hexbear

On #1 the problem that I see is that the userbase does not agree on what the site should be, and admins, from what I've seen mostly don't feel comfortable making that decision for us except where there's an additional clear overriding purpose behind the decision (ie getting rid of the dunk tank). I don't see a ton of users pulling either of these cards, though it has happened more in the past. And "when users care about something it is treated as a bigger deal on the site than when they don't" isn't the own you think it is. There isn't a cabal of mods and powerposters that determines what gets talked about here, besides literally just enforcing a relatively minimal set of rules, its just organic interaction. Is there a specific actionable policy change (or several) the admins could make to fix this issue?

On #2, again, they aren't "drowning out" other posts just because there's sometimes a lot of them, they also have to get upvotes and comments to be featured, and they all decay in the rankings in the same way, it's all going through the same simplistic sort algorithm. This case could be made about any of our posts not just the most frivolous ones. Don't post or upvote or comment on anything even remotely unserious, because other things are more important? Is that the kind of site we want to be, or what brought people here? I agree mutual aid is important, as are a lot of other serious topics, but banning silliness won't work and won't make the site better. Maybe you could do a rate limit on new posts to prevent outright spam, but beyond that I don't see this as being helpful. I don't know what "obvious op-sec reasons" you have for not signing in, especially as you can trivially use a throwaway account just for mobile if you like (and other opsec concerns are almost all shared whether you log in or just browse), but overall this ask just seems like a personal preference thing, and we've moved away from hidden comms because it just ends up making them wastelands and ostracizing the people who wanted them in the first place (ie c/furry used to be hidden). If we want mutual aid posts to be boosted or pinned by default, we could do that, but those aren't the core aim of the site, despite being very important. In fact the Gaza fundraisers have been pinned lately sitewide, which is far more effective than "hide posts I don't like".

On #3, don't you think it's cruel to call out specific people for having an "addiction" in your words, and using the site to cope? I guess you're just built different, but a lot of people here are struggling or have been, and while there is a standard of behavior that we should all be held to, having hobbies and interests and senses of humor that you don't share isn't against the rules and shouldn't be, no matter what bluesky people think of it, and neither is commiserating or nostalgiaposting, which you needlessly pathologize. Again, if we can set a standard of how many posts is too many in a given time period, fine, but banning content that does no harm and in fact gets engagement from other users, goes too far for no benefit.