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

  • Jabril [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    Create a Mod Accountability Post and link to this discussion. Request that users give constructive feedback and ideas as to how their grievances could be solved. Do not shut down ideas with “we can’t or won’t do that”. See if ideas can be generated to find a middle ground first. Perhaps whoever posts this should act as a facilitator. If someone comes in venting their emotions, perhaps try to guide the user towards working towards a solution. Be curious, ask questions. Be more involved in discussion instead of just reading comments and only discussing them in the mod chat. Don’t play goalie when people bring up specific examples, try to get to the root issue or if you don’t know what it is, ask.

    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.

    • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      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