Hello users of Hexbear, there have been many changes and some drama the past few months.
The recent changes we’ve been making have been an attempt to create a more safe and welcoming environment for many demographics that have been overlooked in the past.
For any of our comrades that have been unintentionally hurt in this process, we apologise and hope to find a solution that accommodates as many people as possible while still meeting the needs of the marginalised groups who need a space like this the most.
The intent of this post is to provide a space for all users to air grievances with regard to the site. As well as provide suggestions for specific things that could be changed to address your grievance. Comments insulting the mod team or those without a specific means to address your problem may be removed. No commenter will be sitebanned, unless it clearly breaks the code of conduct.
I’m going to vent about site culture for a moment, feel free to ignore.
I think there is a contradiction in the hexbear culture, where we talk about being comrades, but users dont bother offering some grace to users when they accidentally say something offensive. Conversely, users aren’t humble and don’t question their own chauvinism until they get temp banned then they finally posting on c/selfcrit. Obviously, the latter scenario is worse (JUST ACCEPT THAT YOU WERE OFFENSIVE AND APOLOGIZE, DAMN!) but the former is still corrosive to the site experience and it upsets me especially when mods do it. Like, either be chill or ban, set a good example.
I don’t think this is something admins can fix, necessarily, but it makes this place feel like Reddit and it pisses me off sometimes. God damn, most of the time even if I want to fight about something I give up halfway through typing my diatribe, how people can get through several comments of being in the wrong/being an asshole to a supposed ‘comrade’ without taking a breath and reassessing what has been said, I will never understand.
Edit: Genuinely, I think the song How to Save a Life by The Frey (CW: the song is about an intervention) is a decent guide of what I mean by handling call outs with grace.
Easier said than done. When you’re part of a group that faces actual existential threats, have to put up with organized hate campaigns all the time, constantly see your loved ones getting assaulted and overall have the experience of being put into a category from second class citizen to subhuman other by every political party in your country and most of the mainstream media, being asked to always remain polite is just another form of violence. Civility is privilege. Being supernaturally calm and collected while you’re in the face of danger is cool in the movies, but when you get a ton of minority stress piled on your shoulders it’s only possible on good days, and we don’t have many of these rn.
I mean, i get where you’re going, when you’re in an environment where good faith discussion is at least a possibility, you usually get further by remaining calm and explaining, but i spend half of my life explaining the most trivial bs about my existence to people like they’re 5. It’s tiring. I try my best, and it gets easier over time (until it doesn’t because this fascism shit is just too much to handle), but i can’t always be in wise trans elder laying it out to the cissies mode. I can’t always deworm the baby trans who’ve picked up too much truscum shit on some hellsite. I can’t always do feminism like bell hooks. I can’t always be the chill kind of lesbian or the poly and kink educator or the girl who offhandedly makes people realize that their treatment of fat people or the poor or neurodivergents needs some improvement. Sometimes i need to blow off steam, and i think a safer space is a space where people are allowed to be rightfully angry for a minute. Improving site culture to me means that people reach out to each other after they’ve gone off and vented and heal the grievances that have been caused, not to tone police the marginalized.
I feel you, it’s easy to quote Thomas Sankara when you’re not the one doing the explaining all the time.
I think you’re imagining I’m want you to say something like ‘excuse me, but you’ve done a transphobia’, but this is incorrect. What I want is forcefully pointing what is wrong and not inviting a response. As marginalized people of our own communities, we should, in theory, have the final say on these things. It should just be ‘dont do this’ and the behavior ends. Ranting and attacking the other user just hurts feelings, which invites responses then two people are shouting past one another, and now it’s Reddit. Even if you make amends afterwards it’s just so toxic and messy.
Obviously we do not live in a perfect world, and things will happen. I’m not going to pretend every interaction can be handled perfectly. But when I am seeing some drama meltdown once a week because two people didn’t remember that that other side other the argument was someone they would have otherwise called a comrade, it’s annoying and embarrassing. Especially when it’s mods doing it.
