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 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.
💯 agree it’s good but we can’t then expect our emotions to be implemented
It is very difficult to think about concrete changes because the foundation seems so gooey. If I had an existing thing to amend I could do that. It is real Tyranny of Structurelessness sitch. I’ll give it a shot.
Friendly amendments welcome. Counter-proposals welcome.
This is for discussion only. Of the concept of concrete proposals. Making a proposal should not be taken seriously deep in the
|||||||||||of some random thread. It’s kind of a demo proposal. 🤷 I kind of lost my juice towards the end. But this is intended to be something for people to go against. Even though it’s kind of my sincere idea too.motivation
In every functional organization I have been a member of, meetings are announced in advance and agendas as circulated for review. There is a process for amendment and approval of the agenda. Then the meeting begins. Generally there are bylaws that govern all this. You don’t need to be an f-ing political party to benefit from this. Arts and culture organizations and other “frivolous” purposes run by all kinds of people have this sort of setup.
I think a post like Open-floor meta post on Hexbear for our EM/POC comrades [To be concluded at 8:00 PM EST today 30AUG25] is a meeting.
The agenda was extremely vague, confusing and changed over time. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. If it was for EM/POC then why did so many “crackers” not understand that and make contributions? Did they fail to read properly or was it not clearly stated? Each time I returned to the thread it seemed to change purpose. If the thread was just for EM/POC then the “crackers” should have had their comments deleted or challenged ASAP.
I suggest that by allowing community feedback on the nature of the discussion prior to the discussion actually starting,
question
Has it ever been attempted to discuss the agenda before the meeting actually happens?
Proposal
Admin/mod-initiated site wide meta posts (known as a “Meeting”) shall be formally announced 3-10 days (72-240 hours) in advance of formal discussion. This is the “announcement period”. The purpose of the announcement period is to a) allow interested users an opportunity to think through the issues; b) get feedback on the proposed questions and discussion guidelines.
announcement subject line
🐻 [start date/time] - [end date/time] META: "TOPIC"the announcement will include
links to the most relevant posts/threads/URLs, if applicable
discussion guidelines, such as scope, context
the question at hand
he kind of answers being sought: long form, yes/no vote, survey, etc
usernames of responsible mods/admins/users
the announcement will be stickied during the feedback period
the feedback period shall be the time between the posting of the announcement a specified time 12-72 hours prior to the Meeting
no other posts (such as parodies) will be allowed to follow the same format for subjects. ANY and ALL posts will be banned. People who want to shitpost about it can make their jokes in the body of posts.
the proposed body text of the OP discussion shall be included in the announcement
Amendments to the announcement post
~~strikethroughsDates and times shall be in GMT [or Moscow?] time.
The Meeting
I really like this and will likely repost this as a community pin in hexbear. We often discuss the meeting agends / proposal in the mod chat to make sure the phrasing is agreed on by the entire team, however I’m happy to open that up to the site. After the feedback post / meeting is it intended to have a follow-up post for the actual changes discussed in the meeting? Are the same formatting and requirements applied to that post as well?
As an example a few days before a post where specific changes are made to the code of conduct a meeting post is made where the scope of that changes are laid out as well as some proposed changes / discussion about the changes occurs. After the meeting post there is a post where the code of conduct changes are listed and the users can vote on it?
Thank you, I’ll come back and reread this and edit this comment with any additional questions.
I kind of got a bit tired writing so there’s some process and issues that aren’t fully developed or thought of.
I literally just wrote from the top as a comment. Nothing like this could come fully formed from a single person it must be edited by others with better perspective.
And I would only ever suggest anything like this be implemented as a limited trial even if accepted. For example try it once maybe on a small issue and see how it goes.
Not ready for production. I will also return.
Not to bandwagon, but this example is perfect to make my broader point that I’ve posted like 3 times in this thread.
“We often discuss the meeting agends / proposal in the mod chat to make sure the phrasing is agreed on by the entire team”
That’s a task that the mod team has taken up and absorbed, explicitly, in a role outside of just “enforcer of rules”. That can be fine (though I agree with the proposal to open that up to the site), but it can be the source of tons of extra stress and pain for mods/admins because that small task can reverberate, and disagreements about it afterwards get projected onto the whole team as a shadowy cabal!
So the general conversation I want is something like this, how many more of those implicit or explicit tasks are done by mods/admins without it really being part of the normal role (only enforcer of rules)? There has to be a judgement role (likely distributed across many people, and maybe not structured) for interpretation, otherwise the rules would be ineffective in their current form.
Can you think of others? We could use a space to discuss how those landed in the mods’ hands (likely just because it was small, made most sense, and the team already existed) and then discuss if there’s better ways! And if there’s no better way, at least have it described how the mod team handles it so it’s not entirely opaque!
Beautiful, I love love LOVE this. I also strongly agree that people who aren’t a part of the group that the discussion is about shouldn’t comment. I definitely did in the EMPOC one and I shouldn’t have but once the containment thread opened up I should not have.
