I know it was originally a spin off of the chapotraphouse subreddit but I don’t know much else. Is it it still affiliated with the podcast? How has it grown etc? Why was the subreddit closed etc.
Give me the lore, baby
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It started as a good subreddit. I was the only actual leftist on the subreddit though.
In the beggining there was a dope ass bear
The sub started as an unofficial sub for the pod. Over time it became a focal point for the " dirtbag left", unapologetically hostile and uncivil leftists who wnated to name names and apply blame where it belonged instead of playing the normal civility politics game. It was initially boosted by hope for the bernie campaign and then became a kind of maladaptive group therapy thing.
The sub culture was “all posting is good posting” and we posted a lot. We were the second or third most active sub by post velocity, in roughly the same bracket as the nba sub with millions of members. That made the sub extremely visible beyond it’s membership numbers. We also gained a notorious reputation for being bernie bros when the dems were going hard on discrediting bernie’s street level movement.
And when people would come on to the sub to complain at us we’d bully them ruthlessly.
All of this was embarassing to reddit. One of the far and away most active subs were a bunch of cruel leftist assholes who loudly supported bernie and were mean to everyone. Spez is a nazi, reddit is a psyop, and libs and fash alike are delicate in the face of critique, so we became the specter haunting reddit.
Seriously people were so fucking mad the subexisted. We were constantly accused of brigading although i don’t think we did much. The usual tactic was to @ shitheads to lure them in to the cth sub and then crucify them.
Evetually the admins quarantined the sub on some bullshit excuse, along with most of the other left subs. But that wasn’t enough to stop the red and black menace, so when /r/thedonald finally did enough terrorism to force reddit’s hand they banned all the left subs at the same time on bs pretenses.
That’s what eventually spurred the creation of this site.
so when /r/thedonald finally did enough terrorism to force reddit’s hand they banned all the left subs at the same time on bs pretenses.
IIRC; The Donald was closed months before that by the TheDonald mods, since they moved to their own Reddit spinoff. You could only view posts, but not publish anything. So it was the opposite, they closed the lefty subs and then closed the inactive TheDonald to look evenhanded.
I did not know that!
The bullshit excuse was “calls to violence” against slave owners who have been dead for hundreds of years. It was “John Brown did nothing wrong” that got us quarantined, right?
I think we still have parental rights on Matt Christman
CHAZ deserves a place on the list
Historical bit: Shoutout to
and the Kerryposters as well! I forget if the kerryposters were just mega-shitposters or actual wreckers, but the Silver legion guys (guy? I don’t know how many there actually were) were so fucking melodramatic about their wrecking attempts. Some of their self-aggrandizing quotes are still used as site taglines today!OMG the Silver Legion !! , that was great ! what a fun little period in Hexbear history…
My favorite one was when they gave a Hexbear apocalypse date prediction and then the site actually crashed on the date they gave
Oh god yeah those guys were great, that time they pretended that that PSL member who publicly left was one of them in disguise was also pretty funny. though it’s a shame she left because she seemed pretty cool
The Kerryposters were most definitely wreckers, and absurdly persistent ones at that.
I laugh every time I see the term kerryposting. Idk why lol
Can anyone give me a quick non-biased rundown on the ‘vegan struggle session’?
that occurred after chapochat became hexbear, before that there was a trans struggle session.
I remember it all started because some vegans shitposted in c/food about how to cook a dog and some people took the posts too seriously until it affected all the site
It was specifically that they kept posting variations of it until it got a rise out of people. That’s also a lot of why indigenous practices became such a touchstone in the fight. Because someone finally replied to those posts that their culture actually did traditionally eat dogs and that was the spark that caught.
deleted by creator
I’m naive, or stupid, or something. I thought we were making fun of you people that were unwilling to eat dog meat and I may have accidentally helped give that particular struggle session some good momentum.
Without going too deep down the rabbithole (because doing so risks re-igniting the whole thing), vegans basically said standard vegan type things about how eating meat is morally indefensible, and people who ate meat got very angry about it, and people on both sides engaged in argumentative tactics that were bad and offensive and got the other side very angry. It lasted like several days I think, across several threads, and led to a lot of mods, admins, and even devs burning out on this site, and even now there are still a lot of hard feelings about it on both sides.
