real [he/him, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

2mo ago

Hexbear has felt quiet since the struggle session (short rant)

It seems to really have alienated a number of people and prevented them from posting. This is a great shame because I felt that hexbears’s momentum and place of online leftism was really starting to shine in the days after the election. This is the most important time for there to be an alternative on the left and we’re wasting it, with what appears to be the start of another struggle session caused by mods unilaterally deciding things.

I don’t really have a solution or more to say, more just this dump of feelings

93 comments

Just keep posting. If the poster ahead of you should upvote the wrong post and be banned, pick up their keyboard and press onwards
- Starting to think that all of us sharing one keyboard may be a reason for the lack of posts. We need to bolster the production of keyboards in the next five year plan.
  
  Then after we win the posting wars will we eat keyboards? We can't fall into only wartime production!
  
  Who could have seen this coming?
- Exactly 💯.
  Not one step back!
  
  URAAA
  
  I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

Nothing more leftist than fucking up the vibes for no reason at the worst possible time.

I've tried my best to stay out of the struggle sessions but it feels like the mods keep doing foolish things and pissing off people more and more. HB does feel a lot slower and I hope it's not because people are afraid to upbear/post.
- look i love this stupid website and the admins do good work but also their motto is "if it ain't broke, absolutely fuck with it"
  countless such instances
  
  Everyone keeps saying it
- It absolutely is, there has been a strong decline in site activity since the struggle sesh. Hexbear was among the most active I’ve seen directly beforehand.

Yeah, I’m not exactly a power poster. I just like hexbear as Reddit but with far less shitty politics and cooperate astroturfing. However with these moderation struggle sessions I just find hexbear is less appealing. Hexbear is clearly a very important space to some people and who are getting very upset over things. And I think these events between these users and mods are chilling the community. It’s not a warm welcoming space to bring in new users and encourage interaction and exploring the community. Imagine your first interaction with the site: you open it up and the front page is all pinned posts about stupid drama. Even as a reasonably regular user I haven’t got time to read them and frankly don’t wish to. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who feels this way.
FWIW on the current issue, I think upvotes are good for surfacing interesting content. That’s why Reddit was so good, it crowdsources the curation. A million users is a better sorter of content than a desk of moderators acting as content editors. They’re open to manipulation sure. But I’m not seeing too many issues on hexbear.
- i almost never open the megas.. too much crap to sift thru
  
  ya ive tried and for whatever reason they just don’t jive w my brain systems

Sure it was the struggle session? Even now I feel the details of the session fading away like fingerprints on an abandoned handrail
I feel like it's more post-election malaise, same thing happened back in 2020 after Biden won, alot of bored posting, and I'm leavin, I'm back, I'm leavin, I'm back posts too
- I feel like the almost back-to-back "Dunk Tank" struggle session and then "Upvote Ban" struggle session probably burned a lot of people up. :/
  
  then "Upvote Ban" struggle session
  I completely missed that one, but since neither of them come close to the vegan debacle of 2021, I feel it's safe to assume the site will survive this short period of unrest
  Like I said before, I think alot of these micromanaging debates over forum engineering stem from a misplaced frustration with the state of the world AS WELL as the continuing failure of federation over a year after it's launch, on top of the embarrassing and increasing 4chan-fication of lemmy as a whole
- I definetly think the struggle session had some impact but I've personally been posting less because I hacked my 3DS and have been playing DQ7 nonstop.
  
  @dannoffs 3ds OG, XL, or new3ds?
  I have a 3dsXL but everything I read says that the new one is the best way to go for hacking

I haven't really noticed. Probably because I mostly ignore struggle sessions.
- You're too busy posting to get bogged down! Plus, what self respecting owl would be hanging out in a bog anyway

Yeah it has been slow. Sucks. Genuinely are little concerned that we've reached a fulcrum, and without further action we're about to see the spiral of slower boards-->fewer people bothering to check Hexbear-->even slower boards-->new people who stumble upon HB who would otherwise have joined now just see it as kind of slow and empty like lemmygrad-->death
- Yes some real change needs to be made. I think anyone who has the time and is concerned about the sites future should apply to be a mod (with the newest mod drive) to try and do a lib and change the system from within.
- I think we were bound to get a lull after the election madness and the multiple-month crescendo of bullshit. people are partly recovering from that
  
  I firmly believe with zero evidence that post-election weariness and anger caused the struggle session. Tensions were high.

not being allowed to bully libs has really ruined the soul of this subreddit (website), bring back hexbear cyberbullying pls

I think it's more that a lot of posts are getting consolidated into the megas. Which is good, but also bad.
- Nah it's bad. Megas are cool for general discussion, but a forum like this relies on standalone posts. Otherwise, you're just making a discord server with extra steps. And there's a reason I'm here and not on discord ¯(ツ)_/¯
  
  Hence the bad part. The good part is that each individual comm can modify the rules to its needs.

