I've been a member of this community for about 3 years. in that time, I've gone from lib, through DSA, to something I'm comfortable calling a communist organizer. I discovered I was trans in this space and I have transitioned while posting and, in truth, I will always be fond of it for that reason. in my time here, I've made it a point to be open and share of myself as much as I can, partially because an open posture and profile helps my organizing, partially because I hate alienation, and partially in an effort to try and change this space into something welcoming for people of all genders, sexualities, races, and of differing ability. my hope has always been that by sharing freely of myself, I'd encourage others to do the same. it's in that spirit of openness that I offer this criticism of the userbase - as a whole and without reference to any particular individuals - and an explanation of why I will not be returning to this space. I encourage you all to look through my post history and attempt to understand who I am before you respond with vitriol - I have in fact done my best to make it as easy as possible.
it's ironic, I think, that what finally broke me wasn't the waves of transphobia - the truly nasty, or the insidious and subtle - that have, in the months since our pronouns struggle sessions, found their way into my inbox, the gaslighting over whether it was happening, or even the weird, harassing messages from chuds who decided I was to blame for their bans. it wasn't even the omnipresent misogyny and racism that makes this space so toxic for non-male and non-white users. nope, what broke me was two-fold.
first, the especially cishet white male audience here struggles with criticism. we laugh easily at reddit libs being blatantly racist or sexist but the community as a whole bristles at the notion that they might have work to do.
PSA: we have not won liberation. the hegemonic culture is extremely bigoted on so many axes. even if you spend a lifetime doing hard, careful introspection to root bigotry out of your hearts and minds, the very air you breathe instills it back within you. it's not a personal slight to be told you've fucked up.
in organizing spaces, we hold to a notion of accountability that attempts to raise up the voices of those harmed, especially marginalized people, in order to ensure that hegemonic cultural influences do not infiltrate our spaces and drive away the very people whose liberation we fight for - the American working class is far browner and queerer than the class reductionists pretend and to ignore those issues as predominantly cishet white male organizers, stepping into their spaces is to alienate them from the word go. this notion is utterly foreign to most of the userbase here and it leads to astonishing and bewildering defensiveness.
it is not the job of marginalized people to do emotional labor to make you okay with the fact that you've hurt them. the assumption that you are owed that labor is part of the system of oppression that makes life miserable for people you call comrade. it's the same notion as when a loved one informs you that you've hurt them - if you make it their problem to make you feel better about the fact, you're being an asshole. deal with the hurt you've caused, then deal with the feelings about yourself that having hurt someone causes within you.
this is such a core issue on this site and I've watched it drive away so many good comrades - especially, I've personally noticed, queer people, women, and people of color. I am certain that other marginalized identities are similarly driven away from this place.
please, stop defending this behavior.
please, stop engaging in it.
choose reflection, not defensiveness. you will not be made less. you will, in fact, become so much richer for the experiences and relationships that this space has the potential to foster, but that it cannot for the omnipresent toxicity.
on a more personal note, I'm also deeply frustrated with a space filled with apparent leftists that does so little organizing or any actual praxis. what does it mean to profess left politics and to engage in purely symbolic action. there is so much good and important work to be done. not all of it requires you to know and talk to people. it merely asks that you attempt to solve the problems that you yourself encounter and to share that work with as many others.
we talk endlessly about theory and which tendency is right - but just two days ago I posted a thread to collect the most useful works and so few found themselves able to contribute. someone commented to me that they thought it was the best thread they'd seen here but I was honestly disappointed. over more than a day, less than 10 users managed to even look through this site for resources to post. when I think what might have been... but we each expect someone else to do the work.
that alone would merely be irritating. but to follow that with incessant armchair speculation about the work others should do... I could never convince actual organizers to spend any time here. we joke about every one here being libs but what's the difference? what use our radicalization if all we can do is post about what other people do?
no one is coming to liberate you. we have to build the better world we claim to want. we are the only ones who can do it. it only gets done one brick at a time.
if this post offends you, whatever. I'm not reading the replies so vent all your rage.
if, on the other hand, this speaks to you, if you'd like ideas for necessary work that needs to get done, that would help real people, reach out to me on matrix. you can find me at @therivercass:chapo.chat. I am never without a list of a million different things that would make actual people's lives a little easier but that I will never have the time to get to. I promise, I only bite jackasses.
