Another moderation point I just thought of - I was going to post a thread on the HCA marketplace for 2026 and realized I didn’t know where to put it. Maybe we can expand out the remit of this to Healthcare & Covid or something along those lines?

I don’t know if there’s anything that can get through to people outside this sub about taking covid seriously. Health authorities said return to normal, so everyone did. It’s still killing people, but in numbers people can ignore. It’s still degrading everyone’s health, but it a mostly subtle way that doesn’t draw attention to itself. People aren’t seeing the damage it’s doing, and meanwhile everyone else is back to normal, so there’s not much we can do to change that.

Trying to convince people that it’s still a danger feels like trying to sell people on some quack supplement cure at worst, or like telling a smoker that smoking is killing them and expecting them to stop. People just don’t respond to it, and probably won’t unless covid fucks them up, or fucks up someone they care about, in a way that they can’t blame on something else.

Best I think we can do is to keep covid deniers out of here and make sure this sub stays a source of good information.

Been reading here for a LONG time even though I’m new but I want to piggy back on a few points that @JoeByeThen@hexbear.net and @Demifriend@hexbear.net made about covid denialism and eugenics. While these things do exist specifically on this site, and even on this comm sadly enough, the sad fact is that EVERY site these days is a covid denialism and eugenics hotbed. For christ’s sake, even the DSA can’t be bothered to pass a resolution to mask up, much less the CPUSA or any of the other so called leftist groups in this god forsaken country. It just is what it is at this point.

While this is despair inducing, we can’t give in and sink to the lowest depths. There is a need for moderation throughout the site when it comes to the eugenics (subtle or over) and covid denialism, and it needs to come from US, not the mods! There are just far too many instances of this subtly awful behavior getting posted around the site and we have take the time to point it out and shut it down. At the very least, make these user feel shitty enough about their views that they want to reflect and attempt to change. God knows, we leftists love a good struggle session, but we need to focus on not throwing our fellow comrades to the wolves, and instead attempt to point the mirror back at them and reflect their own poor behavior back in their faces.

None of us came to covid willingly and none of us want others to go through what we’ve been through. We’ll never achieve that if we close ourselves off to every single person that has a stupid, shitty view on this issue. Furthermore, we’ll never achieve the solidarity that we so desperately desire if we huddle around each other, isolated from the outside world. I see very little advocacy from other members on here, and even less backbone to stand up and for one another. I have advocated for militancy in real life in discussions recently but it is a very, very lonely road. Here though, no one is going to spit in my mouth. I don’t have to worry about someone coughing on me and my mask being slightly ajar because I’m chewing gum. No doctor or nurse is going to flatly refuse to wear a mask while I’m forced to take mine off. On here, we can be a community, and we should do more to help our other fellow leftists avoid having their lives completely ruined by this horrible disease if we can.

On that note, from the moderation front Hestia, I’d like to see some more sticky threads on this comm. Its a little ridiculous that there are 47 different sticky posts on the front page, and not a single informative sticky on here. There are a font of resources and information we should be sharing with one another and not just linking back to Reddit.

The site is largely pro-eugenics. Full stop. When historians look back at the absolute shitstorm of the next few decades , the failure of “The Left” in the West to protect and express solidarity with marginalized communities is going to be seen as a major pivotal moment in which the ball was completely dropped. And this site’s activity is the perfect recording of it.

For example, the anti-mask sentiment doesn’t even end at community care, it extends into opsec. Which is just wild. We’ve got people literally being kidnapped off the streets, panopticon cameras everywhere, llm’s small enough to hide locally and be watching our every keystroke and screenswipe; And yet, anytime I bring up opsec I always get at least one response pointing out that you can’t have a perfect defense, so why bother taking action? It’s like the “endemic” argument used to do embrace apathy about covid has completely infected the ability to give a shit about doing any sort of planning for the future. I really do wonder if I’m talking to Feds sometimes with how resistant Hexbear is to discussing the most basic preparation strategies.

