Hello users of Hexbear, we wanted to inform you that we are going to be locking the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank communities. We have created two new communities /c/gossip and /c/counterpropaganda to serve a similar but clearly distinct purpose than the dunk/dredge tanks.
Not only is the dunk tank a term that has racist origins, but also many posts there were almost no effort and often times requiring later edits to show how they weren't reactionary, ~~not useful with regard to developing rhetoric and furthering dialectical analysis of that which we dunk upon~~.
To that end, we wish posts of reactionaries to be placed in !counterpropaganda@hexbear.net along with an accompanying explanation (as simple or complex as desired) with the intent of countering the reactionary propaganda in the post body, as of now comments are not subject to the same ~~rhetorical rigor~~ rule.
For the posts ~~that are not "low-hanging fruit'~~ of notable people we ask that you use !gossip@hexbear.net .
These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.
Any moderators of the dunk tank or dredge tank that want to be a mod in the new communities let me know.
Any users with questions or comments please use this post, this change was made at the behest of the entire Hexbear mod and admin team. We will be looking for more moderators in an organized volunteer drive shortly, if you wish to submit an application you may send it to me via hexbear or matrix direct messages.
Use this post as a place for discussion to these changes. We will keep things as they are for 2 weeks and then reflect on the feedback, including this post: https://hexbear.net/post/3858346
As a personal addendum I am sorry if ~~the closing of the tanks~~ these changes removes a beloved space on the site and if you want to suggest a community to replace them you may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
Sitewide or community changes come from proposals put forth from the mod team, discussed, and voted on by the mod team.
Any users wanting to suggest a community to replace the tanks, may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net current discussion is here https://hexbear.net/post/3858346 or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
You may also consider using !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml as a substitute for dunk/dredge tank posts as well
The mod statement can be found here: https://hexbear.net/comment/5613033
Application
What is your Hexbear username?
Do you have any preferred pronouns?
What are your thoughts on capitalism?
What are your thoughts on imperialism?
What are your thoughts on trans rights?
What are your thoughts on racial justice?
What do think about current and previous protests around the world?
What are your thoughts on Veganism and Animal Liberation?
Do you have any experience with other leftist online communities?
What did those experiences teach you?
What is your approach to moderation, and how do you work with teams?
How do you deal with online drama and people who try to start things for the sake of it?
What current comms would you be interested in moderating?
Do you have any ideas for community engagement?
What is your general time availability? (Time zone, amounts, common browsing times, etc)
Collected statements of mods in favor of this change:
“dunk culture” can be fun but it’s rarely constructive, gives off white cishet man vibes, and has the potential to shift closer to the reactionary reddit “snark”.
It promotes misanthropy and, depending on the post can serve as an outlet for “acceptable” bigotry by copy/pasting the most heinous takes without pushing back and sometimes without a CW.
We have all seen those toxic and reactionary opinions 200 million times, ultimately it is just getting really mad at other powerless people.
Counterpropaganda is where you can post Mike83829293’s takes. Posts require clear effort being made in countering the falsehoods of the original post, or furthering the discussion. What this effort looks like will be a dialogue between the users and mods.
Counterpropaganda posts cutting apart shitty Op-eds, MIC insider articles, journalistic stories, etc. are celebrated and encouraged, and will be separated from the shitpostier/chattier nature of the gossip community.
Gossip is the new place to post about people with power. The person being dunked on must be a public figure, and be paid to be a public figure.
The name gossip is because it makes the content seem deeply unserious, like the posts about Elon Musk, celebrities, journalists, all of the streamer infighting, YouTuber arguments, podcast guys, etc. Locking the dunk/dredge tanks will help with toning down the irony poisoning on this site esp from white people. it's such a white internet communist turn-off for me and it permeates this site. A lot of people have mentioned that there's a definite air of misogyny around the way the site is currently doing dunks, and calling it like it is, gossip, should prove to be not only a method of finding out problematic users, but also a more entertaining way of letting people talk about other public figures besides just Elon Musk and US political candidates
We absolutely need to be more vigilant about toxic behavior in these spaces, there's a non-zero amount of ironic bigotry that has slipped through the cracks to the point where I've independently had multiple different people mention it as a concern.
