Edit2: the ratio is amazing. I’m exhausted. This has quadrupled my hexbear time for the day and I will be limiting myself for a bit lol. I feel like we got somewhere in a couple of good threads thanks to Hellinkilla and ratboy. Good luck, comrades.
Edit: the rant wasn’t clear enough. In Previous struggles users have expressed frustrations with how mods/admin decisions are made. I would like to discuss how they are made and hear from them. Mods have also stated before that they wish we could be better, I’d like to hear how and know how they think this should be approached.
Rant/effort post coming:
What’s the follow up to the recent problems with how mods/admins have handled recent issues? Did I miss something? Can we get some explanations about how this site is structured and what roles we see for admins/mods generally?
history of struggle session, not necessary but gives context
We had a fairly large and fairly one-sided struggle session a couple weeks ago. Z_Poster was banned (and still is, as far as I know) and the emoji was added. Some users (thinking of @hellinkella, smong others) did some effort to really parse out where the pain points were and who was involved (largely Zionism inherent in some positions, Jewish exceptionalism). Only the emoji and banning occurred with no other promises/ideas from mods/admins.
There then followed a leak of mod logs where opinions were still very different than the userbase. I would encourage people not to open it or ask for it, please, and especially not to share it. But I think a significant amount of us did see messages that, regardless of context, gave an image of admins/mods that think the userbase hates them, disagreed with the userbase in significant ways, and which wants to steer us in a better direction. The mod chat was also absurdly active at the time, but there’s been little talk about what WAS discussed, only discussions about what was missed, where more context is needed, and things that were not done in a timely manner. This was not further discussed. (Personally I’m super appreciative of you all, doing work I don’t want to do on a website I enjoy thoroughly, and don’t hate any of you–including previous ones I’ve argued with, but would like to see some changes which will follow below and hopefully other comrades will add to it/change it for the better).
We had an EM/POC post which was tangential to that, but where there seemed to be large support for the userbase with regards to the ideological differences between mods/admins and the broader userbase. There was also a banning for which apologies followed quickly, but which indicates the structural failure more generally. There were of course other topics covered, which I won’t speak on here. I didn’t see any solutions proposed and accepted, from any of the topics relevant to this post. (Please correct me if I read this thread wrong, don’t want to speak for you, EM/POC comrades.)
Was there a follow up? Is that coming? Is the discussion behind the curtain of the mod chat? I understand you all have lives, so don’t spend all your time working on this, but some knowledge of how you’re working would be good. Otherwise it feels like purposeful pushing back of feedback/decisions so that we will forget the passionate feelings or give up. If that’s the goal, it’s a horrible strategy and should just be explicitly told. “3 months after a struggle session is the earliest we will make changes in processes” is better than nothing.
I would also recommend we have an open discussion about the direction of the site. It seems the mods/admins have indicated to have better ideas for what we can be (I remember this from the “dunk” discussions too), but have not made clear what their position in that is. Enforcers? A vanguard (with our input as leading determinant)? A different vanguard (against our input for but in our interests)? Theoreticians that have the ideas but want the users to take the lead? Knowing this would make clearer how to interact with you, and how to make our experiences better. Maybe we do need growth and improvement, but we haven’t been clear about how, and talking down is how most have experienced that. I already love this place, so when I’m frustrated I don’t think of leaving. But that’s not universal
I genuinely don’t understand what this post is asking for.
Some people wanted an emoji. An emoji got added.
Why is there a wall of text about this now?
It’s a fucking emoji, have a missed something?
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.
What unresolved grievances? What outrages?
You’re doing the same generalisation as OP.
Did you read the recent poc concerns thread, and the admins had to ask everyone to stay on topic and that the zionism concerns would be dealt with later? That’s my guess
No. Completely missed it. But I completely miss a lot of things on this site despite being one of the most active users, many things happen lightning fast and do not get enough time for people to notice them.
No all good, sorry if my comment sounded snarky I am at work and was in a rush to type it out. But you should check that thread for context.
I agree things go very fast. Even though everything is ostensibly recorded, it’s washed out by the volume of general stuff. It’s easy to lose track of stuff even if you don’t miss it.
I think this is the thread you missed: Open-floor meta post on Hexbear for our EM/POC comrades [To be concluded at 8:00 PM EST today 30AUG25] (FYI as it is in /c/den only logged-in hexbear users can see it)
I can’t imagine it would be a fresh idea to keep a list of these threads somewhere?
keeping a list of admin announcement/discussion posts would be nice. Not sure how to implement it but it wouldn’t be a huuuuuge burden for someone (wouldn’t even have to be an admin) to maintain it manually either.
