Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
this is not in response to you specifically @Lyudmila. I appreciate the work you and @CARCOSA are doing in this thread to sort things out. thank you.
effortpost preface:
I started writing this at 5am this morning after checking to see if I was banned (confused? keep reading!), seeing @Aradina had been unbanned, stumbling onto the horrifically sad comment that apparently @morte made from an alt after being banned, and crying my eyes out. I've been working on it (and crying! 😂😭) off and on all day, in between reading the comments here to catch up on What Happened.
I have to get this out, and presumably we're supposed to keep all of this contained to these threads.
admins, mods, fellow users – this is not an attempt to restart The Shit.
I'm posting this to get it off my chest and hopefully get some clarification from some people on it, so I'm gonna leave it and close Hexbear and maybe see you tomorrow.
ATTENTION, FELLOW HEXBEARS:
telling me anytime after Friday to logout and let things blow over was ableist, actually.
also, saying this is just a website is callous and fucked up.
please allow me to elaborate. get your clicking fingers ready, because baby, I got links.
I am autistic as fuck. I only just realized this last year, and got diagnosed last week.
justice sensitivity is a well-known neurodivergent trait, and it has been a defining part of my character for my whole life. one of my earliest memories is getting whipped with a spatula for "talking back" because I questioned the justice of adult decisions, for responding to "life isn't fair" with "why aren't you trying to be? why don't you make it fair?"
I have been repeatedly socially ostracized for sticking up for others or finding repugnant behavior intolerable. I lost my hometown friend group when I wouldn't attend functions to which they had invited the asshole who abused another person in the group.
CW: DV
(photos of large, vivid bruising were not enough. seeing the bruises on her in person wasn't enough to make the host uninvite him.)
my husband and I lost his hometown friend group when nobody gave a shit about covid. they stopped inviting us to things because we were masking and distancing. I'd rather have no friends than friends like that.
it's the biggest reason for having left most of the two-dozen jobs I mentioned – somebody outside the management clique is unjustly fired or otherwise punished, and I quit in solidarity with no backup plan. 🤦🤷
it made me unwelcome in the glass program at art school because I reported the head instructor's abusive treatment of a fellow student to the program director.
it's the reason I left Christianity as a teenager. the adults wouldn't stand up for anything. they didn't give a shit about "love your neighbor." they were too busy gossiping and backstabbing each other while jockeying for positions in the social and institutional hierarchy. there were people with country club memberships while some of the other members of the <100-member church didn't have enough to eat.
it has made me the outsider in my conservative evangelical family. they thought it was super fun to get me all fired up about this stuff when I was younger, and then they'd make fun of me for caring until I cried and fled. they also hated that my best friend was a gay boy I met in band class. why should it matter that he was gay? didn't Jesus love everyone equally? I didn't understand. I still don't.
it's what drove me from the Republican indoctrination of my childhood to the Democrats as a young adult. it's what made me ditch them over the way they treated Bernie. it's part of what drove me from DSA. it's what has driven me further and further left.
it's why I would never have employees. it's why I pay for any little indie apps I use. it's why I left reddit during the API fiasco. it's what made me investigate Hexbear when you federated instead of just accepting the warnings about you as facts. it's what made me abandon my other fediverse accounts and live here on local on my previous account and this subsequent one. it's what made me start contributing to the Patreon the day I found out it existed.
I'm not online all the time, so I know there are plenty of things I miss, but since I joined last summer, this place has been fair, it has been caring, and it has been wonderful to see so much good come of this place. people have been fed and sheltered because so many of us are willing to share what we have, even when it is very little. lots of very little bits of goodness added together can make something great.
I'm 42, which makes me older than most users here; many of you are much closer in age to my 17yo son than to me. I don't bring it up because I think it makes me inherently wiser than any of you – far from it, I know I'm a dumbass, I have a lifetime of failure and fuckups to prove it. just because I've been fucking up longer doesn't mean I have learned more from my fuckups than any of you have from yours.
I bring it up because I'm fucking tired, and life is hard, and I genuinely had very little hope for the future until I made a post begging for distraction from terrible thoughts, and so many of you came through for me. 😭 it still instantly makes me cry when I think of it.
the months since then have been physically harder – I had to stop hrt for perimenopause due to life-threatening side effects, and I have been expecting to slide back into the abyss, but I hadn't yet. I really think the community of care I have found here is what was keeping it at bay. @morte's comment let me know I'm not the only person who feels that way about this place, and I don't want her to put herself out there alone.
some of you have become very dear to my heart.
a long-time user I have barely interacted with DM'd me yesterday offering help with getting my son T if Trump bans trans care.
there are no words to adequately express my gratitude for that sliver of hope.
