Shitheads deserve to be dunked on and being civil to the right is a lib move

i wasn't sure if I wanted to join the struggle session, but I feel like I have to get my words out.

we have taken demographic polls of this site. we have pronouns, we have an em_poc comm and we have had struggle sessions about both of these in the past.

the gall to decide that our queer users are giving off 'cishet vibes'. the gall to decide that our POC users are giving off 'white vibes'.

this is genuinely disgusting behaviour, and I cannot believe the admin team let this fly, let alone decided it was worth adding to the argument. I am aware of what other info has come out - this point still stands regardless. why has the admin team signed off on this argument? why wasn't this shot down immediately? why was it ever entertained as a valid argument in the first instance?

Site works fine for a year

It's time to set this place on fire to keep them on their toes

And simultaneously with this crusade against white cishet mindset, you delete poverty finance.

Really do be feeling that downwardly-mobile professional class tbh

Today I learned that dunking has cishet white man vibes or something? I try to fucking and this shit happens.

The name change is a good move once we found out the racist history of dunk tanks but the mods need to take a step back and remember this is just an obscure lefty shit posting forum, it's (probably) not going to be the catalyst for the proletarian revolution that destroys the capitalist class, seizes the means of production, and ushers in a new golden age of peace and human dignity.

It's a place like minded people can get together in a space where we know we won't be shit on for thinking trans people are people, genocide is wrong, capitalism sucks, etc. I don't think that having a comm where we criticize/insult shit takes is negative to the site. If it does stray into attacks on their appearance or other stuff that isn't their terrible takes users are free to remind their fellows that's uncool or report them so the mods can do it. I don't think it's bad to keep focused on more ideological dunks/gossip/takes/etc.

But I'm also a cis white guy so maybe it's my inherent biological need for dunks that's making me say this

Also if you're a mod and you don't like the community you're modding, log off? Quit? Let the users vote on a new mod?

I think the real site culture change we need is to stop the admins cosying up with libs.

If any of the instances were upset at things in the dunk tank, it's probably because they are NOT our allies. Why appease them?

Hexbear is only federated with communities we're compatible with. We're in a cosy spot. Users are generally comfy, kind, happy. Hexbear is a nice bubble of sanity and occasionally an excellent effort post grows out of that.

This is not the vanguard party. This is a commie bar / working mans club. We don't need more serious leftists spaces. We need more cosy leftist spaces.

It just occurred to me that it's also super disingenuous to tell people to request a new comm to replace the dredge tank, when you've already made a commitment to people who aren't users of this site not to allow a dredge tank like comm to exist.

Unless the picture that's floating around is doctored?

The only response I've seen to that image from an admin, is locking the only thread outside of this 1100 comment post where it was being discussed.

If it's real then that picture implies that no such comm would be allowed to be created.

Starting to think that the real issue is that large portions of the admin team do not view themselves as users of the site who have stepped into a community role, but rather as managers and who have contempt for the unruly, unwashed masses they are forced to oversee.

I feel like trying to "clean up" this site kind of goes against the entire ethos of what this thing was in the first place

This kind of feels like old-school forum admin mindset, just being annoying and ruining the fun for no reason even though no one ever asked for that

The name change is fine though that was fucked up when I learned that

but also many posts there were almost no effort

Its a bit contradictory to hold this site to a high standard of high effort leftist rhetoric when in reality this event revealed very fundemental superstructure of the site does not follow in the vein of leftist organisation and is more akin to neoliberal management structures.

inb4 "MUH WHO CARES TERMINALLY ONLINE"

I care keep seething lol

Anyways. This is not to say that the site should be a place of high effort posts if the superstructure was more leftist, its just to raise a point of contradiction.

A more transparent, democratic approach would have been to explain reasons for why a change has to be made and hold a vote amongst the userbase with some engineering control to prevent brigading. This would be more in line with leftist theory and principles.

That is all for that point.

Regarding the supposed discussions with other admins from other lemmy sites, as one of our users said, the majority of "people" who use those sites are insane hyper neoliberal crazy people who basically don't matter.

Therefore, I'd say that there is no need to appease them and we were doing fine before federation so why care about the opinions of their admins who are more often than not the enemy in the most visceral sense.

They support a system that considers each and every one of us burnable waste and would happily have all of us die in agony so that their profits remain in the green (see whats happening in Gaza atm)

So really, why pander to them?

If its about supposed death threats there would need to be valid receipts for such outrageous claims so the offending users can be dealt with appropriately (its not a problem if the recipient is a fascist/neolib)

Again, we will be absolutely fine if we just defederate from everyone and continue with business as usual.

Like the admins have been doing a fine job otherwise so theres no problem with us going at it alone is there?

Hello everyone, I want to personally apologize for how I handled this change.

During my time as an admin I made the decision to shift decision-making from a group of admins admin to all the moderators. My reasoning is that the barrier to entry for a hexbear account to become a moderator was pretty low, and we have a 90% acceptance rate for applicants. Therefore, a mod collective is going to be the users most interested in shaping the site.

