I think the main takeaway from the Melina/Beluga/dsplayer situation is that the correct way to handle a consistently shitty user isn't to make them a moderator. I mean come on.

The most surprising part of this drama to me is that no one on meanwhileongrad has made a post dunking on it yet.

Oh hey, I'm unbanned. Neat. I don't know where it would be best to post this but my recent thoughts are as follows:

After all this I feel conflicted on returning to any sort of activity or interaction with the site. I don't really feel that seen or welcome as a non-white, trans, nd person and it has nothing to do with the tanks. Despite being here since the beginning, I've never been a poster of any renown(?), and as of late I feel like celebrating posting clout and reputation has often taken a higher priority in hexbear's culture than being a safe place for discussion for people like me.

The arrogant dismissal I and many others were recently confronted with is disgusting but, for me, unsurprising. I am disappointed but I expected something like this would reoccurr, as the phenomenon has been demonstrated many times since this site was chapo.chat.

The recent "struggle session" concentrated a lot of the feelings I experienced as an auDHD person throughout my life. Facing broad assumptions about how I felt and having to argue against a person built in the shape of me. It was uncomfortably similar to the arguments I've had with family, authority, educators, that have stemmed from them assuming the worst possible intention and refusing to hear otherwise. It was and is emotionally exhausting and simply not worth it for what this site has provided.

The worst was assumed of people because nobody in power bothered to ask or communicate, and when action was taken, founded on this blind assumption, not only were poc, trans, nd, people ignored but mocked, shamed, and banned.

The aspersions cast on me and others like me, in contradiction to years of our demonstrated cameraderie, have been disheartening. Ultimately I don't think it matters much personally as I've never been a celebrity or poster of renown, just someone who enjoyed the occasional dunk, art post, commiseration on the state of the world.

I don't have illusions of being some valued presence or improving the site culture or anything, and I don't mean all this to convey some high melodrama; for me it's just a dull grey disappointment.

Hot take: the voting badposts aren't funny

Not sure if my ND comrades saw this, but ReadFanon will be hosting online parallel play/peer support drop in hours on Wednesday! Could be really helpful to decompress after all this. Just gonna tag folks who I remember mentioning being ND

@REgon@hexbear.net @dustbunnies@hexbear.net @Smeagolicious@hexbear.net @Thordros@hexbear.net

Oops forgot link

Here's my super serious thoughts and my attempt at effort posting. I have fibrofog pretty bad right now so apologies if I ramble or make shit points.

I think one of the big lessons here is to avoid having power-users. The initial, relatively small, issue was quickly blasted out of proportion when it could have been stopped by a simple "We're sorry, while we didn't intend to say those things, our intent is irrelevant in the face of our actions. We'll work on it and get back to you." along with unlocking the comms and involving users more in the process if the issues with the comms are really so severe. I still think the tanks should be unlocked until a choice is made, as a show of good faith. It'll do a lot to assuage fears that they don't care, and show that the top down community defining isn't going to be how things are done in future.

The second big lesson is that moderators and admins need to be vigilant of resentment toward users building up. I've been a moderator for a very active community before, and it sucks. You do see the worst of the community and that can lead to resentment and cliquishness. The other mods understand, the users don't. It makes it easy to mentally create an in group and out group, we're all humans, and the human brain sucks ass at most things. Perhaps moderators and admins should be strongly suggested to take time off and be a regular user on occasion to prevent this? Obviously there are privacy concerns, and the admins need to protect themselves from doxing, so I'm unsure how to implement this.

I think that overall this might have been a good thing. It's clear to me that there were tensions bubbling below the surface just waiting for this to happen, and now that it has we can identify and rectify those tensions better. A learning experience is always a good thing, even if they rarely feel good in the moment. In fact, they usually feel absolutely terrible in the moment.

AlaskaBall banning themself as a bit and then accidentally misgendering themself is funny in retrospect, but seemed to confirm the idea that there was a shadowy take-over of transphobic mods. Very poor timing as a thing to do, but great comedic timing. People are already looking back and laughing on it, so I don't think that'll be anything long term.

The cult of personality being character assassinated is a good thing in terms of my anti-power-users stance, but a bad thing in that TC69 did stumble face first into this, and didn't instigate it(though she clearly made it worse). She obviously did some great things for the site before my time, and the outcome of her actions is part of what drew me here. It's a space that isn't shit, and she helped build that and should be recognized for that. She shouldn't have returned from such a long break and been given admin straight away. Admins should be people who are currently active in the community, not niche internet celebrities. The fact that she was given admin right away strongly supports the idea of adminship being a big club that you ain't in, which I'm sure the admins don't want.

I'd say there's no hard feelings, but there are a few. I'm willing to try and work through them though. I can't speak for others who are less willing to, and I know I wasn't hurt as much as the others were. I'd have preferred an apology from her directly, but if deleting and purging her account was the choice she made, then I respect that and wish her well. But as said, I can't speak for others.

As others have said, there's also the issue of assuming all he/hims are A: white, B: cis, C: het, D: men, and E: wrong for having those pronouns. This loops back to the resentment thing I mentioned earlier I think. Brainworms are part of the human condition in our world today, it's not your fault for having them, but you do need to put effort into removing them. This is a very hard process that feels shitty in the moment, because you have to catch yourself and stop yourself. Telling your own brain that it's wrong is difficult. Self improvement feels like shit a lot of the time.

Large amounts of users also cited the demographic surveys that show Hexbear to be very white, and seemed to use that to excuse the assumptions, which was clearly quite hurtful to our POC comrades. I'm white, and thus not very qualified to talk on this issue, but I felt it was very worth noting that harm so that it isn't forgotten and can be worked on.

