I probably shouldn't be making this post. I hate getting involved struggle session highschool drama shit and I won't even point to specific evidence because frankly this shit depresses me. But here goes:

This might be a "wtf are you ranting about, Owl?" moment but there are some serious reactionary vibes in this place sometimes. Maybe it's a holdover from the dirtbag leftist era, I don't know, but it's gross. I see it trying to worm its way in here and it's a bad sign

If you ever catch yourself using the kind of shitty othering and ableism you'd see on stupidpol or a 2016 cringe compilation, go do some self crit or fuck right off

  • purpleworm [none/use name]
    ·
    11 days ago

    Shit Gets Boring so to Increase users the rules are lowered

    I struggle to remember this ever happening in the site's history except debatably maybe once when federation started.

    • Oskolki [none/use name]
      ·
      9 days ago

      Perhaps it's just my problem of taking things too seriously, but for instance not that long ago I saw a pinned thread about Alt Text

      There's other, perhaps less strict guidelines I've seen violated like good faith interpretation, some words get used quite frequently when I have seen moderators take action against these words. It is entirely possible the mod team is simply overwhelmed and deals with them in waves, that has lead me to false assumptions. It's not exactly made any easier by the lack of community self-policing. Like let's be honest most of here are probably already having a shit time, places like this get brigaded frequently I'd imagine, everyone gets burned out.

      I'm not exactly helping. After all I'm not volunteering to moderate. I just say the "right thing" like an idealist. If I actually wanted to help maybe I'd try working on implementing an anonymous report feature to help users not feel anxious for reporting people. In order to prevent spam reports I'd do something like require an account as well as place a cooldown on it.

      The more accurate your reports are, the more points you earn earn and eventually you can perhaps become a mod too. But this is all done in my mind chad-trotsky Practically it's kind of useless and just irritates people, might end up getting pickaxe treatment someday. pika-pickaxe

      It's why I'll try to avoid doing it. Honestly my apologies I slipped up. I know I shouldn't be doing this. I've never had a mentor figure if I can afford myself a bit of leeway.

      • purpleworm [none/use name]
        ·
        2 days ago

        People talk about basically-just-theoretical rules and then stop talking about them, but I think you'll generally find that actual enforcement of them either never happens or it is only in the direction of increasing strictness over time. That's because, quite like you describe yourself, this website is full of people, back to front, whose entire ideology is just "saying the right thing," so they are endlessly concerned with finding new takes and progressive-sounding phrasemongering in order to have ever-more-moral speech in place of basically any other understanding about how to make the world better.

        I was trying to remember an old conversation on this topic, and I apparently made this comment before:

        HB has in some respects definitely decayed, though I like to think there's a renewed interest in addressing some of its existing problems. The "left-signaling" thing has always been an issue though, one that really stems from the "we can't do anything, we can merely speak, so we must validate ourselves by speaking and saying better things than others" sort of mindset that I usually associate with academic liberals. It's alienating, doesn't help anything, and ironically has produced an ideological race to the bottom because the "saying better things," (perhaps due to being unmoored from practice or even study) isn't really about saying things that are actually better but about saying things that have a more progressive vibe to other people who also don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

        https://hexbear.net/comment/6719007

        Where I got a very helpful response, which was later reposted in an edited form elsewhere:

        It's been very sad watching this place decline after years of what felt like one of the few truly vibrant leftist spaces on the internet. I do have my own thoughts and opinions as far as a diagnosis for the decline, but I think they're right in line with what you're saying. The series of major struggle sessions where the moderators and admins were at odds with seemingly most of the users on the site were in my opinion what dealt the heaviest blows that this place never really recovered from. But what you're saying about how "left-signaling" has always been an issue here is at the root of those struggle sessions.

        There was a comment that a lemmygrad user made almost a year ago that got to the heart of it and expressed the issue better than I could hope to. Here is just a small part of it.

        Without this educational and patient emphasis - and without structures that help democratize the way the organization communicates and functions - the group becomes at risk of toxicity and focusing endlessly on grievances based on whoever is "in charge" at the moment. Sometimes you get lucky and the people "in charge" keep things running well and avoiding turmoil. More often, you get toxic cliques, subsequent imbalanced application of norms, and a treatment of comrades as primary enemies. creates burnout and alienation between everyone.

        This instance is increasingly tending towards the latter, with calcifying cliques at various levels that are increasingly hostile towards the userbase. They frame this using communist and liberationist language, though often inconsistently.

        It is a much longer comment than what I just quoted, the quoted part alone doesn't really get at the heart of it, so it's worth reading in full. The comment was removed for "dismissing legitimate issues as tokenization" (perfectly exmplifying the point) but another less campist or beligerant mod reinstated it fortunately. It should be noted that the meaning of who is "in charge" isn't necessarily the mods and admins, but can just as easily be a nebulous group of frequent commenters who tend to set the mores of site culture. Incidentally, I think a lot of the problems have actually died down. Hexbear feels significantly less cliquish now than it did roughly a year ago. It is also significantly less active, but that's because of the damage that has already been done, and even if it's not as bad as it was, the problem never entirely went away.

        https://hexbear.net/post/7003089/6739409

        And the comment hyperlinked in that last comment is, in my opinion, one of the best discussions on the site from the standpoint of trying to work out constructive criticisms for the pathologies of HB. Here's the link again: https://hexbear.net/post/4192064/5781123 . If you only look at one thing in my comment, it should be that comment, since it is in my opinion exceptionally helpful.

        • Oskolki [none/use name]
          ·
          2 days ago

          There's a word to describe what's been happening and it's: Corruption. Words have a lot of power, however, a single action can ruin a century of lies. Which then causes cognitive dissonance, a fight or flight response. This is when the subject, who has been invaded by contradictory words, has to either let the synthesis happen or stop it.

