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 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.