Edit2: the ratio is amazing. I’m exhausted. This has quadrupled my hexbear time for the day and I will be limiting myself for a bit lol. I feel like we got somewhere in a couple of good threads thanks to Hellinkilla and ratboy. Good luck, comrades.
Edit: the rant wasn’t clear enough. In Previous struggles users have expressed frustrations with how mods/admin decisions are made. I would like to discuss how they are made and hear from them. Mods have also stated before that they wish we could be better, I’d like to hear how and know how they think this should be approached.
Rant/effort post coming:
What’s the follow up to the recent problems with how mods/admins have handled recent issues? Did I miss something? Can we get some explanations about how this site is structured and what roles we see for admins/mods generally?
history of struggle session, not necessary but gives context
We had a fairly large and fairly one-sided struggle session a couple weeks ago. Z_Poster was banned (and still is, as far as I know) and the emoji was added. Some users (thinking of @hellinkella, smong others) did some effort to really parse out where the pain points were and who was involved (largely Zionism inherent in some positions, Jewish exceptionalism). Only the emoji and banning occurred with no other promises/ideas from mods/admins.
There then followed a leak of mod logs where opinions were still very different than the userbase. I would encourage people not to open it or ask for it, please, and especially not to share it. But I think a significant amount of us did see messages that, regardless of context, gave an image of admins/mods that think the userbase hates them, disagreed with the userbase in significant ways, and which wants to steer us in a better direction. The mod chat was also absurdly active at the time, but there’s been little talk about what WAS discussed, only discussions about what was missed, where more context is needed, and things that were not done in a timely manner. This was not further discussed. (Personally I’m super appreciative of you all, doing work I don’t want to do on a website I enjoy thoroughly, and don’t hate any of you–including previous ones I’ve argued with, but would like to see some changes which will follow below and hopefully other comrades will add to it/change it for the better).
We had an EM/POC post which was tangential to that, but where there seemed to be large support for the userbase with regards to the ideological differences between mods/admins and the broader userbase. There was also a banning for which apologies followed quickly, but which indicates the structural failure more generally. There were of course other topics covered, which I won’t speak on here. I didn’t see any solutions proposed and accepted, from any of the topics relevant to this post. (Please correct me if I read this thread wrong, don’t want to speak for you, EM/POC comrades.)
Was there a follow up? Is that coming? Is the discussion behind the curtain of the mod chat? I understand you all have lives, so don’t spend all your time working on this, but some knowledge of how you’re working would be good. Otherwise it feels like purposeful pushing back of feedback/decisions so that we will forget the passionate feelings or give up. If that’s the goal, it’s a horrible strategy and should just be explicitly told. “3 months after a struggle session is the earliest we will make changes in processes” is better than nothing.
I would also recommend we have an open discussion about the direction of the site. It seems the mods/admins have indicated to have better ideas for what we can be (I remember this from the “dunk” discussions too), but have not made clear what their position in that is. Enforcers? A vanguard (with our input as leading determinant)? A different vanguard (against our input for but in our interests)? Theoreticians that have the ideas but want the users to take the lead? Knowing this would make clearer how to interact with you, and how to make our experiences better. Maybe we do need growth and improvement, but we haven’t been clear about how, and talking down is how most have experienced that. I already love this place, so when I’m frustrated I don’t think of leaving. But that’s not universal
Hi, I’m the dev for hexbear. I have an admin account, but i’m not an active admin and don’t ever act as admin in any capacity. But i do have access to some admin channels, mostly just as an observer and to provide tech support. Speaking in a personal capacity:
Lots of people in this thread (and in the struggle sessions) need to stop assuming the absolute worst of the admin/mod team. We’re all comrades and we’re all human. The admins I see do discuss every potential ban/purge action (with rare exception, like the one in empoc megathread last week). They all take it quite seriously, far more than I would personally if I were an admin. There were people in the emoji thread calling the admins/mods zionists. If I saw someone calling me a zionist over my opinion on an emoji I would just instantly ban you. As a life long forum-enjoyer, hexbear’s admin team is easily the most tempered team I’ve ever seen. They take wayyyyy more punishment than they need to.
The hexbear team works without pay, entirely as volunteers. It is a decent amount of work to be an admin/mod and it does take a mental toll. Especially when every action you take might generate a week-long struggle session.