Which one? Deleting the dunk tank or the other one?
- I am wondering that myself. I don't even remember another one besides the dunk tank shit.
  
  It was about banning or suspending people who upvoted this pretty tame comment https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/94105afc-efc5-4214-879f-cacf2fb38eb5.png

Time to start a new struggle session
Um i think pineapple is good on pizza

The news mega is poppin; God’s in His heaven All ’s right with the world!
- The news post poppin is always a cause for alarm, but at least I know when the nukes are fired, we will die posting
- One would hear that and wonder if seeing a large number of comments being made there means something goods happened or something bads happened.
  Its like a random chance box but as a forum. It's like rolling the silly d10,000 wild magic surge list. When you go on the site, scroll all the way down then roll d100, select the result from the list below, then roll again to determine the exact effect. DISCLAIMER: I did not read all 10,000 things yet so let me know if anything egregious pops up

Idk, I've been interacting less since I started using matrix a lot more, though I was never a capital P Poster. Turns out the Internet keeps re-discovering that yes in fact chat rooms are the most personal way to hang out and be social together. Alor at least I keep rediscovering it for myself. I'm not leaving any time soon though.
- i just feel like i can't keep up with chat rooms. i used to love them. but i work such long hours
  here i can have a slow moving short conversation over many days between shifts. sure it's not as personal, and feels kind of drive-by.
  i recognize lots of people here but takes years to get to know anyone. but yeah back in the early days of chatrooms i made some RL relationships. deep ones. some leading to in person meetups
  learned about my queerness, transness. so yeah i do miss that.
  
  Oh absolutely, forums definitely have their place for that. But I think it's normal for the majority of activity to be in chatrooms for that reason: it's more fast paced and real time. Translation: I'm lonely
- chat rooms and web forums. no more no less. kill ur inner like button. destroy character limits. Be free
  
  Reject modernity embrace tradition but the good kind.

It's ok I'm gonna post butts to bring everyone back
- As long as they're pretty butts. I don't want to see Elon's butt, for example.

Every struggle session is like this. Folks will trickle back in with alts and mostly it'll be fine.

What did you nerds do this time?
- Mods and admins making a lot of stupid unilateral decisions in a short notice.
  
  It's been massively blown out of proportion, people here don't know how to deescalate and talk things through.
  More than anything, what hurts this site are the struggle sessions themselves, not whatever sparks them. People leave to get away from the screaming matches. People need to slow down and talk to each other like human beings instead of snowballing into massive fights over ultimately inconsequential issues.
  Everyone who escalated the struggle session deserves some share of the blame for chilling the atmosphere of the site. Putting all the blame on the moderators and not introspecting is a great way to learn nothing and guarantee another massive struggle session over some equally inconsequential issue in the future.
  
  And when the users complain, it's always some variant of "it puts the lotion on its skin" or the DP apology from South Park
  
  ACAB

it'll be okay. make some GOOD posts
- And don't dare upvote
  
  I'm personally satisfied with the mod explanation on that but I understand why it might not be enough to remove fears for others. I trust that this whole experience will help it stay rare and for egregious circumstances

What struggle session? Was it the vegans again?
- No it was the rock stackers complaining about outdoor cats knocking down their Babylonian towers
  
  Not my rocks!
  
  how could john kerry do this?
- No a bunch of people were up voting some tailist shit and mods used the view up vote tool to see who was agreeing with it and some folks caught some strays. Only temp bans were issued over it and tbh I think most of them could have been corrected verbally unfortunately this is not that sort of medium and some of our lgbtq and poc comrades were uncomfortable with a particular comment being up voted so much. Was it an overcorrection? Perhaps but it is not the massive problem people are making it out to be.
  I am on team remove upvotes.
  
  Once again my totally intentional strategy of not upvoting anything pays off
  
  I learned what tailism is just now, thanks!
- It was Beanis posters vs fake news posters. The fight of the century

Never Stop Posting

Got banned E day, won't mention it again or probably anything else but this thread seems fair game and maybe it's more common. I don't write anything too wild so I tuned out afterwards. Whatever it was for, it was informative.

we need a Great Hexbearian Cultural Revolution
bombard the posting headquarters
this is a bit. unless..

I'm still hanging around. Not like I can go back to

I didn't even notice that Hexbear died.
I missed the struggle. What happened?

Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhh. Idk what's to be done about it.

i think you're misattributing, posting goes up and down all the time. people are making a big scare over 'less posting is happening' when there are far more active users now on average than ever before. i think you notice the lack of content more if you're on hexbear too much, so you really feel the time in between posts. thats my personal experience at least. I suggest logging off for large portions of the day, and coming back when comfortable.

Yeah, I was on the revleft forum for a few years and the vibe that eventually caused that forum to collapse (mainly mods and admins taking their contribution and themselves way too seriously) seems rampant here. Who wants to enter a community with such a high level of infighting, it's awkward. Still better than a lot of other spaces but just kinda sad because it could be much better

93 comments