Hello users of Hexbear, we wanted to inform you that we are going to be locking the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank communities. We have created two new communities /c/gossip and /c/counterpropaganda to serve a similar but clearly distinct purpose than the dunk/dredge tanks.
Not only is the dunk tank a term that has racist origins, but also many posts there were almost no effort and often times requiring later edits to show how they weren't reactionary, ~~not useful with regard to developing rhetoric and furthering dialectical analysis of that which we dunk upon~~.
To that end, we wish posts of reactionaries to be placed in !counterpropaganda@hexbear.net along with an accompanying explanation (as simple or complex as desired) with the intent of countering the reactionary propaganda in the post body, as of now comments are not subject to the same ~~rhetorical rigor~~ rule.
For the posts ~~that are not "low-hanging fruit'~~ of notable people we ask that you use !gossip@hexbear.net .
These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.
Any moderators of the dunk tank or dredge tank that want to be a mod in the new communities let me know.
Any users with questions or comments please use this post, this change was made at the behest of the entire Hexbear mod and admin team. We will be looking for more moderators in an organized volunteer drive shortly, if you wish to submit an application you may send it to me via hexbear or matrix direct messages.
Use this post as a place for discussion to these changes. We will keep things as they are for 2 weeks and then reflect on the feedback, including this post: https://hexbear.net/post/3858346
As a personal addendum I am sorry if ~~the closing of the tanks~~ these changes removes a beloved space on the site and if you want to suggest a community to replace them you may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
Sitewide or community changes come from proposals put forth from the mod team, discussed, and voted on by the mod team.
Any users wanting to suggest a community to replace the tanks, may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net current discussion is here https://hexbear.net/post/3858346 or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
You may also consider using !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml as a substitute for dunk/dredge tank posts as well
The mod statement can be found here: https://hexbear.net/comment/5613033
Application
What is your Hexbear username?
Do you have any preferred pronouns?
What are your thoughts on capitalism?
What are your thoughts on imperialism?
What are your thoughts on trans rights?
What are your thoughts on racial justice?
What do think about current and previous protests around the world?
What are your thoughts on Veganism and Animal Liberation?
Do you have any experience with other leftist online communities?
What did those experiences teach you?
What is your approach to moderation, and how do you work with teams?
How do you deal with online drama and people who try to start things for the sake of it?
What current comms would you be interested in moderating?
Do you have any ideas for community engagement?
What is your general time availability? (Time zone, amounts, common browsing times, etc)
7 months ago the sites active sort was changed to be more like "chapo.chat" active sort, but I can not find a code repository with a commit that shows what was changed (I welcome it of anyone knows where that is). So I can't review what the difference between Lemmy active sort is and Hexbear active sort.
What I can tell you is how Lemmy sorts:
Now I think what was changed is that the decay for Active was made more aggressive.
This means that the algorithm already favors posts that attract a lot of comments. The more a thread gets comments the longer of stays on the front page. Since score is also a major factor, it means that content you can digest quickly and upvote is also highly viable content.
The Dunk Tank and The Dredge Tank were baked in a lab for that kind of math. You get fast food for up votes and fire and forget comment sections. These comms are the peak of the mountain for keeping the front page fresh and lively.
You know what doesn't do that? Marxism, Anarchism, and Theory comms. I managed to game the system with out knowing it a few days ago by including a photo and a title to an effort post that yielded over 100 up votes which is a high water mark for a post here.
What I'm saying is, this shit posting site has a default algorithm that thrives off shit posts. You can't just nuke the shit post communities and expect it to stop. The algorithm doesn't favor thoughtful discussion, long form posting,
Several comms effectively became dunk and dredge after their closure and it you didn't pay attention you might have thought they were still open. This is because from what I can tell, outside of dunk and dredge, comms seem meaningless. Dredge content in the chat comm, dunk content in the chapo comm, both in main. The mega threads seem to occupy most of the posts in the site. That's a whole other topic for another day.
Womenby reopened and no one posts there. Menby I think is open? No one posts there. No one posts in parenting, they post in the weakly thread. No one is posting in theory, Marxism, anarchism, or really any other comm outside of news, chat, chapo, main (but not always), gaming, tech.
This is a small site, it might not have the foot traffic to drive these other communities, and the active sort isn't helping. This is just my rambling but I think if I pull on this thread some more I could draw better conclusions.
We should have been a phpBB forum instead.
Reddit was always multiple steps backwards from phpBB forums, and "shitty Reddit clone but with federation" doesn't seem to be that much better. Like, we still can't even create polls, fucking shit that old-school forums figured out more than two decades ago.
I think the original idea was to create non-corporate controlled alternatives to existing social media and siphon users as enshittification happened, to create a proof-of-concept of a post-capital internet, but if the end-use-case isn't to laugh at Elon Musk's deranged takes or to keep updated on the latest Star Citizen grift idk what we're doing here.
"The purpose of the system is what it does" applies to Hexbear as well- at some point we'll have to reckon with the mismatch between capitalist social media methodology as a means to "drive engagement" against our egalitarian/utopian aims, but that's probably not happening today since this particular struggle session seems more about mod/admin/user miscommunication and infighting (being charitable) so
tag filtering rather than siloed comms or subfora would make sense to me but i guess that's not lemmy
I mean, fundamentally tags and subfora fulfill the same purpose, the issue is the sorting algorithm weighing different types of content differently
The problem with the old active sort was that the decay was so slow, you'd get weeks old posts staying on the front page and clogging it up, preventing new posts from gaining traction. So I don't know what the solution is. Going back to the old sort algorithm means that we'll never see any posts younger than a few days on the front page, because of how prolific we are at commenting on high up posts.
Get rid of all sorts except New
new comments is good too