hexbear

I really think the problems with the past couple of drama waves can be boiled down to "don't govern the site by surprise." Please, just TALK to us before you make big, sweeping changes.

I just want more empathy.

Reading through this thread I see a lot of people with a lot of problems in their lives who use this site at least in part as an emotional safety blanket, who really need it to stay that way.

What this functionally means is that drama is kept to a minimum, and that behaviour where some people take a situation from 0-100 instead of talking, assuming good faith and coming to understanding is discouraged or actively fought as it's a corrosive behaviour that I do not think has ever led to anything good on this site ever.

Lastly I've already mentioned, but vibes-based moderation must be avoided such that a moderation action can be described to neurodiverse members of the site in an explicitly understandable and non-vague way so that person can actionably change that behaviour.

I think y'all are way too comfortable with banning a comrade in otherwise good standing from the site for all time based on a single day's series of interactions where they said something wrong or got heated or defensive. I think the same goes for removing comments or temp bans when someone says something a particular mod disagrees with.

We all have bad days, we all make mistakes, we all have bad takes, and not everything requires mod action.

The attitude I see mods repeatedly voice to justify banning a comrade for all time is that they can just make an alt so w/e. Can you imagine a community you get significant psychic peace from all telling you they never want to see or talk to you ever again and your first response is to go buy a disguise so you can go join the group again?

(I also think requiring temp bans to post in c/selfcrit is psychotic. Being banned or even just being flamed on the boards is humiliating enough, and people learn from those experiences. Forcing the users to engage in this humiliating public process feels like an abuse of power.)

I just wish y'all were more comfortable doing nothing sometimes.

I just want to acknowledge that we had a thread wherein users expressed anxiety that they would now be forced to post in the self-crit comm as part of moderation action against them. These users were assured that this was not the intention of the comm and that it was a place for voluntary self-reflection.

Basically immediately after this users started getting temp-banned and told that it would be made permanent if they didn't post to self-crit.

Users that get into fights with each other in the comments will be temp-banned from this community for 1 day.

I think that posting outside of megathreads should be encouraged. I don't really engage with them much because I think it's a bad format for discussion, though I understand that other people like it, but a lot of posts really should be posted in communities as posts I think.

If thousands of posts are instead comments, we look a lot less active as a website.

My grievance is there aren't enough posts about owls

Mods removing threads for incorrect comm should copy and paste them with all the comments in "correct" comm, if they received enough engagement.

Sorry if that's sounds like work, don't fucking remove threads from "wrong comm" then. Your 3 seconds of "correct bucket sorting is important for my deep learning model" is collective minutes of writing comments by commenters, show that you care eh?

And have mod comment if you think nsfw is not enough of cw/cw is incorrect, how the fuck do you think i have to fix incorrect cw, if i don't know who to answer that i fixed the issue/title? I have to notice it was removed, search modlog like a nerd, see some reason with removal (one that i might agree with or might not, but be fine with fixing), and what then? Only alaskaball does it

Juan Guaidó should be installed as temporary admin until we can figure out what's going on with these owls

I would love to have more micro-transactions, possibly a subscription service named Hexbear Red that would give access to all emojis.

Can we also have some AI driven features to make posting more efficient and productive?

Another good idea would be to partner with businesses to present exiting new products and services to the Hexbear community!

No, seriously, I'm quite happy with the site as it is. People here are much kinder and a lot more interesting than anywhere else on the internet. Whatever the mods are doing, in general the end result is really good.

Not to be a , but has the community considered requiring linked sources in the news megathread? Like maybe not necessarily for everything (e.g., people commenting on or interpreting multiple pieces of news or events), but there are lots of “news” posts that are just quotes from unnamed sources without any link or indication of where it came from, and I think that goes against the point of news and critical inquiry

perhaps unpopular opinion I'd like to discuss:

if frauddogg had been moderated like autismdragon instead of celebrated for null's behavior, void might not have felt the need to delete null's account when found out to be a former troop

this is not conspiracist, "mod-cabal" bullshit – it is undeniable that some people are moderated differently than the vast majority of users. I would prefer to not call out more examples – I'm not interested in a struggle session or interpersonal drama – but I have been poking around and saving them up since the TC69 incident, because "no investigation, no right to speak," and I've seen how @REgon@hexbear.net et al have been treated for trying to discuss this difference without having a fucking catalog of evidence.

if frauddogg had been required to treat other hexbears with the good faith etc called for in the Code of Conduct, would void have felt compelled to delete null's account when the troop thing came up? would it have even come up at all in that conversation, if void hadn't been consistently behaving belligerently towards others, including other em_poc users?

