Yesterday was intense for everyone. Some quick updates as of last night:
- A large amount of the sitemod team has stepped away from the project. Other comrades from the community have volunteered to pitch in and been modded.
- Some core devs also stepped away from the project. For the time being, you should not expect any further development of new features or bug fixes as we reassess our capacity.
- Main has been locked. No immediate plans to unlock.
- Registration is closed and will remain so for the time being.
We 100% understand and support everyone who left yesterday and are also looking forward to the next stage of Hexbear.
We’re probably not going to be making any additional announcements or formal communication until after the weekend at the earliest. Thanks.
I hate to say it, but honestly I expected this to be a bit of a short lived project anyway. Once CTH was killed off suddenly, the ark discord had (relatively) few members, and then the amounts who migrated over here have been even less. And recruitment efforts are difficult. Not only is our niche rather small, and most of the people elsewhere already feel content with what they currently have, but we’re a unique slice of the internet where a lot of us don’t want to deal with the hostility and anger that has been coming out over the past week or so anymore. I don’t want that Reddit tier anger here, if this place can’t stay cozy then I’ll just stick to small discords with friends like I did before.
Heck, I try not to even get too angry at the chuds coming here, I just sigh and go “ugh, guess it’s another dude to report, please leave us alone” at this point thoughts cause I don’t want to deal with the toxicity anymore. I’ve tried making nuanced critiques. I’m a vegan (as much as my unique circumstances allow at least), despite having my ancestors be hunters and my own grandpa having planned to take me hunting before he had died when I was young. I want to see it from all the perspectives and keep a calm discussion. And honestly I just don’t know how half of these people (both vegan arguers and non vegan arguers) are functioning outside of their very insular spaces. It comes off like the types of people who get recorded in public and then trend of Tiktok or Twitter because they just can’t stop screaming for one second, rather than engage in any sort of civil discourse.
I made a point before about how “I wouldn’t go around calling people in the global south barbaric and cannibals because some of them have issues with homophobia, would I?”, and I stick by it. Cultural critique needs to be approached in a very mature manner if you don’t want to come off as hostile and racist, and that includes things that you think are objectively wrong. Obviously every single one of us here is disgusted with the queerphobia that still exists around the globe, but none of us would ever go so far as to call people from south america or asia monsters for it.
I’ve preached before on other accounts about the importance of compassionate veganism and activism. Slowly introducing people into better lifestyles, teaching them and helping them improve instead of just throwing shade. Nutrition classes and help for those with eating disorders, providing healthy and moral food for the poor, overcoming the fear and hostility that has been planted into people in society about vegetables, and I feel like all of that work and discussion has just been shit on these past few days. From people going “I’ll eat meat to spite those angry vegans”, as if all of us here are the exact same way, or those same angry vegans going “But muh indigenous cultures” in a mocking tone, it feels like we’ve reverted to the arguments you’d see in a middle school, not someplace that’s meant to be thoughtful and kind. Those are the types of anger and statements I expect from the_donald, not here.
IDK, maybe I’ll stick around and comment here and there/read threads for news and memes, but things have gotten so hateful and childish that I can barely stand it as is.
Having been off for here for 6 days, I have been extremely surprised that the veganism debate wasn’t immediately treated by the same rules as sectarianism*. That’s been a pretty successful model for this site.
I remember before that we’d regularly have the anarkiddies/tankies threads that did nothing but drive people away. Once the rule was put in place, those tendency fights ended.
*Functionally on this site it’s a political tendency, you’re welcome to check out this sticky if you are unsure, even though there are arguments to be had about it being a philosophy/practice.
there is no assumption of good faith at all here
There’s a good amount and the community does a solid job.
There are multiple private discords with the sole focus of destroying this site and that is an entire level of fucking loser I never expected to see continue this long after launch.
There are multiple private discords with the sole focus of destroying this site
Jesus fucking christ, why are people like this lmfao
There are multiple private discords with the sole focus of destroying this site .
Can confirm these exist, they even have “sleeper accounts” which they created at site launch with the whole purpose of starting shit and inflaming every argument on here. I caught two of them yesterday. I don’t understand what drives people to do shit like that, like ffs go outside for once.
It can be difficult to have good faith discussions when people internalize the “bullying works” meme a bit too closely.
Now that you’re a sitemod from this particular comment specifically, I sincerely hope you’ll work to change the part of the PR post yesterday that excepted the vegan shit-stirring from rules governing sectarianism.
