I’m sorry, but as a mod on this site I feel like I have to say something that I don’t seem to see any other mods/admins saying:

The mod/admin team are never going to remediate relations with the general site user base if this post is indeed how things will be working moving forward. There is no self-crit at all regarding the main thing people are upset about, which is NOT closing the tanks, but that mods/admins get to voice their opinion on this site and what it should look like/how it should be run via executive action that is not available to the average site user.

I’m sorry to tell any of my fellow mods/admins this, but your experience as a mod/admin does not make your opinion inherently any more or less valuable in regards to what the site should look like than that of the average user. Yes, you may see more of what happens behind the scenes, lower quality/aggravating posts, etc. but that is something you took upon yourself as a gesture to the community you are a part of, not a leader of. Not thinking posts are high effort enough is your opinion. Thinking posts dunking on libs are boring is your opinion. Thinking Hexbear needs to change this way or that is your opinion. If you have a problem with things, you must act AS A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNITY and voice your opinion on necessary changes just like anybody else. You should not get to be a more privileged user than the average person here and go ahead and talk behind the scenes with other people who have the power to change the site and decide what needs to happen without user feedback. Mods/admins exist to enforce a site’s rules and act as maintainece, not to be a leading body of powerusers who determine what the site should look like and how it should be run. The reason there was so much pushback on these decisions is that they were never (and still haven’t been, for that matter) presented to the community as something to be discussed at all, and changes were made by executive decision.

The only power the average user has to voice their opinion on how the site should look is via posting, and that is the only way mods/admins should get to voice theirs. Acting otherwise is a classic leftist org blunder that cultivates a massively toxic culture of powerplayers and in-groups at the levers of power that leads to growing tension and eventually fractures both within the in-groups and between the in-groups and user base at large.

A whole host of other very important issues (notably transphobia, misogyny) have arisen as a result of the initial actions taken by the mod/admin team, and there is no reason they can’t/shouldn’t be addressed. That being said, the ignorance/arrogance of the mod/admin team of marching on forward after their wrongdoings have clearly been outlined is concerning and needs to be undone as soon as possible. The only thing worse than making a bad decision is committing to it once it’s well known that it went poorly.

Undo the changes, bring them up with the community just like any average user would have to, gain valuable feedback from them, and take action from there. To genuinely save face + demonstrate that this site is for its user base at large and not just for a few elite users who want it to be their pet project, this the only way forward.

While I shouldn't weigh in too much, especially post-hoc, I could've told you that having TC69 back as a mod or admin was a very bad idea.

As important TC69 was (and from a legacy perspective is) to creating an aggressively positive trans culture, she, for better and worse, acts incredibly narcissistically when she is placed into positions of power, and more importantly, in my opinion, she is/was ideologically incoherent as moderator. You cannot simultaneously say 'its just a website' while also banning people for small indiscretions or personal beef. After all, 'it's just a website' why should the moderators care that much? She tends to take so much shit that goes on here personally and yet expects nobody else to.

A poor decision unless you enjoy drama.

I was at work yesterday so I couldn't have my eyes glued to this.

Are the admins/mods still framing their the problem with the struggle session as just being about the banwaves?

Has anything been said or done about the ACTUAL spark that began the drama? That is, has there been a discussion about the way decisions are made without user input (let alone democracy) for reasons that are then lied about?

This will happen again unless the primary contradiction is resolved: is this website a social club for the mods in which we are simply extras, or is this our website as the users?

I'd like to add that a thing creeping into a lot of these discussions is the survey. the survey is not a representitive of all users, it is a self selecting group of people who took one to give us a sample of the userbase that we have extrapolated. the survey itself says around 600 people responded. a look at the side bar will show you the number of users a day/week/month regularly exceeds this. people in that thread of the survey results were debating about how many trans men and cis women were even on here because the data does not tell them this, so they invented readings from it.

furthermore, the survey does not say; are the 'he/him's cis, are the 'he/hims' white, are the 'he/hims' straight. you do not know who is behind the prounoun tag and username, do not invent a bogeyman out of users based on a survey. it is not empirical evidence. cis het jacketing he/hims is not useful, and can do a lot to hurt people in ways you do not know. I've seen this shit hurt trans men friends of mine so many times

This is still goin huh

Can i get an apology now @booty@hexbear.net for being miscast as the site demon for no reason other than literally , , and a personal beef as a source

This is what I wrote about zoomerists fake selfcrit post before I hit post and realized it had been cowardly deleted by creator

I read your whole post and came to the conclusion that you are a privileged liberal with extreme amounts of projection.

