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.
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?
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Why were we banned in the first place?
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.)
the paragraph after that
I know why Alaskaball was banned, I don’t know why I was banned. A few of us were banned with modlog messages like “Legendary Random Generated Tempban - Unlucky, you rolled 7 Days, sorry.” even though we didn’t reply to the TC69 comment.
ohh I understood it as Alaskaball was banning people as a bit, shows me for reading stuff before coffee. Sorry!
TransComrade69 gave several temp bans out in the previous thread to users she felt were retreading the same points or leading the discussion in a bad direction to the point that it was devolving into conspiracy theories. (Paraphrased slightly from her explanation for formatting)
Several other users asked to be banned elsewhere in the thread.
It was a group decision, but one she agreed with. She said she feels bad for the bans, and I believe her.
Can we keep this one civil (@Civility@hexbear.net) please folks
The other threads were kept civil though. Mostly anyway, aside from the wrecker who kept making alts to harass people. That wrecker is a mod btw.
That wrecker is a mod btw.
I’ve seen this thrown out a few times but is there any real evidence to it other than a similar style?
Well here’s what I’ll say. A very confrontational and aggressive mod not known for letting arguments go waded into the first struggle session in a vitriolic way, overstepped the line, and got some of their comments removed. They then immediately logged off, coinciding with the beginning of the creation of the spam alts, and have not shown themselves here for multiple days of struggle sessions despite myself and other users openly accusing them of being the one responsible for the creation of the spam alts.
You crunch those numbers and get back to me.
We don’t believe that wrecker was a mod. Someone’s name was floated out there the other day, but we were able to confirm that it was not that person.
How did you confirm it? Did the mod in question just pinky promise that no it wasn’t them doing the alts? And completely aside from that, can you also confirm that the mod in question is not the same person as one who was banned multiple times from hexbear in the past for being a wrecker and unable to stop harassing vegans in particular?
I would be very glad to know it if you were in fact able to confirm that neither of these things are true. But given what I’ve seen and what I personally know, it would have to be seriously convincing evidence.
I was watching and read the other 3 threads on this and I think assigning blame to just one or even a few people for this entire shitshow is a bit of a stretch.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there is plenty of blame to be assigned broadly to a lot of mods and admins. But on this one specific issue of this person who kept making alts to harass users who were critical of the changes, that was very very likely to be the work of a single mod.
toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks
Behavior such as?
It’s, “the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior.” So, I’d like to know, too. Am I toxic? Am I being a piece of shit? What have I done wrong?!? I am autistic. Social norms are a fucking mystery to me.
One of our big points of pride as an instance is that we don’t have downvotes, because it fosters discussion. Where’s the discussion? It’s all happening behind closed doors, and nobody has been called out in public. Am I the baddie? Who are the toxic [he/him]'s? This is a tiny community—can we address that on an individual basis?
The thing that gets me is that the admins keep saying to check the modlogs for examples which makes absolutely no sense to me because those are things that are already being removed.
I think it will take time to gather examples and identify who might need to self-crit or take a ban.
More importantly, though, we all need to be receptive to criticism without getting defensive. That is part of having a healthy culture on this site, where queer, POC, and femme users feel comfortable voicing criticisms when they see problematic behavior that those outside their group(s) may be blind to. All of us grew up in reactionary cultures. That doesn’t vanish the moment we join a communist website. Building a better culture here is an ongoing process that will continue long after this struggle session ends. We need to know how to listen to each other and hold slow, patient, thoughtful dialog.
I think it will take time to gather examples and identify who might need to self-crit or take a ban.
Then they should have done that before making blanket statements and changing one of the basic functions of the site based on that supposed information, and they shouldn’t have lied about it by giving other reasons at the start.
we all need to be receptive to criticism without getting defensive.
That is a very important quality and ability for any leftist to have, yes. But the criticism needs to be directed at the people it applies to and it needs to be specific as to where they are going wrong. Rather than blanket statements about everyone who likes to dunk and saying only that they’re misogynistic debate bros without any examples. Again, all of that needed to be in place first if it is even valid reasoning and not just an excuse to just do what they want to do.
We need to know how to listen to each other and hold slow, patient, thoughtful dialog.
Which is what most users have been asking for and what most mods and admins have been refusing to do.
So, I’d like to know, too. Am I toxic? Am I being a piece of shit?
On occasion yes. It’s like 4AM and I have been drinking heavily this weekend and busy waiting for someone to fight me at the new dragonball game but I have most definitely seen some shitty comments from you.
I think moving forward it could be really helpful for there to be one-on-one conversations with people who fuck up, would be very useful for us ND folks for sure. And then maybe a self crit post after private discussion if warranted? Idk that might be way too much emotional labor for mods/admins but could be really good for the culture and good for the people who are saying problematic shit without realizing it
Sending this to you bc the end of your post felt like it’s calling for something like that