This site has long had a lingering uninterrogated colonial mindset across a good chunk of the userbase (myself included!) which has been brought up multiple times, so for the admin/dev team to respond in that both sidesy way yesterday to a specific, high profile instance of it was incredibly disheartening.
There was undoubtedly wrecking that took advantage of the original, legitimate concern, and the response from some to double down on the assimilation take just fed into that. But the response from the admin team stood in stark contrast to the way transphobes got the wall a few months ago.
people see someone who disagrees on a fairly complex issue and jump immediately to the worst fucking mindset possible in the person they’re debating with.
veganism is one of the various positions in which you will rarely see unity in any given left group that doesn’t organize around it. so literally the only way to address it is for both sides of the issue to decide either their comrades are still their comrades despite a differing position on it, or that the differences are irreconcilable in which case the other side needs to be fought at the expense of the community itself.
Yeah this sort of thing is really scary, and I know I’ve done it already myself a bit which I regret like implying they would throw slurs at me if I partaked in things like fishing/hunting that my grandpa and his community took part in, I realize that was unfair and rude of me to just assume. I still think it has a veneer of racism behind that but I was probably too hostile and assumptive about the level. At the end of the day, arguments around all these topics have been in leftist discourse since practically forever. And I’ll also admit, I’ve probably upvoted a few rude comments in my haste that I shouldn’t, which doesn’t help cause it shows “support” for them that I shouldn’t have done.
And besides, there have been vegan communists, they have been omni communists, there was probably a lot of communist thinkers who couldn’t make up their mind too all throughout history. Accusations thrown around like “Vegans are actually neoliberals!” or “You can’t be leftist without veganism” are just silly because of that. It’s so unnecessarily aggressive.
Also uh, this is a problem throughout the whole internet but minorities can disagree with each other is a thing too. I posted before about how I don’t want to talk over my indigenous comrades, but we do need to keep in mind that the term is broad and can refer to a lot of different cultures with different histories behind them. One culture might have a lot of emphasis on hunting and still actively teach their kids how to, while another might have veered away from that in the past few generations. One holocaust survivor might think eating animals is a fair comparison, while other survivors might find it disrespectful of the pain and suffering they went through. Someone who’s ancestors were slaves might think that the comparison to slavery as unfair and rude, while another person with slave ancestors think it’s an apt comparision. People can disagree about these things even in historically oppressed communities. But I do think, the only people who should really be speaking up about that are the ones who go through it. A holocaust survivor can call something similar to the holocaust, but you, someone born 50 years after, shouldn’t be. You can point to the person who did say it, but that’s really it. It’s not your job to latch onto one oppressed person’s words and use them to shove your own non experienced thoughts into a conversation.
feels like we’ve reverted to the arguments you’d see in a middle school, not someplace that’s meant to be thoughtful and kind
Agreed. It was a fucking mess.
I read the rest of your comment, I just don’t have a lot bandwidth. Thanks for writing something long that wasn’t the equivalent of hatemail.
I appreciate all the work that the admins here do, I know that moderating a community like this is difficult, especially one that has always been rather prone to splitting and tearing itself apart. I have a lot of issues with the way that moderation is done here sometimes (like how people have mentioned the mod log needs to be more detailed), but I’m also trying to fight back against the hostility that some of the users are bringing up with it. I critiqued that one dude who was like “Admins do better challenge” for being too passive aggressive, but at the end of the day I know I can’t control anyone. It feels like a losing battle to try to keep civil discussions up.
I loved this site early on for having challenging discussions that made me double back and think “huh, maybe I was being shitty with those things”. I’m trying to work on stuff like my internalized fatphobia, and calling things “dumb” or “stupid” as a go-to insult that I don’t think I would have challenged myself on if people here weren’t nice and kind over it and willing to have discussions. But that magic is fading, and I don’t know if it will ever come back.
Site team really needs to compartmentalise community management and PR from development from moderation.
The combining of all areas creates a mentally draining and emotionally exhausting environment for the entire group. You need a very specific type of attitude to deal with it day in and day out. Those working development should be kept away from it. High turnover in team members having to handle that should also be expected.
Really think the team should consider instead structural changes in the organisation rather than complete abandonment. The problem isn’t that we’re dealing with anything unique, the problem isn’t that the site is dealing with anything that any other site doesn’t have to deal with, the problem is that organisation is a mess of people trying to keep up with absolutely everything every single team is doing instead of just focusing on their own thing.
