Hexbear’s new head of operations just dropped, and their way of dealing with the fallout of their last struggle session is to hand bans out like candy to their concerned and disillusioned users while throwing out “epic” quips like insecure teenagers along the way coupled with their communication (and seemingly contempt) towards their own userbase which isn’t helping their allegations at all and the revelations that were learned about Hexbear’s moderators and admins from their most recent struggle session.
The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.
Late-stage irony poisoning
In addition to the first ban wave which was partially a bit or something cuz people requested to be banned so TC69 used a random number generator but also entries in the modlog that have the RNG stuff weren’t people who requested it??, some of our admins are now banning their alts as a bit to start drama, other obvious alts are coming out to call it out and continue more drama, there’s more but… you get the idea :/
Idk, this all started in an attempt to make our site more serious by replacing the_{dunk,dredge}_tank with higher effort alternatives and now that that didn’t go through it’s all a joke now
Honestly I may log off for a while too, is not rly that funny to me :/ People on this site have literally fed me and my friend, kept us out of overdraft status on bank accts, I learned so much from reading stuff here or books I learned about from here, people have been housed cuz of this site, someone nearby legit offered to take care of one of my irl friend’s pets when he was homeless for a bit, I met new friends here that I talk to every day. It’s not a political party but it’s not just a giant shitpost either, so idk where this is going :/
I’m sure this looks even worse from the outside , but it’s okay, site has survived worse
Like FuckyWucky mentioned, there is a lot of talking going on behind the scenes and no one outside rly knows what is going on sooooo… we see what happens I guess
this all started in an attempt to make our site more serious
…why? Lemmygrad was right there in the corner.
Hexbear always gave me a party vibe, Lemmygrad - a library.
the admins seem to have wanted HB to be more serious for a long time now, well before federation.
LG is also not a left unity space the way HB is. it would only be a suitable fit for some (admittedly likely most) of our users.
the admins seem to have wanted HB to be more serious for a long time now, well before federation.
They should lead by example.
the admins seem to have wanted HB to be more serious for a long time now, well before federation.
They must fucking hate me then lmao.
Well they can deal with the silly, because I’m not about to be less silly and if my silly comrades go then I go too.
Hexbears seem averse to posting here. When cheap dunking posts were banned, they created another tank comm instead of posting to SRS or SUS. Even now that the tanks are shut, there haven’t been any bears that’ve posted to lemmygrad’s equivalent comms.
Hexbear was around for a couple years before federation was a thing so a lot of people only ever post there.
Also, and I say this as a frequent Hexbear poster, the average Hexbear user has read zero theory and just wants somewhere lefty to shitpost. There is not a ton of overlap between them and people that use Lemmygrad/Leftypol/etc
I’m kind of worried I’d be intruding if I posted on grad. You guys are the cool kids and I’m just a clown.
Idk tbh, regardless I feel like they don’t have to be contradictory
I come to this site for the shitposts and the genuine discussion and political education resources
I should also mention the proposal post later also had statements from mods who said they proposed the idea cuz they thought “dunk” culture has “cishet white vibes”, which… idk, is maybe fair, Hexbear is rly white sometimes and I would hate for people to be put off by that (good reason to be put off ofc). It wasn’t rly elaborated upon though
hehehe
Tbh I just ate some decent food (after not rly eating anything for a few days cuz of external factors™ in my kinda bad life-situation rn), pet a cat, read your reply in the struggle sesh megathread, feeling less bad about the whole thing
Really appreciate you genuinely just clarifying what happened including what the rest of the admin team saw, I feel like most of this is just rly bad communication primarily from admins/mods but also the rest of the users (sucked seeing Carcosa’s decision get completely torn apart so badly that they tried to resign before the userbase rejected that lol, I hope they not too about it especially cuz how much they do for our site regardless of this one thing). It’s still been a total mess but it’s nothing irreconcilable or unfixable
10/10 perfect bad-good-good-bad bit
Long live the cabal :3
Honestly almost all of the response by leadership vs users is temp bans, so I’m thinking actual damages aren’t even that bad? But the blood is up so maybe cooling down while whatever behind the scenes stuff gets figured out might be good.
Was a long time HB member since the subreddit days. Autistic, black, nb, so none of the accusations of cishet white male vibes applied to me - that was annoying. The flippant dismissal and joking around with this entirely irony poisoned energy with mods still doing bits and lying about shit was straight up aggravating. Ate the perma because like a few people there, I don’t think I could trust the mods/admins after that. It’s not a high stakes thing for me but that means it’s also low enough stakes that I really don’t want to deal with that attitude any more.
Yeah we probablydefinitely all need to relax lol, regardless there is def criticism to be made about this whole behind-the-scenes adminning thing that developed after our chaotic first year needing to… idk… have more democracy again? After this whole thing especially
I just saw a bunch of people get unbanned now so idk, hard to keep track of it all
I’m gonna go, like… make a meal and do and think about something other than niche web forum drama now lol
They reversed a few bans, but not mine. So apparently something I said was particularly objectionable. I’m not sure what though.