The double edged sword of the pinned post, is that if the posts are left up longer, the arguments tend to just continue indefinitely and get more and more bitter. But otoh, if they stay up for only 24 hours, probably half of the userbase never sees them. Idk how to resolve this besides having some semblance of rules of decorum and enforcing them. But that has to be squared somehow with both people’s mistrust of the mods and the general anti-civility stance here (personally I don’t think this should apply to comrades, but clearly its not settled)
Well, off the top of my head, people were REALLY, and I mean REALLY pissed off about the whole Dunk Tank struggle session.
Also, sorry if I’m causing any trouble, not the intention, but I do apologize if I am.
I was banned in that whole thing, which also spilled over into Luigi stuff. It was a hidden ideological conflict between a divergent group on the site that believes in the theory that America should be treated as a settler state like Israel vs MLs who have a different view. The ML group won, things got resolved later and I got over my ban. Everything is fine?
I genuinely don’t get it.
I don’t think the issue here is about the emoji, or the dunk tank, but the way the mods operate behind these types of decisions and those are just the most recent examples that people can point to. In those posts and many others the convo seems to evolve into mod accountability and distrust from the user base, but the mod team has never seemed to give an open forum to that problem specifically. These grievances are only ever broached in posts which have different specific focuses, but the mod/admin team hasn’t made a space for very specific discussion about this underlying issue. So I think OP is trying to take it upon themselves to try to open that discussion up, however I don’t think itll be productive unless mods/admins join the conversation publicly instead of just talking amongst themselves in the private chats.
This is just my assumption and sorry if thats all obvious to you I may be misinterpreting your comment
Thank you for writing this. Before you started posting in this thread I thought I was just imagining shit or something. But yes, I was hoping to have some mods/admins come to talk generally.
Felt like that was promised anyways, on more than one occasion, with only the EM/POC thread to show for it. Was a good idea to start there specifically for the Zionism stuff, but then I didn’t see any response with any sort of changes? Seemed like once it was said that “we’re already 40% EM/POC” that that was taken by mods/admins as just enough for the entire discussion. I hope it’s not that way, but I have seen pretty much nothing to indicate otherwise.
I will say that I think they take time, like a week or two, to discuss the content of those posts amongst themselves and then they will come back with another sticky explaining the changes to be made. I really do hope that they engage with that “40% mod/admin” thing, simply because many EMPOC users stated that having POC on the mod team wasnt enough because the same problems kept arising. makes sense since that acronym doesnt and shouldnt serve as a monolith for beliefs and such.
The problem is there are many comments expressing their emotion but there is not many ideas for concrete change. This is now the forth post discussing this, after the initial post, a post made by hellinkilla, the post for the EMPOC community, and now this one. From all these posts what changes could be made? I will remove inactive mods, we have a very diverse admin team with multiple admins directly nominated by the EMPOC community over a year ago. We have committed to having more meta posts to engage the community in changes, we discuss every site-ban and often correct error in moderation. We genuinely want to engage in good faith and with the most charitable interpretation of the community.
I kind of read that as more of a reply to people who were suggesting that things would be substantially improved by diversifying the mod/admin team. That it isn’t enough to address the concerns being raised.
Fully agree that that’s how it reads! But when that’s pretty much the only concrete engagement (and other explanations for how things already worked), it begins to feel that the explanations were considered enough to not make any changes. Meanwhile, the thread identified some problems.
An explanation of why a problem doesn’t exist never works. That then means there must be another problem: either the fact that people misidentify a problem (could be a misunderstanding, but then it’d be nice to have it explained) or that there’s a separate problem that the explanation doesn’t touch.
It’s like in systems theories, where someone says “oh no, don’t worry, corn is distributed as best as possible with the market, and I have proof you have corn” as an answer to “I don’t have corn”. There is a connection there between the answers, but there’s so much room for situations to explain the problem! Maybe the corn isn’t openable (canned), maybe it’s rotten, maybe they get 1 corn kernel because the market is so fair.
Idk why I went so deep into the analogy, but I feel like I’m losing it in general. I gotta take a break
I believe there used to be a users union comm here but it was before my time and it no longer exists. Since it’s not something people are constantly bringing up I guess it isn’t missed or the removal was for a good reason.
The user union community was a constant source of unproductive site-drama that was abused by wreckers. We have allowed meta posts in the !hexbear@hexbear.net for over a year now as well as the sidebar matrix channel
good info thanks.
any proposals should be made with past lessons in mind.
