Hello users of Hexbear, we wanted to inform you that we are going to be locking the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank communities. We have created two new communities /c/gossip and /c/counterpropaganda to serve a similar but clearly distinct purpose than the dunk/dredge tanks.
Not only is the dunk tank a term that has racist origins, but also many posts there were almost no effort and often times requiring later edits to show how they weren't reactionary, not useful with regard to developing rhetoric and furthering dialectical analysis of that which we dunk upon.
To that end, we wish posts of reactionaries to be placed in !counterpropaganda@hexbear.net along with an accompanying explanation (as simple or complex as desired) with the intent of countering the reactionary propaganda in the post body, as of now comments are not subject to the same rhetorical rigor rule.
For the posts that are not "low-hanging fruit' of notable people we ask that you use !gossip@hexbear.net .
These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.
Any moderators of the dunk tank or dredge tank that want to be a mod in the new communities let me know.
Any users with questions or comments please use this post, this change was made at the behest of the entire Hexbear mod and admin team. We will be looking for more moderators in an organized volunteer drive shortly, if you wish to submit an application you may send it to me via hexbear or matrix direct messages.
Use this post as a place for discussion to these changes. We will keep things as they are for 2 weeks and then reflect on the feedback, including this post: https://hexbear.net/post/3858346
As a personal addendum I am sorry if the closing of the tanks these changes removes a beloved space on the site and if you want to suggest a community to replace them you may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
Sitewide or community changes come from proposals put forth from the mod team, discussed, and voted on by the mod team.
Any users wanting to suggest a community to replace the tanks, may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net current discussion is here https://hexbear.net/post/3858346 or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
You may also consider using !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml as a substitute for dunk/dredge tank posts as well
The mod statement can be found here: https://hexbear.net/comment/5613033
Application
What is your Hexbear username? Do you have any preferred pronouns? What are your thoughts on capitalism? What are your thoughts on imperialism? What are your thoughts on trans rights? What are your thoughts on racial justice? What do think about current and previous protests around the world? What are your thoughts on Veganism and Animal Liberation? Do you have any experience with other leftist online communities? What did those experiences teach you? What is your approach to moderation, and how do you work with teams? How do you deal with online drama and people who try to start things for the sake of it? What current comms would you be interested in moderating? Do you have any ideas for community engagement? What is your general time availability? (Time zone, amounts, common browsing times, etc)
Collected statements of mods in favor of this change:
“dunk culture” can be fun but it’s rarely constructive, gives off white cishet man vibes, and has the potential to shift closer to the reactionary reddit “snark”.
It promotes misanthropy and, depending on the post can serve as an outlet for “acceptable” bigotry by copy/pasting the most heinous takes without pushing back and sometimes without a CW.
We have all seen those toxic and reactionary opinions 200 million times, ultimately it is just getting really mad at other powerless people.
Counterpropaganda is where you can post Mike83829293’s takes. Posts require clear effort being made in countering the falsehoods of the original post, or furthering the discussion. What this effort looks like will be a dialogue between the users and mods.
Counterpropaganda posts cutting apart shitty Op-eds, MIC insider articles, journalistic stories, etc. are celebrated and encouraged, and will be separated from the shitpostier/chattier nature of the gossip community.
Gossip is the new place to post about people with power. The person being dunked on must be a public figure, and be paid to be a public figure.
The name gossip is because it makes the content seem deeply unserious, like the posts about Elon Musk, celebrities, journalists, all the streamer infighting, YouTuber arguments, podcast guys, etc. Locking the dunk/dredge tanks will help with toning down the irony poisoning on this site esp from white people.
It is such a white internet communist turn-off for me and it permeates this site. In addition, a lot of people have mentioned that there's a definite air of misogyny around the way the site is currently doing dunks, and calling it like it is, gossip, should prove to be not only a method of finding out problematic users, but also a more entertaining way of letting people talk about other public figures besides just Elon Musk and US political candidates
We absolutely need to be more vigilant about toxic behavior in these spaces, there's a non-zero amount of ironic bigotry that has slipped through the cracks to the point where I've independently had multiple different people mention it as a concern.
Dunk culture is along the lines of doing mutual self harm, like a smoking social club. You all go in and smoke together and encourage one another to keep smoking, and you feel a sense of community and a sense that what you're doing is cool and fun, like putting a poster over the hole in the wall instead of fixing the wall.
We want us to continue to be a fun shitposting forum. But there are tons of other kinds of shitposting.
Remember "bad guy bit accounts" when we had like civility and neera_tanden and all those other bit accounts where they just posted and argued while larping as annoying liberals or chuds? We grew out of that, and I think the site is better for it. We still have bit accounts, but there's not really that kind of arguing in the comments anymore.
We can grow out of dunk culture too, and I think the site will also be better for it. We don't have to have a site culture defined by our flailing opposition to mainstream pop culture and politics, uselessly posted where nobody else will see it.
This change has the potential to make HB a lot less toxic improve the quality of posts, we are assessing these changes over the next two weeks and will open the floor for discussion at that time.
Collected statements of mods against this change:
"dunk' culture" isn't inherently unhealthy for the site.
there are aspects of it that need to be cracked down on, and I don’t discount that some reformations to it will probably need to be made, but even after sitting on it for a bit I still think it's not the best idea to strangle the aspect out of the site.
It is not an inherently progressive move for the site culture to totally exclude it. I think a third space for it should exist, with the primary purpose of a space for 'dunk' content is mutual catharsis.
As a leftist, online and a bit offline, is a bit of a maddening experience. A 'dunk' space, even one filled with low hanging fruit, allows me to vent my anger and negative emotions off in a way that gives a shared space for it. It serves these little capsules of exasperation that keeps me from sort of overdosing on those emotion
@ whoever is making the debatebroxyz@thelemmy.club accounts to harass users in this thread: stop making alts, argue on your main or shut the fuck up. all of your alts will be immediately purged the moment they are caught. your behavior is egregious and you are not welcome here, especially if you are too cowardly to attach your main (if you even have an account here, a shame if you actually do, how embarrassing) to the rhetoric you are using.
Genuine question: is it possible for there to be a minimum account age to comment/post?
Even a requirement of a few hours would help a lot with this it feels like.
Considering the harasser is creating accounts on a federated instance, it would have to be added to stock Lemmy as well.
I'm not the best at sussing out users from one account to another but I'd bet good money it's Helltakerhomosexual, easily the most hostile person on HB and it's wild they're a mod.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Is it the same Zionist dude or is this someone completely different?
What is up with deranged people coming from thelemmy.club?
I don't know for sure if the claim that has been bandied about their identity is 100% right (I have trouble with seeing the "posting style is the same" type claim, I guess it's like face blindness for textual speech cadence or something) but it's absolutely got to be someone who is a hexbear regular with an axe to grind.
No way some random reactionary would be so onside for the anti roasting faction that apparently exists on this site.
them specifically going after adjsf for being South African is also way too inside baseball for some random offsite shit stirrer to know
It was just shocking seeing a hexbear user just brazenly misgendering other users to their faces. Really disappointing to see
"I'm about to do a Hexbear poweruser move." - Me before I'm about to misgender trans people I'm angry at
some people really blow a fuse when disagreements happen, and say some real dumb shit. anger can be blinding to a lot of supposed principles. I'm not a fan of the 'go touch grass' type posts, but if any argument ever gets you to that level you need to just walk away because nothing can be worth that level of strain, embarasment, and social backlash
That sort of troll would've just started blasting pure unfiltered hate speech by their second account
I know there is a Zionist lemmy.club user who would pop up in the news mega whenever there's a setback in the Resistance. He would usually name his accounts like HexbearHatesJews. But from the other comments here, it seems like this account is just some regular from here.
