The right spark at the right time, that’s what.

Not trying to say the outrage was justified, but I saw there were a lot of prior outrages, and there was almost zero communication. The gunpowder of unresolved grievances meeting the lit match of a minor struggle.

I have no idea. I am so glad I avoid site drama.

I said multiple times that the emoji wasn’t the basic problem, but a symptom. I never cared about the emoji, but the problems that underlay that were more interesting/important. If that wasn’t true, then why the EM/POC post? It was a fine idea, but what’s the result? There’s a friction that keeps being brought up and no discussion or action seems to come of it.

Edit: and maybe that’s fine? But some people (including me) would like to at least know if nothing will change instead of not hearing anything

I agree that Z_Poster should’ve been banned, but who decides to what extent someone can evade bans before being banned completely? There was talk of algorithms and trends analyses to catch ban-evaders, which I would support, honestly. And enforce it harshly! But let’s be clear about how it works, and what sort of process there is, and maybe discuss if users find it a problem in general!

I only lurked back in the days that people complain about, and ignored most of that. So I’m glad it’s better, and want to see if it can’t be even better!

I feel like people were calling them zionists because of the Jewish supremacy aspect that LoveYourself wrote about in the comment which was censored and then renewed, resulting in the loss of that poster from our community. Another of many non white comrades who have been pushed out via a systemic white supremacist undercurrent which much like zionism does not define the individuals who perpetuate it, but their actions. These are latent, unconscious biases playing out, no one here thinks the mods and admin are secretly mossad. They were calling out the actions of those people which were zionist in nature, which the people doing them didn’t realize.

Silencing Arabs and Muslims, banning them and punishing them, while calling them holocaust deniers for saying they want the emoji to be the actual flag of the zionists, telling people they are antisemitic for thinking it is weird that there are burning flags for other nations but not the one committing genocide; if you read this and didn’t know it was about hexbear, you would think “sounds like zionist behavior.”

that is what is being called zionist, the zionist behavior based on zionist logic.

maybe some users who are actively being silenced and attacked responded in more defensive or aggressive ways due to feeling cornered, and instead of calmly saying “that behavior and your reasoning is based in zionist logic and here is why, please dispense of this logic and be better about noticing when unchecked zionist ideology influences you without you realizing it.” they said “you are a zionist.”

since the people they were talking to were calling them antisemities, reporting them and trying to silence them, allowed to do this without being silenced, and even the Jewish users came in and all agreed that it was not antisemitic and those actions of those people were wrong, resulting in one demodding and one ban of the opposing side for zionism, whats the problem? they got angry and defensive because of this banworthy behavior and the enabling of it by the powers that be and acted up in a way I wouldn’t encourage in general, but they were right about this and most people involved agreed. I can’t blame a person being treated badly by the people with power here for getting angry and communicating poorly.

they were zionist actions, they were using zionist logic, and it doesn’t have to mean that those people are wholly and unabashedly zionists, but to assert that because they are on hexbear and volunteer and are serious about communism means they have fully rid themselves of white supremacy, zionism, and other forms of indoctrination is totally unrealistic and normalizes a culture of shame that actually inhibits the people involved from learning and growing and improving. People were being harsh with them because they were digging their heels in and had to be convinced not to do zionism here. I don’t think prioritizing the harshness of one party over the other party fundamentally using zionist talking points makes much sense.

There were people in the emoji thread calling the admins/mods zionists. If I saw someone calling me a zionist over my opinion on an emoji I would just instantly ban you.

Pretty tasteless comment without context. The discussion only happened and found significant support from users because these opinions suddenly went straight jumping from being on top of the fence to siding with Trump zionist admin.

Without this context, sure who fucking cares about an emoji right. But when your “opinion on an emoji” happens to side with the fascist Trump admin then the context is very different. Usualy this isn’t an issue because 'Murica freedom shit burning the flag free speech all that nonsense… except when it doesn’t and suddenly there could be real world consequences for burning a flag.

If you don’t care about this context it says more about yourself than you realize. Damn good thing you don’t care to be a moderator it seems.