The reason that I made this post and I edited down the discussion to the comment below is to protect any mods from harassment. Not everyone is open to defending their thoughts against the userbase and I didn't think they should have to as long as one of us was willing to engage with this post. I personally agreed with the mod sentiment that this change could be a chance to improve the site but did not mind the dunk/dredge tanks however it was a majority of mod team members that voted in favor of this change during the week+ that this change was discussed & voted on.

I recognize I could have done multiple aspects of this better and I think it is clear from the discussion of this change that it was not the right approach.

Another admin will be putting up a second discussion post for what we will do after some time with the current change. Closing the tanks will be permanent but the decision on if we will be opening a spiritual successor to exist alongside gossip and counterprop has not been made.

The screenshot circulating in this thread of my statement in the lemmy instance admin chat was an attempt by me to get the drama communities on other instances closed, ultimately a failure on multiple counts.

With all that being said, I would like to thank everyone for their input and state that I will be stepping down as admin as a result of my mistakes in facilitating the discussion, executing the change, and communicating with the userbase.

i present an offering to thee to satiate thine cravings for blood for the next while whilst we internally consider the feedback we've gotten

The way this was messaged really sucks, and I don't think I can really agree with the reasoning either. I guess creating spaces that involve being mean can turn toxic sometimes, but so can anything, that's why we moderate.

What's worse, the way it was communicated on the backend to other instance's admins completely mismatches the reasoning given here. And they were given advance notice well ahead of the announcement here?

Why play PR games with people that hate us regardless? I thought we were on the same page about the s.

if the intention behind this was to create a more serious and disciplined image for hexbear then that has obviously failed, that's not something you can just impose on a community overnight. The way this change has been carried out and communicated is actually kind of humiliating, for me included for posting here.

If the intention is to purge an undesirable culture on this website, well that culture is also the most active one. I think further intensification of this policy will more likely just lead to a significant decrease in activity overall. I do hope the administrative and moderation team will cease this course, and revise their plans to instead encourage the higher effort posts they want to see rather than trying to limit lower effort posts.

Furthermore, some of the reasons given for the change are quite odd and inflammatory. I understand how shitposting is not constructive, I think that's the strongest argument. The problem is I'm not usually coming on here to do work believe it or not. I'm usually here when i am trying to avoid my actual work. That and the news megathread, which is actually where the action is. I have the same objection to arguments like it "promotes misanthropy" and "mutual self harm". Come on, are you my mother now? Or my boss? Put on a smile and get to work effort posting? My actual mother gives me less shit over my smoking and she thinks my humor is witty. You can't expect too much discipline from anonymous form users, and honestly this place already has pretty well disciplined users when it comes to supporting each other but being ruthless to the libs and reactionaries. As for the too many white cis male communist "vibes" problem, this is a English speaking website spun off a American social media corporation, there's gonna be white men here. The ones here seem pretty well behaved to me and those who aren't got policed, and there's been a lot of past efforts to insure inclusivity for minorities of all sorts. The unsupported accusations of the shitposters just being stinky misogynists ironically reeks of the reputation r/CTH got branded with among liberal reddit around 2016. First as a tragedy then a farce eyy?

From the message going around it sounds like this was more about reducing inter-instance admin drama. If that was part of it, fine, and overall this 'struggle' is not a huge deal, but the way this has been handled does feel disheartening and reduces my trust in the management of this space.

the year is 2034. hexbear has 20 users left. the final struggle session is about to begin to TRULY decide if hexbear dot net is the debate forum of the central committee organising group to diseminate Marxism to the masses, or a silly meme website about a picture of a pig shitting on its own testicles (very funny image, look it up some time, trust me) that spun off of a political subreddit spun off from a podcast of some guys who said the occasional funny thing

Repeating this comment that I deleted because I have OCD; which should have no bearing on the worth of what I'm saying. Just to avoid any confusion.

I'm not a big fan of the dunk culture, and I've expressed as much alongside my criticisms of this site's general misanthropy. But as I've watched this thread play out, I feel myself leaning much more strongly toward the users who are critical of this decision. You should listen to your userbase. It feels real fucked up to me to just proclaim that wanting to gnash our teeth at bad opinions is "white" or "cishet male" as a justification as if that means that being against this decision is bad a priori without actually dealing with the underlying contradiction of trying to make a more constructive space while still allowing people to vent their legitimate frustration. I have plenty of reasons why I don't like the culture of dunking and think it contributes to a negative environment that is unthinking. But this is not the way to address it. Give the people what they want: ~~Reggae Music~~ easy posting.

Look, Should dunking be moderated more aggressively to prune posts where it's just yelling at some nobody for having a bad take? Yes. Should we all strive to be more effective in our criticism of power and lay out why all the liberal justifications for de facto genocide? Yes. Should we just axe the whole thing that I don't even like to see here? No.

I volunteer to moderate a successor comm, for whatever that is worth. I'll make a matrix account and pledge to just watch out for "yelling at nobodies" or posting a take that happens to come from someone who is potentially considered cringe.

Love all of you anyway though.

>the thread is approaching 1200 replies

"We're banning the_dunk_tank because it's too white and cis" is just the perfect bait post Bravo to the mod team, you've still got it

To me, this comes across as inventing a user to get mad at, then punishing them.

wrong decision. bring it back.