hexbear

Regardless of what you decide, I hope you can slow down on these larger changes soon. As someone who casually browses Hexbear, I don’t want to have to read through pages of patch notes just to know how to use the website.

Im not opposed to change but it feels a bit much in the last few weeks- thats all

Every announcement by the mods here prepended with some communist quote before posting the worst ideas for managing hobby politics webforum is some larp I don't think I'll ever without a solid brick of methamphetamine in my bloodstream.

Why are you doing this to yourself, i will never know. to watch though

Here is a proposal: don't remove posts with some amount of comments in "wrong" comms, like nerds. Your labor in removing that thread is less than a comment, its goal is roughly meaningless, and its result is annoyance. But some mod can have some no-fun-allowed fun i guess.

Want to show how much you care about comm sorting? make the mod repost and reprint all comments in "correct" comm, so that people can continue conversation.

another proposal:

Make upbear only visible to the poster own comments, hide them and only use them for sorting reasons otherwise:

pros: those who like upbears will still see them.

cons: that would require work

I now appreciate your overreach even less now as I’m being treated like shit for this by other users. If this shit doesn’t let up, I’m fucking leaving. I don’t need to put up with this because my brain can’t easily process walls of text.

EDIT: I’ve spoken more in depth with one of the folks and it seems to be a case of mistaken tone, but I definitely have caught flak for this already from another.

I am a process/systems nerd due to my occupation and this just reeks of people trying to use the wrong tool for the job. I don't think the lemmy software is what we need in order to accomplish what you folks are trying to do with the site. I think you're going to have to create an increasingly complex system and implement labor-intensive processes for volunteers in order to make it work, but it will never work. You'll find another problem and try to create policy to address that on top of the other policy.

We need different software, a different system, or we need to accept the limitations of the ones we have.

I've been examining my own upbear behavior and... there's no consistency. It depends on my mood, what comm I'm in, what the discussion is about.

• Sometimes I'm upvoting everything to mark it as read, usually in the general mega and news mega

• Sometimes I'm not upvoting anything

• Sometimes I'm upvoting because I support an argument

• Sometimes I'm upvoting because I disagree but I think the argument is well stated.

• Sometimes I'm upvoting because I just want the writer to know someone read their post

• Sometimes I'm just idly, inconsistently upvoting without any thought at all, from muscle memory

• Sometimes I'm upvoting everything because "all posting is good posting", a years old joke dating to the way the Subreddit strongly, strongly encouraged users to post no matter what. This was in contrast to the rest of reddit where there were very few posters compared to lurkers. This contributed to our famous and unstoppable "posting power" - A very strong community norm of posting, even if it was inane or meaningless, rather than passive viewing. That, in turn, defined the sub and later Hexbear as strongly encouraging active participation in contrast to many online communities where "low effort" posting was either formally or informally punished, and which in turn supressed many would-be speakers due to a chilling effect rising from fear of being judged or scorned for "bad posts".

I have some screenshot, shit, let me find it.

Yeah, here, found it. So, Subreddit with EIGHT POINT SIX MILLION MEMBERS Vs. Small Communist Shitposting Lemmy, who would win? Upvoting everything contributed to the culture of user engagement that lead to Hexbear out-posting the entire rest of the Lemmyverse combined by a good margin. That's a big part of why I found this incident to be so out of line. Arbitrary policing of something as contextless and ambiguous as upbears is directly against what created and sustains this place. As I've said before arbitrary moderation actions that directly run against community norms create a chilling effect and discourage user participation due to fear of running afoul of un-written rules or the whims of inconsistent moderators.

It's late and I'm running low on steam, I'll try to come back to this tomorrow.

If y'all are going to start making upvotes public, then mod actions should also be public, not hidden behind anonymity or "modding accounts". "Radical openness" in one direction isn't radical openness, it's just an excuse to abuse mod powers. If we have a right to know how people upvote, we have a right to see how you all are enforcing or aren't enforcing things.