Hexbear’s new head of operations just dropped, and their way of dealing with the fallout of their last struggle session is to hand bans out like candy to their concerned and disillusioned users while throwing out “epic” quips like insecure teenagers along the way coupled with their communication (and seemingly contempt) towards their own userbase which isn’t helping their allegations at all and the revelations that were learned about Hexbear’s moderators and admins from their most recent struggle session.
The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.
To prevent Hexbear’s internal struggle from spilling over to here and detailing this thread as a whole, we will be locking it. A lot has been said already in the comments and we feel like we are involved in Hexbear too little to a) contribute positively and b) moderate reports that require knowledge on Hexbear lore.
I think I can safely say that we hope Hexbear manages to overcome their internal issues again.
I know I’m an admin myself and I do try to take it somewhat seriously but if I ever find myself in a situation like that and talking like that I will probably log off for good lol
I don’t have a hexbear account and never visit the place so I can’t add a meaningful comment about the situation but it seems like constructive talk was never an option
I’m honestly impressed they thought the changes would be well received. Aren’t those communities the nost active in the site?
Me? I’m not really sure what to think. I didn’t even notice it was happening at first because it was regulated to a single megathread.
I do however think it a little over the top to completely condemn Hexbear over this. This is a problem that can be addressed pretty easily and it seems like the admins are trying to. It looks like there were some shitty mods that started shit, and the admins are trying to unban people and fix it? I think I saw that TC69 is stepping down?
I’m not trying to say it isn’t shitty what happened, but like, I don’t think it’s unfixable and an indication that the site is some kind of evil rotten mess like some people are making out. Our users as a whole are good people and it kind of sucks seeing them tarred and feathered.
Agreed. Hexbear isn’t bad nor is it full of bad people.
From a few comments below, there are a few unresolved threads left which is worrying for another bullshit-event of this caliber.
ive been too busy posting in the trans megathread to be aware of much
My take?
It’s all dumb. Admins didn’t communicate effectively, made changes without making most of the community aware of it on a timescale that should have been days; as most of these discussions should be. A good chunk of the community is irate. Random bans are a method of obfuscation, all though I am doubting that’s actually what is happening here.
Regardless, it is a website and we have this space here.
TC69 immediately sets off red flags for me. It’s one thing to return and welcome yourself back; but the passive language they’re using suggests that they view themselves as some sort of cult of personality figure already, reinforcing the thoughts some have about that concern. The “random number ban” thing is literally just a flex of power, joking or not. I’ve seen that happen so, so many times in communities. It’s the same thing as “Who wants to get a bop on the head from my baton?”. Sure, it’s a joke.
There are already quite a few complaining about moderation style from times past and upon immediate return they make a comment on how the “website has improved” yet still needs an entire overhaul/COC. REgon, usa_suxxx is banned, all though unsure if that is changed now. Also, the thread was locked on that discussion.
It’s all just red flags. Maybe it’ll be a good thing, maybe not. To me, Hexbear did a really good job already on cracking down on shitlibs and misogynistic fucks. Where the hell is this rampant offenses occurring? I don’t doubt we have some idiots wander in and that things were worse before, but this is being treated like we have an active crisis in Hexbear. Which, I don’t really get.
If I’m wrong, I’ll be happy to be wrong and I’ll be more understanding of TC69’s more heavy-handed approach to moderation. But is there like some mass DM-harassment campaign I’m unaware of?
Based only on reading this thread I find this all very confusing and unnecessary, but this is the sort of strange niche drama that only small independent message boards can offer, just not the same on corporate social media, sorta gotta love it.
Facebook could never provide this niche primo drama
Feels like the admin/mod team is trying to tank the site ffs. Just making completely out of touch incoherent decisions behind closed doors, getting mad that people push back on popular communities being closed and just calling us all cis white chauvinists for wanting these comms, and then mass banning people for criticizing them and making jokes of the bans to obfuscate what they’re doing. It’s exhausting, I just want my cozy leftist social space but instead I’m at the whimsy of power tripping internet mods who think they’re reforming our shitposts into the vanguard one top down decision at a time
Edit: it seems like things are settling but good lord some of the admins were on some fuck shit. Such a small disagreement turned into such a huge blow up with weird cross instance admin intrigue and transphobic adjacent shit. I thought I was terminally online…
I am once again asking a bunch of fringe online leftists to stop being so delulu as to think themselves as the new international vanguard ffs
This too. The serious platform shit is not happening. You scroll down to the bottom of Hexbear, click a link and you get a picture of a pig pooping on it’s own balls.
