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.
Yeah I've seen one of the things mentioned wrt "chauvinism" being hornyposting and like... The horniest posters on this site are all queer. @kristina@hexbear.net has written about her hunk of a partner a bunch (approving), I've written a ton about my dating life, we had a whole mini struggle over @twink being too horny on main.
I'm not saying it's inherent to any one group, because it isn't, but it is a bit rich trying to pin it on the "cishet he/hims"
It's not like it was just dudes participating in the BRICS chicks debacle
We're not particularly worried about people being horny, outside of the fact that there could be children using the site. Plenty of people have checked the "yeah I'm tooootally 18" button and started scrolling through far hornier websites, but I think we've generally all settled into a good place on this. It's pretty rare that there's something even worthy of a report, and it's almost always some wrecker hog with a 5 minute old fediverse account begging for attention.
Basically, don't worry about hornyposting. Like 99% of all the posting on this site, it's great and everyone on the site just wants to see more fun posts and keep riffing together, including the mods and admins! Realistically, it's probably less than 1% of posting that's needing correction, and trying to just "tweak" it out of existence clearly isn't working.
I'm prepping to make a post to explain in more precise detail soon, but I'm genuinely nervous about how willing to engage most users are right now. Many people are justifiably upset, and I'm struggling with threading the needle between helping alleviate some of the tension and letting everyone have enough time to breathe before re-engaging to mend the rift and start fixing some of the site issues that made this the powder keg it turned out to be.
Oh I don't worry about hornyposting. I brought it up because it's a thing I feel brings weird vibes, makes communities have certain tendencies and makes it easier for people to say something they'll regret/something that'll turn others away and - as can be seen elsewhere - without good moderation it can bring shitty types. I'm fine with it because it seems to work pretty well all things considered and some users have a need for it and it's not harming the people here. However if we wanted to interrogate why fewer people use the site, then that's something I would point to personally, because it is personally one of the reasons I don't recommend it to others.
You've done an absolutely fantastic job so far. I wouldn't worry if I were you, but I understand why you do. Personally I feel like I'm in a pretty good spot to engage with things, but I'll sadly be going away for a little while, so I probably won't see it. Through most of this, users have really just been asking for good communication (communication is a two-way street, so it's not just saying things in a good way, but hearing what the response is), and you're doing great so far. I get it if you wait a while though, it's been pretty stressful.