I have heard a few different people bring that community up, actually. Twas also before my time as well, on paper it sounds great but seems like maybe it was a breeding ground struggle session. I’d love to know though
At that point, I literally just don’t know. I wasn’t even trying to argue in the original post, I was just trying to explain why it happened, and I guess my explanation wasn’t thorough. If my guesses aren’t good, then I’m clueless as to why this post was made ig.
Also, adding onto this, I think I might be getting myself into something MUCH larger than myself. I tried to make it a point that I observed these kinds of things, but unfortunately I’m not the best historian. And, by communication, I don’t necessarily mean that people weren’t talking, it’s just that not much was being transferred to my observation.
There are constantly unanswered questions about “why” something happens. The dunk tank is also my best example, where I was in total agreement with the decision w.r.t. the name, and was even pretty open to getting rid of the concept entirely (this is another example of the “making us better” mentality), but how the admins/mods went about it didn’t work. And then why that idea was scrapped and the new slop sub was created wasn’t clear. It seemed like there was just enough disagreement that the mods stopped pushing for it, but what was enough pushback? Should that be how it works? I didn’t get how it happened.
For the emoji, what was enough pushback to allow it? Is it always something that can only change by democratic vote? Why this time was it done that way? I sure didn’t understand any of that, nor why there was such intense pushback and banning during such a process, up to and including doctor owl. Was definitely good to ban eventually, and probably at first comment, but I don’t know how its decided that it’s too far/much for new van rules/types
There are others but I’ll digress.
Wait I legit logged off for 10 months and we’re still in the exact same struggle session I logged out of? god this place rules
Lol well as funny as it is, yeah. I was hoping to make a difference in how it was approached by going up to systemic/process level to discuss it, hoping that would make it not just a repeat but a way to approach it together and understand, but that seems to have failed, so we are going quickly back to exactly 10 months ago.
So… You’re relitigating this? Now? Why?
It was renamed because “dunk tank” has historically racist roots nobody had realised until it was raised. Simple as that.
It wasn’t removed entirely because there’s an absolutely massive number of people that use these spaces and anyone that doesn’t like it has the option to not subscribe to it, or to block it entirely. You don’t have to see it.
I don’t see a problem. If you don’t like it, block it?
I’m not relitigating that situation itself, I’m personally fine with how it turned out and just click whatever I feel like.
Again, it’s just that it was entirely unclear how the decisions were made. When is it massive enough to make such a decision? Why is there sometimes a vote and sometimes it’s just “the masses have spoken” without such?
I could agree with every decision and still be frustrated that things just happen without me understanding if my input had any impact, right? Was it yelling into the wind and nobody should’ve bothered? I don’t believe that, but I haven’t been told why anything was ever decided! The original decision to not do the emoji also just happened because there wasn’t pushback (again, not relitigating that decision), but is that also a policy that things are allowed until someone complains? If so, fine I guess, but how many people do we have to have complain to change rules? How many to get a person banned? How many to reverse a change?
We don’t have to have perfect answers for everything, but its constantly frustrating to only get a whiff of an answer to half of the stuff, with seemingly no reaching out to bridge that gap. I made this post in the hopes to discuss that gap and how it works.
Maybe this all stems from me not being a forum person, because I only ever cursorily participated as a child/young adult and never did Reddit except to read the top 5 posts every once in a while. And only found hexbear a few years back after Chapo because I was searching for a place to be a commie.
And how to raise issues in an orderly and comradely fashion that doesn’t result in a giant shit show fight.
From what I have briefly observed the best way to get things done on this website is to stir the pot in the most dramatic way possible.
Law of the Forum
If this is just acceptable, I guess so yeah. Then we just have to do struggle sessions every time there’s anything needing changing. I find them really annoying, and hated my first participation last time. Got dragged in because I commented early without knowing it would become such a shit show.
But if that’s what we’re just saying is how it works
Oh right I see.
The impression I have is that consensus in the team is the preferred method used until something occurs that threatens the integrity of the site, at which point it becomes an authoritarian dictatorship to resolve the issue in one direction or another because SOMETHING has to be done and doing nothing is never an option.
I don’t have special knowledge though and am not in the admin team.
What I do know about part of this was that one of the issues in the past was a hidden ideological struggle between MLs and another group that considers the US to be settler-colonialist and that the only position to take against white people in america is the same position that palestinians take against israeli settlers in occupied Palestine. This disagreement is pretty well described in this article: https://fightbacknews.org/articles/marxism-leninism-and-the-theory-of-settler-colonialism-in-the-united-states
The hardline ML side of that conflict ended up winning I think. Partly because I was unbanned and wouldn’t have been unbanned if the other side won.