🤷

this place is deeply baffling, and if I could figure out somewhere else full of trans leftists where I could get news that isn't entirely drenched in American propaganda, I would have already deleted my account.

edit1: removed an archive link per admin/mod request

edit2: changed another archive link to screenshots per admin/mod request

The bans and subsequent loss of @Awoo@hexbear.net @PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS@hexbear.net ~~and ReadFanon@hexbear.net] (dont recall if fanon was banned, but I haven't seen them around)~~ were bullshit and the mentality that lead to them really needs to be dropped. I also haven't seen @Frank@hexbear.net or @aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net around for a long while. That sucks.

We all have petty grievances, but I really wish those who think they are responsible enough to moderate a community would be responsible enough to leave their private issues at the door.

Was making an official mod statement about the correct way to post about luigi really necessary?

It's also not entirely clear to me if posting about Luigi is still banned on c/cth or not

The only thing I think we need to do a better job on is being less harsh when moderating content that isn't directly and systemically harmful. There's a not very fine line between "this is systemically harmful" and "I don't understand this" or "the vibes of this are off" and there are times when the latter two are treated the same as the former.

If someone is being systemically harmful delete their shit and ban them if they won't fix it. No tolerance for intolerance.

If someone is being weird or their vibes are off...whatever? It's a tiny niche Internet forum by certain standards ALL of our vibes are off. Who cares. Let people be.

Basically posts should only be removed if they actually break the CoC and users should only be banned if they are frequent or egregious offenders.

That's just like my opinion though

Really glad this site is now a super serious place for organising and has lost the dunk culture because we have three slop communities or however many instead of one

That there was no response to a particular mod who posted an offensive "self crit", got called out on it, nuked their thread and presumably created a new account (while still being a mod on the old one) leaves a bad taste

Feels like there are less posters and less posts

Specific suggestions

• have discussions about the future of hexbear or possible changes on hexbear, not matrix
• de-mod the self crit person until they understand why what they did was offensive and incorrect
• remember that if you're not enjoying the site, then you should leave - and that this applies 10x for mods (who not infrequently just leave anyway)

Brace yourselves for and about 10 new communities emerging

there's this one annoying bitch in the trans mega who won't shut the fuck up about how horny she is all the damn time. I think her name is ExtraDog? anyway ban her. And whatever happened to that gerbil Biggs? This site needs more of him. Make him his own comm and a site admin while you're at it

my thoughts? too many commas in a single sentence on this site; wider adoption of the semi colon is required

• Won't rehash what other people said, but yeah moderation needs to be impartial and consistent. I know coming up with procedure's just encourages trolls to "game the system", but purely vibes-based mod action without pointing out what was done wrong in detail or recourse to appeal isn't working out (arguably it's giving an opening to wrecker's to take advantage of, because they can impersonate user's/mod voices and exacerbate any perception of preferential treatment which in turn sours sentiment further... which is what I suspect happened)

• I think trying to replicate the success of the zero-tolerance policy wrt transphobia with misogyny and racism might have been a mistake- our community was much better equipped to combat that particular -ism, probably due to its make-up. Differentiating micro-aggressions from outright bigotry seems important but was overlooked, and giving zero room for rehabilitation and education just seems to have cooled discourse and created a cycle that encourages weaponizing our identities to bludgeon other people with. I'm glad that right now we're encouraging giving the benefit of the doubt to each other.

• Just an observation, but maybe we have to shed the dirtbag leftist irony poisoning that characterized r/Chapo, cos most of you seem half my age now and are waaaaaaay too sincere and make me feel really really old

• Personally, I had come to the conclusion a while ago that material conditions would dictate how the website is used, so I wasn't ever really worried about whether the website was serious business or silly fun, because quite frankly that question is immaterial. However, I do think that we're gonna have to decide what we want to prioritize as a community and start building out the infrastructure for what comes next; if we're the posting vanguard we're gonna need better outreach tools and agitprop, if we're the life boat at the end of the world and the last safe space we're going to need better mod tools and basic stuff like wiki's, and procedure's to ensure the safety of people using mutual aid, etc. Or maybe we decide to be something else entirely. But we can have that conversation a little later, I think.

