Hexbear’s new head of operations just dropped, and their way of dealing with the fallout of their last struggle session is to hand bans out like candy to their concerned and disillusioned users while throwing out “epic” quips like insecure teenagers along the way coupled with their communication (and seemingly contempt) towards their own userbase which isn’t helping their allegations at all and the revelations that were learned about Hexbear’s moderators and admins from their most recent struggle session.
The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.
I compare it to “mandatory fun time” at work. Many workplaces have a Friday outing where people go drink with their bosses at a bar. It’s not mandatory, yet everyone feels like they have to go. They feel that way because going to those events shows you’re a team player, because if a round of layoffs/redundancies comes, the bosses will pick those people who don’t fit into the “work culture”. So despite it not being mandatory, one’s presence or absence is noted.
That is what I have a problem with. That and the insistence that it isn’t mandatory when it obviously is.
I aired my complaints about TC69 and her fans here but don’t get it twisted, the posts weren’t mandatory. The original issue I mentioned was a misunderstanding resulting in a dogpile of a cool person who didn’t deserve it, and the causes are not unlike what occurred in this most recent struggle session.
I never said you said it was mandatory, and I didn’t mean to imply it. I was merely stating how a daily thread on “I love x” (whatever x is) is a bit weird, that’s all. If the hexbear people had a daily “I love communism” thread I’d still think it’s weird and I would still think it’s mandatory. The pledge of allegiance isn’t mandatory, yet the vast majority of kids/students/people in America do it. Why? Standing up for the anthem is not mandatory, yet everyone does it. Did you see the reactions when people didn’t stand for the anthem in America? For me it is the same thing. Many things in life are not mandatory but as I have come to find out, they are expected of you.
There is no daily thread, there is no expectation, and unlike the pledge of allegiance, you can’t look around and see people sitting down. Someone not posting in a thread doesn’t necessarily mean anything and I dare you to give me one example of anyone facing anything for not posting that they “love [their] trans comrades” ever in the history of the site.
That is exactly the same argument people use when one tries to explain to a native of a colonialist/imperialist country what it is like to experience discrimination in their country. Btw, I am not making any assumptions about you, I am talking about your argument. They always ask “well, can you prove it? give an example!” and it’s like, you can’t really prove it because it isn’t anything written down or a physical thing you can take a picture of. It’s a feeling among people and one that people have, it’s what you feel hanging in the air.
Let’s ignore the “daily trans thread”, here’s a different example.
If you see a username on a website for months, that username sometimes writes things you agree with etc., and then a new username comes. You’re more inclined to trust the username you have seen around for months, aren’t you? If someone asked you who should be a mod, you’d pick the username you know better. If someone asks you why, you’d explain it “I just know that person” or “I know them better”. And that is what it is about, knowing someone better.
As you, correctly said, not posting in the thread gives no information at all. But posting in it, signals to you that that person is pro- whatever you are pro-, and from then on you know the person a bit better (we’re assuming honesty and genuine expression here). So if ever a time comes when you have to choose, either vote for, or take a side in an argument, or help, or whatever, and all things being equal, it comes down to the fact that you will choose the person who you’ve seen posting in that thread over a person who you haven’t.
Except it isn’t. This is all spun out of your head. Try giving the slightest bit of evidence for your point that participation is de-facto mandatory.
The fact that you’re behaving like an unhinged zealot who just heard a random person on the street say something negative about their cult leads me to believe that your cult-like practice is in fact cult-like.
I’m not behaving like an unhinged zealot, I’m asking you to give evidence of what you’re saying, because what you’re saying is wrong.
Me not pointing out that your arguments are nonsense is proof you’re right because nobody is arguing against you, but if I do so I am showing the cult-like tendency of attacking disbelievers. It’s all very simple really.
You’re deflecting. And no, saying something is “cult-like” doesn’t prove it’s “cult-like.” Actually a pathetic attempt to flip the conversation.
Your whole attitude towards me from the start was negative and confrontational. I expressed an opinion and you said I should delete my account, called me an idiot, questioned my mental faculties, and then shouted at me in all caps. what kind of response did you expect?
For what purpose when you know I don’t have any? I don’t go on hexbear, I did just recently to see all this drama, so I’m not gonna be able to give you any evidence because I am basing my impression on posts that may not be indicative of the wider community and on the comments of others.
OK, I’m happy to accept that. I am wrong, you are right. But it is all right, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. I won the victory over myself. I love Big Brother.
Just one response with the semblance of a correct point. What did you expect when you got a response to your original comment explaining why it was wrong and decided to smugly misunderstand it and continue digging your hole with awful arguments and bad info?
