New discussion post coming soon re: Changes to Hexbear communities. mod statement in comment

No everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world.

The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991.

I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence.

Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper.

I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten.

In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate.

Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership.

There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it.

My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin.

I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism).

My [main] source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money.

I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol.

I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own.

My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it.

I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist.

During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil.

William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles.

George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together.

The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor.

Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall.

I am running out of walls.

When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution.

I am very smart and people like being around me.

I don't find fault in changing the names because of the history, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little bummed out by the direction of this. It feels like having your sweets taken away and replaced with vegetables.

Big ups on name changes, I had no idea and it's always good to root that kind of stuff out. however

Okay, in defense of a low effort/no effort space for mockery and derision of weird liberal posts

I find that it serves as a form of santiy check and a kind of ritual for reinforcing community and in-group solidarity. The sanity check part is important for me; we're bombarded with so much capital realism and horror every day, and I don't have other commies in my day to day life. So having a space where other people can look at random silly unimportant things and mock them helps me stay grounded and, paradoxically, engaged.

It reminds me that the liberals all around me are not normal, neutral, or natural, that their views are weird and can be challenged and discounted.

The low/no effort part is important bc effort requires effort. Analyzing everything is very taxing and having a goofy place that doesn't ask much of you can be helpful when you're just worn out.

That's my two cents. I'm cool with whatever the community decides, just wanted to throw out an effort post.

We're decommissioning two of our top five communities, and redirecting their users to !agitprop@hexbear.net and !effort@hexbear.net Mk.3?

Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but I don't think people frequent the piss shit owl beanis website exclusively to build a revolutionary vanguard. Part of it is an outlet to vent frustration at an absurd world.

Issue: People are having fun with the dunk tank comm and that makes forum moderators mad for some reason

solution: a series of increasingly incoherent changes and partial walk-backs to try to convince people to stop having fun with the dunk tank comm

(obviously a name change is fine but seriously why do we need to keep having big dumb arguments about this shit that does not matter? we want a comm to make fun of random reactionary stuff. that isn't going to change. so stop removing and remaking such comms. either commit to that not being welcome on hexbear at all for some reason, or just let the comm be)

"We're banning the_dunk_tank because it's too white and cis" is just the perfect bait post

1. c/gossip is a bad and counterintuitive name for the comm. Also it's exclusively for famous people? No other notable content? Who was asking for this?

2. but also many posts there were not useful with regard to developing rhetoric and furthering dialectical analysis of that which we dunk upon.

This is not even close to the reason why I post in dunk_tank. When did we agree that the reason for posts shitting on reactionaries was to "develop rhetoric"??

3. These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.

How do these changes serve that purpose (aside from the dunk tank name, which, fair enough)?

4. I'm glad something is being done about the weird overlap between dunk and dredge tank, but this feels very much like the mod team is saying "Stop having fun, Hexbear is serious business"
   

Edit: Thanks to @CARCOSA@hexbear.net for clarifying the announcement post. Still think gossip is a terrible name for the concept of the sub

Starting to think that the real issue is that large portions of the admin team do not view themselves as users of the site who have stepped into a community role, but rather as managers and who have contempt for the unruly, unwashed masses they are forced to oversee.

Seems like there's a pretty big disconnect between what the admins want Hexbear to be and how the average user treats it (Reddit but leftist). Maybe something that should be resolved sooner than later.

Honestly I have zero faith in the revolutionary potential of a Reddit clone but if people want to take it in that direction we can see how it goes

Not well thought out change, not well thought out names, 1/10. How are posts about disphits opinions gossip? We don't post counterpropaganda for a simple reason we defedded with anyone who might find it counter.

Did you become unburdened by what has been together with dnc or some shit?

Guess i could post anticommie propaganda into counterpropaganda comm

Closing the dunk/dredge tanks is a futile change. I understand that often times it didn't exactly produce valuable discourse and I'm sure there were instances of reactionary posts, but "get a load of this lib/chud" is like 50% of hexbear. The dunk tank exists to contain those posts, closing that community will not make those posts go away, it will just make them clutter the other communities or the megathreads. So what if the posts on there are low effort? Who cares? If I want to read actual theory, I'll pick up a book.

To put it another way: Many of us go on hexbear because getting mad at the same thing together feels cathartic, especially when nobody in our physical surroundings shares our political opinions. We see a dumb tweet by some liberal and we wanna have like-minded folks agree with us that it's dumb, so we go on hexbear to post it here. That's what the dunk tank is for and while it's not very productive and it's not gonna bring about the revolution, trying to stop these kinds of posts is a losing battle.

