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.
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.
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.
Yes, it would be nice, but that shouldn’t be the motivation. If a mod feels like it’s too much work, they should ask for help or stop moderating, cause otherwise they’ll look for ways to make the work easier and that’s often to the detriment of users.