Sometimes a user breaks a rule, sometimes its just bad vibes. Its not a science, its just making good judgements. Its fine to make a request of admin team to reconsider stuff; we make mistakes sometimes. But its extremely unnecessary to make accusations of abuse or reactionary thought towards the team. You can trust the current team to root out abusive actions on our own (as we already have at least once recently with a former admin)
Regarding calls for accountability, sorry, but this is just an online forum. There is the modlog that has all the admin/mod actions. I’ve seen multiple mods removed from position, as well as an admin. There is no reasonable way to be more accountable. Admins are responding to issues and make efforts to give clear reasoning in mod logs for any actions taken. @FALGSConaut@hexbear.net Sorry for picking you, but you’re the only one I remember being in every struggle session calling the admins as being irresponsible/corrupt/powerhungry without any evidence. What exactly do you imagine making things better? If you don’t believe the admins/mods are responding correctly, then guess what, its time to buy your own server, host lemmy, and spend hours a day on managing something you use to get for free.
Hexbear is just a forum; its not a political party. Being banned isn’t the end of the world and its not an act of violence. You can make a new account pretty much any time and get back to posting. Sorry for ranting, and again, this is just my personal opinion, but I hate seeing certain people show up in every thread throwing barbs at the admin team for every imagined slight.
Pretty tasteless comment without context. The discussion only happened and found significant support from users because these opinions suddenly went straight jumping from being on top of the fence to siding with Trump zionist admin.
Without this context, sure who fucking cares about an emoji right. But when your “opinion on an emoji” happens to side with the fascist Trump admin then the context is very different. Usualy this isn’t an issue because 'Murica freedom shit burning the flag free speech all that nonsense… except when it doesn’t and suddenly there could be real world consequences for burning a flag.
If you don’t care about this context it says more about yourself than you realize. Damn good thing you don’t care to be a moderator it seems.
Touch grass. The context is some people wanted an emoji. and if you didn’t want it, you were called a zionists by weirdos like you.
Oh shut the fuck up then, I am literaly telling you why it happened and your first response is to get defensive and calling names.
Stop with the self rightousness shit, take your contributions and shove it. If your “opinion” is siding with the Trump zionist admin you can indeed go fuck yourself.
not wanting emoji == supporting the genocide. that’s your argument. Also for the record, I did want the emoji, but I still saw the validity in the arguments against it. To call someone a zionist over it is a very ‘touch grass’ moment. If you believe the admin team is zionist then just leave? Why are you here?
My particular point was the fucking context.
Your comment = “haha who cares about an emoji, touch grass”
My comment =“Actualy, it wasn’t just an emoji, it was because suddenly Admin-mod policy happened to agree with the Trump admin, it was a bad look and made people unconfortable”
Your comment =“lol weirdo the context was indeed just an emoji, touch grass”
Now you want to discuss? Sure. For the record I wasn’t even particularly involved in that struggle either btw. But your comment was indeed dismissive of the broader context. It wasn’t just an emoji, it is literaly agreeing with the Trump admin.
Do you expect to shame me? Yes actualy, if your “opinion” happens to agree with the Trump admin you are very close to making a pro-zionist argument. You disagree? Suit yourself but don`t come here with the self-righous BS “oh but if it were me I would have banned you”. Who are you threatening? Take the head out of your ass.
If you`re confident in your opinion, make a post right now, relitigate this with the userbase, try to convince us
is just a fucking emoji. Otherwise stfu, admit we mostly don’t agree with you and take a bow out.
calling my comrades zionist is insulting to them and its insulting to me. I keep telling you to touch grass because you seem to think its acceptable to say that to a comrade over a reasonable debate on the emoji. Do you think the ‘against’ side was arguing because they supported the state of israel? You think those people hang out around this site and moderate this site? you’d have to believe every single member of the admin team is a zionist; every single anti-zionist would do everything they can to remove them. You’ve lost your mind online and need to physically interact with another human being and regain sanity. Not responding to you anymore.
their insinuating that my comrades were being anti-semitic for requesting to use the actual flag was insulting to them and me too.
this defensiveness is the problem. if someone told me i was using zionist rhetoric i would take a step back and really think about what i said. no matter if i had past arguments with the user that called it out. but even so, since then we’ve had Jewish users, EMPOC users, and others feel that such zionist rhetoric was not ok. i don’t understand why they can’t own that mistake. mistakes can happen and we are all always learning and growing. just as commiting to be anti-racist is an unending journey where that learning never stops, i think that commiting to anti-zionism is the same. its about how you handle being called out. if someone told me that something i said was racist do you think my best course of action would be to get mad at the person for “calling me racist”?. either you get defensive and further alienate others or take it and better yourself and be a better comrade (especially if in a leadership position)
they seem more upset about being called a zionist by users that were frustrated and felt dismissed, when they should be taking that moment to meaningfully reflect on what they said and how that can impact others in our community.
i understand wanting to defend your comrades but what I don’t understand is why some humility around the situation can’t be shown by them.
seeing users (mostly empoc) leave the site over this and how things have been handled has really sucked. seeing how users (who are still understandibly very upset) are being treated also really sucks. those who are still here commenting want things to get better.
