Remote View

1mo ago

WTF is happening on Hexbear?

Hexbear's new head of operations just dropped, and their way of dealing with the fallout of their last struggle session is to hand bans out like candy to their concerned and disillusioned users while throwing out "epic" quips like insecure teenagers along the way coupled with their communication (and seemingly contempt) towards their own userbase which isn't helping their allegations at all and the revelations that were learned about Hexbear's moderators and admins from their most recent struggle session.

The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.

224 comments

To prevent Hexbear's internal struggle from spilling over to here and derailing this thread as a whole, we will be locking it. A lot has been said already in the comments and we feel like we are involved in Hexbear too little to a) contribute positively and b) moderate reports that require knowledge on Hexbear history.
I think I can safely say that we hope Hexbear manages to overcome their internal issues again.

Late-stage irony poisoning
In addition to the first ban wave which was partially a bit or something cuz people requested to be banned so TC69 used a random number generator but also entries in the modlog that have the RNG stuff weren't people who requested it??, some of our admins are now banning their alts as a bit to start drama, other obvious alts are coming out to call it out and continue more drama, there's more but...... you get the idea :/
Idk, this all started in an attempt to make our site more serious by replacing the_{dunk,dredge}_tank with higher effort alternatives and now that that didn't go through it's all a joke now
Honestly I may log off for a while too, is not rly that funny to me :/ People on this site have literally fed me and my friend, kept us out of overdraft status on bank accts, I learned so much from reading stuff here or books I learned about from here, people have been housed cuz of this site, someone nearby legit offered to take care of one of my irl friend's pets when he was homeless for a bit, I met new friends here that I talk to every day. It's not a political party but it's not just a giant shitpost either, so idk where this is going :/
I'm sure this looks even worse from the outside
, but it's okay, site has survived worse
Like FuckyWucky mentioned, there is a lot of talking going on behind the scenes and no one outside rly knows what is going on sooooo..... we see what happens I guess
- this all started in an attempt to make our site more serious
  ...why? Lemmygrad was right there in the corner.
  Hexbear always gave me a party vibe, Lemmygrad - a library.
  
  the admins seem to have wanted HB to be more serious for a long time now, well before federation.
  LG is also not a left unity space the way HB is. it would only be a suitable fit for some (admittedly likely most) of our users.
  
  Hexbears seem averse to posting here. When cheap dunking posts were banned, they created another tank comm instead of posting to SRS or SUS. Even now that the tanks are shut, there haven't been any bears that've posted to lemmygrad's equivalent comms.
  
  hexbear is deliberately left unity, grad isn't
  
  I'll party at the library.
  
  Hexbear has a bunch of anarchist users, for one thing.
  
  Idk tbh, regardless I feel like they don't have to be contradictory
  I come to this site for the shitposts and the genuine discussion and political education resources
  I should also mention the proposal post later also had statements from mods who said they proposed the idea cuz they thought "dunk" culture has "cishet white vibes", which...... idk, is maybe fair, Hexbear is rly white sometimes and I would hate for people to be put off by that (good reason to be put off ofc). It wasn't rly elaborated upon though
- hehehe
  Tbh I just ate some decent food (after not rly eating anything for a few days cuz of external factors™ in my kinda bad life-situation rn), pet a cat, read your reply in the struggle sesh megathread, feeling less bad about the whole thing
  Really appreciate you genuinely just clarifying what happened including what the rest of the admin team saw, I feel like most of this is just rly bad communication primarily from admins/mods but also the rest of the users (sucked seeing Carcosa's decision get completely torn apart so badly that they tried to resign before the userbase rejected that lol, I hope they not too
  about it especially cuz how much they do for our site regardless of this one thing). It's still been a total mess but it's nothing irreconcilable or unfixable
  10/10 perfect bad-good-good-bad bit
  , I hope your recovery from food poisoning is going well
  
  Long live the cabal :3
- Honestly almost all of the response by leadership vs users is temp bans, so I'm thinking actual damages aren't even that bad? But the blood is up so maybe cooling down while whatever behind the scenes stuff gets figured out might be good.
  
