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
💯 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.
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!
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.
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.
Aw I see. Well I guess I did kind of expand upon that anyway. Sorry I’m neurodivergent and was hells confused but thanks for the apology
deleted by creator
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@01:50