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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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  • This is my thoughts that I have transpired:

    1. This drama has resolved two pressing contradictions: whether Hexbear should be a shit-posting site or a more serious and political site and whether Hexbear should be a space for dunks or a comfy space. From this point forward, Hexbear will be a shitposting site and Hexbear will be a space for dunks. You can't have pretensions about Hexbear being serious and have some incognito admin create an admin account and ban their mod account. This is shitposting territory. It's shitposting par excellence. And as for the contradiction between a space for dunks or a comfy space, the space for dunks has won out. The people want their dunk tank back and in a poor attempt to argue otherwise, the admins more or less misgendered and done the racial equivalent of misgendering many people. Is this not an admission that Hexbear is not going to be a comfy space but a space for dunks? The admins dunked on the users for being cringey cishet white dudes and the users dunked back at the admins for being wildly out of touch dipshits with their heads up their collective asses.
    2. The megathreadization of Hexbear will accelerate. Throughout this dumpster fire, I lurked at the various megathreads up (news, trans, disabled, em_poc, general) and the drama was almost completely absent. I feel very sorry for the trans users who have to put up with this shit because if they had just stayed at the trans mega, they wouldn't have seen any of this shit. Trans users who browse outside the trans mega got misgendered by the admins as cishet white dudes while trans users who stayed in the trans mega and mostly hang out at the trans matrix are blissfully unaware. What's going to happen to the behavior of trans people from this point forward? You can apply the same shit to all the megas. People are just going to migrate to the megas, and non-mega Hexbear will slide closer to closer to the character of the dunk tank. I suppose it's a bit of an open secret, but the various megas have been better than general Hexbear for a good while. Most seriousposting is done in the news and trans megas. Trans, em_poc, and disabled megas are good safe spaces. General Hexbear is just for cheap dunks where you'll occasionally catch strays, and if you don't have a thick enough skin, you'll eventually burn out. In this sense, the dunk tank perfectly encapsulates general Hexbear and to clamp on the dunk tank is to clamp on general Hexbear. The dunk tank is general Hexbear and general Hexbear is the dunk tank. Far from clamping down dunk tank culture, the poorly thought out actions of the admins have only accelerated the dunkification of Hexbear. Something something dialectics.
    3. Given that the completely deranged alts turn out to be done by Melina per the modlog, I don't see any possible justification for /c/fakenews, a comm that many people already dislike for various reasons, still existing. That comm is understood by this website's community to be the brainchild of Melina. The fact that one of the recent prolific posters turn out to be another one of fae's alts only reinforces this point, and I wouldn't be surprised if the mod team outside of Dirt_owl are alts as well. Here's my advice to the admins who have taken a tremendous hit in their credibility. You could start regaining that credibility by getting rid of /c/fakenews, a move that many people have been clamoring for months now. Melina wishing that aaaaaaadjsf would get murdered should be the time for fae's presence, including fae's comm, to be completely purged from Hexbear. Or is the shitposting nature of /c/fakenews a complete fit with Hexbear's shitposting culture, meaning that it will never be removed? This is in dispute. See further comment.

    • I legitimately do not understand what I did to get death threats. I interacted positively with them and even recommended some local food when they were asking about hot dogs a few days ago. I think the only "mean" thing I did was say that the fakenews community was not serious and irony poisoned when responding to one of their alt accounts which was saying vile things to other users (which I didn't know was theirs, it was an alt account) and that seemed to set them off massively

    • Given that the completely deranged alts turn out to be done by Melina per the modlog, I don't see any possible justification for /c/fakenews, a comm that many people already dislike for various reasons, still existing. That comm is understood by this website's community to be the brainchild of Melina. The fact that one of the recent prolific posters turn out to be another one of fae's alts only reinforces this point, and I wouldn't be surprised if the mod team outside of Dirt_owl are alts as well

      I think I should ask to be removed as a mod from /C/Fakenews. I asked to be added as mod as a joke, and never really did anything mod related because I don't actually feel comfortable being a mod (I don't feel like I should be a mod because I'm not always on the ball as far as understanding whats going on with Drama).