Dunk culture is along the lines of doing mutual self harm, like a smoking social club. You all go in and smoke together and encourage one another to keep smoking, and you feel a sense of community and a sense that what you're doing is cool and fun, like putting a poster over the hole in the wall instead of fixing the wall.
We want us to continue to be a fun shitposting forum. But there are tons of other kinds of shitposting. Remember "bad guy bit accounts" when we had like civility and neera_tanden and all those other bit accounts where they just posted and argued while larping as annoying liberals or chuds? We grew out of that, and I think the site is better for it. We still have bit accounts, but there's not really that kind of arguing in the comments anymore. We can grow out of this one too, and I think the site will also be better for it. We don't have to have a site culture defined by our flailing opposition to mainstream pop culture and politics, uselessly posted where nobody else will see it. This change has the potential to make HB a lot less toxic improve the quality of posts, we are assessing these changes over the next two weeks and will open the floor for discussion at that time.
Collected statements of mods against this change:
"dunk' culture" isn't inherently unhealthy for the site.
there are aspects of it that need to be cracked down on, and I don’t discount that some reformations to it will probably need to be made, but even after sitting on it for a bit I still think it's not the best idea to strangle the aspect out of the site.
It is not an inherently progressive move for the site culture to totally exclude it. I think a third space for it should exist, with the primary purpose of a space for 'dunk' content is mutual catharsis.
As a leftist, online and a bit offline, is a bit of a maddening experience. A 'dunk' space, even one filled with low hanging fruit, allows me to vent my anger and negative emotions off in a way that gives a shared space for it. It serves these little capsules of exasperation that keeps me from sort of overdosing on those emotion
Honestly wtf, I thought it was just a mild disagreement/miscommunication, but this is just deranged. This reeks of shitty people using leftist terminology to disguise their abhorrent personalities. How many of you dickheads argued for stacking rocks? NOOOO EVERYTHING HAS TO EXIST FOR ME is what this response reads like. Do self-crit dork ass losers.
Lmao wtf is this line of thought supposed to be? There's no real reasoning beyond "I don't like it". I can also just say shit. This line of reasoning promotes "acceptable" bigotry by ignoring the most heinous takes and insisting we engage bigots by way of rigorous debate, which just elevates them. We have all seen the toxic and reactionary opinions get discussed thoroughly 200 million times, to which the only result has been further empowerment and legitimisation, on top of that, the lack of any space to just breathe and acknowledge that these things are toxic and crazy is something we all haven't had the chance to experience.
I look down on this, therefore it has to have a the name of something I also look down on. This is because everybody who enjoys the dunk tank is white, and enjoying it is inherently white.
things I dislike are white and I am incapable of using the "block" botton. Everything has to be for me on this site.
Look thru this thread and tell me it's the "pro dunk tank" people that have been toxic or bigoted. Jesus christ just say you don't like it.
They are neither celebrated nor encouraged, since it's a new comm dumbass. Just say you wanted that content from the dunk tank, but you can't, because that is the content that was in the dunk tank. Wtf is this argument/statement supposed to say?
Liberals and making wack analogies that make no sense instead of relating to the topic at hand (which has several people arguing directly about "health") name a more iconic duo.
Okay? Then ban those too? Either shitposting is fine or it isn't. Just because you like it doesn't make it better somehow.
Civility is still around. We have two comms dedicated to the concept of "bad guy bit accounts" (badposting and fakenews). Just because you dislike it doesn't make it inherently bad. Mods learn to utilise the block button ffs.
Libs and describing things they dislike as childlike, despite the things not being different from the things they themselves enjoy, name a more iconic duo.
This makes no sense. Yeah we don't have to have a site culture defined by dunking, but we do, by account of that being the basis of this site. The site is an offshoot of r/chapotraphouse. It's in large part about low effort shitposting. It drives massive amounts of its' traffic. If you don't want that, why are you here? This is the place I go for dunking jfc, that's what this place is for you mockery.
Considering the fact that the most toxic users in this thread have been those that dislike the dunk tank... What? How will this make it less "toxic"? How was the dunk tank toxic? Once again: Just because you personally dislike content, does not mean it is toxic or bad.
To all of these mods:
Yeah we'll just have the fake news, and bad posting communities instead, what a huge improvement!!!11 Those communities are definitely very serious, productive, and totally not irony poisoned at all!
