Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
Okay can someone give me a tl;dr of what happened? I wasn't really following but from what I gather the d*unk_tank and dredge_tank got locked for a name change, okay cool good. Then trans_comrade_69 started saying posters on here were misogynistic in a vague way and banned a bunch of people, now mods have stepped down and I'm confused.
I am not going to go thru everything. In part because I am biased, in part because it's all mixed together memory-wise, in part because I get exhausted thinking about it all lol. But here is my best attempt at a somewhat neutral presentation of what went down. At least the big things.
8a. A wrecker earns me 35$ by way of me betting on their behaviour and winning. Thanks for the ingredients for vegan ice cream, dummy.
I am skipping a lot of steps. But this is the basic gist of it as I see it, and seeing as how I was one of the Very Mad Online users, I think it at least gives an idea of how people one "my side" of the fence views the situation. I've tried to be somewhat neutral in the presentation of events and moreso just focused on how things unfolded. I did not succeed in this, but if you think this is biased, you should see what I would've done if I tried to be biased.
edit: Step 8 is also where I started interacting with this as if I was engaging with liberals acting in bad faith, rather than well-intentioned comrades. My tone became harsher than it should have, though I am of course otherwise completely correct in all my opionions, as I can never be wrong. This hostility was a two-way street, I did not begin acting like this out of nowhere, but I did and it's good I got put in the time-out zone.
Don't forget Melina/dsplayer/whatever their original account name was creating a bunch of alt accounts to harrass people with and saying all kinds of vile things.
I think I remember dsplayer or dsplayer IIII whatever the account was called. One of the last things they posted was like this anime mousepad and then they asked for their accounts to be delete not long after (At the time if you pressed the delete account button, it would just delete your comments).
There was also another user whose name I can't remember, but he sent nudes or something to people and refused to stop, which was very strange because he seemed like a normal person. And there was a trans woman who posted a suggestive video and was banned. I don't think she was a bad person, just strange.
Yeah, I saw some of what was posted and it was really not cool, and it did a lot to rile up people and foster a sense of paranoia.
Also makes sense that an ~~ex-mod~~ (see edit) would know enough to talk like they were a current mod and (rightfully) cause the user’s to doubt the sincerity of the staff given how long it took to deal with (they ended up having to de-fed the linked instance to stop the harassment) + TC69’s ban wave was REALLY bad optics.
Our past mistakes come back to haunt us
Edit: Apparently the wrecker is probably an outsider, which actually is even worse because a lot of accusations were flying- we might have done their job for them
Edited to include the most important part of that whole saga.
not really relivant to the actual procession of events, but between 15 and 16 we have Alaskaball banning themselves as a bit and refering to themselves as a 'fella' on their admin alt, leading to a mini drama bomb as it looked like another admin misgendering the userbase moment
Yeah I considered turning it into a bit crimping Brian David Gilberts' Kingdom Hearts Heroes' Journey video but then I decided I'm still not online enough to put in that much effort.
If I had been then I would have included that event as a sort of separate saga though
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
We've got enough comments hexreplybot, shush please
ty for the write up, I'm always late to the struggle sessions
Better to be late than on time
Minor clarification on 9: it wasn't a leaked DM, it was a message in a public chatroom
Hell yeah
and what was that ?
There use to be a subreddit called VeganCirclejerk, something like that. They were invited to join hexbear dot net. It didn't work out, both Hexbear users and the VCJ didn't like each other, wreckers made a bunch of troll accounts. Since VCJ users were fewer than Hexbear users, the VCJ got kicked out. Theres a lot more drama related to this but it's nothing worth remembering and it's all stupid
Nothing to worry about. It was just this drama, but a bunch of years ago.
this is the most insane struggle session oml
See comment from SixSidedUrsine for the relevant links
My 2 cents: I think a big part of what caused the blow-up was Mod/Admin messaging that the dunk comms were toxic due to cis-het- white he/hims. Many POC and trans people found this offensive (and racist, transphobic amd misogynistic in its own right). From what I understand TC69 did not start this and was not even involved in the comms-change decision making, but she added some fire to the already burning flames by coming on strong with the snarky banning spree. There were some unintended mis-communications and certainly mis-steps.
Edit-clarity of provenance
I'm ootl as well. I'm not even in the matrix chat so I can't go back and look