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.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      78·
      5 days ago

      This is my understanding of it.

      The dunk tank stuff is an incredibly minor thing, that should have been easily fixed. Everything else has just been logs thrown on a paper fire over and over again.

      It’s all incredibly silly and it seems like nobody in this team understands that less is more when dealing with minor drama. Responses to drama should be kept proportional to their size, if something is major and deserves a major response fair enough, but if something is minor and you give it a major response then what you do is immediately blow it up into a major issue instead of keeping it the incredibly minor thing it should have been all along.

      In this case the entire admin and mod team should STOP FUCKING POSTING.

      Seriously. Stop. Just stop. It’s that fucking easy.

      • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        52·
        5 days ago

        I think the issue is that the argument around misogyny and “white cishet bro culture” hasn’t actually been made, with users being told to go look at the modlogs as a poor replacement for a good lesson on what characteristics are objectionable.

        I don’t really get it but I’m not a big tank poster, I haven’t seen anything that I wouldn’t see on somewhere like fauxmoi

        It also doesn’t help that it’s clearly not the only issue some people have with the tanks, with others finding them toxic

        As a total tangent, I find the use of the term chauvinism very strange, like I did feminism at uni and it’s definitely a word I would associate with writing 50+ years ago (I assume being used here as a shorthand for male chauvinism)

        • propter_hog [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          46·
          5 days ago

          Yeah I’m still confused by it all, too. We’re clearly not being told the whole story. It sounds like some mods got their feelings hurt by tank posters, I guess. But if that’s the case, specific examples of that should have been included in their stickies. You can hide them in a spoiler so people who don’t want to read them don’t have to. Essentially a tiny modlog with just the examples in question included. But to say that I have to go scour all of the modlog looking for some arbitrary comment and I don’t even know specifically what I’m looking for is more than a bit asinine.

      • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
        31·
        5 days ago

        I think you underestimate the number of mods that were absolutely shitting on the admins in the private chat. Seriously, last night made me lose two weeks of sobriety, stop including “mods” when this was clear as day just TC69 being a petty shithead

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          50·
          5 days ago

          I understand some stuff may have happened behind the scenes.

          Anything that isn’t user-facing is being seen even less by the community though and will therefore create even more confusion when the response is huge walls of text about it.

          As far as the 99% of the community that didn’t see private modchat stuff are concerned, the situation is as I laid out and they’re all confused and completely feel waylaid by what they perceive as a massive overreaction to it and an incredibly confusing pace of events.

          • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
            20·
            5 days ago

            And I’m in control of that? I invited people from outside the official mod chat into a different mod chat to talk about things safely, I really did my best. If I had the energy to respond to people insulting me as a mod, I’d be sharing tons of information from the mod chat. And as someone in the mod chat, I can firmly say 90 percent of the real fallout for this belongs to TC69 and AlaskaBall. Even from the posts it’s clear as day that it’s just TC69 and AlaskaBall doing this shit.

            I will say, mods (or most fairly well read people) are against the “dunk” culture (me included). We literally have known doxxers in this community that haven’t been banned due to dissapointing admin inaction. There is a very firm split between the mods doing unpaid labor on this site, and the most of the admins. We all told AlaskaBall to go fuck themselves last night very directly. Seriously, so many of us have had to deal with serious backlash from this shit with no warning, we are a bunch of volunteers getting absolutely shat on by people we try to help. That is so fucking hard to work through, and my therapist would probably tell me to delete my fucking account.

            I get the confusion, I never check the mod chat, I’m awful about it, I was confused too. But even when you look at the fucking modlog, there is no mod action, IT’S ALL ADMIN! And just like capitalists, TC69 and Alaskaball are simply farming out all the mods to take the actual backlash of this shit.

    • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      51·
      5 days ago

      Yup. Admins can’t stand that the users of this shit posting site want a comm where they can post low effort dunks. That’s the core of it. At every opportunity the mods and admins could have just stopped antagonizing the users of the site for no reason, and at every opportunity they have instead doubled down with some of the worst and most offensive arguments I’ve ever seen from supposed “socialists.”

        • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          40·
          5 days ago

          It’s not a renaming. Essentially, they had one comm where you’re allowed to post low effort dunks of celebrities, and another comm where you’re allowed to post high effort refutations debatebro-r of random losers. The old dunk tank / new dredge tank would, once again, be removed.

            • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              53·
              5 days ago

              Ok but whatever you ‘see some use in’ the point is that that is wildly unpopular. Absolutely does not fit the culture or desires of the user base of the site. We just want to post the shit we like posting. If you don’t want to see that content you’re perfectly capable of blocking it. I think the fakenews comm is bad, mean-spirited, unhelpful, useless, awful in every way. I blocked it (and the person who made it) the day it was made. I’ve never been affected by its existence since. Why exactly do we need people to remove comms for content that they personally don’t like, when those comms are among the most popular on the website?

              • propter_hog [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
                45·
                5 days ago

                Bingo, it’s like banning cth because you don’t like the word cracker or whatever. Like, that’s a core part of the site. I feel that if an admin doesn’t like a core part of what comprises Hexbear ideology and aesthetic, the problem isn’t with Hexbear but with them. They should go join a different instance.

    • SixSidedUrsine [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      45·
      5 days ago

      That’s where it originated but it is well beyond being about that alone now. As just one other little event to mention here, it was revealed that our main admin was telling other lemmy admins about this as a plan a week before any hexbear users were told about it. That admin (who has since stepped down amid calls for them not to, so they may return) told us that they were lying to the other lemmy admins to try to get them to remove their dunk comms, and that they weren’t lying to us. But that is as weird as it sounds.

      One of the things that was revealed by showing mod chats and mod reasoning for the change was that they were saying the people who like to dunk here are toxic cis-hets exclusively when that is clearly not true and got a lot of our trans and queer users who enjoy dunks rather upset at being told their behavior is toxic cis-het. Plenty of misgendering ensued as well.

      There’s also a person who has been making alts and harassing people who express dissatisfaction with this unilateral mod/admin decision and it is almost certain that this chronic harasser is herself a mod of some comms here.

      And there are plenty of other things going on with this too, so hopefully that gives you an idea as to why this is beyond just being about some comm changes. I’m also exhausted and probably didn’t explain things well, but again, I hope that gives you a better idea what’s happening.

    • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      28·
      5 days ago

      So in watching a lot of this go down, yes a lot of people were pissed about the handling of canceling the tanks, but what REALLY pushed it all overboard was someone, presumably a mod who was confirmed NOT to be a mod but was thought to be, making a bunch of alts (if you search the mod log it’s the “debatebro” accts harassing the upset users. Misgendering them, infantilizing them, telling them to kys, etc etc. Many users felt that that issue wasn’t addressed at all. Hence people feeling like the admin team was letting that shit slide, which really pissed everyone off. That’s where shit REALLY started to pop off. That, combined with there seeming to be multiple different reasons coming from admin about why the tanks were closed, then a controversial mod figure coming back after years and just banning everyone and admin turning this whole thing into a bit and posting instead of either ignoring things or answering questions, which just made people feel even MORE disrespected.

      • CARCOSA [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        26·
        5 days ago

        The person who was making the alts was not a mod and does not have any unbanned hexbear accounts, the instance they were using to make the wrecker alts has been temporarily removed from our allow-list.

        • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          20·
          5 days ago

          Gotcha, okay if that was posted somewhere in the comments I totally missed it obviously and I’ll edit my comment to reflect that to avoid the rumor mill from circulating.

          Also, I do wanna say that having to handle all of this must be tremendously stressful and I appreciate you really trying to hold it all together. I really don’t think a lot of the grievances aired were aimed at you personally and I hope you were able to separate that for your own mental health. I do agree with a lot of points made by users as this thing devolved but I also believe that some people were doing way too much in the beginning and took it way overboard. I wish that the conversation could’ve been more productive. I truly believe that yall are taking this feedback into consideration, and to me Lyudmila’s post really speaks to that more than anything. Seems to me that having a broader conversation, or town hall as you will, about conduct of both users and mods can really strengthen this place and hopefully the site can become more welcoming to the people who feel turned off by it because that’s IMPORTANT! Undoing all if the -isms is an every day practice, it’s short sighted to think it has been or ever will be “fixed” but maybe moving into the future there can be regular, ongoing feedback sessions about the health of the site with the broader community??

          Anyway sorry for the ramble from someone who lurks, just wanna say thank you for maintaining a place that has felt so comfy and has been a refuge from the libs during dark times

          cuddle