Information about that conflict was probably largely kept internal because it wasn’t well known in the community, had occurred in a very hidden way with MLs not even realising it was ongoing until very late, and ultimately probably felt an internal thing didn’t need litigating too loudly publicly or else it might’ve been picked up by wreckers and expanded upon.
My understanding is that issue is dead now but I don’t have internal information, I’m pretty content with how it ended though especially as one of the people who attacked me the hardest was literally a US troop.
I had no idea about this example! Interesting. I’ll have to read the full article.
But even if I agree also, if there’s just a wider acceptance that it’s fine not to know, and the admins get to act as benevolent dictators (to the best of their abilities and ideologies), I’m fine with that! But could it be at least told when that’s the way it’s handled? Just a “if you disagree, become a mod, it was a backroom decision and it won’t be changing”. I’d appreciate it more than having threads about input and struggle sessions where nothing is really stated about this.
The way it went down on the site was that a group who believed in the Settler theory were essentially calling everyone who advocated standard ML theory racist. Because MLs are generally very willing to be open to issues framed around making poc comfortable on the site this resulted in nobody noticing it was actually an ideological conflict between a divergent group and the ML position. This went on for months unnoticed. Once the MLs realised that this is what was actually occurring a real turnaround occurred on it and the ML side won. Basically MLs were losing a sectarian struggle because they didn’t even realise they were in one.
The tl;dr of this conflict is basically that one side thinks america is like israel and palestinian settler theory therefore applies to poc fighting in america (against white americans). Hardline ML theory finds this reactionary and incompatible with marxism, it is emphatically stated in Stalin’s “Marxism & the National Question” sections 4+5.
When did any of this happen? Every time I’ve seen that reactionary article mentioned literally everyone is dunking on it
The only people that dunk on it did nothing except read quippy social media titles framing it badly and relying on people not actually reading it because the article is largely correct. If your position is that you think white americans should be fought by poc in the same way that israeli settlers need to be fought by palestinians you will lead people in america to ruin because that is a blatantly absurd and unwinnable theory.
This is all I will say on this. Sectarianism is not allowed on the site and this is a sectarian struggle between the ML position and a maoist / ultra divergent idea from marxism-leninism. The people advocating for this have been, in my experience, maoists, gonzaloites and anarchists. ML orgs have taken positions against it quite rightfully.
slop (and fake news and badposting) leak into other comms. we know from the reddit studies that quarantine doesn’t work and banning subs does.
They do. Mods of those comms should remove the slop though.
The correct argument to make here is for more mods in the spaces with the leaks. Ones that care about containing the slop spills.
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 don’t know anything about another post. I neither saw it nor participated so I am not commenting on that.
I’m confused about how they’re related issues though. I’m just generally confused about what’s supposed to be the problem, what are you unhappy about? What are you calling for?
The whole post seems so incredibly generalised that it sets me off. Maybe I’m in a weird mood idk.
Copy and pasting my response to another user who was asking about it in the EM/POC weekly:
The post in question btw: https://hexbear.net/post/5974671
Basically, a comrade had some heavy criticism about how Judaism is used as a cover for zionism and even went to the point of saying that antisemitism is an illegitimate concept in the current day, being used as a rhetorical weapon against those colonized by or trying to speak for those colonized by the zionist entity and catering to them in these issues is no different than catering towards white people in regards to race issues. They were harsher than my quick summary can convey, but the user had their comment removed and was banned by an admin for antisemitism, which was then overruled by another admin who apologized on behalf of the team. I wasn’t monitoring real-time, but between the initial banning and the admin who lifted the ban checking in, it appears hell was raised about it and for good reason didn’t immediately stop after.
While the ban was lifted, I believe I saw that the user in question found it a pill that couldn’t be swallowed, and it appears they have left the forum.
Had some branch-off debates about how to solve the issue, from forcing mods to have their name signed to mod actions, or maybe just having more shades of skin on the mod team will fix this.
Upsetting, but it is what it is
Basically, that combined with the emoji struggle sess’ has left some users with the unflattering taste of Zion left in their mouths. Didn’t help that some agitator apparently leaked mod DMs, and some of the users who expressed grievances also got to see private venting of the mods as they ‘aired grievances.’
Ultimately, it is what it is; not sure what the point of a fuss is. Can always swap over to 'grad if it’s a big enough issue.
While antisemitism is absolutely used as a rhetorical weapon I’m not going to entertain the idea that antisemitism is an illegitimate concept and I’m not surprised that a mod would kneejerk to banning someone for stating that.