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I gotta say, "adding a gossip comm will make the site better for women" and "dunking is like giving yourself and your friends cancer" are some takes I was not expecting to read on here today
"Dunking Is For White People" and Other Mod Arguments
Who could forget that Woody Harrelson/ Wesley Snipes classic “Only White Men can dunk.”
We all love the white tradition of rap battles
Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice dunk up hill
I called it the gossip thing yesterday, I can't believe we're doubling down on it lmao.
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holy shit you are awful lol & have been up and down this thread in multiple accounts posting this kind of shit. Is this the typical kind of opinion we can expect from the 'anti-dunking' vanguard moving forward??? Just wondering!
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Next in hexbear changes: we're adding "shopping" and "hot chip" communities
Comm request: c/charge_they_phone
This may be the biggest self important waste of time struggle session we’ve had in ages. We still got it
Just when I get out, they pull me right back in
??????????? im too autistic to understand "vibes", but i feel like saying everyone who likes making fun of bigots and such are giving off white cishet man vibes is, kinda gross and weird?
idk i do that with my afab friends a lot, we just call it "girl talk" instead of dunking.
Like...do the mods think "dunking" as a group roast thing was invented by...white men???
i feel like thinking that way gives off the white men vibes way more than actual group roasts lmao
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A pretty obvious observation derived from the mod response.
Non-white people were historically all dower and extremely self serious before white men colonized them with the concept of humor.
"yes massa" was good actually, according to the mods
its mind boggling lol
Right? I would expect that comment to be removed and result in a ban. Coming from a mod is unexpected and upsetting. I did not ever expect a post signed by @CARCOSA@hexbear.net to include blatant racist and transphobic speech.
What is even happening here? This whole situation is becoming increasingly bizarre.
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Ima be honest, that sounds like a crazy reach that is inspired by some personal thing than based in the reality of what is posted on the comms. I don’t even particularly care for the dunk tank and I don’t think I’ve posted there once or twice if even? But It’s literally just “this guy is wrong lol look how wrong he is guys?” almost every time I’ve seen anything there.
Like before the answer to these kinds of tensions with badposting and other things was just block and move on but some how mods and people who have an issue with these comms can’t do that and have to reorient the site around their personal sensibilities? If you find shittalking inherently toxic, even if it’s against people who are literally reactionary/nazis/what have you, why not just block? What do you do outside of hexbear?
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Laughing at nazis and neolibs on the internet = shitting on socially disenfranchised people for kicks
This is deeply unserious. Viva has spent a lot of effort responding and to reply like this is just not right
She hasn’t addressed any actual point once just reinforced her view as a problem and it should change but it’s also ok for her to be wildly toxic lol I’m not taking this as a good faith situation at this point tbh
I already went thru a whole discussion with her about this, so it's just extra shitty of her to redo it from the get-go lol
In this very thread even. But yeah, dunk_tank people are bad and toxic or whatever. This is the type of person who is just great for site culture lol
I’m like 80% sure she’s probably one of the mods trying to force this silly shit through tbh
The irony tho lol
99% sure I found a mods alt https://hexbear.net/comment/5614382 lol
God damn the misgendering while calling you a toxic debatebro is wild; if that's actually a Hexbear's alt, mod or not they ought to catch a permaban for that.
More than likely its @HelltakerHomosexual@hexbear.net the writing style and opinions are both 1:1 on top of the shitty reading comprehension
Just for the record:
Catradora_Stalinism: Carnist/vehemently anti-vegan mod of traa, extremely online and always getting into big slapfights with other users, extremely quick to throw out insults, writes exactly in this style. banned a while back for not shutting up about anti-vegan bullshit, made many alt accounts to troll for a couple days after the ban.
HelltakerHomosexual: Account made shortly after the spam alts stopped, carnist/vehemently anti-vegan mod of traa, extremely online and always getting into slapfights with other users, extremely quick to throw out insults, writes in exactly this style, preferred method of openly harassing people is making a bunch of alt accounts and trolling
The user who made death threats, but didn't get banned because she was friends with a bunch of mods? That user? You're telling me that loser didn't just go away?
Probably a better place than this to make the comment but w/e. I don’t really care to much about the dunk/dredge tank shit but do think the mod/admin response has been pretty silly. But I’ve seen people brush off that this site can be cliquey as ridiculous when it’s not that uncommon. It is noticeable that certain users get much more leniency for being inflammatory than others
Yeah it's been an issue for a long time. I really dislike the fact that mod actions are hidden behind automod and that "mod discussions" are closed off to the userbase. Clique shit. They seem to generate a little echo chamber whereever it is they congregate, looking at the dumbass shit said here.
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She (I don't remember the pronouns anymore, apologies if they're wrong) said so much insane shit. I really do not get how she was around for so long, just like how I don't get it with her alleged alt. There's a lot of users I don't understand haven't caught a ban. Used ta be you got banned as a warning.
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Lol I get what she means because I fast at times, but come on what a dumbass way to say it. I'm gonna assume it was also said in a dumbass context, like some sort of nonsensical dunk. She starts out with saying the concept of hunger isn't a real thing, and then goes on to explain how the feeling of being hungry isn't dangerous. Hunger is very much a real thing.
Feeling hungry is fine, you get used to it (when you fast, not when you starve, not trying to say anything fucked like that. Just that if you go for 24-48 hours without eating, the feeling of being hungry will subsume. It comes in waves.)
Feeling starved is not fine and you do not get used to it.
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thanks for the continued ableism. if your main doesn't get permabanned for this the admins are a fuckin joke
Nice ableism dear non-toxic friend.
Genuinely looking at your reaction and the effort you go thru in order to not engage with text, but just harass people you are mad at for no good reason: You should seek help from a mental health professional.
The easiest way to tell if it's her is to just say something good about veganism lol
She doesn't like veganism?
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everything youve done in the last hour is 10x more toxic than the history of the dunk tank on this site combined lmao
But it's the dunking that is problematic
It's toxic don't you see. Creates a chauvinistic atmosphere, as opposed to what we do, which is create an open and welcoming one.
Honestly all the people who talk about the chauvinism on here are the most toxic losers around. The fact there's not as many cis women as they'd like on here has a whole lot more to do with them, than they'd like to accept.
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clicks moderation history
comment removed and account banned less than a half hour after posting
don't know who that is but banned. can't verify they're not just someone wandering in to stir the pot anyways given account was made specifically for this thread, besides being weirdly confrontational and dismissive
Appreciated nevertheless. Sorry about the paranoia
This appears to be a pattern with a couple of the mods who seem most aggressively for this decision and most against actually discussing it.
I just shrugged and moved on when it was clear I wasn't going to get a reasonable reply, but you're right that many of these mod replies aren't even close to being in good faith.
At this point it really feels like a couple of mods here are just flinging shit because the majority don't seem to agree with them and are annoyed at the disingenuous reasons given for this whole fuck up. It's pretty embarrassing to be honest.
I suppose I just haven’t seen enough of that coming from the comms then. I don’t spend as much time as I used to here but it’s mostly been against people I wouldn’t exactly characterize as social disenfranchised, like I say mostly against libs and reactionaries. I also wouldn’t expect punching down to get a lot of support here, hb is pretty vocal about that kind of thing even if it isn’t perfect. We’ve had enough purges I feel safe in making that assertion.
