Hey everyone, I’ve removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn’t restore your account yet, let me know and I’ll fix it.) Don’t worry! We’re not gonna just ban people for no reason.

In case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I’ve talked to the other admins and mods, and we’re all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)

If you’re afraid that there’s been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that’s absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you’ll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.

I’ve seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can’t get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.

During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it’s the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven’t been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren’t making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn’t foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.

Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    13 days ago

    Okay can someone give me a tl;dr of what happened? I wasn’t really following but from what I gather the d*unk_tank and dredge_tank got locked for a name change, okay cool good. Then trans_comrade_69 started saying posters on here were misogynistic in a vague way and banned a bunch of people, now mods have stepped down and I’m confused.

    • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      35·
      12 days ago

      I am not going to go thru everything. In part because I am biased, in part because it’s all mixed together memory-wise, in part because I get exhausted thinking about it all lol. But here is my best attempt at a somewhat neutral presentation of what went down. At least the big things.

      1. Announcement of minor change - Renaming the dunk/dredgetank + minor change of rules because they were toxic/“chauvinists” (henceforth bigoted, since I’m not from the 50’s). Also want to make our rhetoric better.
      2. Users asking questions/arguing against toxicity/bigotry being an inherent trait of the dunk tanks.
      3. Vague and at times slightly rude (though they were not intended as such) preprepared answers given by Carcosa (who was funcctioning as a messenger for the modteam. This also leads to carcosa taking all the blame and catching all the flak, which is really not deserved. We love our carcosa admin folks doggirl-thumbsup )
      4. Critique of the preprepared answers as well as an update to the thread, which didn’t address a lot of users’ issues (though it did address my issue with rhetoric, which I am very grateful for tysm @[email protected])
      5. Slow unraveling of the “real” reasons the comms were closed, which did not match the reasons originally presented
      6. Now things get bad. The people being supportive of closing the comms dig their heels in. They keep talking about toxicity, but there’s no one who acknowledges the arguments from the opposing side (which I need to underline were presented calmly and politely at this point still.)
      7. It becomes clear that it’s not about toxicity, in part as users find out there are mods of the closed comms like @[email protected] who just straight up dislike the comms they moderate.
      8. A mod statement is released. It’s bad. People are pissed about being called “white cishet he/hims” and not at all being listened to.
        8a. A wrecker earns me 35$ by way of me betting on their behaviour and winning. Thanks for the ingredients for vegan ice cream, dummy.
      9. A DM is leaked of carcosa some days earlier reaching out to other instances. This has more or less been resolved so don’t think about it more. It wasn’t okay the way it was done, but it was a rational action.
      10. People get mad at carcosa for the DM - Which is understandable, but now it’s generally been resolved so please don’t worry about it[1]
      11. Carcosa announces that they’re stepping down.
      12. TC69 and her famed community administration skills step in.
      13. People beg carcosa not to step down.
      14. Carcosa comes back.
      15. TC69 has only made things a lot worse so far. Lots of bans. Basically just the VCJ strugglesesh all over again.
      16. @[email protected] announces they are stepping down.
      17. TC69 deletes her account.
      18. @[email protected] makes this post we are in now.
      19. 72T does not leave.
      20. 72T returns becomes the owner of hexbear and then leads the peoples’ revolution (this happens in 4 months)

      I am skipping a lot of steps. But this is the basic gist of it as I see it, and seeing as how I was one of the Very Mad Online users, I think it at least gives an idea of how people one “my side” of the fence views the situation. I’ve tried to be somewhat neutral in the presentation of events and moreso just focused on how things unfolded. I did not succeed in this, but if you think this is biased, you should see what I would’ve done if I tried to be biased.

      edit: Step 8 is also where I started interacting with this as if I was engaging with liberals acting in bad faith, rather than well-intentioned comrades. My tone became harsher than it should have, though I am of course otherwise completely correct in all my opionions, as I can never be wrong. This hostility was a two-way street, I did not begin acting like this out of nowhere, but I did and it’s good I got put in the time-out zone.

      1. There are still people around with legitimate grievances about this incident and if they feel like it makes sense I warmly and genuinely welcome them to expand upon those in response to this thread, but my impression is that we have generally moved past this point, so just please take it for granted that it’s not important. If you talk to someone and it sounds important, then look into it, but most people will arrive at the position that it is no longer important, given where we are now at. It was fair to be mad about. It was also a rational action on carcosas’ side. It’s also fair not to find it fair. It is however, subjectively, not a big deal, at least not anymore. ↩︎

      • DeathToBritain [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        20·
        12 days ago

        not really relivant to the actual procession of events, but between 15 and 16 we have Alaskaball banning themselves as a bit and refering to themselves as a ‘fella’ on their admin alt, leading to a mini drama bomb as it looked like another admin misgendering the userbase moment

        • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          12 days ago

          Yeah, I saw some of what was posted and it was really not cool, and it did a lot to rile up people and foster a sense of paranoia.

          Also makes sense that an ex-mod (see edit) would know enough to talk like they were a current mod and (rightfully) cause the user’s to doubt the sincerity of the staff given how long it took to deal with (they ended up having to de-fed the linked instance to stop the harassment) + TC69’s ban wave was REALLY bad optics.

          Our past mistakes come back to haunt us foucault-madness

          Edit: Apparently the wrecker is probably an outsider, which actually is even worse because a lot of accusations were flying- we might have done their job for them kitty-birthday-sad

        • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          12 days ago

          Don’t forget Melina/dsplayer/whatever their original account name was creating a bunch of alt accounts to harrass people with and saying all kinds of vile things.

          I think I remember dsplayer or dsplayer IIII whatever the account was called. One of the last things they posted was like this anime mousepad and then they asked for their accounts to be delete not long after (At the time if you pressed the delete account button, it would just delete your comments).

          There was also another user whose name I can’t remember, but he sent nudes or something to people and refused to stop, which was very strange because he seemed like a normal person. And there was a trans woman who posted a suggestive video and was banned. I don’t think she was a bad person, just strange.

        • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          11·
          12 days ago

          There use to be a subreddit called VeganCirclejerk, something like that. They were invited to join hexbear dot net. It didn’t work out, both Hexbear users and the VCJ didn’t like each other, wreckers made a bunch of troll accounts. Since VCJ users were fewer than Hexbear users, the VCJ got kicked out. Theres a lot more drama related to this but it’s nothing worth remembering and it’s all stupid

    • theother2020 [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      12 days ago

      See comment from SixSidedUrsine for the relevant links

       

      My 2 cents: I think a big part of what caused the blow-up was Mod/Admin messaging that the dunk comms were toxic due to cis-het- white he/hims. Many POC and trans people found this offensive (and racist, transphobic amd misogynistic in its own right). From what I understand TC69 did not start this and was not even involved in the comms-change decision making, but she added some fire to the already burning flames by coming on strong with the snarky banning spree. There were some unintended mis-communications and certainly mis-steps.

      Edit-clarity of provenance