If we're going to get rid of low effort posting, just get rid of all of it. Doing this weird thing were certain low effort posting is not allowed while other types of low effort posting are allowed based on personal preference is just nonsense.
i blocked both of those immediately and never brought it up until today. Imagine if I had been like NO. we must ban them and i need an accompanying dissertation on your shit post in this new comm explaining the themes and satirical elements of your fake news post lol.
If we ban low effort posting this site is cooked frankly. Gene Dab is long gone no one left here is making anything worth reading or watching lol
Most definitely. I've made plenty of high effort posts, the trouble is that no one (outside of the news thread sometimes, that's where high effort posts get the most traction imo) reads them or engages with them. I think my last post on the Marxism community, which was a detailed analysis by a South African Marxist on BRICS, de-dollarisation and sub-imperialism, got like 9 upvotes and no responses lmao. People on here want their low effort quick to consume content, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
7 months ago the sites active sort was changed to be more like "chapo.chat" active sort, but I can not find a code repository with a commit that shows what was changed (I welcome it of anyone knows where that is). So I can't review what the difference between Lemmy active sort is and Hexbear active sort.
What I can tell you is how Lemmy sorts:
Now I think what was changed is that the decay for Active was made more aggressive.
This means that the algorithm already favors posts that attract a lot of comments. The more a thread gets comments the longer of stays on the front page. Since score is also a major factor, it means that content you can digest quickly and upvote is also highly viable content.
The Dunk Tank and The Dredge Tank were baked in a lab for that kind of math. You get fast food for up votes and fire and forget comment sections. These comms are the peak of the mountain for keeping the front page fresh and lively.
You know what doesn't do that? Marxism, Anarchism, and Theory comms. I managed to game the system with out knowing it a few days ago by including a photo and a title to an effort post that yielded over 100 up votes which is a high water mark for a post here.
What I'm saying is, this shit posting site has a default algorithm that thrives off shit posts. You can't just nuke the shit post communities and expect it to stop. The algorithm doesn't favor thoughtful discussion, long form posting,
Several comms effectively became dunk and dredge after their closure and it you didn't pay attention you might have thought they were still open. This is because from what I can tell, outside of dunk and dredge, comms seem meaningless. Dredge content in the chat comm, dunk content in the chapo comm, both in main. The mega threads seem to occupy most of the posts in the site. That's a whole other topic for another day.
Womenby reopened and no one posts there. Menby I think is open? No one posts there. No one posts in parenting, they post in the weakly thread. No one is posting in theory, Marxism, anarchism, or really any other comm outside of news, chat, chapo, main (but not always), gaming, tech.
This is a small site, it might not have the foot traffic to drive these other communities, and the active sort isn't helping. This is just my rambling but I think if I pull on this thread some more I could draw better conclusions.
We should have been a phpBB forum instead.
Reddit was always multiple steps backwards from phpBB forums, and "shitty Reddit clone but with federation" doesn't seem to be that much better. Like, we still can't even create polls, fucking shit that old-school forums figured out more than two decades ago.
I think the original idea was to create non-corporate controlled alternatives to existing social media and siphon users as enshittification happened, to create a proof-of-concept of a post-capital internet, but if the end-use-case isn't to laugh at Elon Musk's deranged takes or to keep updated on the latest Star Citizen grift idk what we're doing here.
"The purpose of the system is what it does" applies to Hexbear as well- at some point we'll have to reckon with the mismatch between capitalist social media methodology as a means to "drive engagement" against our egalitarian/utopian aims, but that's probably not happening today since this particular struggle session seems more about mod/admin/user miscommunication and infighting (being charitable) so
tag filtering rather than siloed comms or subfora would make sense to me but i guess that's not lemmy
I mean, fundamentally tags and subfora fulfill the same purpose, the issue is the sorting algorithm weighing different types of content differently
The problem with the old active sort was that the decay was so slow, you'd get weeks old posts staying on the front page and clogging it up, preventing new posts from gaining traction. So I don't know what the solution is. Going back to the old sort algorithm means that we'll never see any posts younger than a few days on the front page, because of how prolific we are at commenting on high up posts.
Get rid of all sorts except New
new comments is good too
My last effort post got 25 upbears and like two replies. I still don't mind doing them every once in a while, but that's clearly not what people are here for in the main
Yeah that's the general trend with regards to that kind of thing. I find there's more traction for effort posts on the news megathread, but that's limited to current events, which limits the posting topics. Not everyone wants to discuss war and geopolitics, and it's perfectly understandable why that is.