(apologies in advance to anyone that reaches out - my responses this week will be slow.)
on a more personal note, I’m also deeply frustrated with a space filled with apparent leftists that does so little organizing or any actual praxis. what does it mean to profess left politics and to engage in purely symbolic action
For me, this comes down to what we think ChaCha is for. We're dispersed all over the world and many of us are in total lockdown. Organising is next to impossible for a lot of us right now, and almost all the praxis threads here are very much US-oriented.
I like being able to come on here to joke around and not face the racism and outright fascism I see on reddit. I also don't feel the need to share the praxis I do, and I'd worry about doxxing myself if I did. If we think of this site as a space for organising, that's all well and good, but there's also room for a space to decompress after a hard day's praxis.
I don't mean to be combative at all, especially because it's clear that this community can do much better when it comes to transphobia. I'm sorry to see you go, comrade.
I was thinking the same thing. There's alot of drama on this site(not counting the transphobia and racism those are serious and should be considered such) and when I see it all I can think of is what's the point. I always considered this site just a place to bs around and talk about leftist subjects. Hopefully it will inspire or help you to do meaningful change in the world but i never saw it as a site that would be specifically for that. I don't know if you ask five different users you'll get give different answers but for me personally I thought this place would be more casual and with each passing day it seems more serious than I thought it would be.
Well I'd say that 'casual' is is different for each person too, that's one of the bigger problems I think. something that could be really hurtful or painful or otherwise entirely not casual funtimes for a marginalized person could sneak right past a group of 'average' chacha posters, because they don't notice or understand. That's a problem with casual spaces when the space is intended as being a space for all, especially marginalized groups, but is dominated by a majority group like cis/het white american males. Y'know what I mean?
This is really the core of the problems this site is having.
If it's meant to be used for hardcore organization, then it probably needs to be locked down completely and have users heavily vetted before joining, don't you think? I'm no tactics expert, but talking too openly/specifically about organizing on an open public forum seems like a bad idea to me. Generalities are good to be inspired by or to get ideas of what to do if you're not currently organizing, but beyond that I'm not sure what the site can offer in that regard as it currently exists.
I personally enjoy having a forum to browse that isn't filled to the brim with liberal/reactionary propaganda like quite literally every other aspect of my life and has people that are (sometimes) funny. I like sharing righteous anger at whatever dumb shit is happening. I like reading feel good stories about currently existing socialist projects. I like learning about some union or bail fund or cause that could use some financial support so I can donate.
I'm not really here for much else.
Having it be reddit style open season the way it is is an opsec disaster. I never thought this was gonna be a place for legit organizing, I legit though it was just like the internet equivalent of a massive left-wing bar to pick up where CTH left off and be a place where we could shoot the shit and be comfortable with ourselves
I like being able to come on here to joke around and not face the racism and outright fascism I see on reddit.
Yeah, I stuck around on the sub and now on here to just post and talk mostly about relatively inane things because the community isn't filled with absolute wankers unlike all of reddit
I guess you won't be reading this, Cass, but on the off chance you do, I want to say it's deeply saddening to see you go. Though your reasons for leaving are eminently reasonable, the site will be made worse by your absence.
To everyone else: I'm not a "power user" and I doubt many people recognize my handle. I don't comment all that often, and when I do it's usually just to make a joke. But this comment is not meant to be funny, or lighthearted, or enjoyable. This is a call-out.