I mean, just look at how the dredge tank came to be: Mods didn't want screenshots of tweets by random nobodies and so they implemented a rule about it, but people wouldn't stop posting them so the dredge tank was eventually created as a compromise. Because although it might be low-effort and unproductive, dunking on dumb tweets is what the userbase wants and it's what they'll keep doing. !gossip@hexbear.net is just gonna become the new dunk tank.

There’s this strange drive towards “x variety of posting/content is not a productive way to spend time as a communist, therefore we must eliminate it” that emerges sometimes here.

I hate to break it to you, but hexbear will never be the most productive thing you could be doing to advance the revolution. If we follow this tendency to its conclusion, the wisest decision would be to close the site and everyone goes and reads books or does work for their local org instead.

No fun allowed.

Change the racist name obviously but the dredge tank rocked and I'm unreasonably upset that it's gone

To me, this comes across as inventing a user to get mad at, then punishing them.

The way this was messaged really sucks, and I don't think I can really agree with the reasoning either. I guess creating spaces that involve being mean can turn toxic sometimes, but so can anything, that's why we moderate.

What's worse, the way it was communicated on the backend to other instance's admins completely mismatches the reasoning given here. And they were given advance notice well ahead of the announcement here?

Why play PR games with people that hate us regardless? I thought we were on the same page about the

I gotta say the idea that hexbear should be a place for "developing rhetoric" makes me sick. I get enough NT people tonepolicing me about rhetoric in my day to day, I don't need it for hexbear. The idea we'd want this site culture to be one that is focused on making people effective at debating is one I perceive as fundamentally hostile to ND-users. I get enough dorks nitpicking my political communication IRL that I don't need it online.
The_dunk_tank functioned as a nice breathing space, a place to vent, a place where you could just call out obvious bullshit without having to duel with some fucking :nerd: about exactly precisely how much genocide is too much. Lord help you if you accidentally insult them.

I can't speak on behalf of all ND people (obviously) and I know plenty enjoy debates, but I also know a great many hate the hostile engagement, focus on precisely communicating ideas (according to how NT people think one communicates precisely), the nitpicking, the... the fucking debatebroism. I don't know how else to put it - that's poor rhetoric! huehuehue :smuglord:

The idea that this site is going to have one of its' biggest comms dedicated to focusing on rhetoric makes me- I feel like I should say worried, but I'm not worried- it makes me mad. I know what that will do, I know what would happen to the site culture if we suddenly begin fetishising debate and "polite" discussion. It would foster a site full of debateperverts. We used to ban people for debatebroism, but now it seems we wish to foster it.
I know what the concept of "developing rhetoric" will mean for a great many ND people and it will mean they're gonna be actively triggered whenever they chime in, because they don't communicate their thoughts in "the right way".

Also the dunking on the concept of dunking is asinine, and teeters on tone policing. The whole concept of dunking is effective rhetoric. Debateperverts should be treated with derision and mockery. Debateperverts want you to go thru all their dumb bullshit point by point. There's several descriptors for this - sealioning for example. Mocking them is a more effective rebuttal and it is a rhetorical tool and one you should make use of at times.

I don't think the site will become full of debatebros, because I think you'll realise your mistake and revert it beforehand. But it's gonna be shitty until you do, and it's gonna push some people away.

edit: I apologise for the heated rhetoric. I hold on to my worries, but I should remember that this is just a website, worst case is permanent

It just occurred to me that it's also super disingenuous to tell people to request a new comm to replace the dredge tank, when you've already made a commitment to people who aren't users of this site not to allow a dredge tank like comm to exist.

Unless the picture that's floating around is doctored?

The only response I've seen to that image from an admin, is locking the only thread outside of this 1100 comment post where it was being discussed.

If it's real then that picture implies that no such comm would be allowed to be created.

This is utterly baffling to me

this sucks lol. offensively poor communication and solution for a fake problem.

Any users wanting to suggest a community to replace the tanks, may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net current discussion is here https://hexbear.net/post/3858346 or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.

You may also consider using !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml as a substitute for dunk/dredge tank posts as well

Something I haven't seen mentioned. Roasting assholes can be a great entrance to leftist thought. Imagine I'm a vaguely left individual. I think Dems suck. I hate Republicans. Ive never read even the most basic of theory. I probably don't know theory exists. I see a wacky Twitter Nazi getting roasted in a dredge thread. Awesome. Then you follow that and see more etc etc. eventually you may actually start engaging in leftist ideas more seriously because the roasts do often hint at or explicitly call out actual theory.

If instead the only option is some 5 paragraph effort post dissecting said Nazi via a Marxist lens... Well probably ain't reading that shit.

Honestly glib roasts seem like they'd be more useful or atleast as useful as more complex posts in having offline impact. Which is kinda what the mods seem to think hexbear oughta do.