We've been thru this already, but your vagueposting about how the dunk tank targets ND people isn't really grounded in the general observable reality of the content of the posts in the dunk tank. Responding, once again, with this claim is both unserious and exemplary of the toxic attitude that is leveled against the dunk tank.
I apologize for by bluntness, but don't all human beings do this, not just men? Can you honestly tell me that you have never spoken to a woman or a group of women and heard them insult a social group lower than them on the conventional social hierarchy? For a current example, there are a certain number of women on Twitter right now talking about calling ICE to have the undocumented family members of their Trump-voting neighbors deported. I mean, men are making those posts too, but I have seen just as many women making the same posts. Anecdotally, I have personally known many Christian women who insult or are dismissive towards Muslim women, which also has a racial component to it.
J. K. Rowling, specifically, is the world's most famous hater of trans women. She holds events where groups of cis women get together to basically hate on trans women together. In my opinion, this is a way for her to earn "social validation." Obviously this is toxic, as you say. But to claim that men do it far more often than women do, well, I have not seen any evidence of that in my personal life nor have I seen any data to support it. If you do have a book on the subject or a scientific study saying that men engage in this activity more than women do, I would be interested to read it and learn more about the issue. But I just think most human beings do it in specific social situations. Thank you for being open enough to have this discussion.
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people besides cishet men reinforce patriarchy, maybe that's a better way to frame all this
Lmao, 1 day old account infighting
I've been here since the beginning, I just delete accounts regularly for OpSec/Grass-Touching breaks.
cant block them when they leak and we know containment doesn't work from that study on reddit bans.
the mods are definitely disconnected from the users but idk why people need dunk/dredge/badposting content when chapotraphouse is also low-effort but not infantile.
bring back kerryposting i guess
??
Having subs dedicated to it obviously contains it more so than not, there’s people in this thread saying they blocked the subs and don’t want them to go bc it helped them not see it.
Well regardless people clearly seem to like it even if you don’t understand it and if you find it infantile you can block it. Like I said I found fake news and badposting infantile personally myself and blocked both so I didn’t have to see them
I think you need to look inwards, because it seems like you just assume a lot about your fellow comrades on this site, which their written words do not support. You generally seem to be reaching about what people in the dunk tank think about themselves and the world.
I do not share your experience of dunk tank posts, as we have thoroughly gone thru. Odd to see you've forgotten that somehow? Or you've decided to relitigate it for some reason?
Consider just blocking the comm, if you dislike its' content. Not everything has to be for you.
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okay that makes more sense, thanks for explaining
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no worries, i didn't really read you as hostile
"making fun of stupid shit people say is only liked by white cis men" Ok, just call me male socialized faketrans while you're at it.
real, it's downright offensive considering the sites demographics
I agree with the need to sweep away all vestiges of the cishet white male culture and restart our calendar at year zero following a thorough cleansing and purification of the site.
-Cis Bi white male (heteroromantic).
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The implications of saying "this thing you like gives off cis man vibes" to transwomen are pretty clear I think
So if I enjoy that activity, I am a white cis man?
So is dunking a toxic white cishetero male Reddit activity or not?
doing a half assed walk back of your defense of gendering dunk posts while simultaneously doubling down is the worst possible way to respond here, just admit what you said was whack
I'm sorry, this is fucked. So really this is intended as a major intervention into site culture by the mod team in order to make the site less "white" and "cis"? By removing dunks? I'm sorry, some of you are absolutely huffing your own farts, and the total lack of transparency in rolling this out is very telling. It was completely unclear how removing these comms was going to make the site less chauvenistic, and now that I've finally heard the actual rationale, I'm floored.
Given the tank comms were some of the most active areas of the site and a major part of its culture from the beginning, it's clear that a significant portion of mod team regards the userbase here as undesirable and inimicable to the kind of site that they want this to be. You (collectively, not CARCOSA specifically) could come not even come to us straight with the reasoning for this and have tried to conceal the reasoning behind it.
As someone who has posted a lot in the tank comms, I'll just say it's nice to know how I'm regarded by the mod team. Not as a long-time valued member of the community, but a toxic Reddit debate bro that's shitting up your site. Good to know where I stand.
I initially regarded this as a poorly thought out decision that needed to be discussed in a comradely fashion. Now I see it as the opening salvo from an anonymous clique of moderators who would like to remake Hexbear in their image regardless of what anyone else thinks
This should be a separate post rather than being buried in here if you're serious about wanting community input on changing the whole fucking character of the community. And the mods who drafted it should consider putting their names on it if they're not too cowardly to say this shit to my face
Edit: They are, in fact, too cowardly
I'd also like to point out that any time some of us actually saw through this shit, we were harassed and even banned for pointing it out. I received my first ever comm ban for pointing out how the mods were unwilling to openly and honestly engage with questions about the motivations and intentions behind the implementation of the dunk tank's "rule 8." I was then harassed by a prolific mod of many comms and by regular users for it for several days. To their credit, Carcosa reversed the comm ban as soon as I pointed it out to them, but that nonsense comm ban was later used as one justification for a site temp ban. The moderator who harassed me is still a prolific poster because they're of course good friends with the mods.
This site has long had a big, big problem with the same thing most internet forums have a problem with at some point. The kinds of people who desire to be the moderator of an internet forum are also the biggest losers you can imagine, and they form disgusting little toxic cliques and do shit like this all day.
I have noticed the same thing about some posters receiving way more leniency than others (inexcusable how long it took someone like melina to get perma'd as the biggest example of the top of my head) but:
most people are way too lenient with people they're friends/friendly with, I dont think it has to do with wanting/being a mod really.
I lurked for a few (omg a few!) years on hexbear but the dunktank eventually got me to make an account. Oddly enough it was one of those random deep comment threads that went off into theory that convinced me. In the past few months I noticed a progressively more vocal group of wreckers posting. They seemed to have the mods blessing. The manufacturing of drama, accusations, hostility, projection, and demand for obedience has only gotten worse. It's a bit cult-like. I've encountered this situation in other leftist orgs and it usually meant a split was incoming. I've seen Hexbear shake ups but the mods typically sorted the drama out. This is different and feels deeply intolerant. I'm glad you, Regon, and PMYF are saying what a lot of people have been thinking but were afraid to say for fear of being banned.
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Thanks for weighing in, random dishit from another instance. Really valuable feedback
This is unfortunately not a random dipshit from another instance, this is a local with at least one permaban under their belt who occasionally busts out alts for all the most aggressive harrassment
Lmao
Just post on your main, HelltakerHomosexual, your writing style is plenty distinct enough that you're not fooling anyone by harassing me on alts (again)
Yeah lol
That's who I figured it was.
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Lol "get purged". It's a website you dork, not a revolutionary party
nice ableism! I'm glad you're showing your whole ass like this so that you can get your current main account banned just like your last main, Catradora_Stalinism
It is kind of amazing how you got permabanned and then they made you a mod of the exact same comm on your new account. This site really needs a mod purge tbh
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LOL
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Mods, yall support this ablelest?
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sad
Incredible to see how some people who have modded the site for a few months think they get to decide the entire frame of the culture. There's a reason I didn't apply to any of the mod-drives, and it's because I didn't feel for the entire site culture. The lack of introspection from this group is incredible. Literally doing the "Am I out of touch? No it's the users who are wrong" simpsons meme
Perhaps this is tangential to your point, but I never understood why modship is opened to anyone and not people who are in good standing and have been here for at least a year. This is also why I didn't like when Pluto was suddenly mod of like 7 comms after only spending a week here (and I think they came here after getting banned from lemmygrad).