This is in the wrong comm. This isn't selfcrit, this is dredge material.

First you project your privilege onto all of us, then you do copious amounts of concern trolling and strawmanning.

You think the workers in the imperial core are redeemable, that's where your liberal brainworms are coming from. Almost every worker in the imperial core earns more money than the ones outside it. They have a material reason to support imperialism. They may be your comrades but that's because you are an imperialist liberal.

Then you suddenly want to decide how the comms you hate are named and run. Are you our emperor? Certainly seems like it, with how you talk over all the marginalized comrades who were deeply hurt by tc69 because of your liberal "protect the marginalized (but don't listen to what they actually want)" shit.

I don't like the implication that some of the admins apparently check every time you say something that annoys them what your pronouns are and tick a running tally until their grudge gets big enough to do something unpopular. Is this the sort of thing people brought up as concerns when they didn't want pronouns to be mandatory? back then it was [none/use name]s who "weren't beating the allegations". I really don't like puppygirl stuff. Do you think it would be productive to take that as an excuse to have a discussion about whether we blame [she/her]s or the [she/they]s as the source of more inappropriate kink comments?

I love my niche communist internet forum that avoids the pitfalls of niche internet forums and communist organisations

this is not in response to you specifically @Lyudmila. I appreciate the work you and @CARCOSA are doing in this thread to sort things out. thank you.

effortpost preface:

I started writing this at 5am this morning after checking to see if I was banned (confused? keep reading!), seeing @Aradina had been unbanned, stumbling onto the horrifically sad comment that apparently @morte made from an alt after being banned, and crying my eyes out. I've been working on it (and crying! 😂😭) off and on all day, in between reading the comments here to catch up on What Happened.

I have to get this out, and presumably we're supposed to keep all of this contained to these threads.

admins, mods, fellow users – this is not an attempt to restart The Shit.

I'm posting this to get it off my chest and hopefully get some clarification from some people on it, so I'm gonna leave it and close Hexbear and maybe see you tomorrow.

ATTENTION, FELLOW HEXBEARS:

telling me anytime after Friday to logout and let things blow over was ableist, actually.

also, saying this is just a website is callous and fucked up.

please allow me to elaborate. get your clicking fingers ready, because baby, I got links.

I am autistic as fuck. I only just realized this last year, and got diagnosed last week.

justice sensitivity is a well-known neurodivergent trait, and it has been a defining part of my character for my whole life. one of my earliest memories is getting whipped with a spatula for "talking back" because I questioned the justice of adult decisions, for responding to "life isn't fair" with "why aren't you trying to be? why don't you make it fair?"

I have been repeatedly socially ostracized for sticking up for others or finding repugnant behavior intolerable. I lost my hometown friend group when I wouldn't attend functions to which they had invited the asshole who abused another person in the group.

my husband and I lost his hometown friend group when nobody gave a shit about covid. they stopped inviting us to things because we were masking and distancing. I'd rather have no friends than friends like that.

it's the biggest reason for having left most of the two-dozen jobs I mentioned – somebody outside the management clique is unjustly fired or otherwise punished, and I quit in solidarity with no backup plan. 🤦🤷

it made me unwelcome in the glass program at art school because I reported the head instructor's abusive treatment of a fellow student to the program director.

it's the reason I left Christianity as a teenager. the adults wouldn't stand up for anything. they didn't give a shit about "love your neighbor." they were too busy gossiping and backstabbing each other while jockeying for positions in the social and institutional hierarchy. there were people with country club memberships while some of the other members of the <100-member church didn't have enough to eat.