The edits do seem to indicate that perhaps not all posts to these new coms need huge effort but as is the other major complaint... It's not actually clear. At all.

Anyway I shouldn't even be online right now so I should stop reading this thread and just see what happens.

Shitheads deserve to be dunked on and being civil to the right is a lib move

Changing the dunktank to "Counterpropaganda" is the nerdest move ever

Dude sometimes just wanna shitpost and see reactionaries embarrassing themselves, not read somebody’s materialist thesis about every meme I see. Do what ya gotta do but this is an L for me.

I know I'm just a .ml loser who can't even see the dunk tank because the .ml admins are whiny little baby people, but I think this is a very bad idea. (The closing them part, not the name change)

Hexbear is a reddit clone, not the vanguard party. The not-serious vibe is what makes Hexbear useful, because it can be shown as a replacement to liberal social media. Having a place to point and laugh at reactionaries helps with that purpose since most people never really see that criticism on other websites.

Also: If you remove the low effort posting places, people won't increase their effort, they'll just stop posting. This will damage the site.

The name change is fine (although gossip isnt really a great comm name tbh) but please please pleaaaaaaase reconsider honestly this just feels so dour and depressing. I dont care if it doesnt develop rhetoric or whatever it was at least a place that was a much welcomed sanity check against an increasingly hostile and terrifying world, something that i honestly feel is going to be even more important in the coming years

Dumb decision imo. By all means change the name, but this is just silly.

The name change is a good move once we found out the racist history of dunk tanks but the mods need to take a step back and remember this is just an obscure lefty shit posting forum, it's (probably) not going to be the catalyst for the proletarian revolution that destroys the capitalist class, seizes the means of production, and ushers in a new golden age of peace and human dignity.

It's a place like minded people can get together in a space where we know we won't be shit on for thinking trans people are people, genocide is wrong, capitalism sucks, etc. I don't think that having a comm where we criticize/insult shit takes is negative to the site. If it does stray into attacks on their appearance or other stuff that isn't their terrible takes users are free to remind their fellows that's uncool or report them so the mods can do it. I don't think it's bad to keep focused on more ideological dunks/gossip/takes/etc.

But I'm also a cis white guy so maybe it's my inherent biological need for dunks that's making me say this

Also if you're a mod and you don't like the community you're modding, log off? Quit? Let the users vote on a new mod?

Why are we against "low-effort" posts? That's the bread and butter of a social media site, which is what we are. Shutting off outlets for shitposting isn't going to result in more effort posts--it's just going to result in fewer posts. 100% behind the name change idea, but I think removing the functionality of those comms will hurt the culture and participation level of the site.

Hmm

I don't think dunk tank's purpose can be changed. People want to post shit they dislike to shit all over it and also to get other people to shit all over it and also occasionally to click through and shit all over the other place too.

That's kinda the point. It's weaponising anger as entertainment to generate counter-argument that people don't often see.

If !counterpropaganda is to replace it what is to be the culture of this space if not simply exactly the same culture? If it's to be exactly the same culture then people would have probably liked to get input on what the new name should be as they feel it should adequately reflect that culture. If it's not going to be the same culture, the audience for it is going to be different, because it will not scratch the same itch.

!gossip is again not really telling people what kind of culture the space is intended to have. If it's supposed to 1:1 be dredge tank's culture then the name isn't reflecting that.

In short: You can't change the name of a community with a specific culture without the new name also reflecting that culture. And also you can't change the entire purpose of a community and expect the same audience to like it, they're likely to just go elsewhere for the same fix they used to get.

Personally: Not against name change or new communities. Not sure about completely closing a popular existing community without feedback and can't really tell if the two new ones are supposed to be 1:1 replacements or not due to the name choices suggesting they're supposed to have entirely different cultures.

I probably would have suggested something riffing off "roasting" instead.

Not trying to stir up a shitstorm, but I was a little surprised when it was pointed out that @replaceable is a mod of the dunk tank, considering the fact he doesn't enjoy its' content. I was also surprised that this is how he decided to engage with those he disagreed with. Honestly if this is how you feel about a comm, just don't moderate it instead. I don't know who argued for what behind the scenes, but if this is the general mindset behind the reasoning provided, then jeez. Posting isn't praxis, hexbear is itself a treat.

I gotta say, it's weird to me to moderate a comm full of content one dislikes. I still don't understand the mentality of "I don't like it, therefore no one should be able to interact with it." There's plenty of stuff here I dislike or don't get, but others do, so what's the problem? I don't really see the purpose of the megathread for example, but others do.

The name change is good and I hope there's some formalized process for voting for new names or whatever is decided. I still don't understand wether the rules have been changed or if you're now going to not do that. I really don't understand communicating like this in an announcement-thread about one of the most active comms, when you're a moderator of that comm, that's just not fostering anything good. It'd be pretty weird if I was a dismissive dick in c/internationale or in a thread about rules changes to c/internationale.

