ChicagoCommunist [none/use name]

Yeah that's actually a good idea, you don't deserve their or anyone's labor

You aren't wrong for having that opinion and your choice of words wasn't great but you shouldn't have gotten the childish response you did. The fact that your supposed comrades couldn't extend a tiny bit of good faith to try and understand your perspective (which shouldn't even sound extreme for anyone who calls themselves a Marxist) is disappointing. And the number of people who still refuse to engage with your meaning and intent illustrates that you were 100% right about the culture problem relating to cringe content.

Hexbear needs a cultural revolution. We don't deserve your labor.

Jesus Christ saying an action gives "cishet white man vibes" is not calling any performer of said action a cishet white man, this is very basic reading comprehension.

It's a poor choice of words but it shouldn't be a difficult concept for supposed Marxists to understand that anyone can contribute to white supremacy, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. Cringe content is something we inherited from the predominantly cishet white male site we broke off from, so making that connection isn't a stretch at all.

Expecting your unpaid servants to grovel for the sin of voicing an opinion on how their labor is coordinated is frankly disgusting.

None of the mods were shitty, they just have opinions about the trajectory of the site they maintain and didn't communicate them effectively. Then a bunch of people read bad faith into the messaging and it spiraled from there.

A lot of the userbase enjoys react/cringe content, a lot of the moderation team doesn't, and that's been a pressure point for a long time.

We don't deserve all the work you do, but I do appreciate it. The news mega is one of the only consistently useful and educational places on hexbear.

Your labor gives you the right to have influence over the culture of the site. It also should warrant a higher degree of good-faith interpretation from the community, and I'm incredibly disappointed with the parts of the userbase that leapt to assume the worst rather than trying to understand intentions. Especially the ones that seemingly expect silent, neutral, invisible moderation from the team of volunteers-- wouldn't want the opinions of workers to interrupt the flow of entertainment!

I know this has been a learning experience for everyone, but I truly hope the lesson is about wording and methodology, rather than the fact that you had an opinion on the purpose and trajectory of the site you help maintain. It's pretty wild how many self-identified Marxists seem to put the wants of the consumers above those of the workers.

Interesting

TW: intrusive thoughts

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Trying to do anything with intrusive thoughts

Middle of a conversation

Let's think about the most horrible thing I could say and possible repercussions, instead of the topic at hand.

Having sex

It would be really awkward if I got fixated on an image of my grandpa and literally couldn't get him out of my mind, hope that doesn't happen. Better focus really hard on not thinking about that or a traumatic thing from my past or the terrible things happening around the world or-- shit I'm not enjoying this anymore.

Putting silverware away

Definitely don't want to wedge one of these between my teeth and pry it around. Gotta be careful not to skoop out my eyeballs too. Fuck I'm gonna finish later

Driving anywhere

The difference between me surviving this drive and not is a very slight angle change with my hands on the wheel. Literally turn the wheel a quarter of an inch and I die. Gotta grip it extra hard to make sure I don't decide to do that.

Fuck

Starting to think weeks where decades happen is just talking about getting old.

Amazing comment

The class distinction, if you want to call the social stratification of a niche website that, is between the users/mods/fake admins who can't even remote into the servers and the real admins who can take down the website with a single terminal command.

Yes exactly, there is no meaningful class distinction between the users and mods/admins. The only material distinction is people with/without backend access (I'll call them developers).

For that to be relevant, though, there'd have to be an example of the developers exerting undue influence against the wishes of the broad user/mod/admin group. Not just admins/mods deciding the manner in which they organize and focus their own labor (like the purpose and structure of the comms they moderate).

In any case, the idea of doing a power analysis of a niche website seems ridiculous to me, since most of the material interests and incentives of this tiny microcosm are going to be dominated by whatever the participating individuals experience in the real world.

The two tendencies I've mentioned are the superiority complex of reaction culture that we inherited from Reddit, and the petty bourgeois dismissal of workers, particularly service workers. The latter is the dominant ideology in the US so I'm not surprised it persists here. We've all internalized it to some degree.

In any case, both tendencies, in fact nearly all interactions here, are going to be dominated by external factors and interests. There's no "hexbear working class" and "hexbear owning class" in any meaningful sense of the words. The people putting labor into the site naturally get more sway in how the site functions, and as a communist I couple this natural flow with an ideological stance that they should get more sway since they are performing the labor.

Buncha pigs gonna spontaneously overdose reading the word "fentanyl" in the title

Business insider doing accidental praxis.

Yeah that's a perfectly valid critique. There's an important concept behind the signifier, but there are better signifiers that can be used to communicate it.

And I'm saying that that's not how material analysis works, that you can't just isolate the site into a closed system and then project external class categories onto it. Regardless, that's tangential to the point at hand, which is that there's not a strict distinction between user and moderation in terms of power. The sole differentiating factor is in terms of buy-in and investment. At any point anyone can choose to volunteer and put labor into moderating the site. Thus the degree to which any distinction exists, when the opinions of the users and the workers diverge, the power should be in the hands of the workers (who also happen to be users themselves by the way).

In any case, the analysis of power you've presented (or my interpretation of it, to be fair) is sorely lacking if it's just a matter of who has the power to do what. Why do they have the power? What gives them that power and keeps others from having it? The reason there's no class distinction is that there is no meaningful barrier to entry other than willingness to volunteer and participate.