          I myself am guilty of this. I have noticed this phenomenon in a lot of isolated, principled people. We don't like to talk about ourselves, but we talk a lot about how insignificant we are. Unfortunately the global class consciousness levels are very low, as such I remain buried and lacking the support of a revolutionary movement.

          These are personally the major contradictions my own family has had to deal with and my own history:

          • a young woman being forced into marriage flees to the countryside, where she finds my great-grandfather, someone from a long line of peasantry. At least that's the story I was told, they never opened up about their past in details.

          • a hard working peasant seeks work in a newly constructed socialist town, this is where he meets my grandmother, her family has a complex history where they've lost property to Auxiliary Police seizing their housing materials, then the Nazi advancement took away men, some volunteered, my grandmother's father decided to sacrifice his leg in order to stay with his family, anxious they wouldn't make it without him.

          • The newly constructed town has a big factory, huge, maybe even the biggest around, but nobody has put on a smoke filter on the big chimney and health issues start happening, the leadership however does address it relatively quickly for the time being and health improved drastically. People are hopeful and looking forward to a bright future, earned through hard work.

          • USSR collapses and all that work goes down the drain. Given the size of the town and if I conservatively assume that people are slackers and only work for 1000 hours a year we lost about 30.000 years of human development. (In working hours, and this does not include reproductive labor) (Of course a lot of it isn't lost, rather appropriated by oligarchs)

          • Due to return of reactionary sentiments my mother is neglected and my family focuses on her brother, my mom marries into a failson who's jubilant and exited for the bright future him and his forest brothers were pushed into ruining us into (My paternal grandpa was so eager to share his exploitations at work, so I have had a decent understanding of what freedom means, from a very young age), he also carried the Mormon bible (likely a link of where they got their funding from)

          • Of course as we all know when capital booms, there must be a bust, ironically forcing my now free father work extra hard, makes his life precarious, pushes him into alcoholism and abusive tendencies etc. Eventually this leads to divorce, my mother running into a really bad person who for my own privacy sake i can't talk about in detail.

          • I'm born in this wacky family, who has no time for me and I just end up watching soviet cartoons all day and mostly raised by my grandparents, who still teach me to be upright and just, which is really sweet, but such a mindset is unsustainable in our world. But then later I am also raised by my paternal grandparents who are selfishly petite bourgeoise which ends up giving me a personality disorder.

          • I get sent to school where I stick out like a sore thumb, also get like low-key xenophobia for speaking Russian, my paternal fam never liked us very much sometimes in anger we'd get called dirty Russians, which my family isn't even from Russia they're Belarussian lukashenko-tired but honestly it was relatively minor inconvenience compared to the issues I faced from my neurological disability, which made raising me extra hard for my family.

          • My family did look for support at the doctors, they were recommended to check me out for ADHD, but the doctor who tested for it found nothing amiss and simply recommended behavioral therapy, my family did send me to a private specialized kindergarten as per recommendations. (Private school was too expensive) The stereotypical "gifted child" scenario happens leading into burnout.

          • As puberty hits I start experiencing severe bouts of dysphoria and this leads me to questions what's up with that. This is when I find out about transgender people and I'm relieved there's a fix, but then I find out how much people hate me and it makes me fall into a pitfall where I've given up completely.

          • My close childhood friends group eventually finds out and disbands, leaving me completely alone. This is when i decide to give it my all and start looking for an exit route and eventually I find one in another country, someone is willing to help out. I end up flying to Geneva thinking I'd finally see a doctor, a professional who can help me.

          • The kind friend turns out didn't listen to a word I said, they just wanted to help me and acted emotionally, they didn't even look for if there's a doctor avaiable I can go to, instead they expected me to be 100% able to do all the things I need help with and then, eventually send me back home. (Btw this is a multi millionaire family, they could have easily afforded to just take me to a doc, if they so cared.) This also illustrates how arrogant and ignorant the petty bourgeoise are.

          • Eventually, through the support of kind strangers who kept me afloat and my one friend who chose to stick around I do get the ADHD diagnosis with 20 years of delay and I've been transitioning somewhat okay, although I face a lot of legal challenges.

          • Now I've read a lot of theory and my history makes sense, why I am the way I am and what to do.

          Despite all my efforts, no matter what I do by myself or with a ragtag team of strangers, society just doesn't seem ready to pull my hand. It would take very little effort for a group of well organized people to completely re-habilitate me and we could accomplish a lot together, but everyone's judgment is too clouded, they are incapable for seeing the potential. And I know that my contributions will probably end up buried in the shadows of history, but I will still try to build even if just a little path for the people who come after me. And I'm honestly terrified, what if the fascist spot me and decide to get rid of me? They're far more powerful than I am and I'm almost completely alone.

          Ironic isn't it? I've repeatedly been called a narcissist, sometimes psychopath, a monster, but my deeds show otherwise. I've accomplished all of what I have with so incredibly little. Imagine how much a well oiled machine organized machine could accomplish. I don't see why something wonderful isn't going to happen and it might be quite soon with the recent events going on. I am just a human being. I really wish someone was game enough to place their trust in me.

          I still take the blame for being unable to come up with the right words to convince people.

          An Addendum:

          I still think it can be a good thing to censor specific words because it teaches people to switch them out and it removes power from the words. I draw my line at thought crimes, but nothing stops me from using different languages with different individuals. This is a private platform, not a public organization. Hexbear is like walking into a strangers house, it's not a government and has no aspirations to become one. if this house is not comfy for someone they can find a new one for themselves, if they want to change society then they have to do politics, policing without a government is just syndicalism, policing without power is even more silly it's just harassment and you either need to conform with the statue quo to do it or you will be squashed.