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.

  • FuckyWucky [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    I don’t get much of it either. My guess is there is a lot of talk going on behind the scenes.

    I don’t think a purge right now is necessary especially given that the user count is pretty stagnant.

    It was all working fine. Splitting dunk tank into dredge tank was a good idea but idk why they removed and renamed it all together.

    • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      They said it was because “dunk tank” has racist origins, which it does, but idk I felt it was pretty excessive anyway. Almost nobody alive today even knows that and those that do are aware that it’s a term that hasn’t been used for over a century. It’s not even the same game anymore.

      • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 months ago

        Yeah I wouldn’t have guessed that at all. My only familiarity with the idea of a dunk tank is white people doing it to each other voluntarily as some kind of fair/fundraiser thing. I always thought the idea of it seemed kind of sadistic (not that I knew the word sadistic back then). But I’m taking it to imagine hexbear’s dunk tank is similar to the shitreactionaryssay that lemmygrad has, where it’s posting takes of people who aren’t even present, and in that sort of context, it seems more like throwing fruit at a picture of someone than anything akin to putting down someone who is trapped there and has to take it. There’s also “dunking on” in the basketball meaning, which is sometimes used to refer to putting someone down on social media, like ratio’ing a person on twitter. That one is more directly humiliating, but doesn’t use the term “dunk tank” and so unless the basketball meaning also has racist origins I’m not aware, we’re looking at phrasing that can quickly overlap and could be confusing to people to take as inherently bad or racist to use.

        If it was just a name change and it was an easy thing to change the name of without messing up links and existing activity and so on, I’d say, whatever, make it a name they don’t feel icky about. But the internet often doesn’t function that way. Screwing over logistics of user activity for the sake of feeling better about a name most people won’t even know the real origins of seems like an odd decision, to say the least.

  • MelianPretext@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 months ago

    Very bizarre wrecker behavior ongoing over there from the admin team. It’s hard to say what’s precisely going on because all the major admins and mods have completely closed ranks against the wider community, preferring to communicate in their own private chat rather than express their positions publicly to their “comrades” in the wider community.

    The fact that the newcomer admin, currently LARPing as a wrecker nonce, is now the second top admin on that site means that whatever issue this behavior stems from is likely emanating from the highest site leadership itself, given that the top admin account is an inactive placeholder shell. This is such boring reddit-typical power mod nonsense, right up to the new admin LARPing as some micro e-celeb through their position and the rest of the admins adopting a “us vs. them” mentality against the community, that it’s frankly just demoralizing to see it “suddenly” happen to one of the only other leftist spaces on the English internet apart from LG.

    The way this incident is spiralling really is showing what personalities are ultimately running the show over there and turns out it’s the same power-tripping story as in any subreddit or forum, apparently. You expect, or rather hope, for something different here when we’re all supposed to be comrades taking refuge from a wider internet space hostile to our very existence, but the way the new admin is straight up banning people, in one instance a permaban to what was clearly an unserious request made under emotional tension, shows that’s apparently not the case. What a waste to treat such a hard-won and painfully built community in this kind of way. It’s quite the ironic touch given that the closure of their site’s r/SLS comms, which precipitated all this drama, was initially justified under the pretext of reforming the community to uphold more “proper” leftist values and yet the admin leadership, in the span of a mere day, seems to reveal that they’re unwilling to walk their own talk.

    • glimmer_twin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Ya, look, I don’t have any particular beef with any admin or mod or whatever, I’ve never had a cross word with anyone. But it’s pretty weird that someone can disappear for years and then come back as an admin overnight, and even weirder that half the forum seems to have some cult of personality around them that’s been maintained in their absence like some kind of cargo cult, lol.

      Then you have the fact that seemingly some of the people accusing the wider community of being liberals/cishetbros/self-hating trans(?) are themselves displaying liberal attitudes when they receive comradely criticism.

      I dunno man it’s all too terminally online for me.

  • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Oh now we’re cookin with gas

    EDIT 4: I’m locking the thread. I tried my best to give some decent paths forward amidst the chaos. Someone else can deal with this.

    It will blow over soon enough, it always does

    • Gribbli@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 months ago

      Not sure if I saw many paths forward being presented lol, but ok. I’ll be interested to see how it shakes out…from a safe distance I think

  • M68040 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Yeah, I haven’t got the faintest idea. Didn’t even really have any idea there was a situation beyond the dunk comms getting the boot. Not a fan of situations, or being involved directly in them.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 months ago

    I’m not familiar with what goes on there, so as an outsider, the fact that in skimming, some of the replies make more sense to me than the admin/mod posts doesn’t seem like a great sign for their leadership. Comes across like they’re acting based on vibes and don’t want to provide substantive examples to back up what they’re doing.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    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 wowee, 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

    • Aradina [She/They]@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      They reversed a few bans, but not mine. So apparently something I said was particularly objectionable. I’m not sure what though.

    • NoYouLogOff [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        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

      • Gribbli@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • BRINGit34@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 months ago

    I really enjoy hexbear but I pretty much only engage with it through the lens of shitposting.

    I’ll probably just ignore hex for a bit til they get it all sorted over there.

    Probably still check out games tho