And saying certain behavior expresses cis white energy says nothing about whoever might be participating in that behavior. I won't say it's the best choice of words, but from a purely semantic perspective, anyone and everyone can participate in "white" or "cis" or "whatever" behavior, that's part of how systems perpetuate themselves. It's still very obvious that we have our roots in reddit, which is a largely cishet white site, and because of that there's still vestigial cishet white characteristics that persist in our culture.

And thanks to the top-down efforts of mods and admins over the years, we've been able to excise a large majority of them to get to the culture we have now. Trans acceptance on hexbear was not something that evolved naturally, it happened because TC69 and others utilized the power of their position to exert influence over the system that their labor was creating.

Sure, but I'd hope the amount of work they've put in has earned them some degree of good-faith interpretation. It's difficult to put concepts into words, especially in the heat of the moment, so sometimes using a "vibe" as a shorthand signifier has to do.

Not to mention this debate has been ongoing for months or years, in various forms, so every statement has a depth of potential implications and contexts that aren't gonna be obvious to everyone.

"Cishet white guy behavior" is perfectly understandable to me as shorthand for the in-group/out-group superiority/inferiority complex that's plagued this site since the beginning, but I've been here continuously from the beginning. It's a poor signifier for users who haven't been here the whole time (whether new users or old users that left for a while) or even people with a different perspective/experience of the site.

"Betraying a petty bourgeois entitlement" doesn't mean the userbase is literally petty bourgeois within the closed system of this site. It means the ideology being expressed is petty bourgeois. Working class people can and do internalize bourgeois ideology, just as bourgeois people can radicalize and become class traitors.

Why might some of the userbase express petty bourgeois tendencies? Maybe it's vestigial from reddit. Maybe it's a problem of how social media is organized in general. Maybe it's from living within the imperial core / anglosphere (which, unlike the organization of whatever social media site or party, is an actual material class distinction).

Whatever power dynamics might be happening on this site are far downstream of real-world relations. You can't isolate hexbear from the real world to do a "class analysis" about the mods versus userbase.

You're simultaneously using analogy to disagree with me, while also saying we shouldn't use analogy. In any case, "ownership" of this site and the tools of management aren't an exclusive material power, they're tools that anyone who requests and meets a basic standard can gain access to. Thus it's much closer to a party structure than some abstract notion of medieval European classes.

I also disagree both that users don't have any power over the platform, and that that's the reason hexbear doesn't work as an organizing platform. The former is laughably false-- in theory, because the culture is formed through participation, and in practice, because the mod/admin team listens to user feedback to a fault and nearly anyone can join the mod/admin team.

I have opinions on the latter (Hexbear's utility as an organizing platform) but it's much less straightforward. Regardless, it's not a problem of the "hexbear masses being deprived of their rightful power over the platform by the gatekeeping mods".

The fact that people keep referring to them as janitors is incredibly revealing. It betrays a petty bourgeois entitlement and expectation of entertainment, unperturbed by the voices and existence of the workers providing it. Not to mention the devaluation and marginalization of service work. It obfuscates the amount of curation and moderation required to maintain a site's culture.

I'm struggling to see what you did wrong tbh, other than maybe not wording things absolutely perfectly (and the fact that you get butchered for this kind of proves the problem of the toxic dunking culture. Like you'd think the months of unpaid labor would earn you more goodwill).

The hexbear userbase isn't the party. They're the consumer of a product produced and maintained by the labor of the mod/admin team. There should be input from the users, but democratic power should be in the hands of the workers, not the consumers. The low barrier of entry for becoming a mod supports this. If you want a political voice, become politically active.

I'm not sure how everything works behind the scenes, but I remember there used to be a hexbear admin team account to prevent volunteers from getting harassed and doxxed. It also made it clearer when something was a result of internal discussion versus the opinion of a single mod/admin.

It's poorly worded but the dunk culture that we inherited from Reddit is a close relative to the "SJW compilation" shit. If you think the only problem with that is the people and ideas it targets, then Hexbear's dunk culture isn't a problem.

I personally think the underlying mechanism of dunk culture, though, is fostering a superiority complex out of in-group out-group dynamics, which is directly harmful to us as leftists. The whole "bullying works" nonsense is reddit shit that does not translate to the real social groups we all have to interact with. The kind of people we see posted in the dunk tank are often gonna be similar to the kind of people we have to agitate and educate in real life. And walking into those interactions with an internalized in-group justifying our superiority just serves to isolate us more than anything.

There's always been a split between whether hexbear is primarily an organizing tool or merely a water cooler for leftish people to hang out. It has potential to work as both. But it's clear that a lot of the unpaid volunteers putting labor into the site would like to imagine their efforts are going somewhere, especially as contradictions heighten in the real world. So when they perceive that a part of the escapist aspect of hexbear is undermining its utility for organizing, it makes perfect sense that they would want to try and change that.

I'm not gonna read through 1500 comments to get an accurate vibe of the response, but I can't imagine it was entirely pleasant. And when it comes down to it I value the opinions of the unpaid workers significantly more than the opinions of the consumers.

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