NGL I haven't paid attention to any of the mod drives or the process of becoming one so my bad if I'm wrong but it would make more sense if mods were voted on by users that have been here for a certain amount of time. It doesn't make sense to me if someone can basically just pop up and become a mod
I just kind of automatically ignore mod app posts because I’m not like a power user, and the idea of even asking for a mod role seems presumptuous
Yea, it's tricky because to me those who really want to be a mod (anywhere, not just hexbear) probably shouldn't be a mod.
executive officermod for the week.Active user sortition for moderator roles would low key be as uniquely based as our emotes
It's like Marx said
I mean they need mods, so I understand it from that point of view, but I don't understand this whole anonymous thing going on. There's a lot of things in place that facilitate this loser set of mods behaving like losers. Wish we could see who removed what for example.
its totally bizarre
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You are all up and down these threads doing the lib thing of “possessing marginalized identity means you have an inherently higher developed take on things/sense of morality not having one means you dont” right up until one of us disagrees and now all of a sudden being queer doesnt let us in the special insight club
lol that’s kind of toxic maybe we can rephrase that
Setting aside the obv “it’s ok when I do it” of this I do genuinely feel like to some extent you’ve read some things into some of these that may not be there. I’m sure there’s been instances where people have dunked in covert way “on not what they claim to be” but I just cannot see it as such a widespread issue it warranted more than an extra rule and a name change
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You brought that energy here from the rip especially with the “oh no adminerinoes “ nonsense and everything else
Frankly I think you’ve demonstrated a lot of hypocrisy and have a pretty lib and overly simplistic view of idpol but fwiw wrt to the compromise post you made I think it’s perfectly reasonable, if kind of the unstated situation between dunk and dredge already.
sorry but this comes across as
because you are the one acting hostile. this is meaningless internet drama and if it is actually making you worked up i urge logging out for a while.
OH NO SOMEBODY RESPONDED IN KIND INSTEAD OF GIVING YOU UNEARNED POLITENESS! HOW SAD FOR YOU
I guess if I disagree with you I have to be cis huh? You're just proving my point
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Right just spiritually cis, since I agree with the cis people
Wow how wonderfully non-toxic. Also great to see how against dunking you are.
You and I went thru this whole discussion, but now you're gonna redo it from the get go because you're still sore about it?
Fantastic example of someone being welcoming or whatever the fuck the idea is supposed to be.
Seems to be describing you, buddy, since you're the person who gets away with making baseless accusations and then cry foul when you're called out for it.
Their pronouns are literally right there you fuck.
So many non-cis users are also against this, but you are doing the liberal bs trick of hiding your shitty opinion behind a rhetorical shield of an imaginary queer person to make it acceptable somehow. Don't use queer people as your shield, stand by your dumbass dipshit opinions yourself, asshole.
Do some self-crit
you should catch a ban for the transphobia of this reply alone. pronouns are mandatory here for a reason
Speaking of toxicity
I've seen toxicity on places like reddit because reddit is a place where you're not allowed to draw a connection between the state of the world and capitalism. You are allowed to blame it on individuals being too stupid or too poor. I've also seen the biggest dunk cultures in the trans and vegan communities here. And you know what? It's good. Being poor or disenfranchised doesn't give you license to be a bigot or a murderer. In fact, this is like the vegan struggle session where we were told that veganism for rich white people who make fun of poor indigenous peoples for basic survival.
The toxicity thing doesn't happen when people correctly draw conclusions that there is an organizational problem with society and while it's not the fault of individual randos, they sure as shit don't get to exist in a vacuum at the expense of vulnerable people.
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Dunks for me but not for thee
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At least you're clear about what your real objections are lol
Loser
So you are pro-dunks on vegan and trans comrades? Why are you even here?
Damn, this reasoning is even more baffling than what I initially thought. I thought you all were pulling the "Trump got elected and so many liberals are now disillusioned about the electoral process, making them a good target for radicalization. Therefore, we're pivoting Hexbear towards being more serious in order to seize this window of opportunity. And also, the tweets of genocidal libs airing out their genocidal grievances at POCs who refuse to bend the knee to the genocidal party are bumming out the POCs in this website."
But this? I'm sorry, but this is so terminally online. Like cmon, POC shittalk irl. Now the nature and target and punchline might be entirely different from the way white people commiserate, but cheap dunks with the punchline being "Man, crackers ain't shit lmao" or "pinche gringo" are a thing, and ime, a good way to build camaraderie and weed out people who would otherwise suck up to whitey.
I can't believe I even have to type this, but POCs talking shit about white people is a thing and is a common bonding experience. In general, people gathering together to talk shit about a mutual target, be it their shitty boss or their sports team that always chokes or the fucking weather or traffic, is a thing. Like, this is just basic socializing. The jobs of admins and mods ought to be that the targets are deserved.
Most of their response is just "coating your shitty opiniong in leftist rhetoric to make it acceptable." Like wtf are they even talking about with trying to make it a race thing lol. Isn't almost the entirety of this site white anyway? Every single comm reeks of white leftist, that's not in any way unique to the dunk tank. Guess we gotta get rid of c/food as well then, since most of the food posted is white people food.
It's alienating as fuck as a person who isn't "just" a cishet man to be told that enjoying the comm "reeks of cis white men". Ffs whoever was the moron who wrote that should do a massive amount of self crit for their bad faith brain
Anonymous coward, show yourself and self crit
Yea ngl I don't really care about most struggle sessions 90% of the time but it really really rubbed me the wrong way to be told i was giving off cis white man vibes.
Would have probably made me spiral if I was AMAB ngl
It's genuinely upsetting. The anonymous nature of the post also means that I have to assume literally all mods that haven't disavowed the statement agree with it, and are thus complicit in the inherent transphobia of misgendering.
Seriously that shit would cost anyone who isn't a mod a ban. It should cost the mod a ban and the admins knowing a bit more about the mod, should stop working with them about this site in general.
Fucking dweeb ass coward posting this behind a shield of anonymity, making carcosa take all the flak. Children.
literally, like the dozens and roasting have been a long time tradition in black culture, it is definitely not a white thing. Also when I lived elsewhere and my friendgroup was mostly Mexican, roasting was a HUGE part of how we got along....And dunking isn't even roasting or the dozens. Maybe I'm missing something and the way that it's done here is white or something, idk..
Go look at some of the newer comments. That was a bullshit excuse. The real reason is because the admins don't want us dunking on L*dditor losers.
Ohhhh yeah that's right, so fucking ridiculous. I joined Lemmy when that Reddit exodus happened last year, and then hopped on Hexbear when it refederated or whatever. Wasn't there a big struggle session about dunking on redditors then? Lol. Even WITHOUT dunking on them, a bunch of instances defederated from us simply because we're "tankies". You can try to be as "serious" and welcoming to libs but at the end of the day it's an anarchist/communist space and no amount of civility/welcome/seriousness is gonna change that and magically make those people want to study revolutionary theory unless they were already thinking about/flirting with the ideologies in the first place
I, for one, am not on twitter and all that so the_d*nk_tank posts provide some insight into the kind of batshit crazy views and opinions being propagated.
Yeh I liked having a brief window into the kind of nonsense that goes on on Twitter without actually having to spend time in that hellsite myself
For the record I am putting my name down as publicly against. Reason being that I feel this has been entirely unnecessary from the start and undemocratically discussed both privately and publicly.
Edit: Also every time the strongest proponents for both the rule 8 change and the closure for dunk-dredge pushed their actions forward, I was traveling and didn't have access to the mod chat to push back because I'm a techno-barbarian who can't be bothered to figure out how to get the app thingy to work on my phone.