I'm pretty damn pissed off right now, actually. We talk about wreckers but the fact is that it's our own shittyness that actually threatens to destroy this community. (I include myself too; I've gotten into at least one obnoxious debatebro-style argument where I started being intentionally dickish, and though the user I was fighting with didn't leave because of me, he did disappear off the site one day. I hope he's OK, and I wish he would come back so I could apologize for being an asshole, and admit that I think he had a better point than I did.) We're bleeding some of the best posters on here, and when I see mods getting mass downvoted for arguing their case in !userunion@hexbear.net, and obnoxious self-righteous complainers getting heavily upvoted, it makes me question whether this site is really any fucking better than r*ddit.
"Dirtbag left" doesn't mean it's OK to be a piece of shit. It doesn't mean it's OK to be reactionary, or harass people, or argue in bad faith. What it means is that we don't self-censor. It means we call people out on their crap, and we aren't afraid to be vulgar or to use a little fucking profanity. At the same time, though, we have to be thick-skinned enough to listen when we ourselves get called out. None of us is above reproach, and that includes mods and admins, and when we face criticism we have to face it like adults, not goddamned children.
And when you have a grievance with someone here, don't be so fucking shitty about it. It's not OK to heap abuse on someone just because you think they're wrong. If anything, you're just going to push them to rationalize what they were doing rather than ever considering your criticism. Remember that there's another person out there that you're talking to!
I'll conclude with a brief story-within-a-story. One time, back in college, I got into some nasty fight on Reddit, probably about politics. I was hanging out at my Korean friend's place, and after firing off a comment I recounted my points triumphantly to him. His response? "You know there's another person behind that other keyboard, right? You shouldn't be so mean to people online." I pushed back a bit on that, and he told me about a time he was at an internet cafe in Korea. He was playing some online game against someone, and being a total piece of shit to the guy, making fun of him and whatnot as he won. Then a while later, he was still online at that cafe when someone came in. It was the guy he'd been shitting on! IIRC, there wasn't a physical altercation, but it sure taught my friend a lesson about recognizing the humanity of others online.
TL;DR: Everyone on this site should be treating anyone who isn't a chud like they would a real-life friend. Before you post your comment or post, ask yourself, "Is this how I'd treat a friend of mine, face to face?" If the answer is no, DELETE YOUR FUCKING DRAFT.
I think people take sites like this and reddit and twitter too seriously and expect too much from it and it's silly.
These sites are designed to waste time and should be treated as such.
Yep. I come here to waste time and shitpost. I don't come here to validate my identity as a trans person or get support, this is just random people & FBI that I'll absolutely never meet.
Taking any of this seriously should be something nobody does. Don't take twitter seriously either. Its absurd. Detaching emotion from all of this helps mentally, I promise.
i'm here to organize and shit post, and i'm all out of organization
Thank you. These are my thoughts as well. Its easy to "detach" when you're not an aspie shutin with very little to any real world "life".
Sorry if this is technocratic, but can mods slap a big bright icon on any threads they see that are about organizing, or getting people to do activism, or similar praxis? Or make it a flair that gets people banned for misusing. I didn't see any of these good posts before. Maybe it would send a message that pig poop balls isnt the point
Yeah I often subconsciously ignore pinned posts, its often a megathread or some gag, or old. I think a lot of people do that.
If admins want to focus the site more on praxis and organizing, it has to be somehow removed from the rest of the front page. I like that we pin stuff, but since those pins can often be random, if we can add another pinned category above featured thats specifically praxis and highlighted different or something and pin one permanent general resource portal post and then actively pin one or two posts there every other day or as they come that are specific to organizing, learning, resources, mutual aid, events, etc. it might do well to encourage people to actively engage with that aspect of this site.
Yeah I was actually thinking the other day- did you know Reddit gives more weight to fast upvotes?
Its an intentional bias to encourage vapid, light content, which generates more pageviews, adviews, and time on Reddit dot com. If you read a great article for 3 hours, Reddit loses money. I believe that bias was consciously introduced way after that site was created.