There is a very valid argument that comments made by mods were Zionist. This argument has been made exhaustively in other threads and are popularly agreed with by the users.
Other mods backed up those statements, allowed them to stand unchallenged, and aggressively moderated the opposing side of the argument, because they are friends and/or because they agree with them.
this removes context, and essentializes what is a relatively minor issue (but still worth discussing) into a larger more fundamental disagreement than it actually is.
Without going back to years-old posts which people have since self-critted on, the “mods making zionist arguments” were specifically 2 mods arguing with Zposter, who was a known entity, and had a history of going far above and beyond comradely behavior to insist this emoji be added. Saying “anyone who wants to depict the zionist rag burning just wants do holocaust stuff and burn the star of david” would be liberal zionist shit for sure. But that wasn’t what was said. What was said was “you [zposter] specifically have such a bone to pick about this issue [by bringing it up with such vitriol multiple times over the course of years] that you must just have an ulterior motive for wanting this particular pictogram to be hosted and endorsed by this website”. It still is a wrong argument, and a bad look, but it isn’t the same liberal zionist argument it’s presented as, and shouldn’t be generalized as such, because it wasn’t phrased in a general sense, nor was it directed at a user who “could have been anyone”, it was a particularized response to the stand-out behavior of 1 user.
To then take this argument, and generalize that the mods and admins are zionists and people covering for their zionist friends, is an extra step beyond the pale. If we can’t work out disagreements without this type of hostility and lasting schism each time, then what chance do we have of doing anything productive with our politics in the real world? This type of criticism is not constructive (some people stayed constructive, but the majority either were unproductive and hostile themselves or got in on the side of “unban zposter RIGHT NOW” without seeing the broader context of that ban or any acknowledgement that there was a problem with zposter’s behavior.
Edit: regardless I’m glad to see some productive conversations are happening now in this post, and I hope more structure and intentionality helps us work through these issues better in the future. Thank you for putting in the effort to explain and suggest improvements, not just relitigate, it’s genuinely appreciated
right, its the slander that gets me. Not every disagreement needs to lead to outright condemnation and calling for the admins heads. If we can’t remain even remotely comradely in what is a relatively tight-knit highly moderated space made up of people who share basic values and principles, then what are we even doing online, what is the point of any of this? The same thing happens IRL, it’s just easier to shut down because screaming at each other is recognized as unproductive and not normalized to the extent it is online.
I’m once again going to recommend people read Constructive Criticism: A Handbook for a useful intro to Criticism/Self-Criticism and guide on how to productively struggle because this ain’t fucking it.
from what i understood the motivation of this thread is to move along the discussion of specifically what changes can be made here on hexbear to give people an option other than
all you are doing is kvetching in a thread of people sincerely trying to avoid the circularity of the drama, about how “we can’t remain even remotely comradely” when this thread is like the most polite one so far on the subject, everyone is going out of their way to be nice. i find your comment very funny for this reason and I would say to you “takes one to know one” and “i know you are but what am i”.
as to your link it looks interesting I’ll put it in my folder to read maybe later. is your suggestion is that every user on hexbear needs to read the 30k word document? perhaps you could pull out what you think as the most actionable and basic items and how it applies to a forum, as the first thing it says on this page is it’s from 1974. Telling people they need to read a pamphlet to be worth your time to interact with is arguably quite “uncomradely”. Not to mention unrealistic.
Criminalizing the burning of state flags lets governments arrest more protesters. That marks people with a criminal record and makes their lives harder. This is an online forum. Not wanting a burning flag emoji does not criminalize anyone. It doesn’t allow for easier control of the people who want it.
This use of a specious comparison as a cudgel is not the way. You either don’t know the difference, which means we should tune you out, or you do know the difference and you’re just being an asshole.
I feel like people were calling them zionists because of the Jewish supremacy aspect that LoveYourself wrote about in the comment which was censored and then renewed, resulting in the loss of that poster from our community. Another of many non white comrades who have been pushed out via a systemic white supremacist undercurrent which much like zionism does not define the individuals who perpetuate it, but their actions. These are latent, unconscious biases playing out, no one here thinks the mods and admin are secretly mossad. They were calling out the actions of those people which were zionist in nature, which the people doing them didn’t realize.