CW: suicide

I’ve sat with this awhile as I wanted to consider my words carefully.

My issues with the moderation team began with the apparent double standard of a mod (who is now demodded) being able to tell another user to kill themselves without any immediate consequences beyond having the comment removed. It took the whole ZP situation blowing up for them to be removed from the mod team.

Suicide and suicide baiting is something that affects me deeply as someone who has lost people close to me to suicide and as someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts and impulses. Maybe it’s my trauma that led me to read into the comment but I do not know how else to interpret it. The relevant part of the comment is as follows: “Please fucking touch grass. Actually touch dirt six feet beneath grass”. I have a difficult time interpreting that as anything other than telling them to go kill themselves. If I am wrong and there are more charitable interpretations I am open to them.

I apologise for being an asshole about it in recent struggle sessions. Talk of suicide and suicide baiting affects me deeply, and it hurts more because of Hexbear’s usually fantastic track record of making sure such topics are properly tagged with trigger warnings. Seeing someone in a position of power engage in suicide baiting upset me.

Anyway, thanks for calling me out but judging by your earlier responses I’m guessing you’ll just tell me to leave and touch grass. It might be for the best

I personally agree and tried to put appreciation throughout the post. But I’m trying to help identify why there is this tension. Because as much as there are a few users who are angry above the rest, there’s this other group, seemingly a majority in the last struggle session, saying that the unaccountability was over the line. I’m not saying we have to restructure everything, but just make clear why that complaining in this case did or did not result in changes. When is it so big that site-wide changes are needed? When is it just a “good enough idea” that needs to talking about? Are those just mod tasks too, to discuss and decide that?

Of course, of course, (but really, do you? I genuinely don’t get that. I just want some clarity and explanations when needed)

I do my share just fine, thanks. This post actually comes from those experiences! Organizing, working, managing groups, coordinating in business, etc, and we could all learn from it how to interact! And besides all that I can spend 15 minutes posting on my favorite forum :)

Wanting the only decent social media to be less shit doesn’t require you to not go outside

The way that moderators are added is an existing mod vouches for them (rare) or they submit a mod application to the admin team, we accept the vast majority of applicants.

I’m also adding that moderators, just like any user, can at their own discretion and of their own free will chose to delete their account and start a new account for whatever reason they may have. Moderators that have done so have informed us of their intent and the name of their new account so as to ensure there is an easy and uninterrupted transition for them to continue their volunteer work as moderators.

This means that whenever there is a new moderator that seems to be a new account being added out of the blue, chances are it’s simply someone swapping out accounts for personal reasons.

the next meta post will invite the user base to discuss updating the Code of Conduct, as well as how moderators are chosen and how they are removed.

not to be excessively contrarian, but that is a way too broad mandate for a single post

waaaaay too much

1 issue per post!!!

Edited for ablism

This answer goes very deep into the portion of admin/modding that relates to reporting and banning/deleting. This is indeed the part that makes the biggest shit show, usually, and can be the main task. And it makes sense to anonymize the modlog, I agree with it given historical perspective. But that change also shifted the way that the relationship works, keeping users more in the dark about something that feels like a community instead of just a forum. It’s the equivalent of masking the police (on a much smaller and less drastic scale, but qualitatively functions the same). And it creates this friction where behind the masks things seem to keep being decided and then sweepingly applied, like how to interpret the rules. If that’s happening, I just want to know how and why. How much is user input/pushback considered? Can we voice those opinions on a more productive way that yelling into struggle sessions about it every time?

It’s also wider than just banning/removing:

If I had previously wanted to make a community where exclusively Israeli flags were burned, just collections of that, I would need an admin to make it also. What role does the admin play there? Are they just a checkbox against the rules before admitting/not admitting the community? My point is just, there is at least slightly more to being an admin/mod than just reacting to comments. Tasks which cannot possibly be done as only “and enforcer of the rules”, but with a second, maybe secondary role. It’s a leadership role, not an enforcer role. And that one is what’s unclear

So they got purged by the admins. I did say that the admins will use the excuse that the leaked chat logs have doxable info to purge the post and sweep it under the rug.

term limits or some other method of rotating mods

I thought of term limits too. But I think you have to have a method of replacing the outgoing before you fire them.