it has made me the outsider in my conservative evangelical family. they thought it was super fun to get me all fired up about this stuff when I was younger, and then they'd make fun of me for caring until I cried and fled. they also hated that my best friend was a gay boy I met in band class. why should it matter that he was gay? didn't Jesus love everyone equally? I didn't understand. I still don't.

it's what drove me from the Republican indoctrination of my childhood to the Democrats as a young adult. it's what made me ditch them over the way they treated Bernie. it's part of what drove me from DSA. it's what has driven me further and further left.

it's why I would never have employees. it's why I pay for any little indie apps I use. it's why I left reddit during the API fiasco. it's what made me investigate Hexbear when you federated instead of just accepting the warnings about you as facts. it's what made me abandon my other fediverse accounts and live here on local on my previous account and this subsequent one. it's what made me start contributing to the Patreon the day I found out it existed.

I'm not online all the time, so I know there are plenty of things I miss, but since I joined last summer, this place has been fair, it has been caring, and it has been wonderful to see so much good come of this place. people have been fed and sheltered because so many of us are willing to share what we have, even when it is very little. lots of very little bits of goodness added together can make something great.

I'm 42, which makes me older than most users here; many of you are much closer in age to my 17yo son than to me. I don't bring it up because I think it makes me inherently wiser than any of you – far from it, I know I'm a dumbass, I have a lifetime of failure and fuckups to prove it. just because I've been fucking up longer doesn't mean I have learned more from my fuckups than any of you have from yours.

I bring it up because I'm fucking tired, and life is hard, and I genuinely had very little hope for the future until I made a post begging for distraction from terrible thoughts, and so many of you came through for me. 😭 it still instantly makes me cry when I think of it.

the months since then have been physically harder – I had to stop hrt for perimenopause due to life-threatening side effects, and I have been expecting to slide back into the abyss, but I hadn't yet. I really think the community of care I have found here is what was keeping it at bay. @morte's comment let me know I'm not the only person who feels that way about this place, and I don't want her to put herself out there alone.

some of you have become very dear to my heart.

a long-time user I have barely interacted with DM'd me yesterday offering help with getting my son T if Trump bans trans care.

there are no words to adequately express my gratitude for that sliver of hope.

Hexbear, I love you, but I care about things being "fair" or "just" more than anything else. I will stop caring about the way other people are treated when I stop breathing. you might as well tell me to stop getting rashes when I'm stressed.

wanna see what it looked like after I saw that @REgon had been banned?? 😂🙃

pic

this might actually be the worst I've ever seen it. it was definitely the worst my husband has.

🏆🥇

you might as well tell me to quit loving my son or quit being 42. it is physically impossible. my parents couldn't beat it out of me.

"don't take it too seriously, it's just online, it's just a website!" friend, right now I wish it were just a website, because I would say fuck this place and never look back. no mere website is worth the amount of anxiety and stress I've felt and tears I've cried in the last 24 hours.

it's not just a website, it is a lifeline for my family and so many of my comrades. it has been a sanctuary for me, until this past weekend. really, until yesterday. "don't take that tiny sliver of hope too seriously"??

if you think that, then buddy,

with all my heart,

with every fiber of my being,

FUCK YOU.

is that hostile? good. maybe if someone who is usually kind to everyone gets hostile, this stuff will fucking matter to you, too. I'm glad that some of you are socially privileged enough to have enough support to not care what happens to this place. I'm not.

those of you who were applauding the behavior of TC69 and her Cool Kids Club this weekend should be deeply ashamed of yourselves.

I know I'm ashamed of you. I finally understand why so many people warn about this place. You Eat Your Own.

and for what??? what was the actual point of any of this? rename the comms plus change the comms equals change the site culture?

was the culture genuinely that bad?? this is a real and sincere question, I'm autistic, I'm sure there are problems that I don't pick up on.

most of the time irl, I don't realize a skillful bully is fucking with me until it's too late, so certainly I'm not gonna catch all the shittiness on here, where I don't have body language to help.

(continues below)

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.

looks around

Every time I fuck around outside of hexbear for a few days some shit goes down... was this all my fault? Was I the sin eater holding everything together this whole time?

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.

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

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.