Is it possible fuck with the ranking algorithm in the opposite direction? If you go too hard, content could get stale, but a small bias might make gag posts have to be REALLY good gags to compete with real shit like praxis posts.
go into the trans comm, and read the modlog of removed comments. scroll through our posts and look at the wave of downvotes going anywhere from 15-30 or more (aside from the newest, those appear untouched for the moment).
look at all the trans related struggle sessions this site feels it apparently must have that just incites more trolls coming in to harass trans users. i'm not a frequent poster aside from the trans comm, and i've seen no less than 4 trans struggle sessions in 5 months where cis people won't listen to us and insist their opinions are correct.
we're all tired here. if i wasn't actively trying to mod the trans comm into a place safe for us, i'd have left this place behind, performative trans rights and all.
How much of this harassment is the community eating itself, and how much is it 4chan, stupidpol, and other assholes happily creating countless accounts to harass people in a well-known place with out and proud trans users. It's like being mad the gay club has anti-gay people posted up outside during its opening day.
I am not trying to concern troll, I'm just curious to whether this is a community issue, or being besieged issue by assholes at every opportunity?
let me once again say: look at the trans struggle sessions. look at cis people talking over trans people and getting highly upvoted while we get a mixed response, or even downvoted. hell, look at cass's comment history, she gets it the worst since she didn't put up with any shit.
and it's probably foolish to discount all downvote and transphobic spam as originating from stupidpol. yeah i won't argue that the bulk is them, but let's not forget it was one of our regular users who went to stupidpol in the first place.
Yeah I remember being in one of those threads a few months ago with the user that's leaving now (cass) and it got pretty bad. And it definitely wasn't just stupididpol people doing it.
I’m not trans but I use the word latinx all the time and even here, I get people telling me that word sucks or whatever, when I feel like it conveys the general sentiment better than latine. So I wanna say I stand with ya’lls in the struggle to tell opinionated and annoying cis people to fuck off (that includes me).
The wonder of grad school and working from home and being a dad is that I don’t have time to give a fuck. I just roll my eyes at people making mountains out of molehills.
when I feel like it conveys the general sentiment better than latine.
why? just curious as i also use X rather than E (when writing) but I guess it's not that popular anymore
I used to downbear a lot of dumb trans stuff in the past and I'm trans, and its also pretty shitty to claim there's only one way trans people can view the world or respond to things. You could say its the community eating itself I guess, but I'm trans and just find some stuff spam or super low quality.
I since stopped downbearing the majority of stuff and left trans spaces once we all got yelled at to not use a button thats there for a reason, and I also didn't know I was hurting people by doing so so I stopped that too.
I frankly don't see a shred of hate here, but again I left the trans communities so I guess im just unaware. I'm guessing there are also mixed reddit ex-chapo participants here which were crossposting among multiple subs including things like stupidpol, but could hold their dislike for idpol in to not offend ditectly, but still silently participate via up/downvotes. Reddit chapo seemed more tolerant.
It's both.
When the vast majority of the site is cis/het white american males, expecting anything other than reactionary brainworms being common to the point of invisibility (to said majority) is silly
No one knows anything until they learn it, and that goes double when it comes to unlearning propaganda ingrained in us from birth, which is why we have to face that reality clearheadedly and annihilate our liberalism through criticism, reflection, and giving more of a damn about each other than we do about 'being right' (aka not even considering you could be wrong)
How much of this harassment is the community eating itself, and how much is it 4chan, stupidpol, and other assholes
We aren't reddit, we aren't a facebook or instagram page, we're a very small community of leftists with a very specific niche. I seriously doubt we are being attacked by outside users on a regular basis.
We absolutely are, and you can see it in the mod log. It seems to happen most visibly when we have a trans issues struggle session which then gets cross posted to online drama watching / chud communities.
I spend a lot of time observing those communities, and I have seen the raids being planned in real time. The mods seem to do a good job of combatting that stuff though.
Agreed, I think this is just a left community with diverse ideas who maybe don't all see things in the exact same ways, but share set of underlying principals. I definitely don't take a downvote or challenge to myself as transphobia. This site was also hard to find for me, a long time reddit cth poster.
