Hi all,
Throughout the last few days there has been an uptick in arguments and turbulence throughout our site. This comes right at a time where we are onboarding new communities that are in danger of being banned by Reddit.
During this, we've seen that it would be beneficial to provide more clear communication around our decisions and stances on current issues. This post will be divided into two topics that have both come up: 1. BIPOC Comrades and Intersectionality and 2. Veganism
BIPOC Comrades and Intersectionality
We have an ongoing commitment to intersectionality. This will always be a continual process as we identify new opportunities for learning and process improvement.
Based on community feedback around BIPOC representation on the sitemod team, we have added two new sitemods who will bring additional BIPOC perspectives to the sitemod team.
While we had BIPOC comrades on the sitemod team previously, they made the understandable choice to not state this identifying information publicly and we support them in their decision. We will continue to increase BIPOC representation on the sitemod team over the coming weeks.
There have been concerns of implicit support of racism amongst the mod team. We hope that looking through the modlog will prove otherwise. Although we can't get to rule breaking comments or posts immediately, we will never tolerate racism on our site, we're sorry about this and wish we could do more. We encourage everyone to continue reporting rule-breaking comments and posts so that they are more visible to moderators.
To reiterate, any posts or comments that are exclusionary to our BIPOC comrades are against our Code Of Conduct and will be removed. Individuals should especially not appropriate comparisons that aren't from their culture. Do not use appropriative comparisons like:
-
Do not use appropriative comparisons like chattel slavery or the holocaust if they are not from your culture.
-
Implying indigenous people are barbaric/mentions of "assimilation" or "evolving" their culture. These phrases are outright xenophobic and have a long history as a dog-whistle for settler-colonialism. They are not allowed.
Our moderator team is made up of volunteers and works to remove reported content that violates our CoC as quickly as possible, but we are unfortunately not able to remove objectionable content instantaneously. Objectionable content remaining up following a report does not mean the moderation team endorses that content. We are continually working to build up the moderation team and number of volunteers.
Veganism
Hexbear is a platform for all leftist communities. As a part of this, we're partnering with a number of vegan communities on reddit who are migrating over to the site. The mods of these communities are intersectional and have a number of BIPOC comrades on their teams including indigenous comrades and we're excited to work with them.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to eliminate as far as is possible and practicable all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals. Veganism is about absolute liberation of our exploited and commodified animal comrades. Veganism is not a diet, although not eating meat and animal products is a common extension of this philosophy.
We encourage vegans to post throughout the site. Our sitemod team is a mixture of vegans and non-vegans, as are the mods of the !food comm. The mods of that comm made the policy change of requiring pictures of meat to be marked nsfw following feedback from multiple comrades who were uncomfortable seeing meat pics. After examining feedback on this issue, the sitemod team has made the decision to support the !food mods agency as moderators.
The "NSFW" tag is very much a "catch all" at this point, although more specific content tags are planned for the future. We encourage all comrades passionate about helping us develop this feature to check out !hexbear@hexbear.net for how to get started with contributing.
Vegans are allowed to advocate for veganism, especially in their own comm. This doesn't constitute sectarianism, classism, racism, etc. and will not be actioned against as long as it does not break the site's code of conduct or a comm's rules.
As with any comm, individual posts and comments will need to be moderated. The diverse team of vegan mods already has experience navigating this from running large subreddits and will respond as these issues are reported. Bad faith generalizations of all vegans will not be tolerated, nor the delegitimization of trauma expressed by our vegan comrades.
In Conclusion
We appreciate the passion our community has for empowerment and intersectionality. As a team, we hope to consistently embody the communal standards we outline in our code of conduct. We feel these changes uphold our goals of intersectionality and left unity and will drive the site forward as a general, inclusive leftist space.
Thank you and viva la hexbear.
What exactly does sectarianism mean to the mod team? It is pretty clear this site is divided into sects on this issue, and inflaming that tension accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Like, I get that vegans really believe their belief system. I genuinely believe that Marxism-Leninism is a settled science. But constantly inflaming these disagreement makes this site unbearable.
I have always interpreted this site's 'no sectarianism' rule to basically mean 'no making this site hostile to any specific type of leftist', which is a more broad rule than the literal interpretation. It does not ban all criticism, but I would hope that, for example, calling all non-vegans liberals or veganism a liberal ideology would not be allowed under the rule. I sincerely hope that this is the case, and that the mod team will clarify this soon.
this has been what "no sectarianism" has meant in practice
To your first point, idk if you could call it “criticism,” but I felt like I was able to engage about veganism with non-vegans on here in the past in like the mega thread or whatever and it was usually pleasant conversation even if we weren’t on the same page.
Maybe that ship has sailed, since everybody seems up in arms and very defensive, and I can’t really blame them, but I would like to be able to talk about my beliefs with other posters in a reasonable way again in the future.
I'm completely open to learning more about veganism. I try to avoid meat because the industrial practices are horrifying & industrial meat production is destructive.
But also, I was raised around animals. I've developed social & cultural relationships with animals that end with killing. I genuinely believe these relationships are beneficial for me and the animals.
I disagree with vegans who believe that morality between humans is the same as morality between humans & any given species of animal.
But this disagreement doesn't need to be inflamed, and I agree with vegans like 99% of the time.
Maybe a right to disagree policy would be more appropriate than a right to criticize?
Even criticisms would be fine if the atmosphere wasn't as hostile.
Like, the Anarchist/ML split flares up occasionally here, but we have managed without the site collapsing.