My experiences have been similar. Effort-posting in a reply to a news mega comment tends to do a lot better than making a unique post. Although I've often done both to try and increase the visibility of other comms.
The unfortunate thing is that I feel like this whole saga has made me less likely to contribute longer, more detailed posts. There's a difference between spending time writing a longer post or reply because you feel like you have something to add that isn't highlighted often or might be useful, and some version of it being a kind of mandated fee to post because a handful of mods seem to want it the whole thing gone but aren't willing to just make that decision and stand by it.
Some of the mods here are great and continue being, but getting one word answers followed by dickish, oddly angry, and doomer-ish rants in response to genuine questions really sucks. It's obviously not a 1:1, but it makes me feel a little like 'if they can't be arsed, why should I put the effort in?'. I've got better / more entertaining things I could be doing.
my only idea is to literally just start pinning effort posts people make. i know that probably would come with the problem of picking which ones to pin and users getting mad if they didn't pin your post but it would be the only way to force engagement to them
Certainly within the smaller Comms this would be useful.
Yeah last time I made an effort post everyone yelled at me. Getting a lot of mixed signals rn.
curious what your effortpost was?
On shooting a tsarviech
Frankly, most people crying about not enough high effort posts haven't done shit. People who have actually typed out high effort posts quickly realize why high effort posts aren't a thing on hexbear dot net, and while I don't think the vast majority of high effort posters have their head so far up their ass that they think they should get paid for their labor, there's very little point in spending more than an hour on a high effort post with almost nothing to show for it.
there is no reason to effort post here. I had a talk with an admin at one point, like a year or so ago, about potentially opening back up c/islam and I was gonna try to effort post there. but all effort posting comms are just fucking dead, there's no desire for the content even when it's there. people come to hexbear for slop, me included. you can't ban that drive out of people, you can't make them dislike one type of content and switch to another, all you can do is meet them where they're at and try to facilitate wider styles also. problem is, this is a small community, we do not have the large userbase where niche comms would have more than a dozen regular users. it is what it is, but you gotta accept it for that
Yeah, I know. I think some of the moderators have a "build it and they will come" mindset, in that they believe that if they change rules and site structure, high effort posts will be appreciated more and we'll be able to branch out and reach more people. While that is a noble goal, I don't see how that is possible for us as an esoteric web forum defederated from pretty much every major Lemmy instance. Where are all the new users who will appreciate high effort posts going to come from? Who are we going to "advertise" hexbear to?
Yeah, if effort posts are what they wanna encourage, I'm thinking why not try to highlight them and make them more accessible instead of stripping everything else away? I've only read a little bit of theory, and I think that is hexbear took a turn for the superserious I would feel uncomfortable even posting here at all. I already feel like I'm not knowledgeable enough to post sometimes, BUT everyone here is friendly and SO FUNNY and smart that I feel relatively comfortable here. The humor and shitposting is a big part of that.
I also kinda feel like if the goal is to radicalize more people, then getting rid of the "fun" parts of the site will just alienate anyone who would come for the dunks but stay to learn some theory
You made an account specifically to post about this? lmao that's pathetic. Especially considering your posting style is very obvious lol
As opposed to your very productive usage of the niche online webforum?
Liberals and being shitty towards ND people, name a more iconic duo. Yeah buddy tell me more about how me disagreeing with you is a tantrum, hey throw in the r word while you're at it
I am neither cis nor het, which is evident from my pronouns you asshole. You were the one to bring up "throwing a tantrum" which is used derisively of autistic people and have since then moved on to be a general negative dipshit thing to say, because it implies the recipient is behaving like an autistic person, which is implied to be bad. I don't need to spell this out for you, because you are aware of this, this is what you were trying to do, but I'm still gonna.
Also eat your own face for misgendering me you sadsack fuck. For someone who dislikes toxic dunktank, you sure do love being a toxic loser. More than likely you're one of the dumbass mods who is arguing for this, and it's great to see what kind of site culture you wish to foster. Real welcoming space, real good focus on not being bigoted or chauvinistic, glad we can see that's what it's all about.
Start doing some breath exercises and learn that not everything has to cater to you.
Honestly this is just pathetic