I figured it out: It’s people who were banned with the haha funny bit reason when it was pointed out they hadn’t actually requested a random ban and were clearly just banned out of spite.
This does seem a lot like the mods wanted to obfuscate the bans of people being critical
As someone with a 2 year old account, I have no fucking clue. What started out as misgivings over two comms being replaced has metastasized into whatever the fuck this is. It seems like there are contradictions that had existed since /r/chapotraphouse that were never fully resolved. I don’t know exactly what because I only occasionally lurked /r/chapotraphouse way back in the day. Mix in all these 2 month alts of people who claim to have been around since /r/chapotraphouse and it comes off as a bizarre mess. It really does feel like people with 5+ year old grudges beefing at this point.
Anyways, this is yet another case of the news mega being the best part of Hexbear.
Anyways, this is yet another case of the news mega being the best part of Hexbear.
Facts. I only really go on Hexbear for the news mega, I’d personally don’t want to lose it because a bunch of admins wanted to make Hexbear their own fiefdom.
EDIT: Even though I rarely go on the TheDunkTank if at all, I do hope they get their comm reinstated.
Realistically, if we somehow lose the news mega, we’ll just move to lemmygrad.
And the news mega actually tries to implement some form of democratic centralism:
It turns out people are less likely to get mad at major changes if they’re actually the one submitting and voting on those changes.
News communities from Hexbear are something that I should enjoy a lot. I don’t want to lose 'em
I feel the same. Ironically the mod’s attempts to make the site more “serious” is probably just going to do the opposite. I’ve spoken at length about this before, but you don’t get people to learn and discuss leftist theory by insisting it is always serious business and you aren’t allowed to joke around or acknowledge how fucked up our capitalist society is.
It’ll just chase people away, which is a shame, though that might be a “win” as far as the mods are concerned. There’s plenty of “serious” leftist groups out there with half a dozen members with their own very specific interpretation of theory with 0 fun allowed, but I can’t really think of anywhere else quite like Hexbear. I don’t want to see them become yet another insular “leftist” space that is actively hostile to people who don’t take themselves as seriously as the world’s most dedicated Internet Leftists.
I’m probably overreacting though, as others have said, this isn’t the first time mods on Hexbear have gone full reddit mod and won’t be the last.
Hard agree. The fact that its fun is what I’ve always liked best about hexbear. It’s easy to find serious stuff. Its good to have a left space to laugh about it
I recently made a post asking why people joined us and like most of them said they stayed because of the shitpost vibes. Making us into a serious only space would be a very, very bad idea if we want to keep being Hexbear.
It seems they’re just trying to memory hole it now.
The newest statement claims everyone was unbanned, which isn’t true. The sockpuppet being used for the new post claims that it was all drama over the AlaskaBall misgendering and banning, which isn’t true. So here’s my extremely biased version of events(They banned me for opposing their bullshit, thus creating this bias.)
The mods wanted to rename the dunk tank, due to the racist origins, but due to federation reasons renaming communities doesn’t work properly, so they locked it and the dredge tank entirely and replaced them with poorly defined pseudo-replacements.
People question this choice and are given a mod statement that misgenders most of the website at the same time, and contains a self-harm reference without a CW.
People question this post and the admin that acted as the mouthpiece steps down. The thread is locked and a new one is made.
Basically no one wanted that and most people want the admin back. The admin comes back.
AlaskaBall bans themself from a new alt, and then when questioned on it, misgenders themself. This was the misunderstanding element of this.
Stuff blows up massively now, since an admin seems to have done something very transphobic and uncool.
Another thread is made, where dissenting voices are banned for three days. One of these bans is reversed and no longer shows in the mod log.
TC69 does a “joke” and posts offering random bans to replies, she then bans people who don’t reply to that post with the same message.
This is around when this thread is made.
Then another thread, using a brand new admin alt, claims that the bans have been reversed (they haven’t)
https://hexbear.net/u/DengistDonnieDarko
https://hexbear.net/u/TerribleHands
And the rest (me) remain banned. Only four of the banned users are actually unbanned.
People have already pointed out that the bans haven’t actually been removed.
Overall, the Hexbear admin team shoved a stick into their own bike wheel and are blaming he/hims, despite the obvious fact that can be seen by checking the pronouns of those linked users (and me).
edit: I’m unbanned now
I’m barely able to parse this message because it sounds fucking ridiculous. What the fuck is going on
I am once again asking a bunch of fringe online leftists to stop being so delulu as to think themselves as the new international vanguard ffs
This too. The serious platform shit is not happening. You scroll down to the bottom of Hexbear, click a link and you get a picture of a pig pooping on it’s own balls.
The entire space is literally synonymous with that. The Pig Poop Balls Vanguard isn’t gonna be a thing.
