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.
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.
Mods genuinely don’t ban enough or go hard enough on reactionary takes IMO. The fact we’ve had so many arguments over bare minimum ally stuff like “not judging fat people on sight” is proof. Plus how moderators always both-sides everything with kiddy gloves and apologize profusely when the majority of users disagree with them. Like, excuse me? We’re just letting bad stuff be here because lots of people are mad when we try to get rid of it?
In that sense I agree with you, because if moderators were properly shutting this stuff down instead of trying to play nice with people saying dog-whistle reactionary opinions (of which “the site isn’t serious” posting I think has become one), we wouldn’t have these arguments anymore.
A lot of users are from the US and are white straight men. There is no reason to cater to them, their opinions and with them a lot of the “majority opinions” of the site are worthless because they haven’t done an ounce of self reflection yet.