And while I am talking on this side of the argument, the other side, who committed the aggression, should also shut the fuck up and correct their behavior. And if they don’t, well, do whatever you want, they brought it on themselves.
I already regret posting this but fuck it
Overall I think you’re really underestimating how many ways there are to dismiss marginalised peoples forcefull corrections, as well as the intensity of peoples’ self-righteousness. For marginalised people to be “forcefully pointing what is wrong and not inviting a response” isn’t any less tiring for them, not to mention that they have been doing that already, this whole time. It doesn’t stop responses of denial (“well I was just saying for me personally”, “I’m just talking about my own experience”), it doesn’t stop minimising and it doesn’t stop the lurkers who also don’t want to examine their shit from upvoting the responses that barely make sense, but ostensibly disprove the marginalised person’s point, since it’s easier to maintain the dissonance than it is to do any self reflection. After all “it’s just a shitposting site, what did you expect”
Some of the most irony poisoned users are also the same ones that don’t believe anyone’s word on anything because they could be an imagined wrecker or cop lying about their marginalisation just to stir shit up and disrupt their based posting with “identity politics that are just meant to divide us!”
Others are just too privileged and comfortable to truly give a shit and unpack the harm they might be unintentionally perpetuating, because “I didn’t mean it! Therefore I’m still a Good Person™, therefore how dare anyone be mean to such a Good Person™ like me!?! Clearly they’re engaging in bad faith and I shouldn’t listen to them.”
The way I see it, a marginalised person can rightly only go through that so many times before coming to conclusions about whose feelings matter more on this site and fucking off, as many have.
I’m literally only asking for the first engagement to not be a rant or attack. Per the end of my comment.
Please feel free to respond to any push back however you wish
Ok so then you’re in a full on disagreement about your existence. Shit is tiring (like we keep saying) and many people choose to bounce instead of waiting for the settler leftists to find it in themselves to be better on racism or fatphobia.
That’s a moderation issue. You’ll notice I am also talking about mod behavior.
I don’t know what this means. If you are suggesting that I, as person with a serious disability, am in the wrong for not immediately attacking people who use ableist language or say ableist things on this site, I strongly disagree.
No, I’m not critiquing your behaviour! Just struggling to make the connection of how your suggestion about mod behaviour improves the situation for marginalised comrades I guess? Since like you say, most of the time we will already begin the engagement respectfully if we do at all
This is a low-key indictment of mods who like to argue more than they like to actually clean up. Generally, when a regular user gets into an argument, it just keeps to the thread and (hopefully) a mod comes in and deletes comments and bans users as necessary, so that doesn’t bother me. When mods argue with users or each other, either on alts or on main, it spills over into the rest of the website. Now everyone is arguing in every thread and the wreckers come out in force. The site turns into Reddit and I leave for a few days.
When this happens, mods in the fight or not, a lot of the time it’s because there was an attack on someone’s pride. This is usually caused not by the call out itself but by the way its handled. There is a fine line, admittedly, between asking for effective communication and tone policing, but I think the key is to treat everyone like a friend, a comrade, and telling them they fucked up like you would a friend. I had to lay it down for some drama a week or two ago because no one was getting through to the OP that said person was being an jackass. It spilled into the megathread which is where I saw it. I even got sassy with my response too, but that didn’t matter, what mattered was explaining bad behavior in an effective manner.
Thanks for clarification. I think we’re headed in a good direction in that regard, i think that our use of the disengage rule is something a lot of other communities could benefit from, knowing that mods are on your side when somebody acts transphobic etc. also does a lot to make things easier and i’d say and that we’ve largely done good progress in moving away from flamewar and debate pervertry culture since the days when we were all fresh off reddit. But yeah, we aren’t perfect in that regard.
to your first point that is something that we need to work on together as a site mods and users.