Lately I’ve been seeing posters here express some form of the sentiment that Hexbear has fallen from its previous heights of glory and now we post amongst the ruins of greatness. This is not a response to anyone in particular, and I don’t want to call anyone out. In fact, it seems to be a normal human tendency to romanticize the past. But I’ve been here since the beginning and want to provide an alternate view.
1. Hexbear just isn’t like it used to be. 
This is one I am particularly suspicious of, since people started posting this after the site had been around for a couple of months. Before that they posted about how chapo.chat wasn’t like the old chapotraphouse subreddit. If the good ol’ days ever existed, they always seem to have been just prior to the current moment. If anything the site culture and vibe have been remarkably consistent since its inception, for better or worse. Faces have changed, people have come and gone and sometimes come back again, but Hexbear remains.
2. People used to be nice here and treat each other as comrades. Now there is just a culture of shallow dunks. 
Seriously? Be for real. I’m not going to deny that we love a good dunk around here, but let’s not pretend that this is a new phenomenon. It’s a big part of the culture around here that predates the site and even arguably even the subreddit. You can be free to like it or not, criticize it or not, say its productive or not, but its definitely not a new development. There’s always been a lot of love and mutual support, but also a lot of vicious arguments intracommunity arguments here. If anything I think there’s less of this now. The early posters would laugh at what passes for a struggle session around here these days. The VCJ struggle session seemed at the time like it might legitimately end the entire site.
3. This site had the potential to be a place for organizing and building something rather than just posting. 
This one is an interesting counterfactual. From the beginning there was no clear agreement on what the ultimate purpose of the site would be, and there were definitely people who saw the site as having revolutionary potential. There were also people who saw it as a place to hang out and shitpost among comrades and were skeptical of its potential for organizing. Over time, I think it’s become clear that we’re closer to the latter than the former. I’m okay with that, personally, but more than that I think it’s worth considering why despite having a lot of smart, determined people on the site, organizing never really materialized, or if it ever had that potential in the first place.
4. People used to post effort posts and stuff and now its just a bunch of shitposting. 
It’s always been mostly shitposting. This is one of my first comments on this site. It’s hard to say if there really used to be more effort posts or not, but what’s stopping you from writing an effort post if you feel like Hexbear needs more of them? I’m doing it right now, and so can you.
One thing that really has changed is that we used to have more comrades actively working on developing the site. Hopefully more people will step up to do that (not me though because I can’t code).
In conclusion, Hexbear is mostly, for better or worse, as it always has been. Enjoy your time here without worrying about whether it measures up to some imagined glorious past. If there’s something you feel is lacking, step up and contribute it. This site is nothing more or less than the sum of our contributions.
On point 4: I do think effort posting has reduced and part of the reason for this is that the biggest people that were previously doing it couldn’t stop being fucking dickheads to anarchists.
I loved Joey Steel’s posting for example but they just couldn’t stick to the non-sectarian rule and for that they got the yeet. This is just one example but it happened to others too.
I don’t see a solution to this, short of alienating large swathes of people that should be our comrades despite ideological differences. The non-sectarian line must be maintained.
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I love my anarchist conrads aktually
Same
Honestly sick of walking into random leftist spaces and see people having incoherent rants about why every leftist they don’t like is a NATO fed liberal red fash tankie and get distracted and obsessed with random conspiracy theories about infinitely far away countries, instead of staying focused and on-mission with the huge number of things actually in our faces to deal with. Sure, HB isn’t perfect, but it is.
This would be an ad verbatim comment on this site if you removed the tankie and red fash part
Honestly the best solution to something like this is for anarchists to have thicker skin.
(Disclaimer so that mods don’t remove this post: I’m an anarchist myself)
Nah the issue goes both ways. It’s not just about thicker skin it’s that any leeway on this topic is a slippery slope that will lead to immense struggle sessions and ridiculous very-online melodrama. It’s also the easiest thing in the world for wreckers to agitate through, both ways, and they know it. Anti-sectarian rules over on reddit are less about sectarianism itself and more about preventing the immense amount of wrecking that comes through it.
That may be true, but I take more offense to the banning of bmf than I do to their sectarian comments (have you ever noticed that they don’t engage with anyone, and have never replied to any comment? every one of their posts and comments is once-off). I even appreciated JoeySteel.
Personally, every now and then I’ll come out and say something about how rigid pyramidal power structures were carried over from feudalism to capitalism, and a successful and true socialist movement is going to have to ditch them. I think there’s a lot of constructive criticism to go around.
I think sectarian posting should be allowed, as long as it’s high effort analysis and not deliberately trying to be antagonistic. I think that would encourage more dialogue rather than stifling it.
I think that’s just inviting an entirely avoidable drama outbreak that will 100% occur when the borderline between “high effort” and not is found and repeatedly tested by those that wish to deliberately see the drama happen because it’s very funny.