chamomile [she/her,fae/faer]

  • 2 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: November 26th, 2020
  • chamomile [she/her,fae/faer]tovegan•The so-called vegan "struggle session"
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    2 years ago

    You're missing the reason it was created in the first place.

    Here's the context: VCJ, an explicitly anti-capitalist sub, was in danger of getting banned on reddit. The vegan mods here, lotf and me, asked permission from the other hexbear admins to reach out to the VCJ mods and offer them a lifeboat community here. The hexbear admins unanimously supported this and actively praised me for working to bring in more users to grow the community. That was a big goal at the time. I don't know if it still is, considering hexbear continues to abuse incoming communities.

    We made an announcement here that we would be vcj's lifeboat because they were at risk of getting banned from reddit. During that week, before any new vegans or vcjers even joined, tons of carnists began abusing us, and making nasty posts meant to start shit. VCJ was getting blamed for shit long before they ever joined.

    I didn't sleep during that week because shit was off the rails. There were countless abusive posts and messages from carnists, hundreds of comments blowing up the site. I have no doubt that wreckers from places like kiwifarms were around. Much of the shit being posted was heinous and disturbing, and that's aside from typical reactionary carnism. I was in contact with other mods this whole time, but we all felt overwhelmed.

    Many promises and agreements were made among the admins at that time. We agreed that nonvegan reactionaries and abusers would be banned, just as we had done to sexist and transphobic reactionaries. We agreed that hexbear would be a default vegan website across the whole website, just as women's rights and trans rights are a default position of the site, but that people were allowed to be nonvegan if their nonvegan posting was CWed.

    Again, I hadn't slept for a week, but with these promises and assurances, I finally, finally was able to crash. When I awoke, instead of all the things we had agreed to, I found that c/strugglesessions was created. Instead of banning reactionaries and abusers, as was promised again and again, they were directed to a comm that promised lax moderation. Not only that, but it became a safe space for carnists to abuse us because vegans started getting banned instead, everywhere, even from that comm. Before, I could ban abusive nonvegans. After c/strugglesessions was created, I could not because it was a safe space for carnist abuse, and users camped on the modlog and would have rained even more hell if we tried.

    I never was even given the chance to weigh in on the creation of that comm. It was done and could not be undone without making the mods look contradictory, which would damage our optics. It should never have been created. We should have banned reactionaries instead of being cowards.

  • chamomile [she/her,fae/faer]tovegan•The so-called vegan "struggle session"
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    2 years ago

    I don't think it's misleading at all. Of course people use optics to maintain power, and I didn't imply otherwise. I used to be a sitemod, and I was in the chatrooms with mods and admins. In the end, optics and good PR were chosen over justice. Promises were broken, solidarity was betrayed.

  • chamomile [she/her,fae/faer]tovegan•The so-called vegan "struggle session"
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    2 years ago

    You stabbed this whole community in the back. If you are truly sorry, you need to work on repairing the damage you did. You need to get rid of c/strugglesessions, allow talk of veganism on the whole board and not just siloed in this community, and you need to ban nonvegan reactionaries and abusers. Most vegans who were banned never came back because the circumstances you helped create on this board made it clear we would never be safe here nor be among comrades.