This post is pretty intense but I’m trying to be validating, I’m sorry if I screw up :( if I do tell me how so I can remove/fix it

thank you for effort posting. Your effort post during the dunking struggle session actually made me back off entirely because I was realizing I was hurting people for the exact reason I cared about or disliked dunking stuff in the first place. I just really dislike how often dunking turns into a social mechanism to enforce specific invisible lines, which is obviously something I never really communicated well because, well, I was in a terrible mindset and had a bad perspective on it.

I think these arguments are part of a more holistic issue that has existed since the beginning of the site and has seen neurodivergent moderators and users that can’t cope with it or properly develop masking techniques to deal with it to quit in droves, which has caused it to get worse because all of the people who would have made it better were basically forced to leave.

A lot of very cool and very gay and autistic people disappeared because of this. And I think it’s gotten worse because, while we are of course still a very queer and neurodivergent site, we’ve managed to reinforce these patterns that hurt neurodivergent people regardless. It’s a system that’s become disconnected from any specific users or leadership, because it’s become a dominant ideology of the site.

Both the changes I wanted to see to “dunk culture” and the whole upvotes thing comes from this same issue. We as a site are so fundamentally infected with this attitude that is inherently hostile to many, many neurodivergent people, that changes I believe moderators have made to try and fix it have been done with the exact problematic attitude. The misgendering and toxicity moderators showed to users was this exact thing made manifest. We are so fundamentally disconnected from the struggle against ableism on a systemic level on this site that our leadership cannot justify changes made with actual neurodivergent theory. Instead, random vibes-based accusations of users that outright misgender and make false assumptions of them had to be conjured up, because users and moderators could tell something was wrong but they basically developed an entirely false consciousness due to having no proper way to describe it (or, worse, a concern that the website’s user base wouldn’t take ableism seriously).

But this site is important to people, and especially neurodivergent users. And upvotes are toxic, and I think the need to monitor them and randomly punish people who cross invisible boundaries with them is proof of that. And lots of our focus on ability and competency and aesthetic judgements over moral ones is fundamentally ableist. But we can’t directly confront it because it goes directly against a core conceit and misconception that I believe is at the core of the “dirtbag left”: that “civility” and avoiding random unrelated insults are the same thing.

But they’re not. Being uncivil is absolutely possible to do while being precise and specific with what you hate. Being uncivil practically requires it, actually, because it’s greatest virtue is in being truthful and when someone is calling people ugly or pathetic or stupid they’re being imprecise and inherently less truthful because doing that is circling around what they have actual issues with.

We’ve let ourselves internalize this aspect of “civility” as a rule- That it is inherently more acceptable to judge and insult and harass and malign evil because it is pathetic, disabled, or weak, than because it is evil. Calling a Nazi a piece of shit Nazi isn’t enough- they have to be a cuck and a simp and stupid and ugly and have a weird chin, because we’ve internalized this fundamentally ableist and deeply problematic idea that it’s more acceptable and accurate to judge people for traits that are in no way their fault by using these demeaning words for normal variation, in fact variation that is very often influenced by mental processes and physical disabilities, than it is to just say someone is bad because they are willfully hurting people. It’s liberal and weak and silly to view someone as a problem because they are a capitalist tyrant, apparently, despite that making no fucking sense. We feel like we have to justify it with random jabs at personality traits and body types and patterns of behavior that we subconsciously view as lesser because of the huge variety of bigoted systems we’ve all internalized. And we’ve taken all of this and claimed it’s better because it’s less civil, when really all we’re doing is taking the same fucking civility fetish and painting it over with a dirtbag left color scheme.

This is so, so fucked. TC69 obviously fucked up bad and I think this is why. We need some sort of immense purge of the entire site’s toxic brainworms, it’s staff, its user base. I don’t really think this involves mass banning though? More like mass re-education. We need mass mod mails and messages and interventions and empathetic approaches to rule breaking and a completely different approach to policing the site than we have done ever before.

Toxicity done in the name of progressivism is still anti-progressive and toxic. Being aggressive and hating someone for good reasons isn’t toxic. But we’ve mixed those two things up and now we have people justifying their harm done to marginalized comrades with anti-civility rhetoric and civility fetishists justifying their protection of that harm with progressive rhetoric.

This is not a good direction for the site and it’s been going this direction since its inception. It has been consistently hostile and difficult to use for neurodivergent users. It has been having this exact issue in different ways since the beginning and that’s because it never, ever implements this actual fundamental change in perspective, only ever band aid changes in conversational policy or random auxiliary rules.

There needs to be a fundamental change in site philosophy. I have seen neurodivergent users be harmed by this site far too many times now for it to be a random or coincidental thing, it is a fundamental issue that has been unresolved for its entire existence.

Edit: To be clear, I expect immense pushback to this. I’m certain many will agree in principle now, but the opinions will shift quickly when they realize they have to give up specific phrases or wording or insults or specific habits and forms of bullying. I expect all sorts of attempts to paint an actual radical movement designed to make the site more neurodivergent-friendly as “problematic”, “liberal”. Of “removing the site’s dirtbag roots and proper teeth”. But this is a false perception of the site’s current existence. It does not threaten anything. Any ideology that relies on co-opting and using the criticisms and beliefs dominant ideology itself uses to enforce it’s power cannot be revolutionary, not without changing what those very criticisms and beliefs are, which is… not happening. To make Hexbear an explicitly, radically pro-autistic-behavior and interaction website will make it more radical, not less. That’s because it will mean focusing on our actual radical criticisms and how to make those criticisms relevant to and relatable to your average person, rather than figuring out how to warp reactionary insults into somehow progressive statements because it’s “just common sense”. Common sense is fake, it’s reactionary, and it is often terrible and bad

And I’ve seen these radical criticisms. They’re there and they’re like the majority of the site. But they’re just covered in this unrefined, liberalistic, reactionary ableism that prevents it from being what it could be. It’s like a piece of steel that hasn’t had the extra rocks and slag cleaned off and it’s just built up more and more gunk over time despite the immensely strong and immovably dependable foundation.