Hexbear, I love you, but I care about things being "fair" or "just" more than anything else. I will stop caring about the way other people are treated when I stop breathing. you might as well tell me to stop getting rashes when I'm stressed.
wanna see what it looked like after I saw that @REgon had been banned?? 😂🙃
pic
🏆🥇
you might as well tell me to quit loving my son or quit being 42. it is physically impossible. my parents couldn't beat it out of me.
"don't take it too seriously, it's just online, it's just a website!" friend, right now I wish it were just a website, because I would say fuck this place and never look back. no mere website is worth the amount of anxiety and stress I've felt and tears I've cried in the last 24 hours.
it's not just a website, it is a lifeline for my family and so many of my comrades. it has been a sanctuary for me, until this past weekend. really, until yesterday. "don't take that tiny sliver of hope too seriously"??
if you think that, then buddy,
with all my heart,
with every fiber of my being,
FUCK YOU.
is that hostile? good. maybe if someone who is usually kind to everyone gets hostile, this stuff will fucking matter to you, too. I'm glad that some of you are socially privileged enough to have enough support to not care what happens to this place. I'm not.
those of you who were applauding the behavior of TC69 and her Cool Kids Club this weekend should be deeply ashamed of yourselves.
I know I'm ashamed of you. I finally understand why so many people warn about this place. You Eat Your Own.
and for what??? what was the actual point of any of this? rename the comms plus change the comms equals change the site culture?
was the culture genuinely that bad?? this is a real and sincere question, I'm autistic, I'm sure there are problems that I don't pick up on.
most of the time irl, I don't realize a skillful bully is fucking with me until it's too late, so certainly I'm not gonna catch all the shittiness on here, where I don't have body language to help.
(continues below)
(continued from above)
please do not ever tell me to go read the fucking modlog again. I do, I try to answer questions myself before I bother anyone else. as others have noted, the modlog is incomplete, and the people telling us to go read it yesterday knew that. notably, the main purveyor of this line of bullshit was TC69, who is my top suspect for the deletions relevant to this conversation, which I only feel vaguely safe saying because she deleted her account.
how many of her fan club have mod/admin positions? am I on someone's Eternal Shitlist now because I am decidedly Not A Fan? idfk, idk who most of you are anymore. it was foolish to think I had any sense of you at all, to trust that I was being treated with the same sincerity and compassion that I have given you. if this is the kind of person you look up to and revere, I don't think I belong here.
I don't doubt there's plenty of her fan club in the userbase left to tattle, and I hope you do, I hope you all get a good laugh at my expense. I hope to fuck someone is enjoying this.
this intentional obfuscation with the modlog that you then bang over our heads as proof of your points is a terrible way to treat anyone at all, let alone your autistic comrades. I know I'm not the only person who thinks so.
I don't fucking know if I want to be here anymore because this place is fucking terrifying, and seeing other people saying similar things is validating but heartbreaking.
the first Hexbear related thing I did this morning was look at the modlog to see if I had been banned because TC69 had finally turned her attention to me. (I had intentionally not engaged with her directly because I had seen how that had gone for even sweet morte.)
after that reply begging for mercy, I messaged a mod who has been kind and friendly to me to beg her to please explain it to me on my old account if I did get this one banned, had a good cry, accepted the invitation @Sulvor had sent me earlier to join movie night for a bit, and calmed down enough to eat something and go to bed.
and after all this I've written about fairness, because of the ostracization and abuse I've suffered my whole life, I can't help feeling like it would have been my fault if I had been banned. I kept trying desperately to understand and talk out what was happening because it seemed unfair and just plain mean, and that's not the Hexbear I know. I kept asking questions when it was becoming clear they weren't welcome as the modlog was filling with bans.
even though I know I would tell anyone else in the same situation that it wasn't their fault, that it wasn't fair to be afraid of asking sincere, honest questions in a comradely and respectful manner when someone asserts something I don't understand... I would have just felt like once again, I fucked myself – and this time, my son as well! – with my inability to just stfu like some of you and keep my head down. everything ruined again, all because I can't let unfairness and injustice just be.
