAM for keywords that interest me (something I still occasionally do even though I almost never use the site anymore), I discovered that one of them dug up my post FOUR YEARS LATER in one of their megathreads for the others to attack. I told them I wrote it because as far as I'm concerned, if they made fun of me for it, that only further justified my decision to soft-quit the site.

And boy did they give justification to spare. It turns out they really like using the r-slur. They use it repeatedly. Including site staff. If you think this is a bad thing, they will accuse you of "using [ableism] as a cudgel." One of the site staff scraped my Hexbear post history so that he could (non-ableistly!) make fun of my emotional dysregulation issues.

They show just how in touch they are with the left by saying things like "god im so glad everyone realized this type of person wasnt helpful to marginalized people or the left and are slowly being sidelined" when every org I've ever worked with has had a zero-tolerance policy for the r-slur, and my comrades in my current org have been nothing but sympathetic when I told them about my struggles as an autistic person.

Hours after I'd gone to bed, one of them actually Googled my username and found my account on an image board and accused me of using the site for fetish material (even though I have only ever interacted SFW images on that site, but you know, they already decided I was guilty.)

Bonus: They also think Hexbear is a bad forum because we tell people not to valorize a guy who rails against DEI and worships Elon Musk.

Never been more glad I've left that forum. It's toxic and abusive in a way I've rarely seen anyplace achieve, and looking at it from the outside, I'm astonished I ever put up with it.