Yeah… Reading the comment: https://hexbear.net/comment/6448883, the first two lines without context do set off alarm bells, and even in context I’m not sure I can agree:
#1 certainly isn’t true historically, and I don’t really know that it is in the present either, but don’t have as many examples come to mind. #2 sets off alarm bells but I might actually agree on further consideration. In the same way I wouldn’t say there is a coherent christian or muslim ethnicity, nation, or people.
But the main issue was, the admin (lack of) communication around the post being a free speech zone.
Yeah, it was a fuck. I agree with you that ultimately, there’s no point of a fuss.
I’m realizing it wasn’t clear enough in the post, but I’m not fussing at that level, but realizing that there are clearly problems an abstraction level higher, within the system of the forum. The lingering taste of Zionism is definitely there, but I’m focussing on how we even decide what to do generally. If the answer is “how it is works for us” then fine, but then I’d like to at leats understand it so we don’t have to have a struggle at the next banning because it was unclear (banning is an example, banning isn’t the only subject)
I mean, I’m just applying standard forum rules. It’s whatever admins/mods vibe with unless enough users get pissed off. It’s been broadly in line with that so far, from what I’ve seen.
Also, the above was mostly contextualizing the EM/POC thread and how it was relevant to the emoji one.
Thanks for the clarification!
If it’s a vibe process, that can be fine, but that should be made pretty clear and responsibility taken for how that “vibe” reflects. The “vibe” was influenced by zionism, for example, and little was said about why that was wrong. The explanation for that is that mods don’t have to do self-crit (or else we won’t have enough mods). But these 2 things don’t really work together well. So can we do something about that? Shift from a “vibe” based to something with topics and voting in a forum, so others are responsible instead of only mods? Just spitballing there, but that disconnect is an example of the lack of clarity.
I did keep it very general, because I’m also very unsure where the problems are! Sorry if that’s setting you off. But many people have stated problems relating to adminning/modding in relation to the previous struggle session and then it’s not brought further! I’d just like to discuss how we related, generally, to each other. Think of it like a process or a set of standards, not about posting itself (ban rules etc, though those are interesting too), but about how we make and develop those together.
I mean essentially, there are party structures that we use in our parties, there are business structures used there, and the lack of that clarity here makes some friction. It doesn’t have to be huge and grandiose, but some clarity on it all would be nice. How did we decide that Z_Poster stayed banned? I still don’t get it. I get the ban reason, but not why it was applied then and who/when that gets to happen
If you can’t specifically name problems then uhhh
Vibes?
I can’t point out the exact problem, but can you answer the questions? Because if not, then that’s the problem. I’m getting pretty frustrated (not at you, definitely partly, maybe mostly, at my communication) because nobody seems to be engaging with the fact that a problem can exist above the concrete examples. It’s grounded in those (my questions are pointing at those concrete things), but the problem is an abstraction level above!
Here I specifically just asked one: how did we decide Z_Poster stayed banned? And that rule, why was applied when it was and not before?
If vibes is the answer, we approach the contradiction that it’s personal, but there’s little desire to be personally accountable, nor a mechanism to do that, when mistaken. I recommend changing the " vibes method" instead of creating punishments or something ridiculous like that
history of continuous aggro and hostility, and because the mods were really fucking lenient on them, which makes a lot of the whining look real funny from over here.
Am I whining about ZP? Several times, even in this specific thread, I’ve said that I agree ZP should’ve been banned. It’s the process surrounding it that is indicative of a problem that pops up more often, where the lack of clarity produces friction between users and mods. It also arises pretty much every time some major decision is made.
wasn’t talking about you, some other people complained about what should be one of the least controversial and most obvious bans.
I really dislike all the comments in past threads about need to “punish” people. Mods, users, admins. Seriously what.
yeah seems not only unrealistic but entirely undesirable for any case. I think self crit is actually already a great solution to this, but that was scrapped because not enough mods wanted to join unless it was lower effort (meaning mistakes had no extra work other than undoing it)
Ahh. I don’t know.
Might not get an answer either. It’s between that user and the site isn’t it?
Is that how it works? Bans are handled only between the mod/admin and the banned user? If so, one of my points of not understanding is clarified, for this specific instance. It sure didn’t seem to work that way though, in that case.
The problem is systemic, literally arising from a system, where individuals don’t solve such a thing without going an abstraction level higher to solve it.
I think the mods agree, because I’ve seen multiple references to forcing us to improve or that we don’t want to get better or other such statements. If that’s the feeling of mods, can we just openly discuss those and who wants that kind of site or who doesn’t?