idk what I want from this. I need to get this off my chest, and I guess I still just desperately want someone to help make it all make sense to me. I don't want to just leave like I have with every other group that has made me feel this insecure and awful. for my son's sake, I want to at least try to understand and find a way to be okay with things and not be scared of most of you.
and I guess more than anything, I want to know why some of you are okay with people you like and admire behaving so badly.
why did none of you who are in the TC69 Fan Club say anything against this?
why weren't you sticking up for anyone?
is this really who you are?
thank you, honestly. social spaces are never just a website, or just a this or that. people care, and some people get very attached to a community they invest in and invests back in them. it's not easy for a lot of us ND posters to just not care about certain things, that's not how my brain works. you have shown some amazing sincerity here and I respect and admire that a lot
I'm honestly not sure if I've ever interacted with you before, but having read the things you've posted over the last few days, I sincerely hope you stick around.
hugs
I know it can't really make up for all that's happened to you, but if it makes you feel even a little bit better, absolutely nobody in the mod staff (that I saw) was on TC69's side after finding out she was responsible for all this. A lot of us (myself included) were openly glad to see her go, and there are no plans to invite her back.
Why'd she ever get let back in in the first place? As a user I don't have a problem, but why was she given effectively top control after literally not being a member of this community for years?
I have no clue.
Wait, did she push for this before she "came back" or something? I thought she just arrived in the middle and made it all worse, not that she was the one who had pushed for it all in the first place.
hey you rock luv u <3
I sincerely do hope you stay on the site as we pick up the pieces and work to make a better, less frightening, and more welcoming space for all of our users.
I want to apologize for my lack of vigilance over the past few days. I was on a mental health break from the site due to some events in my personal life, and I feel horrible that I wasn't there to help protect and reassure you and users like you who were shocked and upset by what was going on, especially given the perception most people had at the time.
I'm sorry.
Logging back in from my break — hell of a time to return — just to to tell you this is very felt. I see your posts in the disability community mega. I never liked the "its just online, u can log off" rhetoric because, yeah, you sure can, and I do, but niche forums like this are (usually) more than some meaningless input-output feedback loop and whether we like it or not this is a space of human beings with lives and names we can recognize and that is called socializing, wow! I similarly do not have many means to "touch grass" because the grass touchers keep making the air toxic and doing nothing about it while telling me I'm the fucked up one. Whenever people say this (call me uncharitable, idgaf) I assume they haven't thought about COVID at all since '21 just like everybody else in the backwards goddamn world we live in now and that tells me all I need to know about who I ought to listen to. This old post I made sums up the "just organize" mentality, a thing I have done & attempted much more and for far longer than most here have even been "leftist":
So, like, yeah, it is just a website. But the real world has fucking abandoned me, and us, and at least I can say Hexbear was a spot where I didn't have to listen to anyone talking about COVID who would also pearl clutch about presinald trunt, or any number of other inane liberal bugbears, if they talk about it at all. It's at the very least a sanity check in times that are simply incomprehensible.
thank you for sharing this. for many people beging forced to log off and shouted down to go touch grass basically means 'socially isolate yourself for a time away from your core socialisation'. I get extreme bouts of anxiety at times that make going outside hard; I am lucky enough to have people in my life who can deal with my anxiety and help me, but before them? being told to 'log off and touch grass' just meant sit in your room alone for me
Irony poisoning has been exposed as what it always has been: a tool of reactionary losers and wreckers
GOOD post!
ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US! NEURODIVERGENT SUPREMACY ANY DAY NOW BABYYYY
AUTISTS ARE GREAT COMMUNICATORS! I'VE NEVER MET AN AUTIST WHO WOULD SAY SOME SHIT LIKE "OH WOW IS IT JUST ME OR IS IT COLD IN HERE?" AND THEN EXPECT ME TO REALISE THAT MEANT "WOULD YOU PLEASE CLOSE THE WINDOW?"
edit - this became a bit of a vent for me too. I'm happy to see where things are going now. I am unhappy with how things have been going. I am optimistic for the new update coming in some hours. Enter at your own risk.
Thank you for sharing your experience, you're perfectly explaining what my issue with moderation has been for a long time. The hostile "My way or the highway" attitude, the arbitrary stuff, the way we act towards each other when we disagree and that behaviour being encouraged by some mods, the way we talk about each other and issues in vague terms, it all makes this place unwelcoming for ND people. I know that's not the point of your post, but it exemplifies this point wonderfully anyway.