Also, I think constant pinned petty drama like this is super off-putting to a lot of leftists.
extremely good post, thank you.
on a more personal note, I’m also deeply frustrated with a space filled with apparent leftists that does so little organizing or any actual praxis. what does it mean to profess left politics and to engage in purely symbolic action. there is so much good and important work to be done. not all of it requires you to know and talk to people. it merely asks that you attempt to solve the problems that you yourself encounter and to share that work with as many others.
something i've realized since i've started doing organizing work is how helpless online-leftist-posting makes me feel compared to actually, like, doing stuff. twitter, reddit, all social media are just simulacra, endless spinning boxes designed to make us feel helpless, to make us think that what matters is numbers on a web page instead of the real people around us.
when i recognized the necessity of the work, but i wasn't doing the work, it was killing me inside slowly. i think that's the root of a lot of the nastiness in online left spaces; people feel helpless, turn their rage inward, and then outward.
so getting out and doing work is important. it really doesn't have to be huge, doesn't have to be Building The Party For The Ultimate Revolution. just doing anything is good.
and sure, read, understand history and science and theory, try and radicalize the people around you. but it doesn't have to be everything at once.
one brick at a time.
:fidel-salute-big:
e: oh, also:
it is not the job of marginalized people to do emotional labor to make you okay with the fact that you’ve hurt them. the assumption that you are owed that labor is part of the system of oppression that makes life miserable for people you call comrade. it’s the same notion as when a loved one informs you that you’ve hurt them - if you make it their problem to make you feel better about the fact, you’re being an asshole. deal with the hurt you’ve caused, then deal with the feelings about yourself that having hurt someone causes within you.
this is a great point. however, having struggled to get into good habits around dealing with this stuff myself, i know it's not necessarily an easy skillset to acquire. if anybody's struggling with this / wants to talk, i'd be happy to chat about it, just dm me.
actually doing stuff makes me feel warm n fuzz and all the comrades are the best
I’m not reading the replies
I'm sad that you want to leave and I value you as a member of the community.
two days ago I posted a thread to collect the most useful works and so few found themselves able to contribute. someone commented to me that they thought it was the best thread they’d seen here but I was honestly disappointed. over more than a day, less than 10 users managed to even look through this site for resources to post.
could this possibly be an unrealistic level of expectation from a 6-month old forum with ~12k users and <1k active
when I think what might have been… but we each expect someone else to do the work.
sometimes we expect a small userbase to fill up a research thread for us within two days over a Sunday and Monday
o7
Sorry to see you go, comrade. Thank you so much for standing up for me when I was tempbanned. Thank you so much for showing me the solidarity I didn't always deserve. I hope I wasn't one of the users who pushed you away but if I was, I'm sorry. :heart-sickle:
:fidel-salute: I'm sorry that this community have failed you. I was proud to think I was in a truly inclusive community but it appears that isn't the case and something to be worked on here.
it's also easy to check a featured post and then it's switched out with another but I mentally ignore it cause in my mind I already read that post
I for one tend to ignore feature posts if I don't understand the title (should I apologize?)
But this one i remember - I didn't participate, 1 because I'm not in the US and though there are many Canadian comrades here I felt I would be an interloper and 2 i did not know what a mass line is so I didn't even open it.
Does that make me a bad chapo user?
Well ok good then.
One good thing is I now know what a mass line is.
But really, a lack of participation in one post is hardly a full representation of the irl actions that the users are doing. I know that Cass won't see this, but the really online people who would interact with a single post are not the people who are doing the most in the real world. Relying on a single post for real action is self defeating - the people most likely to miss it are the ones who are probably most active outside.
maybe worth checking relative number of page views of https://hexbear.net/c/main/ versus https://hexbear.net/
I dont know if I just dont look around enough or its just because I'm in the mega thread, but this is still the nicest most polite community I'm a part of. Its often super sarcastic sometimes over the edge to where I'm confused, but I am also dumb and emotionally pretty bad and have a hard time recognizing people are doing over the top sarcasm.