  Was a long time HB member since the subreddit days. Autistic, black, nb, so none of the accusations of cishet white male vibes applied to me - that was annoying. The flippant dismissal and joking around with this entirely irony poisoned energy with mods still doing bits and lying about shit was straight up aggravating. Ate the perma because like a few people there, I don't think I could trust the mods/admins after that. It's not a high stakes thing for me but that means it's also low enough stakes that I really don't want to deal with that attitude any more.
  
  Yeah we ~~probably~~definitely all need to relax lol, regardless there is def criticism to be made about this whole behind-the-scenes adminning thing that developed after our chaotic first year needing to..... idk... have more democracy again? After this whole thing especially
  I just saw a bunch of people get unbanned now so idk, hard to keep track of it all
  I'm gonna go, like....... make a meal and do and think about something other than niche web forum drama now lol
- They reversed a few bans, but not mine. So apparently something I said was particularly objectionable. I'm not sure what though.
  
  I figured it out: It's people who were banned with the haha funny bit reason when it was pointed out they hadn't actually requested a random ban and were clearly just banned out of spite.
  This does seem a lot like the mods wanted to obfuscate the bans of people being critical

I feel the same. Ironically the mod's attempts to make the site more "serious" is probably just going to do the opposite. I've spoken at length about this before, but you don't get people to learn and discuss leftist theory by insisting it is always serious business and you aren't allowed to joke around or acknowledge how fucked up our capitalist society is.
It'll just chase people away, which is a shame, though that might be a "win" as far as the mods are concerned. There's plenty of "serious" leftist groups out there with half a dozen members with their own very specific interpretation of theory with 0 fun allowed, but I can't really think of anywhere else quite like Hexbear. I don't want to see them become yet another insular "leftist" space that is actively hostile to people who don't take themselves as seriously as the world's most dedicated Internet Leftists.
I'm probably overreacting though, as others have said, this isn't the first time mods on Hexbear have gone full reddit mod and won't be the last.
- Hard agree. The fact that its fun is what I've always liked best about hexbear. It's easy to find serious stuff. Its good to have a left space to laugh about it
  
  I recently made a post asking why people joined us and like most of them said they stayed because of the shitpost vibes. Making us into a serious only space would be a very, very bad idea if we want to keep being Hexbear.

I am once again asking a bunch of fringe online leftists to stop being so delulu as to think themselves as the new international vanguard ffs
- This too. The serious platform shit is not happening. You scroll down to the bottom of Hexbear, click a link and you get a picture of a pig pooping on it's own balls.
  The entire space is literally synonymous with that. The Pig Poop Balls Vanguard isn't gonna be a thing.
  
  Yeah it's crazy to try and make Hexbear ultra serious when the whole reason many people even found and like us is because we made fun of terrible right-wingers and making light of the hell world we live in.

As someone with a 2 year old account, I have no fucking clue. What started out as misgivings over two comms being replaced has metastasized into whatever the fuck this is. It seems like there are contradictions that had existed since /r/chapotraphouse that were never fully resolved. I don't know exactly what because I only occasionally lurked /r/chapotraphouse way back in the day. Mix in all these 2 month alts of people who claim to have been around since /r/chapotraphouse and it comes off as a bizarre mess. It really does feel like people with 5+ year old grudges beefing at this point.
Anyways, this is yet another case of the news mega being the best part of Hexbear.
- Anyways, this is yet another case of the news mega being the best part of Hexbear.
  Facts. I only really go on Hexbear for the news mega, I'd personally don't want to lose it because a bunch of admins wanted to make Hexbear their own fiefdom.
  EDIT: Even though I rarely go on the TheDunkTank if at all, I do hope they get their comm reinstated.
  
  Realistically, if we somehow lose the news mega, we'll just move to lemmygrad.
  And the news mega actually tries to implement some form of democratic centralism:
  https://hexbear.net/comment/5400134
  https://hexbear.net/comment/5426732
  It turns out people are less likely to get mad at major changes if they're actually the one submitting and voting on those changes.
  