Also with a voluntary position, you have to consider that the person filling it ought to get some sort of compensation. As we do not provide a wage, it is just intangibles. Emotional, political, social. Having that suddenly cut off would be really shitty. And to me, if I was considering applying for a position, I’d be pretty much dis incentivized knowing that as soon as I got good at it, I’d be cut off.

There is also value in institutional, long term memory which this website does not yet have available to it by any other means. Term limits would make that worse.

Friendly amendment: terms. Not term limits. Terms where re-selection is required. But if they’re OK, they’re OK.

term limits

Maybe we can do regular mod drives and encourage old mods to step down when there is enough manpower, without actually forcing them to.

As much as I may agree, I also think because it’s a forum we might not get a say or recourse, without becoming mods ourselves (and I don’t intend to!). But making clear when something is doen authoritatively without recourse and saying “for this reason, but there will be no questions” would be helpful.

Martin Luther probably got banned for sharing modchat stuff that had doxxable info in it. But I would love to see a rule which says something like “doxxing will be purged entirely with no questions” to describe it. But I’m just assuming, and there’s still a chance it was just another Z_Poster ban evasion van without telling us. Or a personal disagreement.

We know who leaked the chat log.

They were a recent add to the mod team, and they dow loaded the entire chat from when they joined until a couple days after z was banned. When the leak was sent via url we closed the old mod chat and started a new one with active mods.

The leak does not contain the entire discussion of zppster, the emoji, nakoichi and the moderation of that larger meta event.

I would have been more than happy to discuss their dissatisfaction either on hexbear or in DM. I did exactly that with another mod who thought we were using AI tools to moderate which is 100% false that mods comments are still up and they are still a member of the mod team.

The only change to the mod chat is that we are being more vigilant about not posting personal info there. It is quite sad abd malicious to leak months of irrelevant discussion and personal info because of a disagreement over moderation.

I’m not quite sure how engaging in multiple posts where I’m begging for concrete ways to change is sweeping it under the rug but I can understand how someone would reach that conclusion.

I’m actually also approaching this from worry about the mods/admins. Having all the these tasks outside of just direct “application or rules” that are relevant but not really written/described makes it also more dangerous for them. (Doxxing can be legitimately dangerous). These little, mostly ignored, portions of the free labour they provide can be actually a lot, and especially difficult given that there are little guidelines. That’s one of my main concerns!

Just because they were “involved” in the struggle session. I got pinged. Pretty sure it was the list of ZP defenders, idk. I was fine with banning ZP for ban evasion, but found it suspect and indicative of broader issues (what this post is) when it finally happened the moment ZP was convincing the rest of hexbear that the emoji problem was really latent Zionism. That was enough to become one on the list lol

Didn’t read this in time, but wish I had. Thanks for coming into the shit show! I personally appreciate you pretty much every time something like this happens.

I kind of just chalked the whole thing up to being our biannual Nakoichi gets drunk and starts banning people and triggers enormous drama moment.

Thankfully that’s no longer possible.

Can we prevent things happening in the future? Or can we plan on it? As communists we should be thinking about long term strategic planning. That’s too big of a term for what I’m asking here, but preventing future mistakes in some way seems easy, instead of only preventing repeating mistakes. It’s exactly what the goal of the EM/POC post was, but with a slightly smaller scope

I get the feeling everyone does have ideas about how this place should be run, or at least how they should be part of it, but outside of becoming a mod/admin there’s little that’s clear.

Shut up and get excommunicated you Sephiroth-posting loser

The link posted contained a private chatroom and since it is the entire chat-history dumped contains doxxing info.

Modlogs will not be public due to the history of doxxing and death threats.

We will be involving the user base in a discussion of the mods, and the hexbear community serves as a userunion.

Make the modlogs public, show which admins/mods are taking action […]

These are reasonable,

nah we’ve seen this lead to harassment. trip codes or some kind of “mod #8” or “admin #2” system where we can have a grievance with a specific mod without bad actors having access to their inbox should be possible.