The entire space is literally synonymous with that. The Pig Poop Balls Vanguard isn’t gonna be a thing.
Yeah it’s crazy to try and make Hexbear ultra serious when the whole reason many people even found and like us is because we made fun of terrible right-wingers and making light of the hell world we live in.
I looked at their modlog and they swapped out almost all admins a few days ago
Extremely suspect
That’s not strange. Hexbear regularly swaps admin accounts out for privacy reasons. It’s not a practice that I’m particularly fond of, but it is what it is.
Also, this whole situation is bonkers.
I like to make new accounts every so often as a way of obscuring my online presence. It doesn’t completely make it impossible for someone to put the pieces together and dox me, but it makes that job more difficult. I assume this is what the admins are doing, too. So a bunch of admins getting removed and a bunch of new accounts being made admin aren’t suspect to me at all.
It seems they’re just trying to memory hole it now.
The newest statement claims everyone was unbanned, which isn’t true. The sockpuppet being used for the new post claims that it was all drama over the AlaskaBall misgendering and banning, which isn’t true. So here’s my extremely biased version of events(They banned me for opposing their bullshit, thus creating this bias.)
The mods wanted to rename the dunk tank, due to the racist origins, but due to federation reasons renaming communities doesn’t work properly, so they locked it and the dredge tank entirely and replaced them with poorly defined pseudo-replacements.
People question this choice and are given a mod statement that misgenders most of the website at the same time, and contains a self-harm reference without a CW.
People question this post and the admin that acted as the mouthpiece steps down. The thread is locked and a new one is made.
Basically no one wanted that and most people want the admin back. The admin comes back.
AlaskaBall bans themself from a new alt, and then when questioned on it, misgenders themself. This was the misunderstanding element of this.
Stuff blows up massively now, since an admin seems to have done something very transphobic and uncool.
Another thread is made, where dissenting voices are banned for three days. One of these bans is reversed and no longer shows in the mod log.
TC69 does a “joke” and posts offering random bans to replies, she then bans people who don’t reply to that post with the same message.
This is around when this thread is made.
Then another thread, using a brand new admin alt, claims that the bans have been reversed (they haven’t)
https://hexbear.net/u/DengistDonnieDarko
https://hexbear.net/u/TerribleHands
And the rest (me) remain banned. Only four of the banned users are actually unbanned.
People have already pointed out that the bans haven’t actually been removed.
Overall, the Hexbear admin team shoved a stick into their own bike wheel and are blaming he/hims, despite the obvious fact that can be seen by checking the pronouns of those linked users (and me).
Sorry, trying to do the unbans as fast as I can find them.
I’m barely able to parse this message because it sounds fucking ridiculous. What the fuck is going on
I mean I do suck at writing summaries of stuff.
I think you laid it out nicely, it sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous.
The mass line has relevance especially in a situation like this.
I feel the same. Ironically the mod’s attempts to make the site more “serious” is probably just going to do the opposite. I’ve spoken at length about this before, but you don’t get people to learn and discuss leftist theory by insisting it is always serious business and you aren’t allowed to joke around or acknowledge how fucked up our capitalist society is.
It’ll just chase people away, which is a shame, though might be a “win” as far as the mods are concerned. There’s plenty of “serious” leftist groups out there with half a dozen members with their own very specific interpretation of theory with 0 fun allowed, but I can’t really think of anywhere else quite like Hexbear. I don’t want to see them become yet another insular “leftist” space that is actively hostile to people who don’t take themselves as seriously as the world’s most dedicated Internet Leftists.
I’m probably overreacting though, as others have said, this isn’t the first time mods on Hexbear have gone full reddit mod and won’t be the last.
Hard agree. The fact that its fun is what I’ve always liked best about hexbear. It’s easy to find serious stuff. Its good to have a left space to laugh about it
I recently made a post asking why people joined us and like most of them said they stayed because of the shitpost vibes. Making us into a serious only space would be a very, very bad idea if we want to keep being Hexbear.
