hexbear

General notice: We'll be wrapping this whole thing up by around about Monday.

What's the attitude going forwards wrt irony-poisoning? I remember back in the UlyssesT era I discussed the topic with him and we came to a fair point of "irony is not a good coping mechanism because it promotes detachment rather than facing the problem, but if you can acknowledge that it's acceptable"

But I kinda feel like that's not an ideal position, right? We can all acknowledge that ironic bigotry is still bigotry. But we still do ironic bigotry all the time, just hidden behind an extra layer of exaggeration or abstraction to make it absurd enough that no one is hurt. Is that a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that we often are just skirting around the problems, either because we're privileged and can't really confront them without revealing our biases/ignorance, or because we're too affected by them to feel comfortable treating them seriously? It's a bit of a tough one, IMO, irony gives some safety to comrades who don't wanna seriously delve into dark subjects for them but I personally feel it acts as a shield for my own shortcomings more often than not. I don't think I'd feel great if every Adam Friedland Show reference in this site was removed for ironic detachment or whatever, because it really is just nice having a mechanism to detach for a bit, but I just listed out some reasons why it's pretty harmful so...

What does Hexbear think?

I actually have had no issues with the administration of this site at any point, only problems I've had are a couple comment removals where my tone, intended to be playful, has been a bit too vague and came across harshly. I think that's fair and as much on me as anything else.

My biggest issues remains with a small section of users, those who are obsessed with 'dunking' on users who say anything they perceive to be bad. Both libs who wander in here, and Hexbear users who are just trying to speak honestly. I speak of users who are more interested in getting upbears by calling someone an injoke word in pursuit of "winning" the argument, rather than actually having a genuine conversation. These people really, intensely detract from the 'community' feel and are happy to destroy any good vibes of the site in pursuit of a moment of a fleeting "haha".

Some years ago, we used to far more closely observe the "assume good faith" rule, and I think we should massively return to enforcing that and pushing it as a good attitude - Like 80% of arguments I see on this site were totally unnecessary and stem from people immediately taking negative interpretation and trying to one-up it.

That is what has stopped me wanting to interact on Hexbear much at all in the past months, I've done it a bit but honestly most times I comment feels like lapsing back into a bad addiction, I wish I didn't. I would happily forever , but for me personally, this site is unusable when Slop and Badposting aren't blocked from one's feed.

Meta pair of deez nuts canned laughter

EDIT/UPDATE: It's clear that this is a lost cause, so I'm out.

Oh boy, so much to say

1. The "Schrodiner's Hexbear" Problem

There's still an unresolved contradiction between "this is just a shitposting site" and "this is a place where comrades are serious and feel safe, etc." The worst part is that both these statements are used almost arbitrarily in a weaponized way. What I mean is, if someone raises a concern (but that concern doesn't really strike the mods/power posters as important), then they'll be dismissed with the "tHiS iS jUsT a ShItPoStInG obscure internet forum, dID YoU rEaLlY eXPecT a SeRIOuS DiSCUssION hurrrr durrrr." But on the other hand, if it's a topic that the mods/power posters are personally interested in dealing with, then all of a sudden it becomes "all hands on deck! this is Defcon 9000! We need to make sure we have a huge struggle session!" It's a weird Motte and Bailey that's used to basically gaslight people to only care about certain concerns over others. Very harmful.

Which is sort of tied with the next thing:

2. The badposting, fakenews, slop, communities NEED TO BE HIDDEN BY DEFAULT

There are soooo many low-effort posts that it is ACTUALLY HARMFUL TO COMRADES. What do I mean by this? I mean that there are so many posts that it drowns out actual mutual aid posts for comrades either in the West and sadly, those who ask for help in Gaza. It also drowns out good discussions and insteads puts another "BIT IDEA: what if I stick a pineapple up my ass and then shit it out? Would I get a chocolate bloody mary pina colada?!? BEANIS BEANIS BEANIS" at the top of the feed. I'd be willing to bet that most people aren't logged in when they browse the site. I'm certainly not gonna log in from my phone if I'm away from a computer (for obvious op-sec reasons) so no, I can't just "disable those communities."

Which is connected to my next point:

3. Hexbear is not a place to therapy-dump (I'm looking at you powerposters).

You know who I'm talking about, the KochHandLieutenants, DustVultures, etc. The power posters that sometimes post MULTIPLE THREADS PER DAY. And honestly, most of them are the low effort types of topics I posted about above in #2. I can't help but think that they are suffering from some kind of social media "like" dopamine hit addiction and every time they post and get responses the cycle continues. And often these posts are super low effort beanis posts or posts about literal shit/farts. Or sometimes they are weird nostalgia-bait posts that are super specific: elder-millenials that are in a mid-life crisis and are looking for somebody to commiserate with. E.g. "Hey remember 2D Sonic from the 90s? GEX GEX GEX! (member berries, member berries, member berries) I'm living in the past as a way to cope and I'm using the hexbear community as my own personal therapy session!!" I get it, therapy is expensive, but this is not a place to get your dopamine hits and drown out mutual aid posts (which I have noticed an uptick of recently, indicating that people are really suffering out there). Also think about how this looks and reflects on us. There was a recent influx of BlueSky people and others. Do we really want to tell them "hey this is a great community, just ignore all those posts about farting in a car and how hot-boxing it is a great bit idea!" I think I've said enough about this particular topic.

For now that's what I got off the top of my head. Others have already hit on things like arbitrary moderation so I won't repeat it. If there's anything else that comes to mind I'll post it below.

Yeah I've got a grievance

Why doesn't this website have signatures like the cool BBCode forums???

Also, such a feature would get pretty annoying quickly, so why haven't you made this feature (that you have not even implemented) optional to the viewer??!

In fact, screw forum signatures.

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, there are too many Comms these days. Please remove 3.

We should make hexbear.net/news that just redirects to the current news mega so I can bookmark it

Wait, what happened now?

I actually have separate suggestion (and one i'm absolutely guilty off not doing i realized), mainly to posts to gossip/cth, but i'll make it here to maybe get some feedback: if one posts dipshittery from twitter with editorialized title (expressing general frustration etc), one should put in the body of the post some small searchable tag or description, because searching posts is a pain in the ass (guess how i arrived at suggestion).

But, i would like to know in general how search works? if i put three words in, do i get a match on post containing all three words or is it fuzzier? (does it have proximity score of three words closeness and ranks results accordingly, or is it match/non-match on three words and the results are arranged randomly?)

(Or maybe we should strive to helpful policy of image descriptions to help people using text to speech?) definitely don't think it should be 100% or immediately enforced though, but nice thing to strive for