Edit: I should probably clarify that while vegan struggle sessions had always been a thing here and there, this one was precipitated by an attempt to lifeboat the VeganCircleJerk subreddit, which was full of users who were very outspoken about veganism, often in ways that even many vegans would find abrasive.
Alright I’ll have a go.
The CTH subreddit got quarantined. Partly for being a leftist subreddit that was revolutionary and blasting off in popularity, and partly because it was run like a crack house and its userbase behaved like that’s exactly what it was. This was hilarious and partially responsible for its popularity, but also not so good when it comes to placating admins. This of course gave them pretty easy excuses to come down on it.
The quarantine didn’t work however, quarantines on reddit are supposed to kill subreddits. They’re supposed to stop growing and they’re supposed to go into a decline spiral that leads to them eventually just fizzling out. For CTH this was not occurring, it continued to grow albeit at a slower pace. Only a ban could stop it.
Many reasons are given for the ban, “slave owners should be killed” is the main one. I don’t think it matters too much what the exact reason was because they wanted to do it and would have found anything to excuse it.
The ban came unexpectedly and the subreddit was not prepared. A very hasty lifeboat was set up on discord which turned into a shit show for various reasons because discord always turns into a shitshow.
Then Chapo.Chat was born. Eventually people decided to rename it Hexbear because association with the podcast was hurting initiatives to reach out to people, many of which didn’t want to be associated with the podcast. Thus the name Hexbear was born, which worked out really because Chapo.Chat already used Hexbear as its logo, very little change was necessary.
The site started out pretty much just like r/CTH, utter chaos and a lot of emotions that probably could have led to it being closed down if various people weren’t convinced to just continue the long march and pushing on. It mellowed out considerably over time.
The name Hexbear itself literally just comes from the “Look at this dope ass bear” meme that was extremely popular on the subreddit.
extremely popular
Revisionism, it was a minor bit.
basically sequestered to sorting by new lmao
God that bear really is dope. Been a while since I’ve seen it
i absolutely did not think we were gonna get banned until we did. I was making john brown post and saying BAN US YOU COWARDS. and then they DID.
Hexagons are the optimal shape for stacking many bears
You forgot the part where beatnick made the post that called the discord server the literal vanguard lmao
What happened there?
Discord had some rows and people got antsy, beatnik made a post where the only thing I remember was calling the discord ark after the reddit ban the literal vanguard and something like comparing this to bolsheviki in exile or something, quite the exaggeration and it coincided with banning what would later become the Kerryposters I think
From an early age, young Hex showed a strong interest in the arts. Young Hex focused primarily on architectural representations, but their style was very awkward and stilted. Instead of progressing, they copied their works from nineteenth century artists, mainly. Hex claimed to be the founder of many artistic movements but drew primarily from Greco Roman classicism, the Italian Renaissance, and Neoclassicism. Given that there was little interest in their art, Hex soon had no other options, and found themselves on the front line, occupying a foxhole at the intersection of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, fighting off massive swarms of flies and choking on unappetizing bread loaves. It was no place for an up and coming leftist to be and Hex, fully aware, soon managed to desert their post, fleeing for the relative peace of the Italian Riviera.
Tellusmore tellusmoreee
Started out as r/cumtown
will menaker shut down the chapotraphouse subreddit because it kept attracting too many people to his patreon. matt christman had made a vow of poverty with an eldritch being to manifest trump into the white house because it’d be hilarious and having too successful a podcast may have had devastating consequences, it managed to claim the life of lowtax…
The history of Hexbear is the history of class struggles.
More like a struggle between shitposters and mods who demanded that we read actual theory which most people refused to do. This became a problem when we were told to read LGBTQ+ theory, not reading on principle was enough for some to go on a ban spree. That and veganism struggle sessions.
I still have the trans liberation: beyond pink and blue pdf on my computer that I read the first chapter of and then forgot to read the rest 😞
I feel like I failed TC69
one of these days I will read it! and other theory
in the meantime I keep my uninformed opinions to myself as well as having nothing but love and respect for trans comrades
The Volcels needed a vanguard.