Edit the 2econd: I played with the gizmos and whatschamacallits in the mod tool box and found you can't actually completely change the comm name, its just a superficial change.
Edit 3; Please post more on main losers. Preferably silly animal pics
So it's actually super easy to change the name? Lol. Lmao even
Not the URL or the actual comm name. It's just cosmetic.
Ah that makes more sense!
Alaskaball remains the one good mod.
1: i don't think people are really getting all that "mad" about these posts, we're having a laugh, which often relieves stress.
2: I've seen mockery of
morph into more serious analysis of said 
thats often quite illuminating.
Honestly wtf, I thought it was just a mild disagreement/miscommunication, but this is just deranged. This reeks of shitty people using leftist terminology to disguise their abhorrent personalities. How many of you dickheads argued for stacking rocks? NOOOO EVERYTHING HAS TO EXIST FOR ME is what this response reads like. Do self-crit dork ass losers.
Lmao wtf is this line of thought supposed to be? There's no real reasoning beyond "I don't like it". I can also just say shit. This line of reasoning promotes "acceptable" bigotry by ignoring the most heinous takes and insisting we engage bigots by way of rigorous debate, which just elevates them. We have all seen the toxic and reactionary opinions get discussed thoroughly 200 million times, to which the only result has been further empowerment and legitimisation, on top of that, the lack of any space to just breathe and acknowledge that these things are toxic and crazy is something we all haven't had the chance to experience.
I look down on this, therefore it has to have a the name of something I also look down on. This is because everybody who enjoys the dunk tank is white, and enjoying it is inherently white.
things I dislike are white and I am incapable of using the "block" botton. Everything has to be for me on this site.
Look thru this thread and tell me it's the "pro dunk tank" people that have been toxic or bigoted. Jesus christ just say you don't like it.
They are neither celebrated nor encouraged, since it's a new comm dumbass. Just say you wanted that content from the dunk tank, but you can't, because that is the content that was in the dunk tank. Wtf is this argument/statement supposed to say?
Liberals and making wack analogies that make no sense instead of relating to the topic at hand (which has several people arguing directly about "health") name a more iconic duo.
Okay? Then ban those too? Either shitposting is fine or it isn't. Just because you like it doesn't make it better somehow.
Civility is still around. We have two comms dedicated to the concept of "bad guy bit accounts" (badposting and fakenews). Just because you dislike it doesn't make it inherently bad. Mods learn to utilise the block button ffs.
Libs and describing things they dislike as childlike, despite the things not being different from the things they themselves enjoy, name a more iconic duo.
This makes no sense. Yeah we don't have to have a site culture defined by dunking, but we do, by account of that being the basis of this site. The site is an offshoot of r/chapotraphouse. It's in large part about low effort shitposting. It drives massive amounts of its' traffic. If you don't want that, why are you here? This is the place I go for dunking jfc, that's what this place is for you mockery.
Considering the fact that the most toxic users in this thread have been those that dislike the dunk tank... What? How will this make it less "toxic"? How was the dunk tank toxic? Once again: Just because you personally dislike content, does not mean it is toxic or bad.
To all of these mods:
See, I tried to tell you yesterday.
Removed by mod
Yeah we'll just have the fake news, and bad posting communities instead, what a huge improvement!!!11 Those communities are definitely very serious, productive, and totally not irony poisoned at all!
If we're going to get rid of low effort posting, just get rid of all of it. Doing this weird thing were certain low effort posting is not allowed while other types of low effort posting are allowed based on personal preference is just nonsense.
i blocked both of those immediately and never brought it up until today. Imagine if I had been like NO. we must ban them and i need an accompanying dissertation on your shit post in this new comm explaining the themes and satirical elements of your fake news post lol.
If we ban low effort posting this site is cooked frankly. Gene Dab is long gone no one left here is making anything worth reading or watching lol
Most definitely. I've made plenty of high effort posts, the trouble is that no one (outside of the news thread sometimes, that's where high effort posts get the most traction imo) reads them or engages with them. I think my last post on the Marxism community, which was a detailed analysis by a South African Marxist on BRICS, de-dollarisation and sub-imperialism, got like 9 upvotes and no responses lmao. People on here want their low effort quick to consume content, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
My last effort post got 25 upbears and like two replies. I still don't mind doing them every once in a while, but that's clearly not what people are here for in the main
Yeah that's the general trend with regards to that kind of thing. I find there's more traction for effort posts on the news megathread, but that's limited to current events, which limits the posting topics. Not everyone wants to discuss war and geopolitics, and it's perfectly understandable why that is.
My experiences have been similar. Effort-posting in a reply to a news mega comment tends to do a lot better than making a unique post. Although I've often done both to try and increase the visibility of other comms.
The unfortunate thing is that I feel like this whole saga has made me less likely to contribute longer, more detailed posts. There's a difference between spending time writing a longer post or reply because you feel like you have something to add that isn't highlighted often or might be useful, and some version of it being a kind of mandated fee to post because a handful of mods seem to want it the whole thing gone but aren't willing to just make that decision and stand by it.
Some of the mods here are great and continue being, but getting one word answers followed by dickish, oddly angry, and doomer-ish rants in response to genuine questions really sucks. It's obviously not a 1:1, but it makes me feel a little like 'if they can't be arsed, why should I put the effort in?'. I've got better / more entertaining things I could be doing.
my only idea is to literally just start pinning effort posts people make. i know that probably would come with the problem of picking which ones to pin and users getting mad if they didn't pin your post but it would be the only way to force engagement to them
Certainly within the smaller Comms this would be useful.
Yeah last time I made an effort post everyone yelled at me. Getting a lot of mixed signals rn.
curious what your effortpost was?
On shooting a tsarviech
Frankly, most people crying about not enough high effort posts haven't done shit. People who have actually typed out high effort posts quickly realize why high effort posts aren't a thing on hexbear dot net, and while I don't think the vast majority of high effort posters have their head so far up their ass that they think they should get paid for their labor, there's very little point in spending more than an hour on a high effort post with almost nothing to show for it.
there is no reason to effort post here. I had a talk with an admin at one point, like a year or so ago, about potentially opening back up c/islam and I was gonna try to effort post there. but all effort posting comms are just fucking dead, there's no desire for the content even when it's there. people come to hexbear for slop, me included. you can't ban that drive out of people, you can't make them dislike one type of content and switch to another, all you can do is meet them where they're at and try to facilitate wider styles also. problem is, this is a small community, we do not have the large userbase where niche comms would have more than a dozen regular users. it is what it is, but you gotta accept it for that
Yeah, I know. I think some of the moderators have a "build it and they will come" mindset, in that they believe that if they change rules and site structure, high effort posts will be appreciated more and we'll be able to branch out and reach more people. While that is a noble goal, I don't see how that is possible for us as an esoteric web forum defederated from pretty much every major Lemmy instance. Where are all the new users who will appreciate high effort posts going to come from? Who are we going to "advertise" hexbear to?
Yeah, if effort posts are what they wanna encourage, I'm thinking why not try to highlight them and make them more accessible instead of stripping everything else away? I've only read a little bit of theory, and I think that is hexbear took a turn for the superserious I would feel uncomfortable even posting here at all. I already feel like I'm not knowledgeable enough to post sometimes, BUT everyone here is friendly and SO FUNNY and smart that I feel relatively comfortable here. The humor and shitposting is a big part of that.