Boo! Bad decision!

I'm not against a rename/rebrand, but the entire appeal of the community is that it was low-effort mockery. I'm not going to philosophize about why something is wrong, the entire point was that the stuff there was all the things that weren't worth engaging with. Call it c/heckling or something

is this gonna lead to one single person having more fun do you reckon

These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.

Names the new community "gossip"

I know this is intended as positive change and I agree with the reasoning behind it, but we're just in a similar situation as before, swapping out a comm name that could have racist intention with one that could have sexist intention.

i could take or leave dunk tank and had dredge tank blocked but i agree with those saying this is a bit of an overly serious direction to the point of being kinda silly. also gossip isn't a good comm name.

Why does it seem to me like the aggression and toxicity seems to be coming from the people who (vehemently) hate the dunks more than the people who support the (supposedly) toxic environment?

i wasn't sure if I wanted to join the struggle session, but I feel like I have to get my words out.

we have taken demographic polls of this site. we have pronouns, we have an em_poc comm and we have had struggle sessions about both of these in the past.

the gall to decide that our queer users are giving off 'cishet vibes'. the gall to decide that our POC users are giving off 'white vibes'.

this is genuinely disgusting behaviour, and I cannot believe the admin team let this fly, let alone decided it was worth adding to the argument. I am aware of what other info has come out - this point still stands regardless. why has the admin team signed off on this argument? why wasn't this shot down immediately? why was it ever entertained as a valid argument in the first instance?

this is the most terminally online shit, dawg lol

I should also clarify: it is clear to me that this change is well-intended. The imperial core has never been more ripe for the establishment of actual thought, analysis, and organization efforts. These should ABSOLUTELY be encouraged at every step, to anyone at any point in their political journey. Now IS the time to get out and organize.

But I really, really, really need somewhere to fucking decompress every now and then.

I don't mean to rub salt in the wound, especially when your edited body text is very nice to see, but can we agree the names are an issue, when even the mods can't figure out which comm is for what?

So it looks like most of the userbase is against this decision? Are you going to consult with the people using this website, or are you just going to ignore us?

the year is 2034. hexbear has 20 users left. the final struggle session is about to begin to TRULY decide if hexbear dot net is the debate forum of the central committee organising group to diseminate Marxism to the masses, or a silly meme website about a picture of a pig shitting on its own testicles (very funny image, look it up some time, trust me) that spun off of a political subreddit spun off from a podcast of some guys who said the occasional funny thing

This is the stupidest struggle session in HexBear history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent struggle sessions in HexBear history.

This is literally one thousand nine hundred and eighty four

Anyway I liked the dunk tank and dredge tank. Change the name if you want but low effort posts are nice to me. I don't come to hexbear for education, besides book recommendations. I enjoy hexbear as a shit posting forum

Site works fine for a year

It's time to set this place on fire to keep them on their toes

And simultaneously with this crusade against white cishet mindset, you delete poverty finance.

Really do be feeling that downwardly-mobile professional class tbh

Rename the dunk tank, fine, good. This generally sucks though. The separation of dunk/dredge felt bad as it was, why even bother calling it c/gossip when it's just going to be c/shit_musk_says

I think it would go a long way for all the people involved making these decisions to post an actual cogent reason for the moderation. Rule 8 wasn't exactly clear why it needed to be there. We defined the problem, that people were posting literal whos, but we never heard why that is a problem. I see some small attempts at trying to say it hurts the site in some way, but nobody can describe the harm.

Controversy over Rule 8 turns into a new comm. But now people are mad that the new comm is popular and again, it's somehow harming the site or leftism or rhetoric.

There only needs to be one comm for this. It's all the same thing. Mocking Rob Reiner for posting cringe isn't accomplishing more than mocking pepehitler42069 on reddit. Again, it's like there is someone with an idea of how all this matters and is important and needs to be changed but can't articulate why.

Here are my guesses:

1. Someone wants the comm to be a compilation of the day's hottest takes but is thwarted by images of pepehitler88 on reddit being cringe. They want to use the comm as twitter news, to see what all the big dogs and they don't care about the little stuff.
2. Someone thinks that critiquing twitter posts is some kind of agitprop and not critiquing power (aka people with follower) is ruining praxis. The election of burger king exacerbated this as high-level users saw it as an opportunity to agitate.
3. Someone hates twitter posts, they hate any post that isn't super serious leftist literature except for community in-jokes and power users posting pee-pee poo-poo
4. There's not much else going on so mods are trying to solve a problem that doesn't need solving. We're just keeping busy, trying to find some grievance to salve for our users.