  News communities from Hexbear are something that I should enjoy a lot. I don't want to lose 'em
- Yeah, I appreciate the occasional dunk, but I'm basically only going to use the news mega anymore. Big fat unforced L from the admins/mods

It seems they're just trying to memory hole it now.
The newest statement claims everyone was unbanned, which isn't true. The sockpuppet being used for the new post claims that it was all drama over the AlaskaBall misgendering and banning, which isn't true. So here's my extremely biased version of events(They banned me for opposing their bullshit, thus creating this bias.)
The mods wanted to rename the dunk tank, due to the racist origins, but due to federation reasons renaming communities doesn't work properly, so they locked it and the dredge tank entirely and replaced them with poorly defined pseudo-replacements.
People question this choice and are given a mod statement that misgenders most of the website at the same time, and contains a self-harm reference without a CW.
People question this post and the admin that acted as the mouthpiece steps down. The thread is locked and a new one is made.
Basically no one wanted that and most people want the admin back. The admin comes back.
AlaskaBall bans themself from a new alt, and then when questioned on it, misgenders themself. This was the misunderstanding element of this.
Stuff blows up massively now, since an admin seems to have done something very transphobic and uncool.
Another thread is made, where dissenting voices are banned for three days. One of these bans is reversed and no longer shows in the mod log.
TC69 does a "joke" and posts offering random bans to replies, she then bans people who don't reply to that post with the same message.
This is around when this thread is made.
Then another thread, using a brand new admin alt, claims that the bans have been reversed (they haven't)
https://hexbear.net/u/DengistDonnieDarko
https://hexbear.net/u/morte
https://hexbear.net/u/chair
https://hexbear.net/u/TerribleHands
https://hexbear.net/u/REgon
And the rest (me) remain banned. Only four of the banned users are actually unbanned.
People have already pointed out that the bans haven't actually been removed.
Overall, the Hexbear admin team shoved a stick into their own bike wheel and are blaming he/hims, despite the obvious fact that can be seen by checking the pronouns of those linked users (and me).
edit: I'm unbanned now
- Sorry, trying to do the unbans as fast as I can find them.
- I’m barely able to parse this message because it sounds fucking ridiculous. What the fuck is going on
  
  I mean I do suck at writing summaries of stuff.

Same thing that destroyed leftypol years ago: immature mods, cliques and egos.
- man why are leftist spaces online like this? feels like they're too busy shooting themselves on the foot constantly to get their shit together while fascism and reich-wingers are taking over everything.
  at least this isn't a problem in the grad from what i've seen (and hopefully never will)
  
  man why are leftist spaces online like this?
  They don't start off this way. People usually start-up communities out of genuine passion, but as time goes on the only people willing to babysit/moderate the community are people who spend a lot of time on the internet already. Eventually, the whole mod team becomes people who do nothing else but chat about the community/forum. As they reinforce each other, in their minds the importance of their community/forum grows. No longer is it a fun internet site, now it's serious business, and that means that bad actors want to destroy. Then they give themselves carte blanche to "protect" the community. Naturally, with that kind of mindset anyone who disagrees with them is a potential threat, everyone who posts could be a bad actor in disguise, pretending so as to gain the community's trust.
  What do you get? An insular, paranoid community, resistant to change, distrustful of new people, ruled by a mod clique with their own agenda.
  I don't know enough about Hexbear to make a judgment, those are just my general observations, but from little I've seen I think it is happening there too. The whole "I wasn't lying to you users! It was all a sneaky ruse!" bit is actually sus, feels like damage control after being found out. The HB mods have clearly made their decision without the community and now they're trying to find a way to frame the change so that it doesn't piss off the userbase and result in them losing power or worse losing the userbase over whom they lord over. I haven't seen an apology to the effect of "maybe we were wrong to delete the community" or "maybe we should have consulted the userbase", it's all "sorry we handled it poorly" and "I'm sorry we're bad at communicating!" Very disingenuous.
  
  feds infiltrate and wreck so we can't share organizing advice
  haha jk /s unless...
  
  If there's a silver lining, I don't think this is limited to leftist spaces, or even to online ones.
- Leftypol is still kicking well enough, all the spinoff chans are mostly dead as far as I'm aware
  
  Leftypol is still kicking well enough
  Nah, it's a shit site. Run over by incels and sex/dating threads, plus too much porn/nsfw content. Some users were really adamant to allow porn on the site, even though one can find porn literally anywhere on the internet. Just goes to show the priorities of the people there. All the good posters are gone.