I also kinda feel like if the goal is to radicalize more people, then getting rid of the "fun" parts of the site will just alienate anyone who would come for the dunks but stay to learn some theory
7 months ago the sites active sort was changed to be more like "chapo.chat" active sort, but I can not find a code repository with a commit that shows what was changed (I welcome it of anyone knows where that is). So I can't review what the difference between Lemmy active sort is and Hexbear active sort.
What I can tell you is how Lemmy sorts:
Now I think what was changed is that the decay for Active was made more aggressive.
This means that the algorithm already favors posts that attract a lot of comments. The more a thread gets comments the longer of stays on the front page. Since score is also a major factor, it means that content you can digest quickly and upvote is also highly viable content.
The Dunk Tank and The Dredge Tank were baked in a lab for that kind of math. You get fast food for up votes and fire and forget comment sections. These comms are the peak of the mountain for keeping the front page fresh and lively.
You know what doesn't do that? Marxism, Anarchism, and Theory comms. I managed to game the system with out knowing it a few days ago by including a photo and a title to an effort post that yielded over 100 up votes which is a high water mark for a post here.
What I'm saying is, this shit posting site has a default algorithm that thrives off shit posts. You can't just nuke the shit post communities and expect it to stop. The algorithm doesn't favor thoughtful discussion, long form posting,
Several comms effectively became dunk and dredge after their closure and it you didn't pay attention you might have thought they were still open. This is because from what I can tell, outside of dunk and dredge, comms seem meaningless. Dredge content in the chat comm, dunk content in the chapo comm, both in main. The mega threads seem to occupy most of the posts in the site. That's a whole other topic for another day.
Womenby reopened and no one posts there. Menby I think is open? No one posts there. No one posts in parenting, they post in the weakly thread. No one is posting in theory, Marxism, anarchism, or really any other comm outside of news, chat, chapo, main (but not always), gaming, tech.
This is a small site, it might not have the foot traffic to drive these other communities, and the active sort isn't helping. This is just my rambling but I think if I pull on this thread some more I could draw better conclusions.
We should have been a phpBB forum instead.
Reddit was always multiple steps backwards from phpBB forums, and "shitty Reddit clone but with federation" doesn't seem to be that much better. Like, we still can't even create polls, fucking shit that old-school forums figured out more than two decades ago.
I think the original idea was to create non-corporate controlled alternatives to existing social media and siphon users as enshittification happened, to create a proof-of-concept of a post-capital internet, but if the end-use-case isn't to laugh at Elon Musk's deranged takes or to keep updated on the latest Star Citizen grift idk what we're doing here.
"The purpose of the system is what it does" applies to Hexbear as well- at some point we'll have to reckon with the mismatch between capitalist social media methodology as a means to "drive engagement" against our egalitarian/utopian aims, but that's probably not happening today since this particular struggle session seems more about mod/admin/user miscommunication and infighting (being charitable) so
tag filtering rather than siloed comms or subfora would make sense to me but i guess that's not lemmy
I mean, fundamentally tags and subfora fulfill the same purpose, the issue is the sorting algorithm weighing different types of content differently
The problem with the old active sort was that the decay was so slow, you'd get weeks old posts staying on the front page and clogging it up, preventing new posts from gaining traction. So I don't know what the solution is. Going back to the old sort algorithm means that we'll never see any posts younger than a few days on the front page, because of how prolific we are at commenting on high up posts.
Get rid of all sorts except New
new comments is good too
You made an account specifically to post about this? lmao that's pathetic. Especially considering your posting style is very obvious lol
As opposed to your very productive usage of the niche online webforum?
Liberals and being shitty towards ND people, name a more iconic duo. Yeah buddy tell me more about how me disagreeing with you is a tantrum, hey throw in the r word while you're at it
Removed by mod
I am neither cis nor het, which is evident from my pronouns you asshole. You were the one to bring up "throwing a tantrum" which is used derisively of autistic people and have since then moved on to be a general negative dipshit thing to say, because it implies the recipient is behaving like an autistic person, which is implied to be bad. I don't need to spell this out for you, because you are aware of this, this is what you were trying to do, but I'm still gonna.
Also eat your own face for misgendering me you sadsack fuck. For someone who dislikes toxic dunktank, you sure do love being a toxic loser. More than likely you're one of the dumbass mods who is arguing for this, and it's great to see what kind of site culture you wish to foster. Real welcoming space, real good focus on not being bigoted or chauvinistic, glad we can see that's what it's all about.
Start doing some breath exercises and learn that not everything has to cater to you.
Removed by mod
Honestly this is just pathetic
I love our mods/admin team but this is honestly shit lmao.
I will be calling anyone I see dunking/shitposting/having any fun on this site a white cishet cracker from now on thank you.
LOL what users were legitimately arguing with @Civility@hexbear.net or @neera_tanden@hexbear.net??? I'm sorry but if we still have the Chapo comm, it's kinda insane to point at bit accounts and be like "THIS is the site culture we're trying to move away from".
Guess mayo pete and the joe biden account gotta go, too bad, the mods don't enjoy them or something. They're toxic and chauvinistic I guess
chuckles I'm in danger
white
cis
Not productive
Is enjoyed by users
You better be gay
Better get rid of that too
Removed by mod
This is just sad
Ask yourself why you are spending one moment of your precious time on this earth making totally empty threats on an alt account
The less laughter you have, the more serious your revolutionary potential. That's why Stalin famously never smiled. Ever.
This is needlessly paranoid.
Thought we got rid of wrecker jacketing for a reason, but I guess not
Jessie, what the fuck are you talking about?!
We queer people have made shit talking a core part of our culture for centuries at this point. Polari was an entire pseudo language that queer folks used to communicate in, and it's full of ways to dunk on people!
I'm not naming names, but one of the most prolific posters of this kind of content is not cishet and it's kind of fucked to portray it as such.
Is it me? uwu
You weren't who I was referencing, but many such posters.
I didn't think so, I was just goofing lol
Literally almost every post I've made to the dunk communities consisted of making fun of, calling out, and mocking racist white people, mainly racist white South Africans...
1
2
3
4
5
It catharsis. When this racism is in your face everyday, it's nice to have a place on the internet with like minded people to call it out and mock it. And I don't see how a high effort post is needed to explain why the opinions being presented in the above posts are bad or worthy of mockery, it's self evident. If people need an explanation as to why apartheid and it's prevailing racist attitudes and surviving structures are bad, they honestly need to educate themselves, it's a base level of knowledge we all should have on a left wing, socially progressive website.
Using "content isn't cw'd enough" as an argument and then calling dunk culture "mutual self harm" is dishonest at best age deeply unserious at worst. Furthermore, calling culture "rarely constructive, gives off white cishet man vibes" makes so little sense as to the point where I cannot possibly believe that is the reason for this change. Lastly, cultural changes happen from the bottom up, not the top down. This change is probably just going to result in the revitalization of main posting.
In summation:
January 6th but it's people posting screenshots of racist tweets with 5 likes on main
Coating yourself in leftist rhetoric to disguise your shitty opinion and being a dumbass liberal, name a more iconic duo
Wow. Honestly the statement from the mods that favor this change just seems to be against the culture of the site.
Which, I get it, being a moderator sucks and you're getting the worst of the site rather than the best. Still though, this is something else.
