I escaped the Reddit regime a little while ago. I consider myself a marxist-leninist-MZT. Vegetarian and vegan for a few years. I've a lot of thoughts on how marxism and veganism are connected. Never wrote them down. I'd like to start smth like a club for marxist vegans to develop our own proletarian theory. Most vegan theory I found is either openly bourgeois (Francione is a literal TERF) or revisionist (anti-China, anarchist, libertarian). How about fixing this?
The Hexbear vegan thing wasn't random. It was because Reddit started to crack down on /r/vegancirclejerk which, despite the name, was a place for vegans to discuss serious ethics amongst themselves (along with memes) instead of being constantly filled with "I'm not vegan but..." posting. Too many memes about those users made Reddit uncomfortable in the same way Chapo got banned for John Brown posting. They were also invited, because the circlejerk sub had a lot of crossover with other leftist subreddits and were looking for somewhere to migrate.
It wasn't some sort of invasion, just a result of Hexbear being exposed to a lot of serious vegan users making non-vegan users expand their definition of intersectionalism (admittedly with abrasive posting, in the same way HB is already abrasive) and those vegan users struggling to blend into a space that was now focused on more general interests. The most problematic users were dealt with.
I'm also a HB poster, but this was just on my front page. Just wanted to clarify because your post I think unintentionally plays into the "crazy vegan" stereotype that is all too prevalent all over the internet and makes it sound like they one day decided to take over a completely unrelated website.
My only interaction with that sub was joining for 3 days before seeing some rather disturbing posts advocating for anti-natalism (I don't want to elaborate much but it was content warning worthy) and leaving.
It was barely even relevant to the topic of the sub. Really crazy the kinds of shit that flies in spaces that don't take a hard line for moderation.
This is correct. That sub was a branch from other vegan subs because the more extreme and crazy of the users got banned from them. Vegancirclejerk was literally where all the "crazy vegan stereotypes" went when they normal people in the other vegan subs kicked them out.
I'm not going to say it was full of entirely good takes all the time, but it did aggressively combat the kind of "we're carnivores lol" logic that is even being presented in this thread. Animal liberation is a significant blind spot for a lot of communists that they refuse to even investigate. The 'normal' vegans you're talking about are just quiet about it, which is why everyone likes them because they don't prompt anyone to investigate. I don't think its appropriate to relitigate that entire event, but if someone is comfortable congratulating someone for settling for "less bigotry" instead of "no bigotry", you'll find the difference between the type of person that posts on /r/vegan vs. VCJ.