From what I've seen, Lyudmila and CARCOSA have been handling the aftermath quite well I feel. Putting yourself as the face of an unpopular group is very difficult and I'm sorry for the stress you've likely felt.

That's my wall of text. I hope we can all move forward together as better people, better comrades, and better posters to build a better community and world(eventually.)

This is my thoughts that I have transpired:

1. This drama has resolved two pressing contradictions: whether Hexbear should be a shit-posting site or a more serious and political site and whether Hexbear should be a space for dunks or a comfy space. From this point forward, Hexbear will be a shitposting site and Hexbear will be a space for dunks. You can't have pretensions about Hexbear being serious and have some incognito admin create an admin account and ban their mod account. This is shitposting territory. It's shitposting par excellence. And as for the contradiction between a space for dunks or a comfy space, the space for dunks has won out. The people want their dunk tank back and in a poor attempt to argue otherwise, the admins more or less misgendered and done the racial equivalent of misgendering many people. Is this not an admission that Hexbear is not going to be a comfy space but a space for dunks? The admins dunked on the users for being cringey cishet white dudes and the users dunked back at the admins for being wildly out of touch dipshits with their heads up their collective asses.

2. The megathreadization of Hexbear will accelerate. Throughout this dumpster fire, I lurked at the various megathreads up (news, trans, disabled, em_poc, general) and the drama was almost completely absent. I feel very sorry for the trans users who have to put up with this shit because if they had just stayed at the trans mega, they wouldn't have seen any of this shit. Trans users who browse outside the trans mega got misgendered by the admins as cishet white dudes while trans users who stayed in the trans mega and mostly hang out at the trans matrix are blissfully unaware. What's going to happen to the behavior of trans people from this point forward? You can apply the same shit to all the megas. People are just going to migrate to the megas, and non-mega Hexbear will slide closer to closer to the character of the dunk tank. I suppose it's a bit of an open secret, but the various megas have been better than general Hexbear for a good while. Most seriousposting is done in the news and trans megas. Trans, em_poc, and disabled megas are good safe spaces. General Hexbear is just for cheap dunks where you'll occasionally catch strays, and if you don't have a thick enough skin, you'll eventually burn out. In this sense, the dunk tank perfectly encapsulates general Hexbear and to clamp on the dunk tank is to clamp on general Hexbear. The dunk tank is general Hexbear and general Hexbear is the dunk tank. Far from clamping down dunk tank culture, the poorly thought out actions of the admins have only accelerated the dunkification of Hexbear. Something something dialectics.

3. ~~Given that the completely deranged alts turn out to be done by Melina per the modlog, I don't see any possible justification for /c/fakenews, a comm that many people already dislike for various reasons, still existing. That comm is understood by this website's community to be the brainchild of Melina. The fact that one of the recent prolific posters turn out to be another one of fae's alts only reinforces this point, and I wouldn't be surprised if the mod team outside of Dirt_owl are alts as well. Here's my advice to the admins who have taken a tremendous hit in their credibility. You could start regaining that credibility by getting rid of /c/fakenews, a move that many people have been clamoring for months now. Melina wishing that aaaaaaadjsf would get murdered should be the time for fae's presence, including fae's comm, to be completely purged from Hexbear. Or is the shitposting nature of /c/fakenews a complete fit with Hexbear's shitposting culture, meaning that it will never be removed?~~ This is in dispute. See further comment.

Hello users of hexbear, I have gone back and tried to unban everyone from the past couple days related to this struggle session.

I was offline most of yesterday so I missed what happened.

From the bottom of my heart I am deeply apologetic to everyone who was hurt by the statements and actions of the past few days. I know it will be a long and tough road to regaining back the trust of the userbase.

We are going to let this post sit for a couple of days and then move towards rebuilding. I'm back today and am happy to answer questions.

I still can't get past the fact that the admins lied to all of us about why they were doing the thing (which IMO was a BAD reason), then when they got caught there was zero contrition. Y'all are quick to apologize for the ban rampage and the chauvinistic brainworms, but this seems to be just slipping to the back of the conversation.

The admins/mods demonstrated that they think this is their site, not the users. That was only reinforced by the gleeful cruelty and ambivalence of the ban waves. I for one spent yesterday afternoon reliving the intensity of anxiety I felt when I was in an abusive living situation, because I felt compelled to speak out despite people catching bans literally just for being upset left and right.

None of the apologies coming from the people who did this are speaking to this, that I've seen. To me that means the status quo still stands. Decisions about the site are for making behind closed doors, a week before any of the users know about it, and can be lied about when the rollout happens. And by my measuring of the timeline, that's the point where the userbase went from sad to angry, so letting this fade into the background is just setting us up for another huge drama like this in the future.

This struggle session could've been an email.

"Hey users, the mod team has been talking about the dunk_tank having racist origins so we've changed the name to the_slop_trough. We also wanted to gauge user reaction to changing the format of the comm for xyz reasons. You have 3 days to vote and voice concerns etc."

But at every step it seems that some section of the mod team was lying, vagueposting, bitposting, powertripping, or generally just ignoring valid criticisms and concerns.

I'd love to see this resolved and I think this post is a good start. No need to talk about specific grievances, I think the other users are doing a great job of covering the bases...when they're not being banned for it ;)

Kind of a moot point now that she's deleted her account, but I would explicitly not like to see TC69 return as an admin to the site. I have no doubt that she is a good person who has done good things for the site, but her behavior yesterday was extremely inflammatory and escalated tensions for no reason. I was sitting on the bench for this struggle session until I started seeing childish bans from her leveled against users voicing legitimate concerns.