I moderate a chapotraphouse subreddit derivative and I must scream
Okay but this whole thing about "We want to do a top down change of the site culture" was being smuggled underneath the issue of the unfortunate name of the community. It was never explicitly stated as such, it took all of us picking through the subtext of the statement, and then after confronting the moderating team, they came out with a statement that just lashes out, calls everyone white and cis, and goes to war against the community for no good reason
(Just to clarify, in case it isn't clear- I'm not a mod, just riffing on I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream)
Going back to the site's founding, the vibe I've gotten is that many of the people maintaining the site never fully intended for it to become a direct continuation/replacement of the old subreddit and wanted to use the momentum of the banwave to establish an entirely new online leftist community with its own identity
Unfortunately for them, a large part of the new site's initial userbase was chapo posters (well,the least worst part at least, because there were certainly parts I'm glad didn't make the jump) who brought the sub's posting style with them
I am disgusted. The justifications for this change are full of patronizing and infantilizing comments and, I cannot believe this, actual racism and transphobia from the admin staff. The discussions are rife with ableism as post after post instructs users that they must log off and do praxis with no regard whatsoever for the differing abilities of the user base. Crude assertions are made that the dunk tank is harmful to users mental health, with opponents assigning themself the role of mental health provider to others in a disgusting manner. Numerous heartfelt testimonies that the dunk tank, far from being a source of misanthropy and doom, provides an important role for many users in finding a sense of balance and sanity in a brutally liberal and fascistic world have seemingly gone completely ignored. For some users it is the only place in their lives that they can have honest discussions about the horrors in which we are trapped.
Discussions of effort and praxis totally miss both the way that the site is viewed by the users and the hard fact that effort posts require more effort than exhausted people, people struggling with mental or other illness, or just casual users are able to put in at any time. Effort posts require effort. When I'm up at 3am wracked with bipolar depression I cannot expend effort.
I was initially accepting of this change but seeing the casual indifference, contempt, and ableism, and I cannot believe I am saying this but casual misgendering that has been allowed to permeate this discussion has raised a cauldron of disgust in my belly. It does not seem that the needs of the users are being considered so this amounts to nothing but a testimony, but at least it has been said.
I'm rapidly getting sick of this power user/mod clique thing that's been an undercurrent to the site since the chapo.chat days. I can't believe people are allowed to say some of this shit without getting nuked off the face of the planet
I'm usually willing to cut The Clique™ some slack since they put in the work and drive activity, but I'm unironically concerned they might kill the site with this one lol
At this point it kinda looks like they're actively trying to do exactly that.
Fuck knows why.
As usual, Frank is 100% correct.
The battle against Chapo is coming about 8 years too late. The mods in-favor make it sound like the heyday of the Bernie bro. Most people here don't even listen to Chapo or care about it in any way that shapes their interactions.
Big self important reddit mod vibes here.
Mods coping
You, personally, are doing good. I'm sorry you're saddled with this sad sack of pathetic cowardly group of crybaby liberals. Kick them out and let me moderate everything, I promise to never log off.
at least when TC69 unilaterally forced changes to site usage and culture and strongly enforced it, it was for something coherent
lmao okay
I don't understand how a mod expressed the opinion that dunk tank posters were giving off "cishet man vibes", knowing that there are trans dunk tank posters, and an admin thought "that's reasonable to copy and include"
If that person wrote "your posts are giving off cishet man vibes" under every dunk tank thread they'd be rightfully banned
deleted by creator
I articulated the case for against here, so if anyone wants me to clarify anything w/rt the latter half I can provide some more context to what I was thinking about with it.
I like your "against argument," but I would add just one thing to it: the "Spoonful of Sugar" argument. A spoonful of sugar really does make the medicine go down. I don't think that anyone here is trying to argue that low-effort posts (screenshots of right-wingers on Twitter or Reddit) are revolutionary or will change the world. Low-effort posts are just supposed to be fun. They give you a little hit of dopamine. And then the rest of the site is the "fruit and vegetables" of the website. Personally I go on c/theory to look at the Das Kapital reading club, and I also click on low-effort posts to have a little laugh at how the conservative right-wing cancer is evolving in real time on social media.
Isn't that the whole point of left-wing social media? Invite as many people in as you can with "sugar" (comedy and community) and then introduce them to "fruits and vegetables" (Marxist theory and real-life organizations)? Is there a single website that exists and functions that only has the fruits and vegetables, with no sugar? If Hexbear is going to be a "no fun allowed" website, why not just make it a straight re-direct to the collected works of Marx and Engels? https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
To be fair, did I roll my eyes when I saw UlyssesT make his 1,000th Elon Musk dunk? Yeah, because I had seen it before. But then again, it seems like that was their hyper-fixation, and I don't ever want to insult someone or put them down for being passionate about something. Not clicking on a UlyssesT post costs me nothing. Anyone who wants to avoid low-efforts posts can just unsubscribe from low-effort coms.
And like, people are always going to find a way to make low-effort posts. If you ban recess at school, kids will run around in the hallways. Kids need recess! You can't just tell them, "Sit in a chair all day, and learn all day, and don't do anything fun, or else you're a terrible person." That attitude will obviously lead to resentment among the students.
This whole situation reminds me of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split. The Bolsheviks wanted to be serious and disciplined, while the Mensheviks wanted to let amateur socialists (mainly academic professors) join in. I guess it worked out for the Bolsheviks. But at the same time, Lenin spent a good deal of time "dunking" on people. So did Marx. And one of the reasons Lenin and Marx won people over is because they were funny. They had some sugar.
So this is how I find out that you are one of the toxic Redditors who is ruining the site
Good case, well argued comrade.
But if we're still allowed to post dunk content on the lemmygrad comm, and that comm is still allowed to federate with Hexbear, then what has actually even changed given all dunk content ends up there eventually? Like it's still on the site, our users still see it, its still under Hexbear mod jurisdiction.
The only thing that's changed in that scenario is that anarchists aren't welcome to post dunk content anymore
And if we start posting there our posting power will just boost it right back to the top of anyone who is sorting by all.
As another moderator, I'd just like to piggyback this comment and talk about this.
First, what is (hopefully) the least objectionable part: the creation of c/counterpropaganda. It does have some degree of overlap with c/effort and c/agitprop, but I envision it as a place for stockpiling useful counterarguments and framing devices for use against liberals, whether that be online or when talking to friends and family, where c/agitprop is about creating spreadable images and memes. I might end up posting things from citationsneeded in there. That being said, I wasn't the one who came up with the idea of the comm, and how it'll actually evolve remains to be seen.
While I also did not come up with it, the naming of c/gossip was made intentionally frivolous because what X streamer is saying today is fairly unimportant. In fact, there was an idea that naming it c/gossip would help ferret out people who were like "I'm not doing gossip, that's feminine! I'm a very serious politics understander who is talking about the very important issue of what neo-Nazi shit [streamer] has said today!" I would be fine with a name change (and tried to come up with some in the mod chat but couldn't really find something in the same vein) but the fundamental idea of what it should be is fine in my eyes - if you like discussing what a shitty public figure is doing then you can do that there, and those that don't want to do so can block the comm.
The reason behind locking the dunk/dredge tanks is, as stated above, due to concerns about the impact of things like toxicity and irony poisoning leading to chauvinism and bigotry, even if it's accidental. Dunking is not, in my personal view, inherently bad. It is one tool in the toolkit. The ability to dismiss an idea without effort, using all the lovely techniques in the Logical Fallacy diagram, is awesome for when libs and chuds come along with ideas that have been debunked and dismissed for tens if not hundreds of years. It's also a great way to build a community, as chapotraphouse's (albeit terminated) existence demonstrated. Many of us came to chapotraphouse or to Hexbear directly either through being dunked on, or by seeing somebody else get dunked on, and seeing that there are indeed people who have some real passion about politics who aren't seal-clapping chuds. I personally object to an attempt to just stamp out dunking, at least as it's defined as "refusing to take a person or idea seriously and instead insulting them" (what would be the alternative - a hundred lemmy bots that each respond with a 10-paragraph argument that you could summon for every eventuality?)
