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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.

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  • Here's my super serious thoughts and my attempt at effort posting. I have fibrofog pretty bad right now so apologies if I ramble or make shit points.

    I think one of the big lessons here is to avoid having power-users. The initial, relatively small, issue was quickly blasted out of proportion when it could have been stopped by a simple "We're sorry, while we didn't intend to say those things, our intent is irrelevant in the face of our actions. We'll work on it and get back to you." along with unlocking the comms and involving users more in the process if the issues with the comms are really so severe. I still think the tanks should be unlocked until a choice is made, as a show of good faith. It'll do a lot to assuage fears that they don't care, and show that the top down community defining isn't going to be how things are done in future.

    The second big lesson is that moderators and admins need to be vigilant of resentment toward users building up. I've been a moderator for a very active community before, and it sucks. You do see the worst of the community and that can lead to resentment and cliquishness. The other mods understand, the users don't. It makes it easy to mentally create an in group and out group, we're all humans, and the human brain sucks ass at most things. Perhaps moderators and admins should be strongly suggested to take time off and be a regular user on occasion to prevent this? Obviously there are privacy concerns, and the admins need to protect themselves from doxing, so I'm unsure how to implement this.

    I think that overall this might have been a good thing. It's clear to me that there were tensions bubbling below the surface just waiting for this to happen, and now that it has we can identify and rectify those tensions better. A learning experience is always a good thing, even if they rarely feel good in the moment. In fact, they usually feel absolutely terrible in the moment.

    AlaskaBall banning themself as a bit and then accidentally misgendering themself is funny in retrospect, but seemed to confirm the idea that there was a shadowy take-over of transphobic mods. Very poor timing as a thing to do, but great comedic timing. People are already looking back and laughing on it, so I don't think that'll be anything long term.

    The cult of personality being character assassinated is a good thing in terms of my anti-power-users stance, but a bad thing in that TC69 did stumble face first into this, and didn't instigate it(though she clearly made it worse). She obviously did some great things for the site before my time, and the outcome of her actions is part of what drew me here. It's a space that isn't shit, and she helped build that and should be recognized for that. She shouldn't have returned from such a long break and been given admin straight away. Admins should be people who are currently active in the community, not niche internet celebrities. The fact that she was given admin right away strongly supports the idea of adminship being a big club that you ain't in, which I'm sure the admins don't want.

    I'd say there's no hard feelings, but there are a few. I'm willing to try and work through them though. I can't speak for others who are less willing to, and I know I wasn't hurt as much as the others were. I'd have preferred an apology from her directly, but if deleting and purging her account was the choice she made, then I respect that and wish her well. But as said, I can't speak for others.

    As others have said, there's also the issue of assuming all he/hims are A: white, B: cis, C: het, D: men, and E: wrong for having those pronouns. This loops back to the resentment thing I mentioned earlier I think. Brainworms are part of the human condition in our world today, it's not your fault for having them, but you do need to put effort into removing them. This is a very hard process that feels shitty in the moment, because you have to catch yourself and stop yourself. Telling your own brain that it's wrong is difficult. Self improvement feels like shit a lot of the time.

    Large amounts of users also cited the demographic surveys that show Hexbear to be very white, and seemed to use that to excuse the assumptions, which was clearly quite hurtful to our POC comrades. I'm white, and thus not very qualified to talk on this issue, but I felt it was very worth noting that harm so that it isn't forgotten and can be worked on.

    From what I've seen, Lyudmila and CARCOSA have been handling the aftermath quite well I feel. Putting yourself as the face of an unpopular group is very difficult and I'm sorry for the stress you've likely felt.

    That's my wall of text. I hope we can all move forward together as better people, better comrades, and better posters to build a better community and world(eventually.)

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