      • Hey, would you be okay with us holding a vote on whether or not c/fakenews should be closed?

        Edit: voting has been delayed: we have decided to give the struggle session more breathing room.

      • I don't feel like I should be a mod because I'm not always on the ball as far as understanding whats going on with Drama

        tbh I think that is a good quality for (some) mods to have. Understanding drama means you are part of it in some way. It's good to have people that stay out of it and just step in when things get heated, no matter the context

    • Idk, I think our trans communities here are pretty comfy

    • I hate c/fakenews. I've had it blocked for months. However, I think that removing any comm right now would be a fairly serious misstep.

    • This is a very authoritatively stated comment, which sure sounds like a triumph of the posting proletariat over an anti-fun admin cabal.

      Literally zero people on the mod team, admin team, or anyone else who we have talked to has expressed a desire to make the site a more serious place. We're not out to kill shitposting. All of us are shitposters. We're changing the name of just a couple of the many shitposting comms on the site, because the previous names had racist origins. We also wanted to adjust some of the rules for these communities to be more welcoming to users from minority groups, based on their input.

      Given the fact that this all turned into a truly wild struggle session, I'm not gonna be making any major moves at the moment other than the name changes.

      For right now, please use c/gossip in place of the_dunk_tank, and c/counterpropaganda in place of the_dredge_tank. These were intended as 1:1 renames of the previous comms, first and foremost.

    • The "megathreadization" kinda sounds like a description of various separate communities developing, which was what we sought to do back when we split up main. We imagined it would be individual comms, but instead it's individual mega threads. That's kinda cool honestly. I see it as a positive.

      • Yes, they're just new communities being formed. It's an organic development.

        The only bad thing I see is what happens if the megas completely "absorb" their target demographic leaving general Hexbear without that demographic. What if the trans mega is so successful every trans user here just use the mega? This isn't a good example since we have a critical mass of trans people, but I could see the process happening with the disabled and em_poc megas.

        • On the other hand it might have an inverse effect too. The trans mega is very active, which I imagine draws people in. Likewise with the news mega.
          Some years ago I decided to revitalize a then (basically) dead neurodiverse comm by posting to it frequently. This lead to it seeing more users.
          We are like moths to a light, drawn to the sweet lure of


          I don't know though, I'm just saying that's possible too.

    • Could you please edit out that Melina made the alts, it was not them rather an outside wrecking source either the HexbearHates lemmyclubtroll or db0 as he leaked private communications a la the matrix screenshot of me

      • I am simply going off the modlog, which is public record. I am not privy towards any private chat or screenshot or DM and frankly, I don't want to be. And as of now, I don't see Beluga being unbanned or given an apology since the public modlog as of now still says that Beluga is banned and that "Beluga/Melina/dsplayer/etc was behind the alts and is not allowed back."

        If it wasn't actually Melina, then Beluga needs to be unbanned then. Melina/Beluga needs to be exonerated and given a public apology. Let the record accurately and truthfully show that Beluga wasn't behind these alts.

        I will strikethrough the third part of my post, and say that it's in dispute.

        • Yea I know it's confusing I'm sorry.

          Beluga was temp banned for DM harassment, then the ban was changed to permanent when they were suspected of doing the alts but the ban reason was reverted to the previous reason as there is no way to prove who did the wrecker/harass alts.

          • I don't see Beluga's permanent ban being rescinded into a temporary ban in the public modlog. And regardless of Beluga's DM harassment, it's still fucked up for the admins to say Beluga had an alt that wished aaaaaaadjsf was murdered, meaning that a public apology ought to be given. Let the record accurately and truthfully show that Beluga wasn't behind these alts.

            • It was the opposite, one admin gave Beluga a temp ban for DM harassment, a second admin changed it to a perm ban with the reasoning that Beulga was making alts to harass, and then went back and changed the perm ban reasoning to DM harassment. This happened in a relatively short period of time but you are correct that jumping to conclusions is not helpful at all

693 comments