Silencing Arabs and Muslims, banning them and punishing them, while calling them holocaust deniers for saying they want the emoji to be the actual flag of the zionists, telling people they are antisemitic for thinking it is weird that there are burning flags for other nations but not the one committing genocide; if you read this and didn’t know it was about hexbear, you would think “sounds like zionist behavior.”
that is what is being called zionist, the zionist behavior based on zionist logic.
maybe some users who are actively being silenced and attacked responded in more defensive or aggressive ways due to feeling cornered, and instead of calmly saying “that behavior and your reasoning is based in zionist logic and here is why, please dispense of this logic and be better about noticing when unchecked zionist ideology influences you without you realizing it.” they said “you are a zionist.”
since the people they were talking to were calling them antisemities, reporting them and trying to silence them, allowed to do this without being silenced, and even the Jewish users came in and all agreed that it was not antisemitic and those actions of those people were wrong, resulting in one demodding and one ban of the opposing side for zionism, whats the problem? they got angry and defensive because of this banworthy behavior and the enabling of it by the powers that be and acted up in a way I wouldn’t encourage in general, but they were right about this and most people involved agreed. I can’t blame a person being treated badly by the people with power here for getting angry and communicating poorly.
they were zionist actions, they were using zionist logic, and it doesn’t have to mean that those people are wholly and unabashedly zionists, but to assert that because they are on hexbear and volunteer and are serious about communism means they have fully rid themselves of white supremacy, zionism, and other forms of indoctrination is totally unrealistic and normalizes a culture of shame that actually inhibits the people involved from learning and growing and improving. People were being harsh with them because they were digging their heels in and had to be convinced not to do zionism here. I don’t think prioritizing the harshness of one party over the other party fundamentally using zionist talking points makes much sense.
CW: suicide
I’ve sat with this awhile as I wanted to consider my words carefully.
My issues with the moderation team began with the apparent double standard of a mod (who is now demodded) being able to tell another user to kill themselves without any immediate consequences beyond having the comment removed. It took the whole ZP situation blowing up for them to be removed from the mod team.
Suicide and suicide baiting is something that affects me deeply as someone who has lost people close to me to suicide and as someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts and impulses. Maybe it’s my trauma that led me to read into the comment but I do not know how else to interpret it. The relevant part of the comment is as follows: “Please fucking touch grass. Actually touch dirt six feet beneath grass”. I have a difficult time interpreting that as anything other than telling them to go kill themselves. If I am wrong and there are more charitable interpretations I am open to them.
I apologise for being an asshole about it in recent struggle sessions. Talk of suicide and suicide baiting affects me deeply, and it hurts more because of Hexbear’s usually fantastic track record of making sure such topics are properly tagged with trigger warnings. Seeing someone in a position of power engage in suicide baiting upset me.
Anyway, thanks for calling me out but judging by your earlier responses I’m guessing you’ll just tell me to leave and touch grass. It might be for the best
No reason to say that to you, as your reply is not in any way hostile.
Like I said, the admin team is serious about their duties and do discuss and take action when appropriate. Just remember there’s only a few of them, sometimes they log off for a while, take breaks, get sick, etc. Don’t always expect to see immediate action since they’re not all-seeing. My main point is its very unfair to insult them. Its just personally irritating to me because I see them work so hard to make the correct action, and every struggle session i see people complain about them not doing enough or being abusive.
Sorry to hear about your bad experience, though. Not much else to say about it; I’ve been online all my life so I don’t even register stuff like that anymore as suicide baiting.
I’m aware, but there was over a year between the aforementioned deaththreat/suicide baiting incident and them being removed from the mod team. I know these things take time but it wasn’t until there was greater scrutiny due to the whole ZP thing that they were actually removed from moderation. I’m not asking mods to be perfect people, but it would be nice if they were held to the same standard as everyone else and not given what looks like preferential treatment.
Are you saying that you read “touch dirt six feet beneath grass” as something other than a request for the other person to be dead?
I’m genuinely not sure what else it could read as and it’s hard for me to not take this as a bad faith defense of the behavior.
Its like a generic ‘fuck you’ to me. I’ve been on forums since 2001, its as common as any other insult.
Maybe I’ve been on different parts of the internet but I can’t say I’ve come across the phrase “touch dirt six feet beneath grass” before. Maybe it’s an Albany expression?
Jokes aside, it’s still against the Code of Conduct and the comment was removed at the time, so the mods did acknowledge at the time it was against the rules and was more than just “a generic ‘fuck you’”
Anyway it does feel like you aren’t engaging in good faith so I’m going to shut up about it
Sorry if it comes off that way, I’m taking it seriously
Telling people to ‘kys’ is a very common variation of telling someone to ‘fuck off’ on basically the entire internet. Hexbear is probably the only adult place I know of that would delete a comment for that, which I’m absolutely fine with.
I personally agree and tried to put appreciation throughout the post. But I’m trying to help identify why there is this tension. Because as much as there are a few users who are angry above the rest, there’s this other group, seemingly a majority in the last struggle session, saying that the unaccountability was over the line. I’m not saying we have to restructure everything, but just make clear why that complaining in this case did or did not result in changes. When is it so big that site-wide changes are needed? When is it just a “good enough idea” that needs to talking about? Are those just mod tasks too, to discuss and decide that?