My take?
It's all dumb. Admins didn't communicate effectively, made changes without making most of the community aware of it on a timescale that should have been days; as most of these discussions should be. A good chunk of the community is irate. Random bans are a method of obfuscation, all though I am doubting that's actually what is happening here.
Regardless, it is a website and we have this space here.
TC69 immediately sets off red flags for me. It's one thing to return and welcome yourself back; but the passive language they're using suggests that they view themselves as some sort of cult of personality figure already, reinforcing the thoughts some have about that concern. The "random number ban" thing is literally just a flex of power, joking or not. I've seen that happen so, so many times in communities. It's the same thing as "Who wants to get a bop on the head from my baton?". Sure, it's a joke.
There are already quite a few complaining about moderation style from times past and upon immediate return they make a comment on how the "website has improved" yet still needs an entire overhaul/COC. REgon, usa_suxxx is banned, all though unsure if that is changed now. Also, the thread was locked on that discussion.
It's all just red flags. Maybe it'll be a good thing, maybe not. To me, Hexbear did a really good job already on cracking down on shitlibs and misogynistic fucks. Where the hell is this rampant offenses occurring? I don't doubt we have some idiots wander in and that things were worse before, but this is being treated like we have an active crisis in Hexbear. Which, I don't really get.
If I'm wrong, I'll be happy to be wrong and I'll be more understanding of TC69's more heavy-handed approach to moderation. But is there like some mass DM-harassment campaign I'm unaware of?

Everything under heaven is in chaos; the situation is excellent.

I'm not familiar with what goes on there, so as an outsider, the fact that in skimming, some of the replies make more sense to me than the admin/mod posts doesn't seem like a great sign for their leadership. Comes across like they're acting based on vibes and don't want to provide substantive examples to back up what they're doing.

I don't get much of it either. My guess is there is a lot of talk going on behind the scenes.
I don't think a purge right now is necessary especially given that the user count is pretty stagnant.
It was all working fine. Splitting dunk tank into dredge tank was a good idea but idk why they removed and renamed it all together.
- They said it was because “dunk tank” has racist origins, which it does, but idk I felt it was pretty excessive anyway. Almost nobody alive today even knows that and those that do are aware that it’s a term that hasn’t been used for over a century. It’s not even the same game anymore.
  
  Yea no one was thinking about that. Blacklist, whitelist stuff all over again .
  And it's not clear whether it's even about its "racist origins" that's just the reason provided.
  
  Yeah I wouldn't have guessed that at all. My only familiarity with the idea of a dunk tank is white people doing it to each other voluntarily as some kind of fair/fundraiser thing. I always thought the idea of it seemed kind of sadistic (not that I knew the word sadistic back then). But I'm taking it to imagine hexbear's dunk tank is similar to the shitreactionaryssay that lemmygrad has, where it's posting takes of people who aren't even present, and in that sort of context, it seems more like throwing fruit at a picture of someone than anything akin to putting down someone who is trapped there and has to take it. There's also "dunking on" in the basketball meaning, which is sometimes used to refer to putting someone down on social media, like ratio'ing a person on twitter. That one is more directly humiliating, but doesn't use the term "dunk tank" and so unless the basketball meaning also has racist origins I'm not aware, we're looking at phrasing that can quickly overlap and could be confusing to people to take as inherently bad or racist to use.
  If it was just a name change and it was an easy thing to change the name of without messing up links and existing activity and so on, I'd say, whatever, make it a name they don't feel icky about. But the internet often doesn't function that way. Screwing over logistics of user activity for the sake of feeling better about a name most people won't even know the real origins of seems like an odd decision, to say the least.
  
  Does that make the dunk tank racist though? I mean, it could be interpreted in a revolutionary way: what once was a tool for humiliating black people is now being utilized against rightful targets, who are largely the people who would've been throwing the balls in the past. A device created for oppression repurposed into an instrument of justice for the oppressed.
  idk I'm not black so take that with a grain of salt. A simple name change would've been fine though.