Anyway this structure sounds very reasonable, the way that these discussions move forward should be uniform imo, that helps to avoid confusion
if you agree so hard you should suggest improvements because obviously it’s not perfect
I don’t know how to interpret this comment :/
seems like an invitation to riff on their work to help improve it
Sorry I am just being a jerk you said nice things to me and so i challenged you. Thanks for your kind words.
this is helpful. I’ll make note of this and see how much of it we can work on integrating this or elements of this into future metaposts after carcosa’s own upcoming meta discussion. it reminds me of Roberts Rules and has a universal applicability for its set area of application.
couldn’t be a coincidence
I am trying to adapt to context
since you can’t have a speaker’s list in lemmy
Perfect! This is the discussion I had hoped to start instead of shit slinging! Thanks! Love it!
links to all relevant rules, policies, etc should be included.
Amendment:
subject of post in the format
🐻 META: "TOPIC" [start date/time] - [end date/time]Date/time format:
YYYY-mm-dd@hh:mmeg2025-09-05@01:50Ack I read this earlier and had a lot of thoughts that I thought were good and constructive but now that I’m in front of my laptop my mind went blank. Still, I’ll try to make some coherent points lol. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to be thoughtful while typing this out so I’m sure people have already covered a lot of what I’m gonna say but I’ll send it anyway.
Direct Responses to your comment:
So besides the EMPOC improvement post, I don’t remember any of the other posts that you are talking about. Which one was the inital post? The one that got removed with the modchat screenshots? The first site improvement post? I went through hellinkillas post history and didn’t see anything resembling a post that has to do with what’s going on here. I don’t want you to go through the trouble of finding them for me, but I think this is kind of the problem. People bring up their concerns about mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. but those things are brought up in the shadow of other posts that are meant for other discussion (ie. the ND and EMPOC improvement threads), or through user posts that you brought up. But there has not been a big Community discussion explicitly about these grievances that is stickied and facilitated by the mod/admin team, and that is really what people want and why it keeps coming up over and over. I think that it is kinda different to have posts that say “how can we improve the experience for x or y users” and “we need to address the concerns you have about admin/mod behavior”. The first type of post, imo, only serves to get feedback on how to moderate behavior of average users, as opposed to the latter, which serves to discuss how to moderate admin/mod behavior.
So I think this problem stems from the feedback I gave above. When these grievances are aired in threads that aren’t explicit about accountability, I feel like a lot of that content can be glossed over and forgotten about, because that’s not what is being asked of in the post. This can make it difficult to have a structured, productive conversation when you feel ignored, and that compounds the problem of distrust. I think that giving a structured, focused forum for people to bring up these concerns may yield more concrete ideas.
I believe that the changes that you all have made have been great, but they do nothing to address mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. A lot of people have expressed that when they do air grievances, it’s nothing but radio silence OR, when it is not ignored, replies to these grievances only address the very specific example that a user might make. For example, someone expresses frustration about an unwarranted post removal, and a response might be “we restored that post”. Another example is someone asking why “User X” was banned but NOT “User Y”. The response might be “we ended up banning user y”. But really, it’s not only about frustration around the specific instance, but frustrations at the patterns of behavior by the mod/admin team and that is never directly addressed by the replying mod/admin.
Again, I think that changes y’all have made are excellent, and I think that even the strongest critics of mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. agree with that. I can sense exasperation here and that totally makes sense. I think you all are doing a lot to try to get community input and improve things! But since this specific topic doesn’t seem to have been addressed directly, you’re just going to continually hear these complaints in every community improvement thread, and that is gonna make it feel like no one appreciates the effort that you all put into this. And that fucking sucks and I can understand if it might make you or other people on the team feel frustrated, bitter, whatever it might be. And that might make people go to the mod chat to blow off steam. That’s a reasonable reaction to being continually criticized. But having those shit-talking sessions does nothing to try to fix this problem. It seems like no matter what it’s just a matter of time before chat logs get leaked and that just pisses people off MORE because instead of their very valid complaints being taken into consideration, they are being shown that they are just being mocked behind closed doors, and that reinforces the whole cycle.
I also want to bring up the banning of LY here as another example. So LY, an EMPOC, was commenting in the EMPOC improvement post with a criticism that they put a TON of effort into crafting which explained how EMPOC voices were being silenced and not taken into consideration. What happens? They get banned, with no explanation, in a post that is meant to address racism on the site. That ban was a perfectly ironic example of just exactly the problem of racism on the site. Nobody cares that you unbanned them, they decided to leave anyway because it upset them so much. It never should have happened in the first place. Unbanning someone does not mean that people within the admin/mod team has reckoned with mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc.. The unbanning happened as a reaction to MASSIVE backlash amongst the users. Having EMPOC admins/mods is very important and it is great that they were elected by users. That does not fix this problem, though, as CommunistCuddlefish pointed out.
