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.
Hello users of hexbear, I have gone back and tried to unban everyone from the past couple days related to this struggle session.
I was offline most of yesterday so I missed what happened.
From the bottom of my heart I am deeply apologetic to everyone who was hurt by the statements and actions of the past few days. I know it will be a long and tough road to regaining back the trust of the userbase.
We are going to let this post sit for a couple of days and then move towards rebuilding. I’m back today and am happy to answer questions.
So I know alot of people are upset at TC69 for various reasons. I wasn’t here when she initially was a part of the community, but I had only heard positive things before this shitshow.
Did she only step down from admin, or did she delete her account? I think it would be a shame if she left entirely due to some pointless struggle session.
I think stepping down was the correct decision, she probably should have reacclimated to the new hexbear environment before being put in that position to begin with, it’s a heavy burden to bear. I still want her to feel welcome here though. I love my trans comrades!
Jfc did we drive her away AGAIN!? I am once again insisting nobody do anything about anything while I am asleep/busy.
Seriously thinking of becoming a mod just to prevent this petty bullshit from tanking the site again
“Drive her away” is certainly one way you can describe the reaction to her conflict resolution skills
edit: made it less mean
old text for if you wanna call me out for it
“Drive her away” is certainly one way you can describe being mad that she banned people for disagreeing with her and asking questions like “in 15 pages of the modlog there’s only 2 removals for ‘misogyny’. Even if there were more, why would it be an issue if it’s in the modlog? That’s where banned posters go.”
Please bear with me if I fail keep up with questions and comments. It’s quite late here, but I’ll do my best to address things and will link and pin Q&A’s here
“Why were we banned in the first place?” -NewAcctWhoDis
“Just to clarify, most of this is just around @Alaskaball@hexbear.net being banned and that was something they did to themselves?” - radio_free_asgarthr
Several questions and comments on site culture, not forgetting about chauvinism issues, and more - cowbee
Why did you quote @radio_free_asgarthr@hexbear.net asking a question about the Alaskaball thing? The answer to his question is actually “No, most of this is about completely different things, Alaskaball just did a poorly timed bit with some confusion on gendered terms, but that was resolved and is just a tiny blip in this whole debacle which has many facets involving admins and mods complete disregard for the users of this site, which in turn has many of those users very upset.”
I am trying to understand, I guess the issues with the admins and mods goes deeper than Alaskaball, but I guess I don’t know what is happening other than mods maybe being a little ban happy?
One of the justifications for the removal was that the dunk culture on the site is inherently ‘white cishet bro’-ish. I’m paraphrasing, but this comment goes a little deeper.
Literally no one is upset about the Alaskaball thing and it was only for like 20 total minutes that anyone was before the matter was cleared up. Pretending it has anything to do with the core of the struggle session is just yet another in the seemingly endless series of shameless admin lies.
This is what I wrote about zoomerists fake selfcrit post before I hit post and realized it had been cowardly deleted by creator
I read your whole post and came to the conclusion that you are a privileged liberal with extreme amounts of projection.
This is in the wrong comm. This isn’t selfcrit, this is dredge material.
First you project your privilege onto all of us, then you do copious amounts of concern trolling and strawmanning.
You think the workers in the imperial core are redeemable, that’s where your liberal brainworms are coming from. Almost every worker in the imperial core earns more money than the ones outside it. They have a material reason to support imperialism. They may be your comrades but that’s because you are an imperialist liberal.
Then you suddenly want to decide how the comms you hate are named and run. Are you our emperor? Certainly seems like it, with how you talk over all the marginalized comrades who were deeply hurt by tc69 because of your liberal “protect the marginalized (but don’t listen to what they actually want)” shit.
I’d like to add that a thing creeping into a lot of these discussions is the survey. the survey is not a representitive of all users, it is a self selecting group of people who took one to give us a sample of the userbase that we have extrapolated. the survey itself says around 600 people responded. a look at the side bar will show you the number of users a day/week/month regularly exceeds this. people in that thread of the survey results were debating about how many trans men and cis women were even on here because the data does not tell them this, so they invented readings from it.
furthermore, the survey does not say; are the 'he/him’s cis, are the ‘he/hims’ white, are the ‘he/hims’ straight. you do not know who is behind the prounoun tag and username, do not invent a bogeyman out of users based on a survey. it is not empirical evidence. cis het jacketing he/hims is not useful, and can do a lot to hurt people in ways you do not know. I’ve seen this shit hurt trans men friends of mine so many times
I don’t like the implication that some of the admins apparently check every time you say something that annoys them what your pronouns are and tick a running tally until their grudge gets big enough to do something unpopular. Is this the sort of thing people brought up as concerns when they didn’t want pronouns to be mandatory? back then it was [none/use name]s who “weren’t beating the allegations”. I really don’t like puppygirl stuff. Do you think it would be productive to take that as an excuse to have a discussion about whether we blame [she/her]s or the [she/they]s as the source of more inappropriate kink comments?