However, we've seen complaints from people about how the vestiges of reddit that remain here are turning off people, particularly non-white and non-cis-male people. There's just a zeitgeist of masculinity and reddit background radiation that people can detect and they then choose to go elsewhere, and we should do everything within reason to try and make the site more appealing to those people. Mandatory pronouns was a great initial step in that direction, but we must continue down the path. We have black and/or LGBTQIA+ moderators who are trying hard to fix these issues. I am neither of those, so I've largely gone with their expertise on the matter.
Is Hexbear a serious political platform? Is it a bar where you hang out after work with your friends and shoot the shit? It is both and neither. But it can definitely be better.
The mods have positioned discussing frivolous current events as feminine and used a loaded word that has in the past been used to justify torture of women for the comm.
CW: Torture device, pictures of the device on display and woodcut depictions of the device in use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scold%27s_bridle
Here's a discussion of the origin and history of "Gossip" directly from Federici
https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-subversive-feminist-power-of-gossip
I can't know if this was raised or discussed during discussions, but I do think it's relevant if the goal is to reduce misogyny and misogynistic behavior on the site. "Gossip" is a weapon of patriarchy.
You're good. I want the 100 lemmybots though, but that's just because it's funny.
I do not care about comms and still believe we should mostly post almost everything in main, so removing a comm is fine with me, but come the fuck on. If you weren't a mod this comment would be removed for misogyny and transphobia.
Do some self crit and fuck you.
I just wanted to thank you for wading into this and giving a detailed and reasoned response. Even if I don't agree with every word, I appreciate them all and can see your point of view. The work you and some of the other mods here put in continues to blow me away. You and those mods are the best of Hexbear, which is why I usually don't weigh in on these editorial decisions.
Unfortunately, the behaviour and generally hostile and toxic responses of other mods around this issue have been a fucking embarrassment and have deeply hurt the argument for these changes or the idea they're being done in good faith. (I think they are, for the record, even if I don't entirely agree with all of it).
There are some wild opinions in the pro-side. It really seems like there's some rot buildup in the mod team, if all of these takes are getting posted for banning this content. Do they just hate this website and the community?
So many of these complaints are a) things that have been a part of the community for years, or b) smears against the community
Like seriously, if these are thoughts they have, why are they mods on this site?
I miss those accounts
???
If "dunk culture" gives white cishet mam vibes, you haven't spent enough time behind the Great Firewall of China.
My vision for the site is the weekly news megathread, which has it's own comm, and only 5 people and 1 Dane are allowed to post in it, and one other comm which is just for posting on the birthdays of Masc presenting Genshin Impact characters. Everyone can agree this is the highest ratio of quality to content with the lowest toxicity possible.
Happy Birthday, Kinich!
You have to be fucking kidding.
I guess we need some kind of retirement home for all the white millennial chapo reddit irony style posters
Tbh I think the othering of “dunking” as if it’s a unique to white, now millennial, and an implied I’m sure men, or some mixture of this is kind of silly and somewhat infantilizing to people who don’t fit in these categories. I’ve been in communities that were largely bereft of people that fit that identity and there’s still plenty of dunking on people that the group finds agitating or wrong, whether the community be made up primarily by black men and women or trans people or whatever
The fact is, this is a niche in-group and we do some shit talking about people who are out group in the same way every other community does. I think there should be some stuff in place to protect people catching strays which seems to be the concern from some people, those rules are kind of already in place, ppl call ppl out on that shit and our mod team is pretty active but if it needs to be even more formalized than great I can respect and stand by that. But by and large the dunks are directed towards reactionaries and like others have said, I see toxic shit and lib shit everyday on the internet. I see people talking shit about us and our beliefs, it’s nice to go somewhere and see some pushback be treated as the correct position
I just reflexively assumed us white millennials had ruined everything
Phew, narrowly dodged that one
In all seriousness,
This is why I don’t frequent those com’s so personally I’m happy to be seeing this addressed.
oof, double the jice
I am a newly appointed mod to a few comms (I sent the application after Carcosa posted this thread) and I half-heartedly agree with this. While I have enjoyed the old dunking, I do partially agree it fosters irony poisoning which is a hell of a drug, and the higher bar that c/counterpropaganda requires you to clear can help with more constructive/less misanthropic takes. I mean I will absolutely miss some of the wilder dunks, but I think it might lead to a somewhat healthier atmosphere in here
Since there's a total of 3 posts to c/counterpropaganda at the moment I'm assuming there's just going to be a lot less posts in general.
This is extremely patronizing. I, and I would venture most users, do not need the mod team to protect me from irony poisoning and misanthropy. And, frankly, dunking on ghouls is an assertion of the value of humanity by recognizing that liberalism is not a neutral or natural belief but rather a highly artificial ideology enforced and maintained using hellish and inhuman violence. Rejecting the liberal worldview is an assertion both of one's own humanity and of the potential of humanity. It is a direct rejection of Capitalist Realism that tells us all of this is natural and we must accept it to be part of society.
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What compromise?
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FWIW, I think that's a totally reasonable compromise. I would be fine with something like that
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This is an extremely L take, you're talking specificaly about the election results yeah? That already excludes people who are sad about both candidates being the same on issues like Gaza. If you already understood both candidates are shit the election itself shouldn't make you any more sad then any other day during the past year of genocide for example.
To be sad about Trump winning means the actualy believe the mainstream rethoric, which means they're not an ally or at best they're still very far away from having a concrete view about current issues so their opinion is mostly worthless or at the very best just noise.
Its not uncharitable to say if you're only sad now that you're probably a shit lib that deserves to be dunked on. We're not changing their minds, if we were capable of that then they've turned into a socialist or abandoned the dems at least when they saw any of the Gaza hospitals being bombed and not when orange man won the election.
Point is, even if you're not necessarily a socialist but already abandoned the Dems following Oct 7th you're not going to be particularly sad about Trump. Same on any other issue the dems refused to fight on.
Kamala would've meant "states rights"ing trans rights, Trump means an acceleration of discrimination against trans people and likely federalization of the horrific laws we've seen passed in many states. They would certainly be the same otherwise, but to say people being sad about the outcome aren't allies, especially given the demographics of this site, I think is a bit much. And before I get accused of being a liberal or a democrat for caring about losing the healthcare that has kept me alive faster than I would have under a Kamala admin, I voted PSL and was always going to vote PSL, but especially because of the genocide in Palestine. And just to clarify, people are upset about a Trump win, not a Kamala loss. She did everything in her power to lose as hard as possible and deserved it for open endorsement of genocide and tacking very hard to the right on just about everything.
I totally agree, and I say that as someone who took some schadenfreude in prominent media liberals suddenly being faced with the realisation that all their self-deluding electoralist optimism was just that. It's entirely possible to see the sham of the American uniparty for exactly what it is and still feel shit or sad when the thing you know is likely to happen happens.
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I think it's absolutely valid to comment on the phenomenon of infantilised baby talk, we all rightly made fun of the fren types for that
Though I will agree the post you highlighted seems a bit mean. They just seem like very unremarkable embarrassing American liberals
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"People being mad about an unpopular decision is a sign it's a good decision actually. The fact a lot of people haven't brought up a separate post I made that didn't get seen because why would it, is very telling of this."
What?
This is a featured post, your compromise has a handful of upvotes in a meta comm.