To reiterate what I said in one of the stickied threads, if any mod has a problem with a core component of Hexbear culture and aesthetic, the problem isn’t with Hexbear. That mod should just go join another instance.
Same thing that destroyed leftypol years ago: immature mods, cliques and egos.
Leftypol is still kicking well enough, all the spinoff chans are mostly dead as far as I’m aware
Leftypol is still kicking well enough
Nah, it’s a shit site. Run over by incels and sex/dating threads, plus too much porn/nsfw content. Some users were really adamant to allow porn on the site, even though one can find porn literally anywhere on the internet. Just goes to show the priorities of the people there. All the good posters are gone.
man why are leftist spaces online like this? feels like they’re too busy shooting themselves on the foot constantly to get their shit together while fascism and reich-wingers are taking over everything.
at least this isn’t a problem in the grad from what i’ve seen (and hopefully never will)
feds infiltrate and wreck so we can’t share organizing advice
haha jk /s unless…
man why are leftist spaces online like this?
They don’t start off this way. People usually start-up communities out of genuine passion, but as time goes on the only people willing to babysit/moderate the community are people who spend a lot of time on the internet already. Eventually, the whole mod team becomes people who do nothing else but chat about the community/forum. As they reinforce each other, in their minds the importance of their community/forum grows. No longer is it a fun internet site, now it’s serious business, and that means that bad actors want to destroy. Then they give themselves carte blanche to “protect” the community. Naturally, with that kind of mindset anyone who disagrees with them is a potential threat, everyone who posts could be a bad actor in disguise, pretending so as to gain the community’s trust.
What do you get? An insular, paranoid community, resistant to change, distrustful of new people, ruled by a mod clique with their own agenda.
I don’t know enough about Hexbear to make a judgment, those are just my general observations, but from little I’ve seen I think it is happening there too. The whole “I wasn’t lying to you users! It was all a sneaky ruse!” bit is actually sus, feels like damage control after being found out. The HB mods have clearly made their decision without the community and now they’re trying to find a way to frame the change so that it doesn’t piss off the userbase and result in them losing power or worse losing the userbase over whom they lord over. I haven’t seen an apology to the effect of “maybe we were wrong to delete the community” or “maybe we should have consulted the userbase”, it’s all “sorry we handled it poorly” and “I’m sorry we’re bad at communicating!” Very disingenuous.
I don’t think it’s fair to put it all on terminally online people. I’m very online due to a chronic illness and know what it’s like to depend on an online community to interact with people. Mod abuse happens due to too big fragile ego, simple as.
I don’t think it’s fair to put it all on terminally online people.
In my understanding “terminally online” doesn’t mean people who spend a lot of time online (I know I have spent my fair share of time on the internet), it means people who are negatively affected by it, in a way that makes them forget that a website isn’t the end-all be-all or that on the other side of the wire is a human being with their own feelings, thoughts and emotions.
I edited my comment to use the same wording as you did (because you didn’t use the phrase terminally online in the first place).
I don’t think terminally online is a very good phrase anyways because it’s often used to shame people like me who are dependent on online communities. It can be used in the way you describe but I think it’s better to clarify that to avoid a misunderstanding.
Yeah, I specified it’s mods who make a website their life. One can do many things on the internet/on a computer, there’s literally countless possibilities. Also, nothing wrong against helping online communities, mod work is important in removing not only fascists, bad actors etc. but also spammers, nsfw images, gore posters, phishers, scammers and so on. It’s when it crosses over from making a community run smoothly to bossing a community.
Unfortunately dedicating such an amount of time as is required to handle the workload of a community as active as Hexbear with the amount of mods and admins we have means it does become a significant part of our lives and it would also be nice for people to recognize the amount of unpaid labor that goes into maintaining spaces like this.
It goes even moreso for Hexbear while trying to be a big tent space and maintaining some of the chaotic nature of the original community that gave it so much of its charm.
If there’s a silver lining, I don’t think this is limited to leftist spaces, or even to online ones.
Yeah, I don’t know why people frame this as a leftist thing. It might happen more, but it’s not unique.
For the older folks out there; you have seen this sort of thing happen on MMORPGs certainly. In my anecdote, it happened to me in real life with a debate club I was in when I was younger lmao.
With great posting power comes great struggle sessions