Concerning

I know I'm an admin myself and I do try to take it somewhat seriously but if I ever find myself in a situation like that and talking like that I will probably log off for good lol
I don't have a hexbear account and never visit the place so I can't add a meaningful comment about the situation but it seems like constructive talk was never an option

Based only on reading this thread I find this all very confusing and unnecessary, but this is the sort of strange niche drama that only small independent message boards can offer, just not the same on corporate social media, sorta gotta love it.
- Facebook could never provide this niche primo drama

I'm honestly impressed they thought the changes would be well received. Aren't those communities the nost active in the site?

Feels like the admin/mod team is trying to tank the site ffs. Just making completely out of touch incoherent decisions behind closed doors, getting mad that people push back on popular communities being closed and just calling us all cis white chauvinists for wanting these comms, and then mass banning people for criticizing them and making jokes of the bans to obfuscate what they’re doing. It’s exhausting, I just want my cozy leftist social space but instead I’m at the whimsy of power tripping internet mods who think they’re reforming our shitposts into the vanguard one top down decision at a time
Edit: it seems like things are settling but good lord some of the admins were on some fuck shit. Such a small disagreement turned into such a huge blow up with weird cross instance admin intrigue and transphobic adjacent shit. I thought I was terminally online…

No mods no masters

Oh now we're cookin with gas
EDIT 4: I'm locking the thread. I tried my best to give some decent paths forward amidst the chaos. Someone else can deal with this.
It will blow over soon enough, it always does
- Not sure if I saw many paths forward being presented lol, but ok. I'll be interested to see how it shakes out...from a safe distance I think
  
  I've seen this same Admin say stuff very similar to this like 4 years in the past, its somehow kind of nostalgic in some strange terrible way lol
  Honestly I'm here for it at this point, TC69 is a GOAT

Me? I'm not really sure what to think. I didn't even notice it was happening at first because it was regulated to a single megathread.
I do however think it a little over the top to completely condemn Hexbear over this. This is a problem that can be addressed pretty easily and it seems like the admins are trying to. It looks like there were some shitty mods that started shit, and the admins are trying to unban people and fix it? I think I saw that TC69 is deleting her account?
I'm not trying to say it isn't shitty what happened, but like, I don't think it's unfixable and an indication that the site is some kind of evil rotten mess like some people are making out. Our users as a whole are good people and it kind of sucks seeing them tarred and feathered because of a few assholes.
- Agreed. Hexbear isn't bad nor is it full of bad people.
  From a few comments below, there are a few unresolved threads left which is worrying for another bullshit-event of this caliber.

I'm sure they will get through it, they have up until now

I really enjoy hexbear but I pretty much only engage with it through the lens of shitposting.
I'll probably just ignore hex for a bit til they get it all sorted over there.
Probably still check out games tho

The mass line has relevance especially in a situation like this.

I sure wouldn’t know: I was permabanned two months ago, by an admin who apparently was de-admined about a month ago 🤷

ive been too busy posting in the trans megathread to be aware of much

With great posting power comes great struggle sessions

Reminds me of some of the CTH subs some years before reddit's horseshit blanket sub bans. Hopefully it settles down.

I looked at their modlog and they swapped out almost all admins a few days ago
Extremely suspect
Edit: 27 days ago, they removed 10 admins
They also added all the new ones there, I saw it yesterday, but today, I only see the adding of 2 new admins there. Maybe certain modlog entries expire over time, or when more modlog entries are added (this would explain the whole "ban-trolling" bs, filling up the modlog to hide information)
- That's not strange. Hexbear regularly swaps admin accounts out for privacy reasons. It's not a practice that I'm particularly fond of, but it is what it is.
  Also, this whole situation is bonkers.
  
  I like to make new accounts every so often as a way of obscuring my online presence. It doesn't completely make it impossible for someone to put the pieces together and dox me, but it makes that job more difficult. I assume this is what the admins are doing, too. So a bunch of admins getting removed and a bunch of new accounts being made admin aren't suspect to me at all.

Yeah, I haven't got the faintest idea. Didn't even really have any idea there was a situation beyond the dunk comms getting the boot. Not a fan of situations, or being involved directly in them.

Don't worry about it, this is hexbear stuff, keep moving

224 comments