FInal Thoughts: People do not like that they do not seem to get engagement directly with mods/admins beyond a “we fixed that problem” comment. People do not feel that vague apology posts after the fact are adequate. People want DIALOGUE. People seem to prefer that problems that many have agreed are systemic get dealt with, instead of the admin/mod team having to play defense and clean up every time something shitty happens. I think that Maoists got it right with criticisms and self-crit. I totally get not wanting to take seriously comments that are unnecessarily hostile, but I think many people do not feel like their criticisms are taken seriously, and do not feel that the admins/mods have actually tried to engage in self-crit because they do not see these problems as systemic and are issues in the imagination of many users. I think that part of demonstrating that you have engaged in self-crit is not just relying on users to give you “concrete examples” of how to fix things, but to really investigate these problems amongst yourselves and suggest ways to improve trust and transparency specific to mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc.. Some people have actually given concrete suggestions, and I have seen those shut down, so not sure how much users can really give that will be agreeable to you all.
Concrete suggestions:
maybe some kind of ongoing stickied posts with purposes like this could be good to solve for the lack of institutional memory. Then it will be easy to go directly to the stickied thread where all the mod accountability dialogue exists, all the struggle sessions, etc. Then all discussion outside of these spaces can be directed there to prevent post derailment, and all of the historic dialogue around it will be there so people don’t have to repeat or rehash out things as much or search deep to find it or be totally unaware it even happened.
Yeah I really think thats a good idea, hellinkilla mentioned that too. All of the different criticisms, lore, suggestions and improvements are SO dispersed that compiling all that stuff would be helpful for everyone.
I love what they are doing with specific community improvements but yeah I think even with maybe a yearly temp check that could really help. Could even have kind of a poll format to more easily organize where users are at. Underneath all of the individual complaints there are through lines that speak to just a couple specific issues so I could see that being an easy way to group things together
I can really understand why mods would be hesitant to agree to this. If I imagine myself under such scrutiny, it feels like physically painful. Given the hostility that comes up. The mod/admin team cannot be solely comprised of people with this very specific variety of public humiliation kink.
We need to find a way to walk step by step to a place that is amenable to this kind of thing. Without a lot of casualties every time.
I think that it would be better if the mods are considered to be mandated by the communities/users. So the accountability ought to be shared by all of us. Actually the present example of the
israel-coolemoji is such a great example. The userbase apparently had a real change of heart on an issue since it was originally decided years ago. At the same time as a lot of people around the world. The criticism was, ultimately, on the collective that consented/relented, even reluctantly, to the original “policy” of no burning israel flag emoji. Anybody could have submitted an emoji to /c/emoji during that entire time yet I don’t think anyone did. At least not that was brought up.I mean, my thoughts are that they already are constantly subjected to this every single day. Every community improvement post. Every meta post. Passive aggressive comments everywhere. So in my brain, finally satiating people’s want for an open discussion that is specific to this might be a way to “rip the bandaid off” so to speak. Like anything said in the post likely won’t be worse than what the poor admins have had to deal with for the last year or more, and itll be contained and maybe they can make more sense of the complaints.
At the same time I think it should be very tightly moderated when it comes to name calling and singling people out. Discussion should very specifically be about the problems, not specific mods/admins.
The only problem I see with simply voting in mods is that these complaints will still remain. They do that with admins already and it hasn’t resolved anything.
When it comes to the Israel flag emoji, there was a HUGE struggle session about it, and I don’t remember if there was an official stance on it, but the main emoji maker was someone who was against it and I think people just gave up on fighting about it instead of there being an actual decision. So to me that still just points to this larger problem that if people feel like they just have to give up instead of feeling heard, they will just grow bitter. However that mod did really think about this a LOT and to me it shows a testament to their ability to be introspective and I respect the hell out of that, regardless of the outcome.
I really see where you’re coming from and I don’t think that my position on this is more correct than yours. It can totally blow up, I do recognize that people turn nasty really quickly and idk if either admins/mods or users could handle this kind of conversation gracefully. It really would take a LOT of emotional intelligence and ability to express what the actual deeper problem is instead of just pointing fingers. I just think that we havent actually tried to do that kinda thing with very strict ground rules so why not when its been so messy doing it the way we have been already
Also lmao at your kink comment
Thank you for being my literal better voice lol. Maybe the word I should’ve used waa “patterns” everywhere instead of talking about processes, because this works to explain my point really well.
I tried, oh how I tried lol. I cannot believe I hit the character limit too. It is kind of astonishing to me that so many people don’t understand what we are trying to convey, maybe it’s just because it’s note difficult to parse through text. Or maybe we really are the confused ones
Well just after posting this and getting almost universal “you are absurd, wtf” comments definitely made me confused. I’m still pretty damn confused hahahah but I did have an original notion of what I was talking about, just lost in the sauce since then
Thank you very much for responding, I will read this in detail soon and respond appropriately
I’m so sorry for how ridiculously long it was, I didn’t go into it thinking it was a novel. I personally don’t expect a detailed response to it or anything, just trying to explain what Ive observed/interpreted from other peoples comments/complaints over time
No need to apologize at all, I greatly appreciate your words and perspective.
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 100% agree, thank you
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