Can you get out of your Orwell irony for one second? You admit you know nothing about the site, and yet use irony to deflect from admitting you’re wrong. I’m not asking you to submit to anything, you’re not in a dystopia, you thought there were daily threads where users were expected to say something and there weren’t. There never were. And no “we were always at war with Eurasia” nonsense. Just stop.
Not to be insulted for one. I made a general comment about a whole website, and here you are insulting me personally. Did I insult you? Did I say “hexbear, and especially robinn_”??
I decided to misunderstand it? Misunderstand implies one didn’t understand something, saying I decided to misunderstand makes no sense because you’re saying I understood the point but chose to interpret it incorrectly, and that’s a different accusation entirely.
I said I was wrong. Wrong about it being a daily thread.
My insults are actually very straightforward and not revenge for being insulted in the first place. I insulted your intelligence because your replies are unintelligent.
I think your misunderstanding is a product of your needing to be right alongside poor reading comprehension. You decided to be cemented in your beliefs rather than take a closer look.
Lastly, check the chronological order and what comments you’re replying to. Please don’t keep replying to me, it’s the same thing over and over again.
I know, because I never insulted you.
Perhaps they are unintelligible, but I don’t think they are unintelligent.
Yeah, and you ran a perfect campaign for me to do so, calling me a “fucking idiot” from the first response. But I am the one who should just take insult after insult, do what you want me to do, all so I could in the end agree with you. No. I won’t do what you tell me.
Kinda hard to do when my inbox is being bombarded by people from the place that is totally-not-a-cult.
Hi. As someone that is no longer on the admin team but was in favor of TC69 stepping down after all this, you just sound like you’re trying to mask transphobia behind a critique of a single user. The memes about TC69 come from the fact that she was the one that spearheaded the pronoun tags and the removal of downvotes to combat transphobia, both of which resulted in massive struggle sessions and ban waves that ultimately made the site better, now this situation is different but no more volatile than any previous upheavals. No investigation no right to speak.
People were literally downvote brigading any tans-positive post anonymously before we made it so that admins could see who the driveby downvotes came from to take action. That led to the removal of the downvote altogether which has had a majorly positive impact on the site as a whole, so there is a reason she was trusted and well liked when she returned.
You wouldn’t accuse me of being transphobic if I posted in that thread. Why do you have to assume that just because I don’t engage in your liberal performative rituals that I am against whatever that ritual is about? And then you also say “posting in those threads isn’t mandatory”. Yeah, if you don’t want to be considered a transphobe.
IRL, I’ve both educated people on trans issues, pronouns and advocated for removing transphobic people from spaces. So that’s why the accusation feels like an insult rather than a judgment on me or my behaviour. Feel free to go through my entire post history on lemmygrad and find something that can be construed or interpreted as transphobic.
I read her 1-2 recent posts on hexbear and she doesn’t sound like a good person to me, she sounds egoistic. I wasn’t there to see the hexbear cultural revolution and start of the golden age, I am not claiming to know everything. I gave my impressions on Hexbear in a thread on Hexbear. Or wait, was this one of those “I love Hexbear” ritual threads? Dammit! I’m terrible at reading social cues.
Which person are you talking about because I was referring only to the I Love My Trans Comrades posts that you seem to have some sort of issue with hence the accusation.
TC69
I don’t have a problem with that thread in particular, I have a problem with a “I love x” in general. As an autist my whole life I have been outside looking in. I see social rituals as exclusionary, because I could never pick up on the cues or know which “non mandatory” things are actually mandatory. So when I see an expression of a shared micro-culture online (like a forum) it makes me weary because from my experience 1) people who develop a “shared culture” often expect you to not have any other cultures, 2) group goes through purges and “purifications”. Can you take a wild guess who’d be one of the first ones to be purged?
And why? Look, people have accused me of being transphobic because I don’t use the same language, same signifiers and symbols or ways of talking/thinking, and because I went against what is apparently established canon or whatever. Do you see now why I might be weary of joining any group where I think that some sort of wink-wink signaling to one another might be necessary?
That is your problem not ours or our comrades who feel validated by such posts.
Wtf do you mean by this? What language do you not use and why don’t you simply adopt new words into your vocabulary? As an ML surely you have done so in the past. All this just comes off as excuses for bigotry. Hell every single one of us is always adapting our language as we learn new words and concepts this is a really weird and honestly sus argument.
Also quite fuckin insulting to use being ND as a shield.
OK. And am I over on hexbear telling you all this and arguing that you should change things? No, I’m on lemmygrad in a thread discussing hexbear. Now all you hexbearians are here angry that someone has an opinion on hexbear. Or is the problem that the opinion is expressed on a website where you don’t have control? Instead people come here from hexbear to insult me and brigade me like the totally-not-cultists that they are.
It wasn’t mandatory. I was there.