Edit: Oh one point I kinda forgot about- the mega-threadification of hexbear means that we can't really assume a uniform site culture anymore. I know we've done this to give more people safe spaces but imo it's gotten kinda cliquey and I kinda feel like we're 2 shitposts from (completely arbitrary and made up example) the News Mega launching a civil war against Badposting or something. Idk if it's actually a problem or not tho

Some users have been concerned about the new moderator onboarding process, I've detailed it on other threads but will repeat it here:

There are two ways for a user to become a mod:

An existing mod in good-standing vouches for the mod and promotes the user, the mod that does so is then responsible and held to account for any actions a mod they've vouched for takes.

The second and by far most common way is to send an application.

• The interested user sends me via direct message on hexbear or matrix message the mod application (you can technically send it to any admin but I've been the one onboarding mods for the past few years)
• I read the application as well as any of the other admins interested in the mod on-boarding process, during this time we will look at the account age and modlog for the user as well as any previous usernames the applicant mentions (mods just as users cycle their accounts for opsec reasons and we do not demod the old account when we mod the new account to obfuscate this account cycling)
• If everyone involved is in agreement the mod is onboarded with instructions on how to use the mod tools and to use the code of conduct as the reasons for removals, and encourage discussion with the other community moderators, if there are any. Some community mod teams discuss onsite, or offsite, the most common place is the hexbear self-hosted matrix mod chat channel.

The community creation process includes a request for mod-application and account age / previous mod actions are taken into consideration for this as well.

We wanted to try and encourage users to get involved with community creation or moderating an existing one but also set a level of vetting that wasn't prohibitive.

Systems of moderation for forums like this necessarily need to be a bit arbitrary and, for this forum in particular, very opaque. This creates a situation where the users' trust in the moderation team becomes a critical resource for the community. In my admittedly vibes-based analysis this trust, while still relatively high, is at an all-time low.

Trust is generated over time, but this site being populated mostly by different varieties of contrarians and malcontents seems to make generating trust pretty inefficient. I suspect even moderately big reforms for accountability or whatever will be seen as empty attempts at legitimation. Of course, trust will still need to be spent from time to time, but before any reforms, I would make sure internally that it isn't being wasted. To make this a little less uselessly abstract, for example (chosen randomly, please do not take this as a complaint about this case in particular), punishing users for upvoting a pretty bad post probably isn't worth it from the perspective of trust.

这个社区应该只讲中文。 😏

Actual problem is site is very slow now. I do not know why. It is a recent problem.

Site feels way more cliquey than it used to and think mega threading is contributing to that and exacerbating the grievances people sometimes have w "power posters". Megathreads are a huge part of the site culture so idk what you would even do or want to do to change it.

uhhh i don't wanna relitigate specific things or point fingers and be incorrect about it, but one of my honest but tangential takeaways from the last big struggle sessions was that maybe TC69 was scapegoated for the whole thing and that really sucks. i dunno, just felt like a "uhhh this big change isn't going down well HEY EVERYONE HERE'S TC69 AND THE CHANGES ARE ALL ON THEM oh shit that didn't work either and now a number of people will definitely never return ever again" situation and that made me feel bad for everyone involved (me being sad about a website lmao). Even as someone who didn't always see eye to eye with TC69 in the early days (not on TC69 thought, but on specific fights between users in the first year), I really thought the whole thing was a raw deal.

multiple people have touched on what I think would be a better solution and @HarryLime@hexbear.net said it simplest: just talk to us. we're not a pile of 3000 babies with shitty nappies to be cared for, we're a bunch of like minded people posting and talking to eachother on a website. if we need to be managed that hard to a point that talking to us is stressful, then legit just turn the servers off for your own wellbeing. i'm not joking here, i would prefer the wellbeing of any and all admins, mods, posters, comrades and whoever over me having the privilege to shit out my dumb thoughts onto a screen.