Thank you for putting all of this into words much better and much more eloquent than I could ever hope to do. I am so happy you are a part of this community. I remember how it was last time TC69 was around. I felt so stressed. This site was not a chill space to be in. You could get banned for anything, and so many people pretended it was just a joke or something. I felt like I had to walk on eggshells. I tried to push for making this space more inclusive to ND people precisely because I saw how uncomfortable it was. Especially with the irony poisoning. It was infuriating to see people talk about making this a "safe space" for queer users and then making JOKES about issues raised wrt to ND users.
I was positive towards TC69 upon her return, because I reread some old threads and saw that, yes, there was an issue with transphobes. I hoped she had mellowed out a bit since then, but clearly not. You know what issue we've always had? People being ableist and oblivious to it. Lots of users here do things that are ableist and they don't even think about it. Talking down to people, tonepolice, say people are throwing tantrums, downplay others complaints and REFUSE TO ARGUE IN GOOD FAITH WITH COMRADES.
Acting like a shithead or BANNING PEOPLE FOR ASKING QUESTIONS does not make this a welcoming safe site with a non-toxic culture. What got me banned was not being overly hostile. What got me banned was stating that I am tired of the vagueposting about chauvinism that has been going on for well over a year now, especially when those vagueposters are bigoted as fuck themselves. Every time we learn anything about this site, they use it as an excuse to push for kicking out more people that don't fit into their shitty little group. "Oh there's not a lot of cis women on site? Well that's because we have a culture of cisnormativity and misogyny" - The site is overwhelmingly queer and trans. Maybe it's got something to do with all of us, or us queer people, maybe, just maybe, it's not some inherent trait of the 10 straight white guys we've got on site. I know I don't show this place to people for reasons that do not at all have anything to do with "male chauvinism." I don't show it because of *the unhinged shit some of you weirdos post. We've had several unironic calls for genocide. We've had so much hornyposting - and you know who does it? Not the cishet guys. We used to have someone who posted furry porn every day ffs! And it was celebrated! By you!
I am really happy to see where things are heading, but like you @dustbunnies@hexbear.net I too feel incredibly unsure about the moderation team, because I know it wasn't just one or two people being shitty. It was a clique, a little fan-club. Those of you still around, do some self-crit. If you truly want to remove toxicity, do some self crit. If you don't give a shit and you just want your own place to hang out, then fuck off and make a discord, why are you even here?
We bring up the "rock stacking" thread as a fun little joke. That thing was triggering af for me for a good while. You know why? I saw some kindhearted people put genuine effort into calmly and kindly explaining something, only to get yelled at, and then after the fact we treat it like "oh yeah everbody was overreacting." No they weren't. It's actually a pretty adequeate reaction to get pissed when people act shitty towards you. You know what's not an adequate reaction though? Acting like a chanlord troll because you've been told you shouldn't stack rocks. The discourse after the fact soured me so much towards the site. Yeah it's ridiculous, but actually it's not, because the reaction of so many users told me so much about them. Not the ones who got told about the events after the fact, I don't blame any of you, but the people who were acting shitty and then tried to play it off as just "everybody being a bit miffed" or whatever. Do self-crit. It's the exact same situation with this conflict we're in now.
I became pissed, not because people disagreed with me about something minor, but because people in what I thought was a cozy fun good-vibes online community, turned into the worst nitpicky debatebro dickhead types the second things didn't go their way.
Also to do with regards to justice, doing all the bans (as a bit or whatever the story was), while the user(s) that were harrassing others were still unbanned at the time left a real sour taste in my mouth. The people/victims who were getting harrassed were getting banned, while the perpetrator(s) of the harrassment were getting away with it (at the time). I'm just glad that it's been addressed, the victims of the harrassment unbanned, and the preparators chased off of the website.
Also when I said it going to blow over a couple of days ago, I really thought that, I did not see the doubling and tripling down, along with the harrassment campaign with the alt accounts, and insensitive moderation, happening again. I honestly thought this website was past that, that such was a thing of the past.
It was pretty shocking to see, I think a LOT of us older members thought it was petering out 2 days ago
Just wanted to let you know I read this whole thing and I appreciate you taking the risk to make yourself vulnerable to say something you needed to say. Yeah, in a perfect world, nobody would need this site, and it's an indictment of our society that it's some people's only lifeline, but there's a big gap between "is" and "ought."
Says a lot about our society that this is considered a disability trait.
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