I very much feel like I am surrounded by people on this site who don’t realize that they are basically illegal and the only the reason they’re still free is because their dehumanized status hasn’t been normalized among a large enough portion of the population, yet. And then these same people, through their own inaction and apathy, contribute to the dehumanizing of marginalized communities all around them.

Now, how can moderation can change that? I don’t know. I’m pretty happy with how the comm mods here ban covid minimization. Sometimes I think they’re a bit too quick on folks who aren’t happy with vaccines given how they don’t measure up to what the promise of them was, but I can appreciate the need for it. I don’t know that you can really have that sort of quickness of banning minimization of these topics to extend into greater hexbear because it’s a site culture issue, in much the same way dunking and shitposts are. This site’s userbase very early on decided it wanted to be the Jon Stewart of leftist sites (lots of dunks, no responsiblity) and for the most part they’ve succeeded in pigeonholing themselves. Most comms that do focus on topics beyond shitposting (covid, vegan) have to be “soft bordered” and then just don’t get a lot of activity.

Now, if you haven’t figured out by now, I’m not exactly very fond of hexbear at the moment. I mostly find myself coming back for c/covid and then shitpost in the rest of the site to agitate where I can and with what I feel I can get away with. But real conversations largely devolve in to with folks that I find myself disengaging from, largely because they’re not at all familiar with the topic beyond what they’re repeating from seeing in other threads. Hexbear has its own set of misinformation on certain topics that have become trope-like at this point, and pushing back against that is just exhausting.

Idk, I don’t envy the job the mods and admins have dealing with all this shit (I run my own so I get it) but also ever since the c/anti-union debacle I really have lowkey wondered, “WTF, y’all?”

lol, that about what you’re looking for?

I’m pretty much fine with how this comm is moderated. Sometimes covid denialism shows up in the comments here and stays up for a bit, but I understand that it’s a pretty low activity comm and most of the people here are burned out, so it makes sense that covid denialism won’t always be caught right away. Usually that sort of thing is removed once it’s been reported and someone is able to take a look at it, so no complaints from me there.

As for the rest of the website, I would like to see covid denialism be taken more seriously, even more casual forms of it. It’s very frustrating that there are so many people on this website, and on the left in general, who have obviously given up on masking (or taking any precautions at all) and think that they are still my comrades. For instance, I used to post in the trans megathread regularly, but have avoided it for a long time now because it is obvious from the posts many people make about their lives in there that they aren’t masking, and that lack of solidarity makes it clear that people like me aren’t welcome. It says to me that trans lives only matter if they aren’t immunocompromised or otherwise at risk, or if they can delude themselves into believing covid won’t harm them or the others around them. It says to me that a eugenicist mentality is acceptable here as long as you are passive about it. I single out /c/trans because it’s the community I cared the most about and feel the most betrayed by because of it, but this feeling extends to the rest of the site’s community as well. I pretty much only use this site now because it’s just about the only place to talk about video games on the internet that doesn’t tolerate nazis, otherwise I would have just left completely by now.

The normalization of ignoring covid and allowing everyone to be repeatedly infected, and the widespread death and disability resulting from it, is one of the most devastating forms of class warfare we face currently. To ignore it shows a complete lack of principles among the communists here, and I know they know better. I cannot take anyone seriously who tells me “a better world is possible” while languidly allowing this behavior to slide, when being cautious and protecting ourselves and each other is so much easier than any revolution will be.

I guess to reiterate, I would like it if a more active approach was taken to discourage casual covid denialism on this site. I think beyond moderation, that would require a change in culture on the part of users here as well. I’m not sure what that actually looks like or how we get there, maybe taking a similar approach to veganism, where carnist behavior is generally shamed here. Sorry for the rant and thanks to anyone who read this far. I hope I got my point across ok, it’s hard to talk about this without letting my temper flare and losing my train of thought.

haven’t had a problem in here, wish our mods got to be covid stalin on the rest of the site