It doesn’t matter if there’s a small drama outburst in one comm or another or whatever. They’re small short lived events that get handled and the community moves on from them.
Too many team members are involved, too many are getting emotionally involved. Things should be handled by a much smaller number of people and those that are part of that should be the types of people who can take an emotional step back from events.
There are 74+ accounts in the modchat. It is a free for all.
Burn out keeping up with that incredibly online space is not at all surprising to me.
I don’t know. I think that a lot of burnout comes down to a need to DECREASE the amount of drama various key individuals have to be involved in.
In essence, the goal should be for decision makers and the incredibly important developers to be as separated from the emotional impact of decision making as humanly possible.
I’m sure there are various things that could improve the lives of users but the problem first and foremost seems to be that there’s structural issues in the team that requires structural changes to address turnover problems with volunteers. The first and foremost issue there is to prioritise key team members and making sure turnover and burnout happens as little as possible with them. When they burnout things get really bad. That hurts the whole site, users included.
Emotional impact on key team members seems to be the most pressing issue at hand.
Yes, admins I’m begging you, allow some back channel from union to admins for hasty/(presumed yeasty) bans/concerns, which is filtered through some judgement. Or to relay stuff back from mods to there. Right now it exists in hanging state, where people are lucky to receive some answers, so disappointment builds there without info (or get banned, which is bad)
Site team really needs to compartmentalise community management and PR from development from moderation.
The combining of all areas creates a mentally draining and emotionally exhausting environment for the entire group. You need a very specific type of attitude to deal with it day in and day out. Those working development should be kept away from it. High turnover in team members having to handle that should also be expected.
This definitely hits the nail on the head.
I come to this website (like the sub before it) to basically just shitpost, read shitposts, maybe occasionally learn something or teach some people something. I see an obvious drama thread that triggers the red flag in my head, maybe I’ll read some of it out of Bile Fascination for shits and giggles and eye rolls, but I’ll almost never engage with it. If I even click on it at all.
This is really the kind of attitude you have to have when approaching this bullshit on the internet. Yeah, I have some deeply held opinions on these topics, and frankly, they’ve so far mostly gone against the grain of the authorities/majority opinion here at least in broad strokes. But I also know just how fruitless and unnecessarily stressful and emotionally taxing it is to engage deeply with online arguments like these. After years of taking yelling at people on the internet way too fucking seriously, I know when to just keep my mouth shut and walk the fuck away. It’s not that important.
When I was a terminally online lib in my early Reddit years, a frequent user of /r/SubredditDrama among others, going way way way too fucking deep into the anti-GamerGate rabbit hole, that level of time and emotional investment into petty online argumentation led me to a very dark place when Trump won in 2016. My response to that (aside from deep depression, identity crisis, and an escalation of my alcoholism) was to almost immediately cut myself off from all political and meta-internet communities, basically everything except sports. Eventually I suffered a second identity crisis and came out at the end as a communist, diving back into the online world as a result, but I knew then from experience how deeply toxic and self-harming it is to become addicted to meta-internet drama. It’s equivalent to turning self-medication into self-harm.
Remain detached, at arms length, from this kind of shit. It’s not worth it, and considering this community past and present already attracts emotionally unstable personalities becoming addicted to that is almost literally making suicide a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stepping back and bricking up a barrier of ironic detachment is, in this case, a lot healthier than binding yourself intimately to these topics.
is this site really going to fucking die over a veganism struggle sesh
Everyone will upvote the “solidarity” comment now, but boy was Dash treated like shit in their “I’m leaving” thread.
Enjoy your weekend. Seriously I really think a ton of users vastly underestimate the amount of effort that goes into running a website like this, for free of all things. I still remember when an admin DM’ed me to check if I was okay after I posted about being harassed by trolls and k*rries. We need to treat these people with the respect they deserve for doing such a thing, sacrificing their free time to ensure that the website is running smoothly. If we don’t we’re going to turn into r*ddit 2.0. Also please send my condolences and thanks to all the devs, mods and admins, I’ve tried to message them all (those that left) but I’m unsure if their accounts are still active. Some of the attitudes I’ve seen towards the developers and admins have been very sickening, expecting someone working on the website to bend to their every will and command and not being thankful or even displaying basic human kindness and decency towards them. People expecting the site to be renamed immediately (someone actually made a post that was very condescending like that), stuff like that. Again thanks for everything, I strongly believe that we can get through this.
