One of the easiest ways to strengthen a community against attacks is to shine a spotlight on the behaviors shown by people attempting to sabotage it. This is done by labor organizers in real life to strengthen a group of workers against union busting, for instance.
The term often used for this is “inoculation”. Similar to being vaccinated once you are aware of an attacker, the effectiveness of their behavior decreases.
So Hexbear comrades, what patterns have you noticed in wreckers, trolls, and feds? Comment in the thread and I’ll update this post to include your feedback.
Terminology
Troll
:troll:
Standard internet bog person. Not particularly clever or inventive. 4chan-tier. Nothing in their brain but slurs.
Wrecker
:silver-legion:
Typically fixated on the site, repeat and/or sustained activity. (Eg Pumpkin Spice Flintstone guy). Might be a reference to an old USSR term for saboteurs in the party?
Fed
:fedposting:
Rare (?). Tries to encourage illegal behavior. Bad at it. Often doing it just to see who corrects them and in what ways.
Patterns I’ve noticed
General
:cissues:
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new account with slightly “off takes” that gradually becomes increasingly aggressive
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“just asking questions”
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“innocently” brings up incredibly specific past struggle sessions
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tries to position obvious shitposts as sincerely held opinions that somehow reflect poorly on the site (eg “everyone loves hunter biden”)
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attempts to take other user’s sentences out of context and spin it into an argument
Wrecker Types
Fresh Accounts without History (FAWH)
:amogus:
These are accounts created in the last few weeks with little to no activity FAWHs indicate ban avoidance, shell propaganda accounts, and/or a desire to hide a pointed agenda. Identify and counter this by checking post histories.
Defrosted FAWHs
:corporate-art:
These accounts behave similarly to FAWHs but show a much older registration date combined with long periods of low activity, reflecting history editing or dormancy. They will occasionally only have comments at or around the time of struggle sessions. Identify and counter this behavior by checking post histories.
Drive-by Accounts
:stupidpol:
These accounts post bigoted or inflammatory comments in active threads then delete/edit their comments a day or two after the submission dies to obscure the pattern of their activity.
This is hard to spot unless you check back in with your suspected trolls or seek them out by reviewing. If you catch them in the act it’s hugely indicative of subversive intent.
Identify and negate this by monitoring suspected trolls for post deletion and reporting before they are deleted. Also quoting especially aggressive replies so they can’t edit it away.
I’ll update this based on other’s comments. Viva la Hexbear!
:hexbear-retro:
7 day old account acting needlessly aggressive in response to a completely inoffensive post
yeah thanks for the example, buddy
Considering how readily the website bans people even with long histories, taking no intermediate steps between “silently removing comments hours later” and “banned”, it’s no wonder you get people with new-ish accounts and negative opinions on the assumptions people make for the sake of community discipline.
You, and now I mean specifically you as an example, are creating a narrative in which everything can be dismissed with the same level of critical thought as “Russian bots” and “wumaos” and so on because of how readily you assume they’re a wrecker, implying they should be banned, which means that if they want to participate they need to make another account, and thus will be commenting from a new account. It’s a feedback loop.
I don’t think I’ll change your mind, I’m just thinking aloud because I only just now realized how that loop works. You can’t simultaneously be loosey-gooosey with bans and then implicitly penalize people for having new accounts if you want something more than a mechanism to enforce the specific ideologies of the moderators with no ability to discuss what might be worth changing.
how readily you assume they’re a wrecker, implying they should be banned
That’s really not it. I don’t care if the person I replied to is a hardcore Nazi who sleeps with a copy of Mein Kampf under their pillow and is currently posting on 8chan about how they owned the commies, or if said individual is the most commie communist who ever communized and will personally lead the global revolution in 2027. Their behavior is not useful to this forum and it should be ceased, one way or another. I would prefer that they simply fall in line with the vibe and stop being an asshole, but if they double, triple, quadruple down on it and get banned I won’t lose any sleep over it either.
The most important thing to keep in mind when you’re dealing with a project like this one is that the identity of the individuals in question is completely irrelevant. It is not the person who is the problem, it is their behavior. We’re going to have trolls lurking one way or another, but preventing them from making trouble is what matters. If that means I tell a communist who’s being an asshole to stop being an asshole because they look :ursus-hexagonia: :amogus: then so be it
I would prefer that they simply fall in line with the vibe and stop being an asshole, but if they double, triple, quadruple down on it and get banned I won’t lose any sleep over it either.
:this: there’s a certain type of debate bro who would learn a lot from going to local shows and getting thrown out of them for being shitty
It is not the person who is the problem, it is their behavior.
This is important. Trying to judge motivations is a losing game that is way too exploitable because of how meta people can make it. This conversation is a decent example, actually. Lenin had provocateurs in his inner circle and was able to make progress, not because the provocateurs were necessarily bad at their jobs, but because the party had falsifiable standards for actions.
And to be fair, I think site leadership and membership alike could put more effort into establishing those falsifiable standards. We have the TOS and the CoC, but those aren’t rules which are generally integrated into the culture of the site. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but have a feeling that we could use some major help from a statistics nerd with a background in social sciences willing to guide experimental and incremental reforms.
Here is what I was originally going to say in response:
My claim is that your parameters of suspicion are so bad that it may as well be engineered to be so. Using account age as evidence is not a useful metric when banning is done readily –
And then I thought about your comment for an extra two seconds and realized “Oh wait, they do know what they are saying.” You actually want the website to be ideologically static and for challenges to be shut down. I don’t know what to tell you except to offer this: I don’t have the audacity to assume that I’m correct about everything, and I won’t ever be corrected where I am wrong if I create a space where the overriding directive is to “fall in line”. Do you believe that such a space can correct your errors? Or do you assume that you’re already right about everything? Or do you just not care? I’m struggling to find an answer beyond those three options.
Considering how readily the website bans people even with long histories, taking no intermediate steps between “silently removing comments hours later” and “banned”, it’s no wonder you get people with new-ish accounts and negative opinions on the assumptions people make for the sake of community discipline.
Lol what are you talking about? Just thinking of the two long time users that were banned most recently, they had a very long history (well over a year) of saying either misogynistic or overly aggressive things without being banned. That really doesn’t match up to the experiences you’re describing here. I think most people knew the most recent dude was likely to pop off if you so much as suggested he do something differently
taking no intermediate steps between “silently removing comments hours later” and “banned”, it’s no
bruh there is literally a public mod log and you could have appealed why are you writing essays
Because the ban isn’t the point. The mods kindly unbanned me so I could delete my account and I did (I think, it took a couple tries for some reason)
