Hello users of Hexbear, there have been many changes and some drama the past few months.
The recent changes we've been making have been an attempt to create a more safe and welcoming environment for many demographics that have been overlooked in the past.
For any of our comrades that have been unintentionally hurt in this process, we apologise and hope to find a solution that accommodates as many people as possible while still meeting the needs of the marginalised groups who need a space like this the most.
The intent of this post is to provide a space for all users to air grievances with regard to the site. As well as provide suggestions for specific things that could be changed to address your grievance. Comments insulting the mod team or those without a specific means to address your problem may be removed. No commenter will be sitebanned, unless it clearly breaks the code of conduct.
Systems of moderation for forums like this necessarily need to be a bit arbitrary and, for this forum in particular, very opaque. This creates a situation where the users' trust in the moderation team becomes a critical resource for the community. In my admittedly vibes-based analysis this trust, while still relatively high, is at an all-time low.
Trust is generated over time, but this site being populated mostly by different varieties of contrarians and malcontents seems to make generating trust pretty inefficient. I suspect even moderately big reforms for accountability or whatever will be seen as empty attempts at legitimation. Of course, trust will still need to be spent from time to time, but before any reforms, I would make sure internally that it isn't being wasted. To make this a little less uselessly abstract, for example (chosen randomly, please do not take this as a complaint about this case in particular), punishing users for upvoting a pretty bad post probably isn't worth it from the perspective of trust.
You can just say leftists/communists/socialists
Should be a tagline
Hoping to start towards rebuilding that trust with this post, and we will not be punishing hexbear users for only upvoting posts, but we do use it in conjunction with other mod tools to inform our systems of moderation.